RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/releasing-terrorists-doesnt-help-flatten-the-curve-627327

According to a report on Wednesday in German weekly Die Zeit, Israel is close to reaching an agreement with Hamas. Though the details of the deal are murky, the gist is clear. In exchange for the return of the bodies of soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul from Gaza – and the release from lengthy captivity of civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed – hundreds of Palestinian terrorists will be freed from Israeli jails.
To call this a “prisoner swap” is to obfuscate its true nature, by creating moral parity where it does not exist.

Goldin and Shaul were killed during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists, terrorist tunnels infrastructure and rocket launchers in Gaza in the summer of 2014. Since that time, Hamas has refused to relinquish their remains, despite repeated heart-wrenching pleas on the part of the Goldin and Shaul families for mercy.
 
THE TERRORIST organization that rules the Gaza Strip is not as stupid as it is evil, after all. Indeed, Hamas honchos are well aware of the value that the Jewish state places on human life in general, and on that of its own populace in particular. They also know that the Jewish state does not abandon soldiers, dead or alive, in the battlefield.

https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israeli-disinfectant-kills-100-percent-of-viruses-bacteria-627242

A state-of-the-art disinfectant developed by the Israel Institute for Biological Research and distributed by Tera Novel is capable of killing 100% of bacteria, viruses, molds and some fungi, including the novel coronavirus.

“Our disinfectant works in a very different way from many others,” Tera Novel chairwoman Karen Cohen Khazon told The Jerusalem Post. “We also use hypochlorite, but in a very high [concentration] and we add some [additional ingredients] so that anywhere the disinfectant is sprayed, it becomes a very white film of gel which keeps the [material] on the surface for a while.”
To clean it off, she explained, you simply need to rinse it off with water or clean it off with a towel or paper towel.

Hazon explained that the disinfectant works well on walls, ceilings, floors, toilets, restrooms, spas, airport bathrooms, and now, mikvaot (ritual baths).

The company began a test run in Bnei Brak as part of the effort to slowly ease the coronavirus restrictions in the region by using the disinfectant in mikvaot in the ultra-Orthodox city. The pilot is seemingly a success, as the town plans on reopening mikvaot in the coming days.

“Jabotinsky… The Man and His Vision” is the best short work on the Zionist leader Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky I’ve ever read. A monograph of 36 pages, it provides a perfect balance of essential details with brush strokes broad enough to capture the life of this seminal figure.

It was written by William Mehlman, who passed away on April 27 at the age of 91. His death was sudden. He was still lucid, writing up until the end. I always enjoyed my conversations with Bill, whose manner was two parts thoughtful intellectual and one part enthusiasm.

“He was passionate about his views. What he believed in he believed in very strongly,” his son Ira said.

Prominent for Ira, in remembering his father, was his sense of purpose. “He had a sense of purpose every day. He had it even after he retired from working,” Ira said.

That purpose may have come from the sense that time is fleeting, something Bill may have come to understand when he lost his own father, who was only 52 when he died. “He never said that, but I suspect it in retrospect, it does change your outlook. It has changed mine,” Ira said.

For Bill, the purpose that fueled him was defending Israel and the Jewish people. He was going to do whatever he could to make sure Jews would never again find themselves in a position of powerlessness. This worldview was likely the result of living through two seminal events during his formative years – the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-high-court-clears-way-for-benjamin-netanyahu-to-form-next-government-11588804563

TEL AVIV—Israel’s top court ruled that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can form a government while under indictment, removing a final hurdle in the incumbent’s bid to remain in power as he goes on trial later this month on corruption charges.

The High Court this week reviewed eight separate petitions challenging a deal between Mr. Netanyahu and rival Benny Gantz to form a unity government after three inconclusive elections in a year. The two politicians said the coronavirus pandemic necessitated an end to continued political uncertainty.

But their deal was challenged by nongovernmental organizations, other political parties and advocacy groups who argued Mr. Netanyahu shouldn’t be leading a government while he faces bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges.

Late on Wednesday, the panel of 11 High Court judges decided not to intervene. “The legal decision we’ve reached is not meant to detract from the seriousness of the pending charges against MP Benjamin Netanyahu…nor from the difficulty of the tenure of a prime minister charged with criminal acts,” the justices wrote in their decision. “It is the result…of having the presumption of innocence.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/israel-wins-battle-against-covid-19-ari-lieberman/

During its brief history, the modern state of Israel has had to endure endless wars, terrorism, political, cultural and economic boycotts, and has triumphed decidedly over all these hardships. The Jewish State, with a population of just under 9 million and about the size of New Jersey routinely ranks among the most powerful nations in the world and its citizens enjoy a standard of living on par with Western nations, an astonishing achievement considering that Israel has been in existence for only 72 years and is surrounded by medieval, genocidal neighbors.

