RUTHFULLY YOURS

 www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Go beyond the hyperbole and bias of headlines and venomous antisemitic chants of campus protests and read about the real Israel cataloged by Michael Ordman. Even during wartime Israel’s research and technology works 24/7 to better the lives and aspirations of citizens in every continent of the globe. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
Ari leaves the ICU. (TY Yanky) Ari Spitz, a Givati Brigade soldier, has regained full consciousness one and a half months after being severely injured in Gaza. He is considered one of the most severe casualties of the war.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/388392  
 
From battleground to bakery. Yedidya Harush has literally fought his way through combining IDF reserve duty with running a matzah-baking factory. Using personal loans, crowdfunding, and a generous JNF grant, he provides a livelihood to his 50 employees, and hand-baked matzah to IDF soldiers and evacuees.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-battleground-to-bakery-one-mans-mission-to-support-his-community-with-matzah/
 
Helping a community to heal. The Jewish National Fund-USA’s Build Together plan has brought volunteers from around the world to help rebuild communities following Oct 7. One such is Moshav Mivtachim where some two-thirds of the 450 residents have now returned home to the pleasant surprise of a refreshed town.
https://www.jns.org/wire/a-community-heals-together-with-american-volunteers/
 
Look who helped Israel against Iranian attack. Saudi Arabia acknowledged that it had helped the newly forged regional military coalition – Israel, the United States, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and France – repel an Iranian attack against the Jewish State. They intercepted dozens of drones heading for Israel.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/artc-saudi-arabia-publicly-acknowledges-role-in-defending-israel-against-iranian-attack  https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/the-gulf/artc-uae-saudi-arabia-privately-shared-intelligence-with-u-s-on-iranian-attack-report  https://www.ynetnews.com/article/h1jlzltga
 
Thanking our friends. Some non-Israeli whose post Oct 7 support for Israel has been no less than heroic. This article thanks Douglas Murray, Sen John Fetterman, Rep Mike Johnson, Rep Richie Torres, Rep. Claudia Tenney, Sid Rosenberg, Floyd Mayweather, John Spencer, Richard Kemp, Pete Hegseth, and many others.
https://www.jns.org/hats-off-to-the-heroes-and-heroines-in-israels-existential-battle/
 
Sylvan Adams talks about rebuilding the South. Philanthropist Sylvan Adams is interviewed on I24 News  a few weeks ago about how his $100 million transformational donation to Ben Gurion University (see here previously) to rebuild Israel’s south devastated on Oct 7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWKoc_hvEVY
 
 
ISRAEL’S  MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Robotic cataract surgery demonstrated. Top cataract surgeon David Chang performed the first-of-its-kind robotic cataract procedure on a porcine eye, using the ORYOM platform from Israel’s ForSight Robotics (see here previously) at the annual ASCRS Ophthalmology Conference in Boston.
https://www.firstwordhealthtech.com/story/5846609   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAO0il3Xwog
 
Using AI in neurological therapy. Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center has partnered with Israel’s NeuroBrave to develop brain-computer interface (BCI) solutions for both complex neurological conditions and patient care. One example is to translate a non-communicative patient’s brainwaves into speech.
https://nocamels.com/2024/04/top-tel-aviv-hospital-using-ai-in-neurological-therapy/  https://neurobrave.com/
 
AI for mental health care. A new platform, called LIV, developed at Israel’s Sheba Hospital in the wake of Oct 7, streamlines intake of patients for mental healthcare. LIV’s GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) “converses” with a prospective patient to generate possible diagnoses and treatment recommendations.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-anxiety-surges-during-war-israeli-genai-platform-can-ease-psychiatrists-workload/
 
Successful trial to grow your own bones. Israel’s Bonus Bio (see here previously) has completed Phase II clinical trials of its BonoFill for facial reconstructions, with a 90-percent success rate. The company is now entering phase three trials in the US. Read how BonoFill uses fat cells from your body to grow new bones.
https://nocamels.com/2024/04/biotech-firm-grows-bone-from-your-own-tissue-for-seamless-healing/
 
European project to cure muscular dystrophy. Technion Professor Shenhav Shemer has joined DREAMS ((Drug REpurposing and Artificial intelligence for Muscular disorderS), a European Union-funded project to discover treatments for rare neuromuscular disorders such as muscular dystrophy, suffered by some 400,000.
https://ats.org/our-impact/technion-researchers-awarded-prestigious-grants-for-brain-research/
 
