Cannabis appears to have gone thoroughly mainstream in Israel this year. The country has yet to actually legalize, but between the decriminalization measure passed last year and an expansion of the medical marijuana program, acceptance of cannabis across the political spectrum is increasingly evident.<\/p>\n
As of this month, there are now two former Israeli prime ministers who are involved in the cannabis industry. First, Ehud Barak of the Labor Party<\/a>, who ruled the country from 1999 to 2001, was\u00a0appointed<\/a>\u00a0last September as chairman of InterCure, holding company for cannabis cultivator and product developer\u00a0Canndoc Pharma<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n Now Barak has been joined in the industry by Ehud Olmert, of the ruling right-wing\u00a0Likud<\/a>\u00a0party, who served as prime minister from 2006 to 2009.\u00a0Univo Pharmaceuticals<\/a>\u00a0announced\u00a0in early April it had named Olmert as a consultant.<\/p>\n In an interesting twist, Olmert was convicted and served prison time after he stepped down as prime minister, which means that under law he cannot be a major shareholder or serve on the board of directors of a publicly traded company. (The charge concerned bribery when he was mayor of Jerusalem.) But as a consultant for Univo, he will pull a monthly salary of $10,000 for about 40 hours of work.\u00a0Univo\u2019s shares jumped more than 37% on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in response to the news.\u00a0<\/p>\n Univo has big plans for industrial-scale cannabis cultivation at its facilities in the southern coastal city of Ashkelon. Although it is still awaiting a license from the Health Ministry to begin operations, its website boasts of providing \u201cCannabis from seed to market.\u201d<\/p>\n In reporting Olmert\u2019s joining Univo, Israeli daily\u00a0Ha\u2019aretz<\/a>\u00a0noted that this is part of a greater trend of powerful figures moving from officialdom to the cannabis biz. InterCure has also named Nitzan Alon, a retired major general in the Israeli Defense Forces, as CEO of Canndoc.\u00a0<\/p>\n And\u00a0Together Pharma<\/a>\u00a0has appointed former Israeli national police commissioner Yohanan Danino as chairman. Together Pharma\u00a0made headlines<\/a> last year when it became the first Israeli cannabis producer to announce plans to establish grow operations in a foreign country, although it failed to name the country.<\/p>\n Cannabis also emerged as a key issue in the Israeli elections that were just held this month. But unexpected advocates arose to fight for the herb once associated with the peace-and-love ethic of the hippie culture. Bloomberg<\/a>\u00a0ran the counterintuitive headline \u201cCannabis Has Young Voters High on This Israeli Right-Winger.\u201d The candidate in question was\u00a0Moshe Feiglin, a West Bank settler who broke from Likud to form the new\u00a0Zehut<\/a>\u00a0(Identity) party \u2014 which played to the youth vote with a cannabis legalization plank, while taking an even harder line than Likud on the Palestinian question (which is saying quite a lot).<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s legitimate that people from different reasons will support us, but we don\u2019t hide anything,\u201d Feiglin told Bloomberg, admitting that legalization plank was intended to appeal \u201cto the young generation of Israelis.\u201d<\/p>\n But his other planks called for cancellation of the Oslo Accords (the 1993 peace deal with the Palestinians, calling for an eventual two-state solution), Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank and \u201ctransfer\u201d (that is, forced removal) of the Palestinians living there.\u00a0Ha\u2019aretz<\/a>\u00a0called him the \u201cPro-pot Jewish Evangelist Who Wants a Holy War.\u201d<\/p>\n Feiglin\u2019s run for the Knesset, Israel\u2019s parliament, clearly put the country\u2019s traditional cannabis activist community in a bit of a pickle. Israel\u2019s most prominent legalization advocate has until now been Boaz Wachtel, who founded the single-issue\u00a0Ale Yarok<\/a>\u00a0(Green Leaf) party in 1999.<\/p>\n \u201cI have mixed feelings,\u201d Wachtel told Bloomberg. \u201cI\u2019m sad that such an extremist \u2014 and I don\u2019t want to use too many harsh words \u2014 such as Feiglin has gotten on the legalization wagon and he\u2019s making an issue for himself riding our work.\u201d<\/p>\n Media coverage both within Israel and internationally named Feiglin as a likely \u201ckingmaker<\/a>\u201d who would be instrumental in forming the next Israeli government after the elections. When the results came in on April 10, however, it was clear that he had been\u00a0defeated<\/a>. Nonetheless, his bid broke new ground in mainstreaming once-radical ideas in Israeli politics: one good idea (legalization), and several very bad ones.<\/p>\n The incumbent and scandal-tainted Likud prime minister, Benjamin \u201cBibi\u201d Netanyahu,\u00a0prevailed<\/a>\u00a0over his challenger Benny Gantz, who lead the somewhat more moderate\u00a0Blue and White<\/a>\u00a0coalition. When the results were announced, Netanyahu\u2019s followers broke out into disconcerting chants of \u00a0\u201cBibi, king of Israel<\/a>.\u201d He is now poised to overtake Israel\u2019s founder David Ben-Gurion as the country\u2019s longest-serving prime minister.<\/p>\n Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti told the BBC World Service<\/a>\u00a0that the elections indicated \u201cthe death of the peace camp\u201d in Israeli politics. \u201cIf you count the number of people that were elected that would support a two-state solution, the number would not exceed 18, and most of them are Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens.\u201d There are 120 seats in Knesset. Barghouti said the election marked \u201ca very serious shift, not only to the right, but actually to racism, a system of apartheid. All these parties want to keep the occupation, none of them is ready to accept a two-state solution.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So the prospects for peace are not good, alas. But the prospects for cannabis are better. The across-the-board legalization championed by Feiglin may not be imminent, but there\u2019s been a clear shift in the direction of greater liberalization. In February, cannabis\u00a0exports were\u00a0approved by the cabinet<\/a>, sending the share prices of Israeli cannabis companies soaring on the Tel Aviv exchange.<\/p>\n And last year the Knesset overwhelmingly passed a cannabis decriminalization measure<\/a>, which was actually sponsored by Netanyahu\u2019s conservative Likud government.<\/p>\n But the strange juxtaposition of liberalizing cannabis policy and a hardening stance on the Palestinian question may eventually raise the prospect of marijuana being targeted by the international movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS<\/a>, against Israel.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, what\u2019s surprised you about the evolution of cannabis policy in Israel?<\/p>\n The post Israel\u2019s Political Mainstream Embraces Cannabis, Even Amid Lurch to the Right<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Cannabis appears to have gone thoroughly mainstream in Israel this year. The country has yet to actually legalize, but between the decriminalization measure passed last year and an expansion of the medical marijuana program, acceptance of cannabis across the political spectrum is increasingly evident. As of this month, there areContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,6021,6157,9822,133,9823,81,9824],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34874"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34874"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34875,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34874\/revisions\/34875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Key Election Issue \u2014For the Far Right<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Will Bud Feel the Boycott?<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Israel\u2019s Political Mainstream Embraces Cannabis, Even Amid Lurch to the Right<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"