RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://unitedwithisrael.org/breakthrough-1st-shiite-muslim-majority-country-to-open-embassy-in-israel/?utm_source=newsletters_

My e-pal Nurit Greenger has been writing about this nation for years…..rsk

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited Azerbaijan in October to discuss security and policy and foster defense cooperation.

Azerbaijan’s parliament on Friday initiated the process of opening an embassy in Israel, making it the first Shi’ite Muslim-majority country do so.

“Azerbaijan is an important partner of Israel and home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Muslim world,” Prime Minister Yair Lapid said in a statement following the development. “The decision to open an embassy reflects the depth of the relationship between our countries. This move is the result of the Israeli government’s efforts to build strong diplomatic bridges with the Muslim world,” he added.

Last April, Azerbaijan opened a tourism office in Israel for the first time and signed a cooperation agreement. The month also marked the 30th anniversary of establishing diplomatic ties between the two nations.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited Azerbaijan in October to discuss security and policy and foster defense cooperation.

Israel buys 40% of its oil from Azerbaijan, and supplied 27% of Azerbaijan’s major arms imports from 2011 to 2020, including 69% from 2016 to 2020, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Both Israel and Azerbaijan see Iran as a threat.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC24cdDLzkNJf2_CNNzdI-UQ

“Top Story” with Jonathan Tobin and guest Ruthie Blum, Ep. 70.
November 17, 2022 / JNS) Israelis are ready for a new Netanyahu government. But the American midterm election results will mean that Israel’s leader will have a difficult path to navigate as he attempts to stop the Biden administration from appeasing Iran. In the latest episode of “Top Story,” JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin sums up the results of the elections in the two democracies and what they may mean for the Jewish state.

Discussing the prospective new Israeli government with him is JNS columnist Ruthie Blum. According to Blum, the upsurge in Palestinian terrorism and other crime on the watch of interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s coalition has left Israelis seeking a different, more aggressive approach. This, she argues, is why there isn’t much resistance to controversial Religious Zionist Party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir becoming the internal security minister.
Another pressing need is the reforming of Israel’s judiciary, she says, arguing that, contrary to the claims of the left, the new government would be upholding democracy by giving power back to the Knesset, not undermining it.
As for Netanyahu’s prospects as he returns to office, Blum says, “It’s no accident that he’s the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history. He is also a genius at long-term strategy.”

The columnist believes that Netanyahu will take action against Iran, especially as there seems little chance that the United States will turn away from a policy of appeasement. She believes that there is a good chance that the protest movement in Iran is succeeding. Israel and the United States should help this movement, not the tottering Islamist regime as Biden seems to want to do, she emphasizes.

Turning to U.S. politics, the two discuss former President Donald Trump’s plans to run in 2024.
While Israelis are deeply grateful for Trump’s historic support for the Jewish state, his behavior during the midterms and attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were “childish and foolish,” she says. Gratitude “doesn’t mean that now we should watch him destroy the remnants of the Republican Party” with his “crazy ego.”
“Top Story” also airs on JBS-TV.

https://www.jns.org/a-breakable-alliance-israeli-conference-spotlights-worrying-socio-political-trends-in-us/

“This conference is a warning conference,” said IDF Maj. Gen. (res.) Tamir Hayman, executive director of INSS. “We expect a reality that within five to 10 years the superpower support that Israel enjoys will be at risk.”

It’s referred to as the “unbreakable alliance,” but a conference in Tel Aviv on Monday painted a more disturbing picture, of a U.S.-Israel relationship headed for trouble.

The conference, titled “Israel-U.S. Relations: Trends and Looking Ahead,” became a call to arms as speakers insisted the matter was now at the level of a national security threat. It was sponsored by The Reut Group, the Israeli Institute for Economic Planning (IEP) and the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), and featured politicians, public figures, former IDF officers, analysts and U.S. Jewish leaders.

“This conference is a warning conference,” said IDF Maj. Gen. (res.) Tamir Hayman, executive director of INSS. “We expect a reality that within five to 10 years the superpower support that Israel enjoys will be at risk.”

Warning of a world where the United States no longer vetoes anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, or helps replenish Israeli weapons stockpiles, philanthropist and high-tech entrepreneur Yossie Hollander, who helped organize the conference, said, “The present situation between the government and the elite is still good, but the situation we’re moving toward is catastrophic.”

