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ISRAEL

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Lessons in geography for some anti-Israel protesters.

First, to those calling for a two-state solution: Look at a map! Judea and Samaria (aka known as the West Bank) has an Arab city named Tulkarm which is only nine miles from the Mediterranean Sea which would give the “River to the Sea” barbarians an opportunity to divide Israel’s population with disastrous consequences.

Second, Israeli students should join the protests of Asians calling for race, gender, and ethnic neutral admissions to Harvard. Israel is in Asia, a fact that even some supporters don’t know. Duh!

Third, the moron of the week prize goes to a protester who recently declared: “If you can put a man on the moon, you can craft a cease-fire. Duh!

Michael Ordman’s weekly catalog of Israel’s dazzling contributions to humanity gives the lie to other shibboleths and outright lies about Israel. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
Christian Embassy donates 4 ambulances. The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem has donated four new ambulances to help replace the dozens of Israeli ambulances destroyed on and since Oct 7. One is an advanced military  ambulance for Gaza border communities. One will serve Holocaust survivors in the North.
https://www.jns.org/wire/international-christian-embassy-jerusalem-donates-four-new-ambulances-to-israel/
 
Reservists complain – let us fight. Israel’s military ombudswoman Brig. Gen. (res.) Rachel Tevet-Wiesel has found that most of the 1,316 complaints during the first three months of the war (Oct-Dec) were civilians seeking to return to reserve duty after receiving exemptions and reservists asking to be moved to a combat unit.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-ombudswoman-report-finds-rise-in-reservists-clamoring-to-be-allowed-to-fight/
 
The largest ever IDF enlistment of Yeshiva students. The upcoming IDF recruitment cycle will include a record 1,000 fighters from the Hesder yeshivot (300 to combat units); another 300 from Zionist yeshivot gevohot (post high school yeshivot); and hundreds more from religious pre-military preparatory schools.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/386759
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-confirms-1300-to-be-recruited-early-from-pre-army-programs/
 
Volunteering changed her life. On Oct 7 Yocheved Ruttenberg was in Dallas Texas waiting for her lone soldier brother to return from Israel so they could start a business in the USA. Now Yocheved is co-founder of NGO Sword of Iron – Israel Volunteer Opportunities, helping others organize their Israel volunteering trips.
https://www.israel21c.org/how-a-two-week-trip-to-volunteer-turned-lifechanging/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/353201190423242/
 
You need it, Ariel 3D-prints it. Ariel Harush is an engineering student at Israel’s Ben Gurion University. He 3D-printed a radio connector for a friend in the IDF and suddenly army commanders were asking for 1,000 of them. He and 400 volunteers have since printed 43,000 items, from knee pads to night-vision rifle adaptors.
https://nocamels.com/2024/03/volunteer-engineer-is-3d-printing-kit-for-israeli-troops-at-war/
                                                     
Latin America solidarity mission. A delegation of governors and mayors from Panama, Uruguay, Honduras, Chile, and Guatemala, traveled to southern Israeli cities targeted on Oct 7 and met with family members of Israeli hostages during their four-day trip.
https://www.jns.org/latin-american-local-leaders-pay-solidarity-visit-to-israel/
 
IFCJ funds 123 bomb shelters. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (FCJ) is funding more than one and a half million dollars to place 123 shelters alongside bus stops serving 42 northern Israeli communities, amid Israel’s ongoing conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah. 
https://www.jns.org/ifcj-funding-123-shelters-for-bus-stops-near-lebanon-border/
 
Sderot supermarket re-opens. The first supermarket in Sderot has reopened more than five months after the Israeli city was mostly evacuated due to the war with Hamas. Its owner, Prosper Peretz, said, “I worked throughout the war, even though my house was hit by a rocket. I didn’t give up and I didn’t leave the city.”
https://unitedwithisrael.org/sderot-supermarket-open-for-business-5-months-after-hamas-invasion/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Phage therapy combats antibiotic resistance. The Israeli Phage Therapy Center (IPTC), led by two Hebrew University of Jerusalem professors, has used a bacteriophage PASA16 on compassionate basis to treat tough Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in 16 patients. It has shown promising results with an 86.6% success rate.
https://en.huji.ac.il/news/anti-bacterial-virus-phage-pasa16-treated-antibiotic-resistant-infections-866
https://www.cell.com/med/abstract/S2666-6340(23)00225-8
 
