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ISRAEL

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

If you want to be depressed by stories about violence, tragedies, and lies about Israel, there are many websites you can link to and email groups you can join.  But if you want the truth about the positive achievements of the only Jewish State, then Read It Here! Michael Ordman

Could not say it better! rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
Israel’s largest flag. (TY Yanky) 50 meters above Moshav Netiv HaAsara flies is probably the biggest flag in Israel at 17 meters wide and 12 meters tall. It is visible from Gaza, as a symbol of defiance to the Hamas terrorists who tried to overrun the Moshav on Oct 7.  https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/hyuhfkwl0
 
CAM-supported volunteers honored.  Members of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) received Presidential Volunteer Medals in Jerusalem for helping those impacted by Oct 7. They included Yahaloma Zechut (Ofakim Resilience Center), Racheli Tadesa Malkai (Ethiopians), and Wahid Alhuzeil (Bedouins).
https://www.jns.org/herzog-honors-cam-supported-volunteers-for-post-oct-7-response/
 
Volunteers learn resilience. Some 100 US college students just completed the Jewish National Fund-USA’s “Alternative Break” week, supporting families in southern Israel impacted by the Oct 7 attacks. They repaired houses, worked on farms, and made food packages for IDF soldiers and admired the spirit of all the Israelis.
https://www.jns.org/wire/college-students-volunteer-in-israel-on-alternative-break/
 
Cooking for soldiers. (TY Yanky) Yehudit and a group of volunteers make Shabbat food for IDF soldiers. An online order mix-up resulted in a donation to pay for the food. She blogged the story and got more donations. Soldiers love it when she brings the food to the bases. They are hungry for home cooking.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-jewish-mothers-way-to-the-soldiers-stomachs/
 
How does a comedian deal with Oct 7? (TY UWI) Israeli standup comedian Modi was flying to Paris on Oct 7 to perform to European audiences. In this interview on Israeli Internet TV channel I24 he relates how Jewish humor can give respite in times of crisis.  (see also Seinfeld below)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wMmT0yygo
 
IDF rescue tortured Gazan donkey. The IDF found a donkey in Gaza that had been tortured and tied up and released it. Earlier in the war, the IDF rescued dogs, cats and exotic birds (see here previously). They even took care of a neglected lion from a Gazan Zoo.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-idf-rescues-tortured-tied-up-donkey/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Taking research to heart. As cells age, they stop dividing. Our immune system removes them, but they build up as we age. Scientists say that all these “senescence cells” must be removed to prevent aging, but scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have discovered that those formed after heart injury are needed, to protect the heart.
https://www.israel21c.org/cellular-aging-mechanism-may-actually-heal-hearts/  
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44161-024-00493-1
 
Candida gets the blue-light treatment. Israel’s Zero Candida has developed a device to treat candidiasis – an infection that affects hundreds of millions of women per year worldwide. It uses high-energy blue light to destroy the fungus quickly and without side effects. The device has been patented in South Africa!
https://nocamels.com/2024/06/israeli-femtech-startup-patents-candida-treatment-in-south-africa/
https://zero-candida.com/
 
Cancer immunotherapy clinical trials. Israel’s Biond Biologics (see here previously) has begun multi-center trials of BND-35. It is already trialing BND-22. Both are immunotherapy treatments for solid tumors.
 https://nocamels.com/2024/06/novel-cancer-immunotherapy-drug-given-to-first-patient-in-trial/
https://www.biondbio.com/clinical-trials/
https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06274437?term=BND-35&rank=1
https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04717375?term=BND-22&rank=1
 
Shining light on pancreatic cancer. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to illuminate previously undetectable pancreatic tumors. They injected deuterium-enriched glucose into the bloodstream. The tumors eat the glucose and excrete lactate that MRIs can reveal.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/392102
 
Med-tech and fast response saves mother’s life. After giving birth to her second child in Israel, Nofer’s vital signs plummeted. Her midwife alerted emergency teams who found multiple blood clots and a heart defect. A cardiologist then used advanced ultrasound technology and minimally invasive surgery to save Nofer’s life.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-midwifes-quick-thinking-saves-mothers-life/
 
The youngest doctor? Doron (31) was only 25 years-old when he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Technion in 2018. Today he is a fourth-year Technion medical student and intends to combine his expertise in mathematics with medicine to help people with mental illness. As a child, Doron “operated” on his toy animals.
https://ats.org/our-impact/doron-elad-the-young-technion-scholar-on-a-mission-for-answers/
 
Kidney exchanges save lives. (TY Nevet) Israeli Ronit and a kidney transplant recipient in Czechia (Czech Republic) underwent a kidney exchange thanks to Israel’s National Transplant Center. Ronit’s friend Yair donated his kidney to the Czech recipient, whose wife donated her kidney to Ronit. https://www.jpost.com/international/article-804396
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/units/transplant_center/govil-landing-page

No, Israel is not starving the people of Gaza It’s the latest piece of heinous propaganda used to denounce the Jewish State: Jake Wallis Simons

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/

This may come as some surprise, but only three per cent of the residents of Rafah, in Gaza, were poorly fed in May, according to the United Nations. In Khan Yunis and the central town of Deir al Balah, that figure stood at six per cent. The biggest challenges were faced by those who had failed to evacuate from the north at the start of the campaign. There, 13 per cent were found to be hungry. The overwhelming majority of Gazans had “acceptable” quantities of food.

