RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/lapid-dont-count-on-courting-democrats/

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid seems pleased about his meeting on Sunday in Rome with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Like his American counterpart, he belongs to the self-described “center” of a political camp pressured by a far-left minority.

What this means is that while neither is openly hostile to either country, both cling to failed premises about the nature and purpose of international relations. More specifically, Blinken believes that the best way to prevent the powers-that-be in Tehran from building the bomb is through a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or some version of it.

Lapid, who was gung-ho for the JCPOA when it was negotiated in 2015, now says he has “serious reservations” about resuming its current iteration. Still, he hastened to reassure Blinken that the new Israeli government “believe[s] the way to discuss [Israeli-American] disagreements is through direct and professional conversation, not a press conference.”

This was a not-so-veiled reference to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, whose tenure as the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history ended on June 13. Less than a month earlier, the now-former prime minister ostensibly embarrassed Blinken during a joint talk with reporters in the wake of the ceasefire that ended “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” Israel’s 11-day war against Hamas and terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.
“I hope that the United States will not go back to the old JCPOA, because we believe that that deal paves the way for Iran to have an arsenal of nuclear weapons with international legitimacy,” said Netanyahu unabashedly, despite sharing the stage with Blinken.

“Whatever happens, Israel will always reserve the right to defend itself against a regime committed to our destruction, committed to getting the weapons of mass destruction for that end,” he declared.

The very different message that Lapid wanted to convey to Blinken was that Washington could count on his tact and obeisance—traits that Netanyahu supposedly has been incapable of exhibiting towards Democrat-run administrations. It’s an accusation that Lapid and his “center-left” compatriots have been hurling at Netanyahu for years, both when Barack Obama was in the White House and during Donald Trump’s term in the Oval Office.

https://www.jns.org/could-palestinian-protests-lead-to-the-ouster-of-mahmoud-ab

Hamas is also turning up the heat, hoping to one day seize control of the West Bank from Fatah as it did in Gaza.

As unrest continues in Ramallah and Hebron, questions have arisen surrounding the future of Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas.

For the fifth straight day Monday, protesters called for the ouster of Abbas following the death of activist Nizar Banat. PA security forces forcibly removed Banat from his home last Thursday near Hebron. He was beaten with iron rods by two dozen officers, taken for questioning and pronounced dead a few hours later, according to his family, Reuters reported. Banat was a vocal critic of Abbas.

Large-scale protests ensued. Videos uploaded to social media show Palestinian forces, some in riot gear, others in plainclothes, firing tear gas at protesters, hitting them with fists and clubs and targeting reporters. Journalists on the scene expressed their anger, with one tweeting, “Abbas will fall, the authority will fall, and the security coordination dogs will fall.” Hundreds also protested on the Temple Mount.

“These protests are almost unprecedented in their intensity, in the number of people participating in them,” Arab-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh told JNS. “For the first time you see large numbers of people chanting ‘Down with Abbas’ … It’s no longer about Nizar Banat only. It’s about people demanding regime change.”

Last Friday in Hebron, thousands attended Banat’s funeral, with mourners arriving from across PA-controlled territory.

“Abbas has completed the 16th year of a four-year term. Under him, things seem to be going in the wrong direction for the Palestinians,” Toameh said, noting divisions within Fatah, the loss of the Gaza Strip to Hamas, lack of freedom of speech and the recent crackdown on activists.

He added, “The feeling on the Palestinian street is that the Palestinian leadership is on a different planet, that it’s insensitive to demands regarding elections, regarding reform, regarding corruption. If you take all these things into consideration, you see how serious it is. The Palestinian people feel they’re not part of the Palestinian decision-making process and Abbas has turned it into a private fiefdom. People are saying enough is enough.”

https://www.jns.org/the-biden-administration-turns-to-unrwa-in-its-rush-to-rebuild-g

“UNRWA is a very problematic organization. It is fully controlled by Hamas. Hamas uses the facilities of UNRWA for weapons storage and to launch rockets. All of the local employees of UNRWA are Hamas people. Nobody’s allowed to work in UNRWA without the permission of Hamas,” said Kobi Michael, senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies.

Following the recent war between Israel and Hamas, the Biden administration has put an emphasis on rebuilding the Gaza Strip, promising the terror group won’t benefit. Some experts say Washington’s approach will fail to bear fruit.

Rebuilding Gaza was the first agenda item U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken mentioned when he met Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid in Rome on Sunday. It’s a recurring theme for Blinken, who brought up reconstruction of Gaza at every stop during his two-day visit to the Middle East in late May, days after the last bombs fell in “Operation Guardian of the Walls.” He stressed that rebuilding Gaza must be done in such a way that Hamas, which runs the coastal enclave, won’t redirect the aid to its military effort.

Blinken was echoing President Joe Biden, who shortly before a May 21 ceasefire said the U.S. would seek to quickly rebuild Gaza “in a manner that does not permit Hamas to simply restock its military arsenal.”

The administration is funneling money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In April, it had announced it was restoring $150 million to the U.N. agency. Following the Gaza conflict, Blinken said the U.S. would inject almost $33 million for “UNRWA’s emergency humanitarian appeal,” again ensuring “Hamas does not benefit from these reconstruction efforts.”

Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, who has studied UNRWA for two decades, said, “UNRWA is a case study of the client hijacking the service provider because the majority of UNRWA employees are Palestinians.” (UNRWA employs 28,000 Palestinian staff members, according to its website.)