How do some viruses get nasty? Tel Aviv University researchers discovered a mechanism used by viruses to decide whether to kill their bacterial host. These phages monitor the health of the cell they are occupying. They also check that there are no viruses residing in nearby cells that the phages wish to occupy.
https://foodsecurity.tau.ac.il/sbcr/news/how-do-viruses-choose-whether-to-become-nasty-or-not-16-1-2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01551-3
 
Clues may lead to a cure for Parkinson’s. Researchers at Haifa University have discovered that sufferers of Parkinson’s disease have brain cells that are deficient in mRNA and proteins that build the extracellular matrix (ECM).  It is the ECM that provides brain cells with structural and biochemical support.
https://www.israel21c.org/parkinsons-breakthrough-link-discovered-between-disease-and-brain/
 
500 doctors to make Aliyah.  Nefesh b’Nefesh’s Medex event held in Teaneck, NJ was a huge success. Nearly 500 medical professionals attended from 30 states and provinces in the US and Canada, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, dental hygienists, and many more. A European event is scheduled end-March.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/03/11/nefesh-bnefesh-inaugurates-international-medical-aliyah-program-to-combat-israels-physician-shortage/  https://www.jpost.com/aliyah/health-services/article-791431

The Strategy of Atrocity in the Gaza War by Michael Hochberg and Leonard Hochberg

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20495/hamas-strategy-atrocity-gaza-war

Hamas is perhaps the first regime in recorded history to fight a war designed to maximize casualties among their own population.

Failing to swiftly destroy Hamas and directly punish Hamas’s backers in Iran and Qatar will teach sympathizers in other parts of the Muslim world that strategies of atrocity should be added to the playbook of regimes challenging U.S. allies around the world. Even worse would be for Hamas to actually achieve a strategic victory and gain a Palestinian statehood; such an outcome would ensure that atrocity becomes a standard and widely used strategy for at least a generation to come.

The laws of war — primarily a Western innovation — are being weaponized by the enemies of the West, who do not subscribe to Western culture….. Today, the United States and our allies find ourselves at war with states and non-state entities who do not subscribe to the laws of war.

“[T]he Hamas terrorists killed by Israel in the ensuing war, and civilian non-combatants killed in the Gaza Strip while being used as human shields by Hamas. They are all considered “Martyrs” whose families are eligible to receive stipends of 1,400-12,000 shekels [$375-$3200] per month for life.” — Itamar Marcus; Founder, Palestinian Media Watch, palwatch.org, January 10, 2024.

The popular accusation of disproportionality is, in point of fact, aimed to prevent Western-aligned nations from achieving decisive victories. Even when the allies of the United States have the military capacity to break the will of the enemy, thereby imposing peace on the defeated, they will be forced to resort to fighting forever wars.

Why should the Israelis be compelled to allow aid into Gaza, when Hamas continues to hold hostage not just Israelis but also Americans? Under the guise of benevolence and generosity, international organizations promote forever wars.

If the type of warfare that we have seen from Hamas is allowed to succeed, and is not met with overwhelming violence and utter defeat, it will become the standard approach for those challenging Western dominance. If, however, we want to live in a world where the laws of war mean something, then the penalties for deliberately flouting them need to be terrible. Otherwise more regimes will be tempted to gain advantage through strategies of atrocity.

The US should stop imposing on our allies a doctrine of defeat.

Finally, the day after hostilities end, the Israelis must protect the new Gazan government from being undermined by renewed efforts to support terrorism and remilitarization.

The only path to peace, other than the destruction of Israel, is through a comprehensive Israeli victory and an unconditional surrender by Hamas in Gaza, and a post-war arrangement ensuring that the Gazans will not be able to commit such atrocities in Israel again.

Hamas is perhaps the first regime in recorded history to fight a war designed to maximize casualties among their own population. Pictured: Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen shows a photo of an Israeli soldier posing next to a Hamas weapons cache that was found at Rantisi Hospital in Gaza, at a press conference at the European Office of the United Nations in Geneva, on November 14, 2023. (Photo by Pierre Albouy/AFP via Getty Images)

“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.” — Niccolo Machiavelli.