Among the currents within the United States working against Israel highlighted during the day-long conference were American political polarization, a new generation whose values are at odds with the Jewish state, and the rise of a radical, progressive ideology that has swept through America’s institutions.

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The conference’s first speaker, William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, focused on the political polarization, noting that Democrats and Republicans were increasingly partisan in their thinking, leaving less room for agreement on key issues.

“We must do all that we can to ensure that support for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship does not become yet another divisive partisan issue, like reproductive rights and gun control,” he said.

https://www.jns.org/the-fbi-has-been-weaponized-against-israel/

On Monday, Israel’s Channel 14 reported that the FBI had informed Israel’s Justice Ministry and the Israel Defense Forces that it had opened a formal criminal probe into the shooting death of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin in May.

Glick and Smith discuss how the administration coerced the outgoing government into accepting responsibility for her death in a firefight between Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists and IDF forces last spring.

Now, two months later, the administration has loosed the FBI on Israel’s soldiers.

Smith says that the Biden administration has weaponized the FBI against its political foes. According to Smith, the move on Israel is in keeping with the administration’s domestic policy.

The author places the administration’s efforts to realign America towards Iran and away from Israel and Saudi Arabia in the context of its treatment of its political foes. He explains the administration’s cognitive continuum between its political enemies and its foreign policy: allied governments that do not share the progressive worldview are lumped in with Biden’s political foes.

https://www.jns.org/writers/benjamin-kerstein/

The words “settlement” and “settler” have decidedly nasty connotations these days. I am not speaking only of the discourse on Israel and Zionism, in which the settlers in Judea and Samaria are routinely portrayed in the most negative possible terms. On a global scale, “settlement” and “settler,” as writer Victor Sharpe has been warning us for years, have become not only pejoratives but synonyms for absolute evil.

It is only fair to say that there are some good reasons for this. The dominant “post-colonialist” paradigm sees settlement as inherently colonialist, imperialist and often genocidal—the brutal oppression of indigenous populations of color by white Western empires. And indeed, this has often been the case.

Thanks to the prodigious efforts of Israel’s enemies, much of the world’s elite has applied this post-colonialist paradigm to the Jewish state. Israel, they claim, is a “settler-colonialist” society created by foreign conquerors who stole and continue to steal the land of “Palestine” from the indigenous population.

A great many people have dealt rather summarily with these charges, and I will not reiterate their arguments here. I will note, however, that once one begins to unpack the post-colonialist paradigm—with its metaphysical dichotomy of “settler” and “indigenous”—it becomes much more problematic than it appears at first glance.

One could argue, for example, that with the exception of a handful of sub-Saharan Africans, no one is indigenous to anywhere. The theory that different species of Homo sapiens rose up more or less out of the ground in various parts of the world—which was the foundation of 19th- and 20th-century racism—has been thoroughly discredited. It is now universally accepted.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/judgment-day-for-israels-legal-system/

 Nationwide outrage over the light sentence meted out by the Beersheva Juvenile Court last Wednesday to a Bedouin who sodomized a little girl two years ago sheds light on why the right garnered a clear victory on Nov. 1.

As the 25th Knesset is sworn in today (Tuesday), with coalition negotiations in full swing, the above heinous crime and measly punishment can help explain the election results. Chattering-class hysteria notwithstanding, the probability that Religious Zionist Party member Itamar Ben-Gvir will be given the public-security portfolio he’s been demanding is actually a relief to much of the public.

Ben-Gvir is by no means the only figure who’s been bemoaning the loss of Israeli governance in the Negev, which, despite being located in the south of the country, is often referred to as the “Wild West.” But his shouts about and proposed remedies for restoring law and order in that and other key areas have resonated far and wide; as has the rape case in question.

The horror story took place on a Friday night, after the child and her family had finished their Shabbat meal and gone to sleep. Three young men—two of them aged 17, and the third, who waited outside in a getaway car, past his 18th birthday—approached the house.

The “teenagers” had already burgled other residences, so they must have been feeling pretty confident when they entered this one. All their scrounging produced, however, was 50 shekels ($14.50) and a few toys.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

On average, Israel has about 300 sunny days a year with hot summers and mild winters. While beautiful beaches, cafes and cuisine, scuba diving in Eilat, ruins in Caesarea, and ancient Churches which have been meticulously restored by Israel, are among the sites that lure tourists of all faiths from all over the globe.

