RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://bit.ly/2XFqiei

Liberals, leftists, socialists and secular folks may not like being told this, but the following are truths that cannot shrivel away.

So when did it become an accepted truism that a delusional peace between Israel and the predominately Muslim Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, require that Israel give to them it’s very own Biblical birthright in its Jewish heartland for a mess of potage? When did the Oslo Accords, the Wye Agreement, the Roadmap, ad nauseum, supersede the eternal possession of the Jewish people to their God given heartland of Judea and Samaria? To even ask the question would seem to be a monstrous tragedy, so enormous as to spit in the face of God and make the very angels in heaven weep.

“Who are they who dare divide the land that the Almighty bequeathed to Abraham and to his descendants through Isaac and Jacob? Who are they who would give any part of tiny Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) to the descendants of Ishmael, they who possess vast lands throughout the Middle East and North Africa?

Unlike the deeply appreciated present incumbent of the White House, President Donald J. Trump, too many previous presidents displayed pro-Muslim Arab policies, which created a clear and present danger to the very existence of the Jewish state and, may I suggest, to the very spiritual and physical future of our own beloved America itself. Remember Genesis 12:3.

And then there was Barack Hussein Obama whose hatred of the Jewish state surpassed even that of the lamentable Jimmy Carter. Remember Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, who came numerous times to pressure and threaten Israel, thus ushering in an even more baleful time for the Jewish state?

 www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

As this week’s newsletter shows, the Israeli descendants of the Patriarchs are still building items of historic significance. From artificial knee cartilage, to devices that recognize viruses from bacteria; from joint Arab-Jewish learning programs, to water purification systems for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico; from robots, to satellites; from electric planes, to fraud detection systems, from eco-friendly weed-killer, to ecological parks; and from better access for the disabled, to life-saving bone marrow databases.  Michael Ordman 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Israeli-developed artificial knee cartilage. Israeli doctors performed the first commercial replacement surgery of the meniscus (knee cartilage) on two Israeli patients. Via a small incision, they each received the NUsurface artificial meniscus implant developed at the Netanya, Israel R&D center of US company Active Implants.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/two-patients-in-israel-get-netanya-developed-artificial-meniscus/  
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Worlds-first-artificial-meniscus-implant-performed-in-Israel-608138  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96NW_uqa-A
 
Positive results for Brainstorm’s ALS trial. As reported (here) previously, the stem cell treatment for ALS from Israel’s Brainstorm is doing well in trials.  The latest Phase 2 trial of Brainstorm’s autologous bone-marrow derived MSC-NTF cells (Nurown) in 48 patients at 3 US sites was effective and well tolerated.
http://ir.brainstorm-cell.com/news-releases/news-release-details/brainstorm-cell-therapeutics-announces-publication-nurownr-als
 
The first Hadassah accelerator graduates. Hadassah Accelerator, run jointly by Hadassah Medical Center IBM and the Jerusalem Development Authority, has graduated its first six med-tech startups. They are MyMilk, TuneFork, Deep Health, Neuroya, Ukappi and MDI Health Technologies.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3772621,00.html https://www.mymilklab.com/
https://www.tunefork.co.il/  http://deep-health.co/ http://www.neuroya.com/https://www.mdi.health/
 
New med-tech TV series. A US TV production team has been filming for a documentary series on Israel’s medical device industry. It will showcase the people and technologies that are saving lives around the world. The show, called “TrueFuture,” will feature Israel in eight to ten episodes in Series 3.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/documentary-delves-into-growing-weight-of-startup-nation-on-med-tech-scene/
 
More Euro funding for virus / bacteria test. (TY UWI) The European Innovation Council has just added 2.5 million Euros to international funds that Israel’s MeMed previously received (see here) to roll out its test that distinguishes between a virus and a bacteria. Very timely for World Antibiotic Awareness Week (Nov 18-24).
https://www.israel21c.org/is-it-a-virus-or-a-bacteria-israeli-solution-wins-e2-5m-award/
 
Let’s get loud. (TY Janglo) On October 15th, 2019, Koolulam collaborated with Israeli NGO ‘One in Nine’ to mark International Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  2,000 people got together in Tel Aviv to sing Jennifer Lopez’s hit “Let’s Get Loud” and celebrate life alongside breast cancer survivors, families and friends.    
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQqFzLJXg40 https://www.onein9.org.il/support-services/?lang=en
 
 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/israeli-settlements-are-a-political-not-a-legal-issue/

It was not radical for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to revive the Reagan policy.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just upended longstanding, widely held opinion about the legality of Israel’s West Bank settlements. Critics say he is off on the law, has radically broken with U.S. policy, and is undermining the pursuit of peace. Those critics are wrong on all scores.

Pompeo made four main points. First, the settlements are not “inherently illegal.” Second, the West Bank’s fate should be determined through negotiations. Third, international law “does not compel a particular outcome” in favor of Israel or the Palestinians. And fourth, the issue is political in nature, not legal, and attacking the settlements’ legality “hasn’t advanced the cause of peace.”