The Biden Administration Attacks Democracy Abroad The Biden administration is attacking the democracy of our ally Israel over the war in Gaza and how it is affecting democracy—American democracy, specifically Mr. Biden’s re-election chances. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/16/the-biden-administration-attacks-democracy-abroad/

A friend sent me a link that, upon opening it, I initially thought I had been directed to The Babylon Bee. I rubbed my eyes and pored over the blurb again. Amazed, I remembered Mr. Biden’s State of the Union declaration: “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack at—both at home and overseas at the very same time.”

Of course, I was aware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters have been assiduously attacking American democracy. Indeed, in recounting how the Democratic Party is anything but democratic, Victor Davis Hanson concluded:

The Left talks grandly of ‘democracy dies in darkness’ as Joe Biden beats the dead horse of January 6 to warn that democracy is in its greatest peril. But all such rhetoric is projection. The verbiage masks the most comprehensive effort in modern American history to radically change, destroy, or warp American laws, customs, and traditions for the short-term aim of gaining and retaining political power.

The rationale is that the left is of such superior morality and wisdom that it has the right to violate the Constitution or the hallowed traditions of the country to achieve the higher end of ensuring a progressive agenda.

However, I was unaware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters had been attacking democracy abroad. Of course, I knew the Authoritarian Axis of communist China, Putin’s revanchist Russia, terrorist-state Iran, and the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships had been persistently attacking democracy. But none of these rouge states besieging free peoples were the target of the Biden administration’s call for regime change.

A ‘Revitalized’ Palestinian Authority? A new report shows PA police participating in terror against Israelis.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/palestinian-authority-security-forces-regavim-report-israel-terrorism-hamas-gaza-e0514b62?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank. Photo: Mohammed Turabi/Zuma Press

The Biden Administration is pitching its “two-state solution” to Israel with the lure of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, as if the doctor ordered a trip to a day spa for PA leaders. A new report by Regavim, an Israeli NGO, shows that real reform is going to take a lot more.

The report reveals a pattern of Palestinian police “turning their Western-supplied guns on the State of Israel” and then being glorified for their terrorism by the PA. It specifically identifies 76 officers of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) who have been killed or arrested while carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis in the past three years.

Take Capt. Ziad al-Zar’ini, who helped hide a Hamas terrorist wanted for murder, then opened fire in March 2023 at the Israeli forces in pursuit. “The PASF and Fatah,” the PA’s ruling party, “issued glowing tributes and eulogies,” says the Regavim report.

The latest example is Capt. Muhammad Manasrah. He had already served two sentences in Israeli prisons when, hired as a police officer, he shot up a gas station on Feb. 29, murdering two Israelis, ages 16 and 57.

The PASF was created to fight Hamas terrorism in collaboration with Israel, but for too long it has abetted, committed or celebrated terrorism. Why again does Secretary of State Antony Blinken think this PA gang will deradicalize Gaza?

Biden Should be Threatening Qatar and the Terrorists, Not Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20486/biden-should-threaten-qatar

Biden’s reported threat to halt or suspend US military supplies to Israel if the IDF enters Rafah is what encourages Hamas to continue fighting and reject every proposal to release the hostages. When Hamas leaders hear that Biden is threatening Israel to prevent the IDF from entering Rafah, they must say to themselves: “Why should we make any concessions to Israel? America doesn’t want the Israelis to destroy the four remaining battalions. The US administration is opposed to Israel’s plan to eliminate Hamas, so let’s wait!”

A total defeat means the elimination of all of Hamas’s battalions. An Israeli victory will never be complete as long as one, or even half, a Hamas battalion remains intact.

Biden is actually sending a message to Hamas and Iran’s other terror proxies, including Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis, that America is about to throw Israel under the bus. Cutting off US weapons supplies to Israel is the ultimate fantasy of the terrorists.

The administration could show impressive leadership and in fact “bring this to an end as quickly as we can” — not just for Israel but for all in the region who are seeking peace — by encouraging Israel to take out the terrorists in Rafah without delay.

Instead of pressuring Israel, Biden should be pressuring his friends in Qatar to force their Hamas puppets to hand over the Israeli hostages and surrender. Instead of threatening to cut off weapons supplies to Israel, he should be threatening the leaders of Qatar with the withdrawal of US forces from the country’s Al Udeid Air Base and to officially designate Qatar as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (for its funding of Hamas, Hizballah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Shabab, Al Nusra Front, among others).

