RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the most widely accepted misconceptions concerning the Arab-Israel conflict (a subject awash in misconceptions) is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “hard-core right winger.” There is nothing in his behavior as Prime Minister during his first years in that role (1997-99) or in his more recent period in office, beginning in 2009, to support this belief. On the contrary, like his predecessors, he has made repeated dramatic territorial and other concessions, including acceptance of the so-called “two state solution.”

In Jan. 1997, still in the first year of his first term, he signed the Hebron Protocol with the Palestine Authority, turning over most of Hebron, after Jerusalem the most important city in Jewish history, to the PA. Netanyahu did so little to change Labor’s disastrous post-Oslo policy that erstwhile supporter Benny Begin (Menachem’s son) derided him at a Likud Party meeting in March of that year. “Arafat releases terrorists and so does Israel. Arafat smuggles in weapons and we give him assault rifles to round off his stores….We have government offices in Jerusalem [supposedly the unified capital of Israel] and so do they.” The following year, under President Clinton’s prodding, Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum in which he promised to turn over 40% of Judea and Samaria to Arafat, a safe corridor between these areas and Gaza, even an airport in Gaza. It is true Wye was not implemented, but that’s only because (predictably) Arafat promptly reneged on his commitments under the agreement.

That same year Netanyahu embarked on secret negotiations with Syria in which he offered to return the Golan Heights. Was Netanyahu prepared to go back to the 1967 border (which Clinton and Dennis Ross assert in their respective memoirs) or did Netanyahu, according to other reports, hold out for several kilometers beyond the international border line? Although Assad backed out, according to widespread reports in the Israeli press, in 2010 Netanyahu tried again, this time with Bashar Assad, offering to return to the June 4, 1967 lines. Fortunately the negotiations collapsed with the onset of the rebellion against the Syrian ruler. (One shudders to think what “success” would have meant for Israel, with Hezbollah and/or ISIS embedded on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.)

That near miss with disaster has not prevented Netanyahu from continuing to offer major concessions. In the wake of Obama’s Cairo speech, Netanyahu agreed to adopt the “two state solution” as his government’s policy. Moreover, retired Brigadier General Michael Herzog (brother of Israeli Labor Party head Yitzhak Herzog), who has participated in almost all Israel’s peace negotiations since Oslo in 1993, writes in The American Interest that Netanyahu in the Obama years offered such large withdrawals that he could not admit their scale to the Israeli public or his coalition partners.

And contrary to the widespread perception, fostered by the media, that Netanyahu has peppered the landscape of Judea and Samaria with Jewish settlements, Israel has not built a new settlement in 25 years. The much publicized on and off settlement freezes to which Netanyahu has agreed applied to existing communities, the “freezes” meaning there was no building even to accommodate natural population growth within them.

So what accounts for Netanyahu’s reputation as an unbudging hawk? The reason is that he knows better than he acts with the result that his rhetoric differs from his policies far more than has been the case with other Israeli leaders. Prime Minister Shimon Peres seems clearly to have believed in the mirage he concocted of a New Middle East. Prime Minister Olmert appears to have genuinely felt the emotions which in 2005 (in a speech to the Israel Policy Forum) he attributed to the people of Israel as a whole: “We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous; we are tired of winning; we are tired of defeating our enemies.”

One of the oft-repeated laments from many world leaders when speaking about the long-festering Arab-Israeli conflict is regarding sacrifices.

How many times did former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, former president Obama, or other leaders talk about the need for both sides to make sacrifices for peace? We’ve heard it repeatedly. Yet the truth of the matter is that only one side has made sacrifices, while the other side has not made any. One side has continuously demonstrated its desire for peace, while the other side has continuously demonstrated it wants the other destroyed.

The Arab population makes up over 98% of the Middle East, while geographically covers more than 99% of the land compared to the size of Israel. These facts are merely to provide some perspective. Yet despite of the overwhelming advantage the Arab world enjoys, the tiny Jewish nation of Israel is considered intolerable by many.

List of Jewish Sacrifices

1. In June 1967, Israel was forced to defend itself against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. During this decisive Israeli victory the Holy Old City of Jerusalem was captured from the Jordanians, who had been in control of it since the Independence war ended in 1949. The victory reunited the Jewish people with Temple Mount and the Western Wall of the Second Temple compound. Israeli flags flew over their holiest site for the first time in modern history.

Yet, at the conclusion of the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a huge sacrifice in the interest of peace by awarding administrative control of Temple Mount to the Jordanian Waqf (Islamic Trust). He ordered Israeli flags removed and he banned Jews from praying on Temple Mount. This remains in effect today. In spite of Israel’s sacrifice Temple Mount remains a flashpoint issue and numerous riots have taken place at Al Aqsa mosque.

In the same war Israel captured the Gaza Strip and virtually all of the Sinai Desert.

Israeli scientists have made an enormous discovery that can help lead
to a new treatment for at least two of the most resistant cancers that
exist: pancreatic and triple negative breast cancer.

Many cancer patients struggle with the adverse effects of
chemotherapy, still the most prescribed cancer treatment. For patients
with pancreatic cancer and other aggressive cancers, the forecast is
more grim: there is no known effective therapy.

A new Tel Aviv University study published last month in Oncotarget
discloses the role of three proteins in killing fast-duplicating
cancer cells while they’re dividing. The research, led by Prof. Malka
Cohen-Armon of TAU’s Sackler School of Medicine, finds that these
proteins can be specifically modified during the division process —
mitosis — to unleash an inherent “death mechanism” that
self-eradicates duplicating cancer cells.

