RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271286/israel-beefs-its-military-ari-lieberman

Israel’s shrillest critics often accuse the Jewish State of exaggerating security threats. Some detractors have even characterized Israel’s security conscience leaders as “paranoid.” We often hear them spew tired and meaningless banalities like “peace of the brave” and “risks for peace” in connection with their calls for unilateral Israeli concessions. But Israelis, who have been compelled to fight seven wars with their Arab neighbors since acquiring hard-fought statehood, know better. They are keenly aware that peace treaties with authoritarian leaders and two-bit kings, generals and sheikhs are worth no more than the paper on which they’re written.

Nothing underscores this concept better than outrageous but unsurprising statements recently made by Jordan’s former prime minister, Abdelsalam al-Majali. In an August 18 televised interview, al-Majali, who was a signatory to the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty, stated, “The Arabs do not have any power. If we ever have military power, will we let them keep Haifa? We’ll take it.” And just in case anyone had any doubts as to the meaning of his words he added, “If tomorrow we become stronger and can take Haifa by force, will we really decline just because we have an agreement with them?”

The comments were made in Arabic to an Arabic audience. This is typical. Arab leaders often speak in forked tongues when the topic centers on Israel and have become adept at this type doublespeak. When addressing Western audiences, they moderate their tones and often employ euphemisms and ambiguities to mask their real intentions. But it is an entirely different affair when they address their fellow kinsmen where their true pernicious intentions are exposed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/god-said-be-fruitful-and-multiply-1536705344

I was heading for the final leg of my flight to Tel Aviv when something curious happened. As I crossed the Brussels airport, I was joined by other travelers. At each corridor, the crew swelled in size. Kippah-capped men carrying heavy briefcases, young couples wearing Star-of-David embroidered backpacks, older Hasidic rabbis who looked like Moses, families with infants in strollers and several toddlers trudging behind—we were all heading to the same place.

At the gate, I felt as if I’d crashed a family party. A couple of young boys zipped through the crowd on scooters like dive-bombers on a mission, with tzitzis (knotted fringes) and peyes (long side-curls) flying in the air.

Where I had started, the airport was hushed and gray, a space designed for efficiency. Its unadorned industrial motif was utilitarian, if not nihilistic. At my departure gate, I found a vibrant and chaotic scene, alive with color, noise and frolicking kids. I relaxed. As a pediatrician, I recognized the messiness; I work in that universe each day.

My experience vividly displayed how two countries, Belgium and Israel, view children. Israel treasures them. According to a 2018 report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the fertility rate for Israeli women stands at a robust 3.1, nearly double the level of most European nations. The Belgian fertility rate is 1.7, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271284/oslo-twenty-five-history-delusion-kenneth-levin
Twenty-five years ago, the world watched as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestinian leader and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. The Oslo process, launched with the September 13, 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles as President Clinton looked on, was supposed to lead to genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It never happened because Oslo was based on a delusion, a false belief by many Israelis that they had a partner for peace.

The truth was readily evident. On the evening of the White House ceremony, Arafat broadcast a speech on Jordanian television assuring Palestinians, and the Arab world more broadly, that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Palestine National Council’s 1974 decision. This was a reference to the so-called “plan of phases,” according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) would acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing Israel’s annihilation.

Why did Oslo’s supporters deny the truth? The Arab siege of Israel had been underway for nearly half a century, since the Jewish State’s founding. Invariably under conditions of such chronic besiegement – whether involving minorities marginalized and victimized by the surrounding majority or small states whose neighbors seek their destruction – elements of the population under assault will shun reality. They will fool themselves into believing that sufficient self-reform and concessions will win relief. They do so out of desperate longing for respite and despite typically overwhelming evidence in the rhetoric and actions of their attackers that the besieged are merely indulging in wishful thinking.