Now consider the situation before Hamas brought catastrophe to Gaza. Despite billions of dollars of aid money pouring into the Strip, 14 per cent of the population faced hunger in 2022, according to a contemporaneous study by the World Food Programme. So it appears that provisions are better now than they were when Hamas was in charge.

Not that you’d know it from the reporting. In its analysis, the UN grudgingly concluded that it was “unable to endorse” the classification made by the likes of the head of the World Food Programme, who had claimed that Gaza had entered a “full-blown famine”. Was there an apology? Nope. The new line, spun by the UN and amplified by the BBC and fellow travellers, was that Gazans faced “catastrophic levels” of hunger.

Without wishing to minimise the deprivations of war, here was an object lesson in propaganda in the age of mass media. 

Step eagerly forward the Guardian, which on Tuesday published an article headlined “The starvation of Gaza is a perverse repudiation of Judaism’s values”. The author, John Oakes, is a radical American intellectual, whose authority appears to rest on his book about the history of fasting. Whether he knows anything about the conflict or Judaism, or has ever met anybody from Gaza, is unclear. According to his website, his second book will be about the nature of intelligence.

Hamas in Its Own Words: We’re Losing This War Despite the naysayers, the terror group’s great expectations lie in ruins. P. David Hornik

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

Daniel Hagari, spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces, recently created a flap when he said that “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people—whoever thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

Hagari added that Hamas would remain in control in Gaza unless Israel “develops something else to replace it.” 

The statement was widely cast as an admission that Israel was not really winning, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to reply that the Israeli security cabinet “has defined as one of the war goals the destruction of Hamas’s military and governance capabilities…. The Israel Defense Forces is of course committed to this.”

It was a sensible rejoinder, implying that Israel did not actually aspire to vaporize Hamas from the face of the earth, but to break it as an effective military and political force.

Indeed, Nazi Germany was defeated, but almost 80 years since the war ended Nazism certainly still exists as an idea, as do a plethora of neo-Nazi organizations. ISIS was militarily devastated in Iraq and Syria, but still exists not only as an idea but as a terror group that in 2024 has inflicted mass-casualty attacks in Russia and elsewhere. Both entities were defeated but not annihilated.

West Wing worry about Bibi’s upcoming speech Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/west-wing-worry-about-bibis-upcoming-speech/

An article published in Politico on Saturday claims that the administration in Washington is worried about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address next month to a joint session of the U.S. Congress.

The reason for the anxiety—say the outlet’s White House bureau chief, Jonathan Lemire, and national-security reporter Alexander Ward, citing “senior officials” whom they “granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal deliberations”—is that “no one knows what he is going to say.”

According to the authors and their nameless contacts, the White House fears that Bibi might take the opportunity of the podium on Capitol Hill to (gasp!) criticize President Joe Biden for not sufficiently supporting Israel’s war effort.

Terrifying indeed.

That ship sailed, of course, as the piece makes sure to stress by referring to Netanyahu’s by-now infamous video urging Biden not to uphold arms shipments—you know, the ammo needed for an Israel Defense Forces victory over Hamas. Naturally, no mention of the Israeli premier’s invoking Winston Churchill’s 1941 request of Franklin Roosevelt to give Britain the tools to “finish the job” against Nazi Germany.

Calling the clip “unhelpful,” the op-ed disguised as a news story quotes one of the unspecified inner-circle denizens as saying that Bibi could make things “far worse up there in front of Congress.”

The clarification for those curious about what this actually means is void of information, but rife with partisan speculation.

“Frictions have deepened between Biden and Netanyahu since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, with Biden aides increasingly believing that the Israeli leader is prolonging the conflict to stay in power,” it asserts. “And that he would prefer Donald Trump return to the White House.”

Hamas is the enemy of the Palestinian people This reactionary religious movement has never had any interest in national liberation. James Heartfield

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/23/hamas-is-the-enemy-of-the-palestinian-people/

On 7 October last year, Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. Despite this demonstration of anti-Semitic barbarism, many Western anti-Israel activists continue to see Hamas as some sort of ‘resistance’ movement, fighting for Palestinian nationhood.