For 35 years U.S. administrations refrained from repeating President Carter’s criticism of Israeli settlements as illegal, Pompeo recounted, but then President Obama broke with this policy by taking the Carter position at the United Nations. President Reagan had rejected Carter’s view. “This administration,” Pompeo said, “agrees with President Reagan.”

I advised President Reagan on the subject. Here’s some background.

President Carter had a famously strained relationship with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Carter pressured him to make concessions to the Palestinians. This included condemnation of Israeli settlements as illegal, supported by a five-page letter dated April 21, 1978, and signed by State Department legal adviser Herbert Hansell.

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-Elections/Right-from-wrong-Israels-battle-on-the-home-front-608659

Anyone following the political chaos of the past six months could have predicted it would take a miracle to prevent a third round of Knesset elections.

Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz’s announcement on Wednesday evening that he was returning his coalition-building mandate to President Reuven Rivlin came as little surprise. Anyone following the political chaos of the past six months, particularly that which ensued when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to cobble together a government, could have predicted that it would take a miracle to prevent a third round of Knesset elections.

This is chiefly due to Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman, whose ill-deserved role as “king-maker” seems to have caused him such megalomaniacal pleasure that he’s decided to try to hold on to the title indefinitely.This, too, might have been anticipated.

Indeed, as nausea-inducing as all the above has been, none of it has elicited gasps of shock. The Israeli public has come to expect the worst of its politicians, after all. It also has grown increasingly disillusioned with an electoral system that enables small parties such as Liberman’s to dictate terms to their larger counterparts, and abuse their disproportionate power to topple governments at will.

Nothing new about that.

SOMETHING JAW-DROPPING certainly has been taking place, however, which explains precisely why Netanyahu has been the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history. In the past two weeks alone – with the threat of indictments by Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit hanging over his head and a justified fear of Gantz forging a narrow coalition with outside bolstering from the anti-Zionist Arab parties – Netanyahu has been fighting a war on two fronts against Iran. And with a newly appointed defense minister, Naftali Bennett, to boot.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/arabs-against-boycotting-israel-11574293923

London

Boycotting Israel and its people has only strengthened both, while doing great harm to Arab countries, and not least to the Palestinians. For the sake of the region, it is long past time to move forward to a postboycott era.

That’s where the Arab Council for Regional Integration aims to go. The council formed this week in London and is made up of 32 civic actors from 15 Arab countries, including us. The council isn’t a government organization—members include heads of NGOs, prominent media figures, Muslim clerics, and even musicians. The only political figures who attended were a former Kuwaiti information minister and an Egyptian legislator who also heads a political party there. Regardless of profession, those gathered espoused a spirit of partnership that knows no borders and repudiates the culture of exclusion and demonization that has wreaked havoc across the Arab world. First on our list is the generations-old boycott of Israel and Israelis.

The boycott evolved in stages. In the mid-20th century, Arab elites enacted exclusionary policies against 900,000 Jews indigenous to Arab lands, culminating in their mass dispossession and forced migration. In the 1940s, the internal crackdown developed into an intergovernmental Arab effort to target the young country to which most of these Jews fled—Israel—through political, cultural and economic isolation. The goal was to uproot them and their European Jewish brethren from the area. Next came a ban on all civil engagement with Israelis, even and especially in countries nominally at peace with Israel.

The latest iteration is driven largely by foreigners: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement aims to drive a wedge between Israelis and their global partners. Each boycott has failed to defeat Israelis. Instead, the economic pressure inspired innovative responses that invigorated their economy and society.

The US position on the future of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) should be based on US interests in the context of a violent, volcanic, uncontrollable and unpredictable Middle East.

On September 18, 1970, the pro-USSR Syrian military invaded Jordan in an attempt to topple the pro-US Hashemite regime, which would destabilize the regional balance. The invasion was rolled back, largely, due to Israel’s deployment of its military, and Israel’s deterring posture on the Golan Heights and the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria. Thus, Israel’s posture of deterrence spared the US the need to deploy its own troops (while it was bogged down in the Vietnam quagmire), in order to secure its Jordanian ally, and prevent a devastating ripple effect into Saudi Arabia and all other pro-US Arab Gulf States (at a time when the US was heavily dependent upon Persian Gulf oil).

Israel’s control of the mountains of Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley – as well as the Golan Heights – dramatically catapulted its regional position from violence-inducing weakness to violence-deterring strength, reducing regional violence and threats to all pro-US Arab regimes.

Israel’s control of the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria – the cradle of Jewish history – has transformed the Jewish State from a supplicant and national security consumer to a strategic ally of the US and national security producer.  In the words of the late General Alexander Haig (former Supreme Commander of NATO and US Secretary of State), Israel has become the largest US aircraft carrier with no US boots on board, yielding the US a few hundred percent rate of return on its annual investment in Israel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pompeo-busts-the-occupation-myth-11574207220

Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law. That is now America’s official view, announced Monday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The historic decision repudiates the conclusions of a 1978 State Department memorandum.