The traditional position of left-leaning Israeli parties had been that Israel needed to await a peace partner who would renounce terror and recognize Israel’s right to exist. But in the years preceding Oslo, this reasonable stance had eroded in the face of the unrelenting siege and the Left’s alienation from governments in which, since 1977, the right-leaning Likud had largely dominated. Growing numbers on the Israeli Left – including an overwhelming majority within the nation’s academic, cultural and media elites – concluded the major impediment to peace was the Israeli Right and its unwillingness to make necessary concessions. The Labor Party’s victory in the 1992 election gave the Left the opportunity to act on its delusion.

VeryGoodNewsIsrael.
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Alpha radiation destroys solid tumors safely. (TY OurCrowd) Israel’s Alpha Tau Medical uses alpha radiation to treat various types of solid tumors. Alpha DaRT (Dіffusіng Alpha-emіtters Radіatіon Therapy), developed at Tel Aviv University, is to begin clinical trials in Massachusetts USA.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3744829,00.html
https://www.massdevice.com/alpha-tau-wins-approval-to-test-cancer-targeting-device-in-the-u-s/
https://www.alphatau.com/ https://www.youtube.com/embed/ja2UQdFOueM?rel=0

Israeli leukemia treatment approved for UK children. The breakthrough CAR-T personalized leukemia therapy devised by Professor Zelig Eshhar of Israel’s Weizmann Institute (see here) is now available in the UK. The National Health Service will fund Kymriah – the CAR-T treatment commercialized by Novartis.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/04/nhs-fund-game-changing-personalised-cancer-drug/

Good results for colon capsule scan. Israeli biotech Check-Cap announced positive interim results for its post-CE approval study of the C-Scan system Version 3. Check-Cap’s capsule detects polyps (cancerous or precancerous) in patients without them having to undergo a colonoscopy or even any preparation.
https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/check-cap-announces-promising-interim-results-from-its-ongoing-post-ce-approval-study-of-c-scan-system-version-3-2018-09-04

Preventing hemorrhagic shock. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University and Hadassah Medical Center have developed software named VitalMiner to predict blood pressure instability in intensive care patients. It can give several extra hours’ warning of impending hypotension, where vital organs are starved of oxygenated blood.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-us-researchers-develop-software-that-predicts-blood-pressure-instability/

“Natural” protein to treat osteoporosis. Ben Gurion University scientists have discovered a natural protein in the body that can be tailored to treat osteoporosis. The protein can be modified to inhibit its standard bone destruction function, which avoids many of the side effects common with current treatments.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/authors?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2002979

Safer transplants. I reported previously (see here) on Israel’s Orgenesis which was developing a treatment for diabetes based on replacing cells in the body. Ogenesis is now working with Ben Gurion University to develop a cell transplantation process that avoids being attacked by the immune system.
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/pages/news/orgenesis_bgu.aspx

Auto-adjusting orthopedic brace. Israeli startup OrthoSpin is developing an electric brace to help with bone lengthening, setting complex fractures, and correcting deformities. The system tunes the brace’s position from pre-programmed instructions by an orthopedist who monitors progress remotely.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3742883,00.html
https://www.israel21c.org/let-a-robot-tend-your-fixation-device-after-leg-surgery/

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271245/quaker-event-promotes-blood-libels-against-israel-andrew-harrod

“This is not prison; this is a genocide,” stated an audience member following August 29 movie screenings concerning the Gaza Strip at the Washington, DC office of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Typifying the Israel-hating audience of about 25 that filled FCNL’s small Capitol Hill presentation room, this woman’s comments demonstrated how Quakers at FCNL and beyond have joined the global demonization of Israel.

The woman, a self-professed member of the radical anti-Israel organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), “was totally sickened” by the evening’s viewings of Gaza in Context and Gaza: A Gaping Wound. These two films formed the latest presentation of Voices from the Holy Land (VFHL), a Washington, DC-area film club that unites local members of Israel’s enemies such as JVP and is well-known to this author. Gaza’s ruling Hamas terrorists could not have been more pleased with VFHL’s pseudo-documentaries depicting victimized Palestinians and fiendish Zionists, as the JVP woman declared, “I just want to stand up and salute every Palestinian.”

