The bill would cancel the so-called Tender Years Clause, which since 1962 has guaranteed custody to the mother of all children if one of them is five years old or younger.
By GIL HOFFMANNAFTALI BENNETT in the Knesset – he can best woo Netanyahu’s voters by never mentioning him in any legal or personal context.(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
A controversial divorce reform bill set to be voted on in the Knesset on Wednesday was postponed by a week due to the political crisis.The bill, sponsored by Yamina MK Matan Kahana, would cancel the so-called Tender Years Clause, which since 1962 has guaranteed custody to the mother of all children if one of them is five years old or younger. Kahana told the Knesset plenum that he realized MKs cannot vote their conscience on such a political day and that he would wait until they can.Coalition Chairman Miki Zohar agreed to suspend coalition discipline if Blue and White would have agreed. But Blue and White was focused on Wednesday’s vote on dispersing the Knesset and would not discuss Kahana’s bill. “How long will Israel remain one of the last countries in the world to discriminate against fathers?” Kahana asked the plenum. “Sixty years ago, when it was drafted, this law made sense, because women stayed at home and men went to work. But now women work in every field and men are now more involved in raising their children. The top criterion needs to be the good of the child.”Earlier Wednesday, the Knesset Committee on the Advancement of the Status of Women voted to advance a bill that would remove parental rights from a parent who murders or attempts to murder the other parent.The bill, which was sponsored by committee chairman Oded Forer (Yisrael Beytenu) and Gideon Sa’ar (Likud), came following an incident where a father who tried to murder his wife blocked her from vaccinating their child.