This view couldn’t be more wrong. As Italian journalist Paola Caridi shows in her largely sympathetic account of the group, Hamas: From Resistance to Government (originally published in 2009 but updated last year), Hamas is not and never has been a national-independence movement. It is above all an intransigent, religious movement set on the destruction of Israel.

The exhaustion of Palestinian nationalism

To get to grips with the nature and development of Hamas, it’s important to understand the broader historical background. The central problem here for Palestinians and Israelis is that their national aspirations are irreconcilable.

Israel was founded in 1948, after Jewish people revolted against Palestine’s British rulers. (With a mandate from the League of Nations, the British took over from the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled Palestine for over four centuries, at the end of the First World War.) During the 1920s and especially the 1930s, Palestine’s indigenous Jewish population was supplemented by refugees from Eastern Europe and later Nazi Germany. This growing and increasingly restive populace rebelled against British occupation, just as neighbouring Iraqis did in the 1920s and 1940s, and Egyptians did in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In doing so, these rebellions laid claim to new nations, which claimed descent from ancient civilisations.

Many Arabs, caught in the crossfire of the often violent Jewish struggle for an Israeli state in the late 1940s, fled to the neighbouring territories of the Egyptian-governed Gaza Strip and the Jordanian West Bank. In 1967, Israel defeated the Arab coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War. Through this war, Israel conquered the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, complete with their Arab populations. These became the ‘occupied territories’.

As the Six-Day War demonstrated, the Arab world refused to accept Israel’s existence. Arab nations took Israel as an affront to their own independence. Yasser Arafat, born to Palestinian parents in Cairo in 1929, co-founded the paramilitary organisation, Fatah, in the late 1950s. Its object was to fight for a Palestinian state. In 1967, Fatah joined and became the dominant faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which was then a national-independence movement. Arafat became PLO leader in 1969.

Israel’s leaders always understood that the national aspirations of Palestinians were irreconcilable with the existence of Israel. Hence, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir insisted in a 1976 New York Times op-ed that there were no ‘Palestinians’, only Arabs, living in Egypt, Jordan and Israel itself.

Hezbollah Storing Iranian Weapons at Beirut Airport by JNS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20729/hezbollah-beirut-airport

Hezbollah is storing massive amounts of Iranian armaments at Rafic Hariri International Airport, Lebanon’s main civilian airport, staff say.

Hezbollah has been accused of using the Beirut airport for weapon storage in the past, but whistleblowers say it has ramped up the practice since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel.

“This is extremely serious, mysterious large boxes arriving on direct flights from Iran are a sign that things got worse,” an airport worker told The Telegraph. “When they started to come through the airport, my friends and I were scared because we knew that there was something strange going on.”

He feared that an explosion, or an attack on the airport to destroy the weapons, could cause major damage to Beirut, similar to the 2020 port blast that devastated much of downtown. That explosion was blamed on a weapons warehouse belonging to Hezbollah.

“Beirut will be cut off from the world, not to mention the number of casualties and damage,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time before a disaster also happens at the airport.”

Stored weapons include Iranian-made Falaq artillery rockets, Fateh-110 short-range missiles, mobile ballistic missiles and M-600 missiles with ranges of more than 150 miles, The Telegraph reported.

AT-14 Kornet, laser-guided anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM), Burkan short-range ballistic missile and RDX, a widely used explosive, are also stored at the airport.

Netanyahu Is Right to Reject Vassal-State Etiquette by Jonathan S. Tobin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20726/netanyahu-reject-vassal-state

As far as the White House and Democrats are concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing it again. Similar to multiple occasions during the presidency of Barack Obama, Netanyahu is not playing by the rules Washington and the foreign-policy establishment believe are laid down to govern the behavior of client states.

Rather than assume the role of the loyal and pliant vassal to his nation’s superpower ally, there have been several times when Netanyahu has talked back in public to Obama and now President Joe Biden. Washington’s angry response to the video the prime minister released last week, in which he spoke of the way the administration has been slow-walking arms deliveries, made it clear that—assurances of goodwill from both sides notwithstanding—U.S.-Israel relations have reached a crisis point.

In the 49-second video posted on the YouTube page of the prime minister’s office on June 18, Netanyahu said the following:

“When Secretary Blinken was recently here in Israel, we had a candid conversation. I said I deeply appreciated the support the U.S. has given Israel from the beginning of the war. But I also said something else. I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunition to Israel. Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies. Secretary Blinken assured me that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case. It should be the case. During World War II, Churchill told the United States, ‘Give us the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.”

Washington’s anger

In reaction, Washington expressed shock and anger. According to U.S. officials, Netanyahu’s claims were both fictional and a sign of ingratitude after all that Biden had done for him and Israel since Oct. 7, and throughout the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Their story is that despite Biden’s talk of potentially refusing to continue to send arms and ammunition to Israel if it doesn’t obey him and not attack the last Hamas strongholds in Rafah, there have been no such cutoffs. The only exception, they assert, is a review of whether the United States should send a special kind of 2,000-pound bomb that might cause too many civilian casualties in urban areas.