This is the way – the only way – to end the war quickly, as well as to send a signal to America’s adversaries looking on, that the US is prepared to uphold the values of civilization, not the values of terror.

US President Joe Biden will consider conditioning military supplies to Israel if the Israeli army moves forward with a large-scale invasion of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, according to four US officials.

Biden has also told MSNBC that a Rafah operation would cross a “red line,” although he balanced that statement with a commitment to support Israel’s right to self-defense.

Aramean Christians Train to Fight for Israel For decades, the country classified this community as Arab over its objections By Rebecca Sugar and Michael Freund.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aramean-christians-train-to-fight-for-israel-e284ed6d?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Forty-eight Israelis graduated in February from Kinneret, a premilitary program, or mechina, in Kibbutz Beit-Zera, near the Sea of Galilee. They spent seven months undergoing training, lectures and field exercises to prepare for army service. Unlike the country’s dozens of other mechinot, Kinneret’s founder and half of its students are Aramean Christians.

The Jewish state is home to some 185,000 Christians, including around 15,000 Arameans, whose ancestors lived in the Levant before the Arab conquest and were early followers of Jesus. For decades Israel registered them as Arabs over their objection.

In 2014 Israel recognized the Aramean Christian community. That recognition was an important step toward fuller integration into Israeli society, says Shadi Khaloul, who founded Kinneret in 2017.

Mr. Khaloul, 48, was born in Jish, a mixed Christian-Muslim community in north Galilee, and educated in Haifa. His uncle served in the Israel Defense Forces, and his father was an Israeli policeman. It was no surprise, then, when he joined the army and became a paratrooper at 18. “I was taught that the Jews are our brothers and our allies,” Mr. Khaloul says. “This state is our state. We need to defend it too.”

He laments that young Aramean Christians study in Israel’s Muslim educational system, where they aren’t taught about their own heritage or historical ties with the Jewish people. Students “become anti-Israel under this system,” Mr. Khaloul says. “It’s what they are taught.” He says he filed a complaint two years ago with the Education Ministry after a Muslim teacher in Jish reprimanded an Aramean high-school student for honoring Israel’s fallen soldiers on Memorial Day. “This is not our holiday,” the teacher reportedly told the teenager. Mr. Khaloul says there are many such incidents in the schools.

Chuck Schumer Lectures Israelis on War and Peace Democrats are making Prime Minister Netanyahu a scapegoat to appease the anti-Israel American left.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-schumer-israel-benjamin-netanyahu-75bf4d58?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Israel-Hamas war is melting brains on the Democratic side of the aisle, and the latest evidence is a remarkable speech Thursday by Sen. Charles Schumer calling for new elections to replace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yes, the Majority Leader is telling Israelis to replace their government—or the U.S. “will have no choice” but to intervene to “change the present course,” whatever that means.

Mr. Netanyahu is the duly elected Prime Minister of an American ally. Israeli voters will have a chance to hold him accountable, if they choose, for whatever policy and security lapses left his country vulnerable to Hamas’s vicious invasion on Oct. 7. He also will have to answer for how effectively he has prosecuted the war, including whether he has struck the right bargains in exchanging temporary cease-fires for the release of Israeli hostages, and whether the ultimate end-state for Gaza leaves Israel safer or otherwise.

But precisely because Israel is a democracy, accountability for Mr. Netanyahu is baked in. The Prime Minister at this moment represents a broad consensus in Israeli society that the country can’t afford to allow Hamas to continue its violent and corrupt control of Gaza after the horrors unleashed on Oct. 7.

Mr. Schumer knows all this and said as much in his speech on the Senate floor. He blamed Hamas for the atrocities of Oct. 7, and he noted that the terror group has “knowingly invited an immense civilian toll during this war” by using Gazans as human shields. The Senator also allowed that Israel “is surrounded by vicious enemies.”

So what does the Democrat from New York want? He hopes a different Israeli Prime Minister would advance a two-state solution of the sort Mr. Netanyahu has resisted. This reflects the political neurosis developing among Democrats, who wish some deus ex machina would allow Israel to “win” the war against Hamas in a way that would minimize the anger of the anti-Israel left in the U.S.