Healthier fish. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have proved that breeding disease-resistant carp can make fish farming more sustainable and profitable. It can even keep non-resistant fish healthier. The study bred fish with built-in immunity to the common cyrpinid herpes virus that kills 60-80% of infected fish.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/researchers-study-how-to-keep-our-gefilte-fish-healthy/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55133-2#Sec2

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/04/reconstructing-gaza-the-international-communitys-cycle-of-impotence/

If ever there was an example of the lethal, recurring consequences of the self-proclaimed “international community’s” inanity and impotence, it is their recurrent bouts of vows to reconstruct Gaza.

In their own version of the movie Groundhog Day (sans happy ending), the United Nations, the Biden administration, and other largely western nations have plans for rebuilding and revitalizing post-war Gaza. (Proximity to the Hamas terrorists makes neighboring Arab nations far more pragmatic in their planning.) The international community’s plans—much of them taxpayer subsidized—are expansive, expensive, and will ensure perpetuation of the Hamas terrorists’ cycle of violence against Israel.

And, tragically, this will happen regardless of whether the international community delivers on their promises.

To begin, the tragic recap:

Hamas launches a terrorist attack against Israel and murders, rapes, tortures, and kidnaps civilians;

Hamas holds the kidnapped civilians as an insurance policy and human shields against Israeli retaliation;

Hamas further uses Gaza’s civilians and critical infrastructure, such as hospitals, as human shields;

Hamas directs a propaganda operation through its supporters in the west, including leftists on college campuses, and in various international institutions demand a cease-fire to insulate Hamas against the consequences for their terrorism—as well as the large swath of the Gaza population that approves of their terrorist attack against Israeli civilians;

The international community rebuilds and revitalizes Gaza and insulates and rewards Hamas for its terrorist attack;

And reinforces among the Gaza population that they are correct in supporting Hamas’ hatred, terrorism, and genocidal aims, which are deemed justified, indoctrinated and celebrated throughout successive generations.

Rebuild, revitalize, repeat…

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20611/palestinian-state-hamas

[T]he Iran-backed Hamas terror group is again trying to dupe gullible Westerners, including the Biden administration and the European Union, into believing that it has accepted the “two-state solution.”

The Hamas official would not have dared to utter similar nonsense to an Arab media outlet. He knows that here his lies are directed at English-speaking audiences, who tend to swallow whole the baloney spouted by Israel’s enemies.

The Hamas official wants everyone to believe that his group is ready to stop killing Jews for a period of five years “or more” if it gets the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. He just forgot to mention that there was an official truce between Israel and Hamas until October 7, when the terror group Hamas initiated the current war.

The Hamas official also forgot to mention that Hamas has repeatedly violated several truces and ceasefire agreements reached with Israel over the past 17 years. The truces and ceasefires were always used by Hamas to regroup and rearm in preparation for the next round of attacking Israel.

Hamas will never abandon its weapons or dismantle its armed group, especially after the establishment of a Palestinian state

The mere talk about a Palestinian state these days is regarded as a reward for Hamas’s genocidal assault on Israel. It sends the message to Hamas that after you murdered so many Jews, the international community will reward you by giving you a state. It reaffirms that terrorism works. Where do we sign up?

The secret that the AP and the US administration do not want you to know is that Hamas does not actually want the Gaza Strip or the West Bank or east Jerusalem. Hamas wants to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Iran-backed Islamist terror state.

If Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are given a state next to Israel, they will absolutely continue to pursue their goal of killing Jews and obliterating Israel. Hamas official Ghazi Hamad has clearly said that the terror group will repeat the October 7 attack, time and again, until Israel is annihilated.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal has repeatedly clarified that his group’s acceptance of a Palestinian state does not mean that it will abandon its goal of destroying Israel.

“The lines below are for the next person who comes to me with ‘Hamas agreed to two state solution.’ It DID NOT! Hamas outlines this scenario fully in its Charter as amended in 2017…. Hamas will likely then stock as much rockets and drones possible for the next round of war to destroy Israel…. Prophet Muhammad is said to have entered into a 10-year truce with the infidels. He conquered them a few years into the truce. Hamas imagines a similar scenario with Israel.” — Hussain Abdul-Hussain, X, April 25, 2024.