Smotrich details ‘mega-dramatic’ shift to tighten control of Judea and Samaria By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/smotrich-details-mega-dramatic-shift-to-tighten-control-of-judea-and-samaria/

Israel’s government is implementing a seismic shift in the way it manages the civil administration of Judea and Samaria by transferring authority from military to civilian hands.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads the Religious Zionism Party, described the advances that had been made, and their significance, to a gathering of leaders from Judea and Samaria at Shacharit Farm, an Israeli community in western Samaria, on June 9.

Smotrich said it was critical that control of civilian matters in Judea and Samaria be taken out of military hands to energize the growth of Jewish communities and block a carefully laid Palestinian Authority plan to establish facts on the ground via illegal construction, part of its quest for a state.

“We are in the middle of a huge job right now to implement a completely new enforcement system in the Civil Administration,” Smotrich said.

“If everywhere else in the State of Israel there are certain goals for enforcement, in Judea and Samaria there is one big consideration. And in the end, it is what to do geopolitically, strategically and security-wise,” he said.

‘Going To End Badly’: How Biden’s Signature Plan For Gaza Aid Turned Into A Costly Nightmare Jake Smith

https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/23/going-to-end-badly-how-bidens-signature-plan-for-gaza-aid-turned-into-a-costly-nightmare/

President Joe Biden’s signature initiative to deliver aid to the Palestinians quickly fell apart and has turned into an operational nightmare, creating the possibility that the project could be scrapped far earlier than expected.

During his State of the Union address in March, Biden said he was going to direct the U.S. military to build a floating pier system for aid delivery to Gaza via the Mediterranean Sea, promising it would “enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance” to the Palestinians. But since it became operational in May, a series of operational and logistical problems have plagued the pier, endangered U.S. troops and hampered efforts to get aid into Gaza.

Moreover, the pier was never built to withstand the rough conditions of the Mediterranean waters, dooming the project from the outset, according to officials and aid workers who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. So troubled is the pier that U.S. officials are privately warning aid organizations in Gaza that the Biden administration will pull the plug on the operation entirely in the coming weeks, much sooner than the anticipated target of September, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The Palestinian Plan For ‘The Day After’ In Gaza: To Kill More Jews And Destroy Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20725/palestinian-plan-gaza-day-after

The Palestinians, meanwhile, appear to have their own ideas about what should happen the day after the war in Gaza: they want to murder even more Jews and carry on the Jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel. Rebuilding the Gaza Strip is not a top priority for many Palestinians. Their primary focus lies in providing support to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations that aim to destroy the sole homeland of the Jewish people.

Hamas says its plan is to “keep the flame of resistance burning…. the [resistance] will not end and will not be extinguished until the comprehensive liberation and the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Hamas refers to a variety of terrorist actions as “resistance.” These include suicide bombings, stabbings, car-rammings, shootings, firing rockets, gang rapes, and beheadings. This is the only form of “resistance” Hamas has known and practiced since its founding 36 years ago. As far as Hamas is concerned…[a]ll Jews are “settlers” who need to be killed or expelled from their state.

As Hamas openly states in its charter… “There is no solution for the Palestinian question expect through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Hamas… is, not surprisingly, also opposed to any plan that seeks to remove it from power in the Gaza Strip. As long as Hamas’s military capabilities are not totally eliminated, neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Arab countries will take over administration of the Gaza Strip.

The only plan Hamas (and many Palestinians) believes in is one that calls on all Muslims to undertake Jihad against Israel. For this reason, the Biden administration is misguided in thinking that Hamas, which enjoys broad support among the Palestinians, would approve of any plan for the day after in the Gaza Strip that does not view terrorism as the only means of eradicating Israel and ethnically cleansing the Jewish people.

The [Palestinian Center For Policy and Survey Research] poll also found that satisfaction with Hamas’s performance has increased to 75%.

Any strategy the Biden administration proposes for the day after the war in the Gaza Strip is bound to fail…. Any legitimate discussion about what the day after looks like in the Gaza Strip must address the radical and Islamist elements in Palestinian society.

“The possibility of defeating Israel is very real…and the possibility of liberating Palestine is very great… Any other option will certainly be rejected, especially if it is accompanied by any non-Palestinian security presence. The Palestinians will consider it a new form of occupation, regardless of the identity of these forces.” — Bassam Naim, senior Hamas official, to Al-Jazeera.

“Israel is a country that has no place on our land…. We must remove it because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation…. We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth….” – Ghazi Hamad, senior Hamas official, Lebanese TV channel LBC, October 24, 2023.