Biden’s Middle East Is a Fantasy World He imagines Palestinians are eager for peace and Israel’s government is at odds with its people. By Amit Segal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-middle-east-is-a-fantasy-world-israelis-and-palestinians-arent-as-he-thinks-198003a8?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

When Joe Biden and officials in his administration talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians, they describe two peoples that don’t exist in reality. According to the White House, the Palestinians aspire to peace, reject Hamas and are ready to make painful concessions.

A week after Hamas attacked Israel, Mr. Biden said in an interview on “60 Minutes”: “Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people.” National security adviser Jake Sullivan said: “The many, many Palestinians who have had nothing to do with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas—the vast majority of the population of Gaza—they deserve dignity. They deserve safety and security.”

In reality, according to a November survey by Arab World for Research and Development, affiliated with Ramallah-based Birzeit University, 59% of Palestinians “extremely support” the Oct. 7 massacre, and another 16% “somewhat support” it.

When Mr. Biden refers to the Palestinian Authority as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, he ignores that its president, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected 19 years ago to a four-year term, and that the last time the Palestinians went to the polls, in 2006, they voted for Hamas.

The Israeli people as the White House envisions them are also different from the real thing. Vice President Kamala Harris this week uttered a statement about Israel of the kind typically reserved for dictatorships: “It’s important for us to distinguish or at least not conflate the Israeli government with the Israeli people.”

A Zone of Disinterest at the Oscars Josh Levs

https://www.newsweek.com/zone-disinterest-oscars-opinion-1878405

When a British writer-director accepted an Oscar Sunday night for Zone of Interest, a fictional movie set against a backdrop of the very real Holocaust, he showed that his own grasp of reality is dangerously lacking.

In repugnant, victim-blaming remarks, Jonathan Glazer said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”

Note to Glazer: No one is hijacking your Jewishness or the Holocaust. That idea is an antisemitic myth popular among some deluded people who call themselves “progressive.” It’s a myth that fuels terrorism and attacks on Jews all over the world.

The differences between the real world and the imaginary one that Glazer described could not be more stark. In his imaginary world, an “occupation” somehow “led to” the October 7 terrorist attacks. In the real world, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, and the Palestinian Authority has long controlled Palestinian areas of the West Bank. Hamas, backed by Iran, carried out the most unimaginably evil terrorist attacks of modern times because years of brainwashing children in UNRWA-backed schools and training them to seek Jihad have created a radicalized population that celebrates the slaughter of Jews with candy and fireworks.

In Glazer’s imaginary world, the Holocaust is “hijacked.” In the real world, Jews (the people of Judea) have spent centuries trying to return to Israel, their indigenous homeland that they were expelled from by empires—long before the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed. The largest population in Israel is made up of Jews who had to flee Arab nations (not Europe) for their lives, losing everything.

Bari Weiss: The Holiday from History Is Over A free society is only as strong as the citizens willing to defend it. Reflections and videos from my time on the ground in Israel.

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-the-holiday-from-history-is-over?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPT:

Like everyone paying close attention to this war, I am thinking about the future or death of the two-state solution. I am thinking about Hezbollah in the north and when that front might explode. I am thinking about the impossibility of a nuclear Iran. I am thinking about the Red Sea and Rafah and the young men setting out to those places. I am thinking about the innocents killed in Gaza. I am thinking about the women and children trapped there by terrorist leaders and the kidnapped Israelis still held there—all of them hostages. 

But the questions that echo inside me since I returned home—flying from a country living inside history to a country where many people believe we are still outside of it, immune to it—are more basic ones.

Questions like: What would I do? What would the people I know do if we were thrust into a near-death experience? If we had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? The kind of seriousness I saw in ordinary Israelis—where does it come from? Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came? Or would we be like the Americans in this recent poll who admitted that they would flee rather than fight? 

Those are questions whose relevance grows more urgent by the day for those of us living in the free world.

I asked Haviv Gur if he thinks that a similar waking-up moment will come for America and Americans.

“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a long period of time when there was nothing in the Pacific that could have stopped a Japanese landing in California. And that sense of vulnerability created what Americans still today think of as the greatest generation,” Gur said. “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.”