Hamas is well aware of the credulity of the international community. It knows that it can engage in all forms of propaganda and win friends in the West. It also knows that the best vehicle to advance its goal of killing Jews and destroying Israel is a “two-state solution.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-4-29-why-is-israel-singled-out-as-the-uniquely-hated-state

Around the U.S., and particularly at the most elite college campuses, seemingly smart and well-educated young people keep up their passionate protests in support of the Hamas rapists and murderers and against Israel and Jews generally. The claimed reason for the protests is that Israel is engaged in “apartheid” or “genocide,” or even the ultimate evil, “settler colonialism.” Yet meanwhile, the world is filled with state actors treating their own or neighboring populations in the most appalling ways, far worse than anything that Israel could remotely be accused of, without attracting anything like the passion and vitriol directed at Jews and Israel. Think North Korea, keeping its own population in permanent prison conditions, and often starving; or China, cracking down on all dissent and even confining large sub-populations (e.g., Uyghurs) in slave labor camps; or Azerbaijan, which expelled an entire Christian community of about 150,000 people just a few months ago. These examples, let alone the human rights abuses in places like Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, attract almost no interest from our passionate student demonstrators, not to mention even slight notice from the press or anyone else.

How to explain this discrepancy? In recent weeks I have seen multiple writers advance the hypothesis that this is not really about Israel specifically, but rather that Israel is just the proxy of the moment for broad hatred for the West, for capitalism, for America, and for civilization generally. That hypothesis at least offers an explanation for why all bad actors who are not of the West or of capitalism, no matter how reprehensible they may be, get a total pass. In any event, I don’t have another hypothesis that can explain that anomaly.

Consider the ongoing treatment of Christians in the Muslim world. (I might suggest considering the ongoing treatment of Jews in the Muslim world, except that Jews have been almost entirely expelled and eliminated from the Muslim world, with the result that there is no remaining “ongoing treatment” to discuss.). The treatment of Christians by Muslims in Muslim countries would be almost impossible to learn about except for the work of a single guy named Raymond Ibrahim. Ibrahim scours obscure local news sources, and also frequently interviews sources on the ground in various Muslim-majority countries, and he then puts out regular reports of the ongoing atrocities in these places.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/29/israel-has-chosen-the-least-bad-of-bad-alternatives/

History frequently offers insight into present-day events. Far too often that perspective is ignored either because of a lack of knowledge, the mistaken belief that it has no relevance in today’s world, or discomfort over the challenge that that knowledge presents. The war in Gaza does have an historical precedent, albeit one on a far grander scale.

Bear with us as we unpack the analogy …

As the endgame of World War II in mid-1945 became focused on the planning of “Operation Downfall,” the invasion of the Japanese homeland, the decision was made to deploy the first (and last) atomic weapons ever used in warfare. This was not a choice taken lightly and was repugnant to President Harry Truman and many of his advisers. But it was made based on a grim calculus comparing the hope that the bombs would force an immediate surrender (at a cost of more than 100,000 civilian lives), against the anticipated casualties and impact of an invasion of Japan’s home islands.

An article written by one of us (Dr. Miller) last year delves into the background. After experiencing 18,000 dead and 78,000 wounded in capturing Iwo Jima and Okinawa (two relatively small islands), the magnitude of the resistance was understood. And unlike in those battles, a mainland invasion would face troops who could be easily resupplied, making them even more difficult to dislodge.

In that 2023 article, a Marine four-star general and historian is quoted as saying there were no post-invasion plans for the six Marine divisions (each 23,000 strong) in Operation Downfall because they were expected to be decimated and non-functional after invading Honshu to make way for the Army. In other words, it was expected that just to commence the invasion, some 100,000 allied lives would be lost, along with far more Japanese killed. Estimates of subsequent American deaths neared 1 million, with at least 5 million Japanese expected to perish.

https://www.jns.org/the-perils-of-a-bad-deal/
Whenever I sit down to craft a piece on the “Bring Them Home Now” protests, a call I received at my office in 2009 haunts me into changing or tweaking topics. The person initiating the conversation that day introduced himself as the grandfather of Gilad Shalit.

No further clarification was required. By this point, the Israel Defense Forces soldier who’d been captured by Hamas terrorists nearly three years earlier had become a household name. So, too, had his family.

“How dare you?” Tzvi Shalit began, going on to berate me for jeopardizing the campaign for Gilad’s release. My latest column, he said, was not only insensitive; it was downright dangerous.