“The discovery of an exclusive mechanism that kills cancer cells
without impairing healthy cells, and the fact that this mechanism
works on a variety of rapidly proliferating human cancer cells, is
very exciting,” Prof. Cohen-Armon said. “According to the mechanism we
discovered, the faster cancer cells proliferate, the faster and more
efficiently they will be eradicated. The mechanism unleashed during
mitosis may be suitable for treating aggressive cancers that are
unaffected by traditional chemotherapy.

“Our experiments in cell cultures tested a variety of incurable human
cancer types — breast, lung, ovary, colon, pancreas, blood, brain,”
Prof. Cohen-Armon continued. “This discovery impacts existing cancer
research by identifying a new specific target mechanism that
exclusively and rapidly eradicates cancer cells without damaging
normally proliferating human cells.”

The research was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Shai Izraeli
and Dr. Talia Golan of the Cancer Research Center at Sheba Medical
Center, Tel Hashomer, and Prof. Tamar Peretz, head of the Sharett
Institute of Oncology at Hadassah Medical Center, Ein Kerem.

A new target for cancer research

The newly-discovered mechanism involves the modification of specific
proteins that affect the construction and stability of the spindle,
the microtubular structure that prepares duplicated chromosomes for
segregation into “daughter” cells during cell division.

The researchers found that certain compounds called Phenanthridine
derivatives were able to impair the activity of these proteins, which
can distort the spindle structure and prevent the segregation of
chromosomes. Once the proteins were modified, the cell was prevented
from splitting, and this induced the cell’s rapid self-destruction.

“The mechanism we identified during the mitosis of cancer cells is
specifically targeted by the Phenanthridine derivatives we tested,”
Prof. Cohen-Armon said. “However, a variety of additional drugs that
also modify these specific proteins may now be developed for cancer
cell self-destruction during cell division. The faster the cancer
cells proliferate, the more quickly they are expected to die.”

Reprinted En.mida.org.il.

Last week, a 29 year old illegal immigrant from Eritrea was charged with the attempted rape of an 80 year old woman in South Tel Aviv. The victim, in describing the attack, said “he beat me and dragged me across the floor.” Later in the week, a 40 year old woman was brutally raped near the Old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. The perpetrator is still on the loose.

Over the past few years, urban neighborhoods throughout Europe have been overtaken by refugees and illegal immigrant populations. Crime has risen, local populations have lost their sense of security, and areas have become no-go zones for police. South Tel Aviv is on the precipice of becoming like these European cities. Yet the media remains silent, and the ruling class are oblivious to the situation.

Last week’s violent acts in South Tel Aviv are not sporadic instances, but tragically have become the norm. Last week, during a protest involving illegal immigrant groups, residents of South Tel Aviv and local police were ridiculed and berated by illegal immigrants who screamed ‘the police are ISIS’, ‘this is not your country’, ‘your country is sh-t’, ‘you are not a Jew’. Many police were needed to quell the demonstrations, which turned violent towards the end, as illegal immigrants began attacking residents filming the protest. In previous documented cases, illegal immigrants are seen hitting an elderly Israeli with a wood plank, while in other instances saying “the Nazis should be thanked” and showing admiration for Hitler.

Sheffi Paz, a resident of South Tel Aviv and a leading activist against illegal immigration, has received death threats on her Facebook account on more than one occasion.

The rapes, violence, intimidation, and the lost sense of security, intensify the feeling that South Tel Aviv is losing its Israeli character. This feeling is backed by a report published by the Knesset Research and Information Center (KRIC) last June which estimated that the illegal immigrant population in South Tel Aviv is greater than the Israeli population. This assessment was based on information received from different branches in the Tel Aviv municipality. It estimated that at the beginning of 2016, the illegal immigrant population in South Tel Aviv numbered between 48,000-60,000 people, whereas the Israeli population in that area is 39,150 according to 2014 statistics, with those numbers declining annually.

Yet, it is possible that the gap is even greater.

In response to KRIC’s request for additional information, the Tel Aviv municipality admitted that it lacks statistics regarding births and deaths among the illegal immigrant population as well as a realistic count of the children. In an effort to reach an accurate number of illegal immigrant children, KRIC crosschecked information from the Tel Aviv municipality and statistics from the Ministry of Health, and concluded that there were an estimate of 3,600 illegal immigrant children below age six, as opposed to Israeli children in that same age group numbering 2,960.

The destruction of fifty-one Jewish homes in Ofra and Amona in February by order of the High Court raises questions about Israel’s claim to be “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The evictions made no sense, and, although Prime Minister Netanyahu signed an agreement on behalf of the government with the residents of Amona to provide alternative housing in a new community, he has failed to honor his commitment. The families remain in distress, helpless and homeless.

Absurdly, this destruction and others served no one. Jews were traumatized; Arabs can’t use the land for security reasons and because they cannot prove ownership; most Israelis perceived it as a national disgrace; it alienated many and undermined trust in the High Court and the government; and it wasted money and resources. No one benefited!

Although Jews were accused of building on “private Palestinian land,” the question of who owned the land was never heard by an Israeli civilian court. No valid proof of ownership was presented. The destruction, moreover, violated the law in Israel and all other democratic countries: someone who has built in good faith on land which he/she later discovers belongs to someone else is entitled to pay compensation to the legal owner when the value of the building is worth more than the land.

Touted as “the rule of law,” the destruction was intended to demonstrate the power of the High Court regardless of any government decision, or legal issue. The High Court’s decision was meant as a clear political message to the government: it, not the government, would decide the fate of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, “the settlements.” The High Court’s assertion, therefore, challenges the basis of Israeli democracy, the role of its judiciary, and its definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

The struggle over that definition arose in 2011, when MK Avi Dichter proposed a Basic Law: “Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The purpose of his bill was to codify the nature and values of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to prevent Israel from becoming a binational state. Although supported by the government coalition, including PM Netanyahu and opposition MKs, it did not pass a preliminary reading.