Such bias belied the supposed objectivity of the evening’s introduction by VFHL’s Deepak Kenkeremath, a member of Manassas Presbyterian Church in Virginia. The “mainstream media” discusses Gaza in terms of “words and phrases like terrorists, and Hamas, and rockets, and suicide bombers, and Israeli Defense Forces,” he stated. Somehow the evening’s agitprop sought to expose a deeper, hidden truth behind the clear meaning of these plain words, and give “context for understanding what is going on in Gaza right now.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12920/abbas-arafat-mistakes

The question that needs to be asked is: Is it Palestinian public opinion, brought on by decades of incitement, that is pressuring Abbas into embarking on his anti-peace and anti-Israel rhetoric?
Abbas has chosen to endorse a legacy that he himself denounced in 2011. This legacy does not consider the lack of a Palestinian state to be the problem, but the existence of a Jewish and democratic state. It is a legacy that does not believe in peace with Israel but peace without Israel.

The majority of Abbas’s people do not trust him, are dissatisfied with his leadership, and demand that he resign. He is unable and unwilling to help his people abandon nationalist and Islamist delusions and myths representing outdated objectives, beliefs, and rhetoric. At this point, he cannot grow out of them. In short, Abbas has duplicated the mistakes of Arafat.

Why did Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently reject an offer to meet with White House advisors Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt?

According to a report in the London-based, Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, Abbas viewed the reported offer as an attempt by the Americans to push the Palestinians into agreeing to a peace process favorable to Israel.

Abbas and his PA leadership have been boycotting the US administration since President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017.

Abbas’s refusal to meet with the Trump envoys did not come as a surprise. In fact, in light of his anti-Israel rhetoric in the past few months, the Palestinian leader’s decision was expected.

Consider, for example, what Abbas said in an address to the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in January 2018, in which he approvingly quoted Egyptian intellectual Abdel-Wahab El-Messiri’s denial of the 3,000-year Jewish connection to Israel:

“The functional nature of Israel means that it was evoked by colonialism in order to fulfill a specific function, and thus it constitutes a colonialist enterprise that has nothing to do with Judaism.”

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/misrepresentation-israels-democracy/

Early in the morning of July 19, after eight hours of debate, the Knesset passed by a vote of 62–55 (with two abstentions) a law codifying Israel’s status as the national home of the Jewish people. First introduced in 2011 by the centrist Kadima Party, the so-called nation-state bill joined more than a dozen “Basic Laws” that now function as Israel’s unwritten constitution. Its 11 paragraphs mostly restate long-operative principles of Israeli democracy: Hebrew is the national language, “Hatikvah” is the national anthem, the menorah is the national emblem, Jerusalem is the nation’s capital, and Israel is where the self-determination of the Jewish nation is exercised.

One might find it surprising that such generalities would provoke a global outcry. Then again, Israel and selective indignation seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. Criticisms run the gamut from saying the law is unnecessary and provocative to saying it’s racist and anti-democratic. The Israeli left, in alliance with Israel’s minority Arabs and Druze, has marched in the streets. Institutions of the Jewish Diaspora have called for the law’s repeal. They have found themselves, rather uneasily, on the same side of the debate as anti-Zionists and Israel-haters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in Muslim capitals, and in the EU and UN. “The spirit of Hitler, which led the world to a great catastrophe, has found its resurgence among some of Israel’s leaders,” said Turkey’s Recep Tayip Erdogan.

Leaving aside anti-Semites such as Erdogan, reasonable people and friends of Israel may disagree about the necessity and utility of the nation-state law. Such disagreement, however, ought to be based on facts. And facts have been sorely lacking in recent discussions of Israel—thanks to an uninformed, biased, and one-sided media. Major journalistic institutions have become so wedded to a pro-Palestinian, anti–Benjamin Netanyahu narrative, in which Israel is part of a global trend toward nationalist authoritarian populism, that they have abdicated any responsibility for presenting the news in a dispassionate and balanced manner. The shameful result of this inflammatory coverage is the normalization of anti-Israel rhetoric and policies and widening divisions between Israel and the Diaspora.