 As Michael Ordman details in his essential newsletter, scientists in Israel work 24/7 to harness the benefits of sunshine and clement weather to produce innovations in the production of food for citizens throughout the world.

This evokes Psalm 107-9 “Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind, for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.”     rsk

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Nitric Oxide speeds recovery from Covid-19. The LungFit Nitric Oxide device from Israel’s Beyond Air (see here previously) speeds up the recovery of hospitalized COVID patients. Clinical (human) trials showed they needed less oxygen support and spent less time in the hospital than those who didn’t receive the treatment.
https://nocamels.com/2022/10/covid-patients-recover-more-quickly-with-nitric-oxide/
 
Device avoids need for open-heart surgery. (TY UWI) Israel’s Cuspa Medical is testing the Cusper – a device that takes over the job of a damaged heart valve that can no longer open and close properly to control blood to the heart. The Cusper is inserted using a catheter in a minimally invasive procedure, avoiding major surgery.
https://nocamels.com/2022/11/simple-device-spares-patients-from-heart-surgery/
 
Preventing secondary cancer. It’s early days, but Tel Aviv University scientists have managed in lab tests to reduce the incidence of breast cancer relapse by 88%. They used two chemotherapies – doxorubicin and cisplatin together, which reduced the spread of cancer cells (metastasis) that occurred using just one therapy.
https://www.israel21c.org/existing-drug-may-reduce-breast-cancer-relapses-by-88/
https://www.jns.org/israeli-researchers-improve-chemotherapy-treatment-for-breast-cancer-patients/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33598-x
 
Preventing hair loss from chemo. Decursin is a substance that promotes hair growth, especially in chemotherapy patients. Decursin is normally extracted from a rare seasonal flower in an expensive process, but students at Israel’s Technion Institute have just won awards by synthesizing it using enzymes from bacteria.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/technion-undergrads-wow-paris-meet-with-plan-to-reduce-chemo-induced-hair-loss/   https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-720574
 
Medical research to use real-world data. Israel’s Ministry of Health is partnering with Israel’s Lynx MD (see here previously) to make patient data from 49 Israeli medical centers available for research. Lynx MD’s medical intelligence platform anonymously secures the data before releasing it to researchers.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/nw2pq59af
 
Medicine and Peace conference. (TY Hazel) The 3-day medical conference “Tomorrow’s Medicine as a Bridge for Peace” in Morocco brought together 60 cancer specialists from Morocco, Israel, and France. It was organized by Pax Medicalis, a France-based nonprofit known in English as the Peace Medical Association.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/medicine-and-peace-conference-in-morocco-features-israeli-docs-and-shabbat-songs/
 
On the spot. Israel is a small country, and paramedic training is a priority.  A volunteer EMT from NGO United Hatzalah was walking on the same Netivot street as a man who had a heart attack. The EMT began CPR and was soon joined by another EMT with a defibrillator. Shortly afterwards, the man regained consciousness.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/361982
 

https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/11/opinion-the-us-israel-relationship-navigating-the-post-election-landscape-bryen/

The confluence of Israeli and American elections has brought the pundits out in full force to dissect the question, “What does this mean for U.S-Israel relations?” Two points should illuminate the conversation.

First, for all the hyperbole, there is a fundamental sharing of democratic Western values between the two countries, and confluence of interests on basic international security issues — with the possible exception of Iran, but that is changing. Second, in both countries, there are domestic considerations on people’s minds that foreign friends would do best not to meddle in.

Israel was, is and will remain a free and democratic country. Voters had choices ranging from an Islamic Arab Party to a far left anti-Zionist party, to several in the secular left and center-left to right and center-right, to both the religious and anti-religious right. That’s a lot more choices than American voters had.

More than 70% of eligible Israeli voters went to the polls, which is a lot higher than American turnout. For those worried that a religious right wing party may be in the government, please note that it won 7% of the vote.

Which is the second point. When American voters elected Ilhan (“It’s the Benjamins, baby”) Omar, Israelis did not fret about the end of America. When the death of George Floyd sparked deadly riots across the United States, Israel did not denounce American police as racist. When protesters entered the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, the Israeli government did not bewail “insurrection.” Those are not issues that need Israeli government input.

And neither does judicial reform in Israel. It is worthwhile to understand that Israel, with no written Constitution, has a different set of issues for its Supreme Court than Americans might have for our own. But that’s as far as it goes. No one in Israel said a word about the Democrat plan to expand and stack the U.S. Supreme Court.