Stunned by his accusation and intimidated by his understandable pain, I stuttered a sympathetic response. Yet, neither my apology for having caused unintended offense, nor my explanation that the article in question was actually a critique of the media for stifling debate, did any good.

As far as he was concerned, I was siding with the enemy—not the organization holding his grandson in Gaza, mind you, but the then-caretaker government of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

After his resignation over corruption charges, he was replaced by Tzipi Livni as head of Kadima in the party’s September 2008 primaries. Her inability to form a coalition in the following weeks spurred the February 2009 general election.

And though Kadima garnered a majority of Knesset seats, Livni still couldn’t form a government. Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded where she failed, and thus it was he who succeeded Olmert as prime minister.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/as-hamas-loses-its-grip-gazans-speak-out-against-the-terrorist-sect/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

The unrest on America’s college campuses took a noticeable turn for the worse shortly after Iran entered the war that erupted with Hamas’s 10/7 massacre, and it got worse still after Israel retaliated in response to that 350-plus missile and drone attack on its territory. But even as the country’s most outspoken college students lean into their conclusion that the problem in the Gaza Strip is Israel, Gazans themselves are growing bolder in their condemnations of the terrorist sect that consigned them to this war.

“Palestinians in Gaza are increasingly willing to voice their anger against Hamas,” the Financial Times reported Thursday. Although “Hamas rules Gaza with a tight grip” and reliably visits retribution on the Gazans who speak out against its misrule, Palestinian civilians are increasingly “speaking out against the Islamist group.”

One Gazan who spoke with FT’s reporters criticized the terrorist outfit for failing to foresee the consequences Israel would mete out in response to the 10/7 massacre — or, if they did, to ignore them. “They [Hamas] should have restricted themselves to military targets,” he said. Another castigated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. “I pray every day for God to punish the one who brought us to this situation,” that Palestinian civilian exclaimed. “I pray every day for the death of Sinwar.”

According to pollsters with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, these sentiments may be indicative of broader trends in the opinion landscape.

Khalil Shikaki, director of the centre, said that support for Hamas fell by almost a quarter to 34 per cent, according to a poll taken during the first week of March. The movement also lost popularity in the West Bank, where support fell from 44 per cent to 35 per cent. “There is no doubt support for Hamas is declining in Gaza because more and more people feel it has some responsibility for the pain they are enduring,” said Shikaki.

And the liberty Palestinian civilians now feel to voice their hostility toward Hamas’s regime freely is almost certainly a direct result of Israel’s efforts to degrade and, ultimately, disperse the terrorist organization. “Critics have been emboldened because there’s no one now to fear,” said one Gaza analyst. One former resident of the Strip, a professor at the Gaza-based al-Azhar University, put it most succinctly: “People are no longer afraid.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-and-the-decline-of-the-west/

The response of the U.S. and EU leadership to Hamas’ genocidal savagery against Israel, a Western liberal democracy, has been despicable and dangerous. Blustering protestations of support and solidarity by politicians have been undercut by schoolmarmish hectoring about Israel’s “disproportionate” tactics and alleged callous disregard for Palestinian Arab lives and well-being.

This geopolitical virtue-signaling has been correctly interpreted by Hamas and Iran as a green-light to double-down on its aggression, which won’t stop with Israel.

Last week Iran showed the way by launching an unprecedent, indiscriminate attack on Israel with a 300-strong barrage of drones and missiles. Aided by the U.S., Great Britain, and Middle East Sunni states, but mostly the result of Israel’s superb anti-missile defenses, Israel suffered only one casualty.

But consistent with the kinda, sorta support the West has been showing for the last six months, this aid was followed by criticism and warnings against retaliation that once again signaled Israel’s enemies that the West really doesn’t have Israel’s back, but can be depended upon to stick a knife in it.

The Biden administration took the lead. Biden himself instructed Israel not to retaliate, but “take the win,” an egregiously stupid comment bespeaking what Biden’s track-record has repeatedly shown: that he is a Chamberlain-class appeaser. But the Europeans and the Brits were just as short-sighted, not to mention displaying the usual “preemptive cringe” that for decades has been the West’s default posture when engaging its enemies.

As World Israel News reported, “French President Emmanuel Macron said the international community should do ‘everything we can to avoid a flare-up.’ He said he would attempt to convince Israel ‘that it should not respond by escalating, but rather by isolating Iran.’