But in late February, it became readily apparent that Israel, indeed the world was facing a much more insidious enemy, an invisible foreign virus, which emerged from the Chinese city of Wuhan. While China was lying to the world and spinning false narratives as to the nature and origins of the virus, Israel’s leaders understood that this was an enemy unlike any other they had faced before, and consequently took immediate and drastic measures to minimize the damage.

Fast-forward to May 1, 2020. Eighty percent of Israeli towns and villages have reported no new COVID-19 infections. Hospitals throughout Israel are reporting no new COVID-19 admissions. Of the nation’s 16,193 confirmed COVID-19 infected, nearly 10,000 have fully recovered. Israel’s mortality rate from COVID-19 is among the lowest in the world, only 231 deaths.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/scales-of-israeli-justice/

Israel’s High Court of Justice just spent two full days hearing petitions against the continued rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the national-unity deal that he signed last month with Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz. The only thing good about the proceedings was that they were broadcast live. This not only gave viewers a glimpse into the workings of judicial activism, as well as a better understanding of the arguments on both sides of the dispute, but hopefully served to keep the robed men and women on the illustrious bench somewhat in check.

After all, these self-anointed demigods of democracy may have been able to fend off coronavirus droplets with surgical masks and plastic seat dividers, but the rest of us need protecting from the political power that the High Court wields far beyond its purview.

Ironically, judicial reform was a key element of Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s platform during all three rounds of Knesset elections, the first two of which resulted in political deadlock. Though the outcome of the third initially appeared to be pointing in a similar direction, the stalemate was resolved (if you can call it that) by the very coalition deal whose legitimacy is being determined—you guessed it—by the court.

To put it simply, this means that a panel of 11 judges will decide later this week on whether the Israeli people made the right choice of parliamentarians at the ballot box. If it weren’t so outrageous, it would be funny that one of the petitioners against Netanyahu and the coalition-in-the-making is the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, a self-described “non-partisan” NGO, whose president, Eliad Shraga, played a starring role in the High Court hearings on Sunday and Monday.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15975/judges-us-israel

Were the Supreme Court of Israel to decide that Benjamin Netanyahu is legally prohibited from forming a government in which he served as prime minister because he is under indictment, it would be usurping the role of the Knesset (which has not enacted such a prohibition) and the electorate (which gave him plurality, knowing that he was under indictment), as well as undercutting the rule of law (which presumes indicted individuals innocent until and unless convicted).

Such a ruling would throw the justices into the “political thicket” (to quote the US Supreme Court) and further politicize the manner by which justices are selected. It would be a self-inflicted wound on the independence and neutrality of the Supreme Court. Finally, it would give too much power to prosecutors and police officials to interfere with elections, by issuing indictments that might not result in convictions

This is not the time to further politicize a great Israeli institution.

The book of Ruth begins with a cautionary description: “In the days when judges ruled, there was famine in the land.” Though the Bible suggests no causal relationship between the judiciary ruling the people and bad things happening to them, history suggests that governance by unelected Platonic guardians is anathema to democracy.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/05/03/the-palestinian-refugee-scam-2/

Can history be undone? The correct answer is: of course not. Surely what happened happened, notwithstanding any subsequent discomfort with the result.

Not so fast.

For example: Who are the rightful inheritors of Palestine? Indeed, where is “Palestine”? These questions, embedded in discussions (and inevitable disagreements) for the past century, have been thrust to the forefront with announcements by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the planned extension of Israeli sovereignty over settlements in Biblical Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and the Jordan Valley.

Prompted by the centennial anniversary of the San Remo accords, a long dormant set of flawed assumptions has surfaced. Those 1920 accords, ratified by the League of Nations and never rescinded, affirmed the promise made three years earlier by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The San Remo agreement became, and remained, the international affirmation of Jewish sovereignty over the land west (and originally also east) of the Jordan River. But the United Nations, with its long history of discomfort often shading into overt hostility toward Israel, has yet to recognize this embedded precedent of international law.

Yishai Fleisher, spokesman for the Hebron Jewish community, recently cited, “This momentous occasion, on which the international community recognized and then ratified the inalienable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel for the first time in modern history.” But one year later, at the Cairo Conference, Great Britain excluded Transjordan from the territory comprising the Jewish national home and bestowed it as a gift to King Abdullah for his newly invented Kingdom of Jordan.