For decades, Israel’s detractors have appealed to consensus, asserting that settlements are illegal because the entire international community agrees they are illegal. As with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the Trump administration has refused to be cowed by a hollow consensus. By dissenting, the U.S. has destroyed both the consensus and the frail arguments that relied on it.

The four-page 1978 memo, written by legal adviser Herbert Hansell, was hardly a thorough study. It painted with broad strokes across several issues and cited no precedent for its key conclusions. Most important, its legal analysis of occupation and settlements has never been applied, by the U.S. or anyone else, to any other comparable situation.

Hansell’s memo took two analytic steps. First, it concluded that Israel was an “occupying power” in the West Bank. Next, it invoked an obscure provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says the “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Hansell concluded that Jews who have moved past the Green Line into disputed territory have somehow been “deported or transferred” there by the state of Israel.

https://worldisraelnews.com/israel-says-it-struck-iranian-military-targets-in-syria/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=vwo_notification_1574240011&vwo_powered=1

“The attack took place in response to the launching of rockets by an Iranian force from Syrian territory into Israeli territory,” says the IDF. 

Israel Air Force fighter jets attacked in Syria overnight, striking “dozens of military targets” belonging to the Iranian Quds Force and Syrian army, according to the Israeli army spokesman on Wednesday.

“The targets included surface-to-air missiles, command headquarters, weapons depots, and military bases,” said the Israeli military in a statement on Twitter.

“The attack was carried out in response to the launching of rockets by an Iranian force from Syrian territory into Israeli territory and an intent to cause damage in Israeli territory,” the statement added.

“We, as a military, will not allow Iran to entrench in Syria. We will not put up with Iranian entrenchment on our border and will stand up against it,” vowed the IDF spokesman.

The Israeli military also released a map which illustrated the locations of the targets which the Israeli jets struck, most near the Syrian capital of Damascus, but also close to the Syrian-Israeli border.

The IDF said that the attacks from Syria had come on Tuesday morning.

“Four rockets were fired at us,” said the statement on Twitter, adding that they were “intercepted by Iron Dome [air defense] batteries.”

The Israeli military says that it is “prepared for an attack and any scenario,” but that in the meantime, Israeli citizens living in the northern part of the country near the Syrian border could proceed with their daily routines.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/no-israeli-settlements-do-not-violate-international-law/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that the United States is abandoning a Carter-era bureaucratic decision that Israeli settlements – the homes of Jews living in Judea and Samaria – are illegal under international law. Pompeo’s statement represents a dramatic reversal from the Obama administration, which under the auspices of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, publicly held that Israeli settlements constituted a violation of international law.

Pompeo’s action is particularly notable coming shortly after the European Court of Justice ruled the EU was required by international law to label Israeli products from the West Bank as made in “settlements” in “occupied” territory. That decision, like the Carter-era policy Pompeo rejected, applied a unique rule, crafted solely for Israel, and masquerading as international law. Pompeo’s latest statement serves as a reminder that the Trump administration does not bow to anti-Israel sentiment positing itself as “international law,” no matter what shape it arrives in.

In challenging the international law consensus, Pompeo noted that the labeling of Israeli civilian settlements as “inconsistent with international law” has not actually forwarded the objective of long-term peace. Pompeo’s declaration is also an affirmative nod to what a host of others in the international community, particularly Professor Eugene Kontorovich of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, have been asserting in opposition for decades—the inhabitance of Jews in territories recaptured in the Six-Day War in 1967 does not violate international law.

The outrage over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s September announcement regarding the potential application of Israeli civil law in the Jordan Valley mirrors the current outrage being lodged at Pompeo’s declaration. Both Netanyahu and Pompeo’s assertions, however, find solid grounding in international law.

https://www.jns.org/writers/ruthie-blum/

Every action that his administration has taken stems from the understanding that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian peace process” has failed repeatedly—not only as a result of being based on a false premise, but of following the same old paradigm.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s dramatic announcement on Monday that the “establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law” sent shockwaves around the world. In retrospect, however, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.

Since his election three years ago, U.S. President Donald Trump has been consistent in his efforts to reverse the policies of the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Not only in relation to Israel. But his pro-Israel stance has been steady and unapologetic from the get-go, which is as it should be.

Indeed, each of his decisions—such as recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the embassy accordingly, defunding the Palestinian “pay for slay” machine and acknowledging Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights—has been geared towards cementing the natural U.S.-Israel relationship in a healthy way. Every action that his administration has taken stems from the understanding that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian peace process” has failed repeatedly—not only as a result of being based on a false premise, but of following the same old paradigm.

Team Trump has been engaging in what the high-tech sector refers to as “disruption.”