Will The Mayor Of Bet Shemesh Lose The Power of Building Allocation

It seems that the mayor of Bet Shemesh Moshe Abutbol has been given the ladder he has needed to climb down on from his lofty position. He has been exposed by the police as a liar. Not a single government office has supported his position. And now they are considering taking away his legal right to allocate school buildings.

This can only be perceived as a ladder for him if you look at it as though he can now go to his friends the thugs with whom he started this fight and he can tell them that he can no longer continue this battle. He can tell them he has done what he could but his hands are tied.

The Abutbol family, no relation that I know of to Moshe Abutbol the mayor, is one of the major mafia and crime families in Israel. It seems Moshe Abutbol has learned from them and applied it to the way he runs the city. he makes up a threat and then causes a fight, and then he tries to step in as the righteous middle-man looking for a peaceful situation in which the only winner is his team.

According to Ynet, the mayor has had a meeting with the parents committee of OROT Girls. They told him they asked for the meeting as a way to strengthen him against the thugs, offering him the ability to reject their claims. They also told him that they have received instructions from the Prime Minister's office, from  the Ministry of Education and from the Ministry of Internal Security that they should continue their preparations for the start of the school year in this building.

He is really stuck now, with all this heavy support being given to the school. He only has one card left to play, and that is that he holds the legal power for giving the final ishur to use the building. the actual permission to go into the building goes through the mayor.

With all those cannons lined up against him, he is going to have to toe the line in this case and admit defeat. The director of the Ministry of Education is looking into legal ways to take that authority out of the mayor's hands and the Ministry would be responsible for it.

The only question I have is if they would do so to punish him or just to circumvent him in this situation. Meaning, is it a one-time thing that they are taking away his authority regarding this building alone, or will they punish him and take him out of the game completely because of his actions? We wait and see.

I think it is time someone opened an investigation against the mayor for the way he handled this. That someone would need to be either the police or the ministry of Education. With all the information coming out now about how he lied to get his way and cause tremendous dissension among the residents, causing hatred and fighting, the whole chain of events needs to be investigated.