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

We are grateful to Michael Ordman for the weekly catalog of Israel’s contributions which fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy (I created you, and appointed you A covenant people, a light of nations Isaiah 42:5-8)— by bringing light and hope for a better, healthier, more efficient and productive life for millions. rsk

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

UK trials for Israeli cancer treatment test.  The UK National Health Service (NHS) is to trial the blood test from Israel’s OncoHost (see here previously) that predicts how well cancer patients will respond to immunotherapy treatment. Trials will focus on patients with advanced melanoma or non-small cell lung cancer.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-oncohost-uks-nhs-to-study-cancer-patient-responses-to-immunotherapies/

Israeli vaccinations good till 2022. Israelis can now download new coronavirus vaccination or recovery certificates valid until the end of the year. Despite an uptick in new cases, and a return to wearing masks indoors, the Pfizer vaccine continues to show some 90% protection against even the Delta variant.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-to-issue-new-proof-of-vaccine-recovery-documents-valid-until-end-of-2021/

Contact-free patient monitoring. Israel’s Clair Labs is developing 24×7 contactless patient monitoring technology. Its biomarker sensors only need partial line of sight to the blood vessels on the patients’ facial skin to measure physiological markers, e.g., heartrate, respiration, airflow, body temperature and oxygen saturation.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/clair-labs-raises-9-million-to-monitor-patients-remotely-by-reading-skin/

https://clairlabs.com/

Ariel University dedicates its Medical School. The Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School of Medicine at Israel’s Ariel University has now been officially dedicated. 40 graduating students received doctoral degrees during the event and President Reuven Rivlin and Dr. Miriam Adelson were awarded honorary doctorates.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/miriam-adelson-rivlin-get-honorary-doctorates-at-ariel-university-med-school-opening/  https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308592

Saving a life on the way to son’s graduation. Just as United Hatzalah volunteer medic Haim set off for his son’s 8th-grade graduation ceremony, he was called to save the life of an unconscious 72-year-old man. CPR and several defibrillator shocks revived the pulseless man, allowing Haim to continue to his son’s graduation.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/308584

https://www.jns.org/why-are-increasing-numbers-of-young-evangelicals-moving-aw

“We have a serious education problem in the evangelical church. Too many people just don’t know a lot about any given subject. They’re smart, but they’re starved for information because their pastor is hawking his latest book from the pulpit on Sunday morning, instead of explaining serious issues,” says researcher and writer Jim Fletcher.

Over the past few decades, evangelical Christians have emerged as one of Israel’s core bases of support both in the United States and many other countries as well. However, growing trends of secularization and liberal ideology, as well as the erosion of a pro-Israel theology, are threatening to undermine this support, particularly among young evangelicals.

A recent poll commissioned by two University of North Carolina at Pembroke professors—Mordechai Inbari and Kirill Bumin—showing a sharp drop in support for Israel among the younger set has raised some eyebrows.

It found that young evangelical support for Israel had plunged to 33.6 percent from 69 percent in a 2018 poll. Those supporting the Palestinian side rose to 24.3 percent, up from 6 percent in 2018. Those supporting neither side stood at 42.2 percent.

The poll focused on evangelicals ages 18 to 29, and was conducted between March 22 and April 2 by the Barna Group, a polling and research firm focusing on issues of faith and culture.

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It appears to be backed by earlier polls. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor at the University of Maryland and director of the university’s Critical Issues Poll, tells JNS that two polls he conducted in 2015 and 2018 also exhibited a widening gap in support for Israel between younger and older evangelicals. In 2015, 40 percent of young evangelicals said the United States should lean towards Israel, a number that dropped to 21 percent in 2018.

Inbari and Bumin remain cautious in explaining the reasons, saying they’re in the “preliminary stages” of their analysis.

Still, they have their hypotheses, one of which is related to the racial makeup of evangelicals.

“We discovered that race matters,” says Bumin. “What we find is that African-Americans are about 34 or 36 percent less likely to support Israel than people from other ethnic groups.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/21/bibi-is-out-and-they-are-back/

“They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” is the way Talleyrand referred (supposedly) to the restored Bourbon dynasty after the abdication of Napoleon, encapsulating in a nutshell those who keep doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results.  

Such people believe that every intelligent person should recognize that their theory is the right one. The wrong circumstances had failed the theory, and if one would just give it another try, one would see that this time the theory would work. 

It’s difficult to imagine foreign policy wonks dancing in the streets of Washington, D.C., but my guess is that was exactly what they were doing in their favorite think tanks and editorial offices, not to mention in Foggy Bottom and the White House Executive Office Building (which houses the National Security Council) when they heard last week that their long-time nemesis, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, was out of power. Now that the circumstances have changed, they imagined, they will have yet another opportunity to retry their theory, and this time it will work. 

The only person that liberal internationalists despise (and I mean, really despise) more than Netanyahu is, of course, his personal friend and diplomatic partner, former President Donald Trump. 

One can more readily comprehend the animosity toward the Archie Bunkered Donald among the cosmopolitan graduates of Ivy League universities who ran foreign policy for the Obama-Biden Administration and are now doing the same thing for Joe Biden.

But Netanyahu is an intellectual who graduated from MIT, who opens his day with the New York Times, and reads the same books they do.  

So it’s nothing personal in the end, and has more to do with politics, and possibly the notion that Israel was led by a conservative statesman who could have probably run as a Republican for the U.S. Senate if only his dad had not decided to return to Israel with his family. (After watching Bibi on TV, one of my Millennial students asked me whether he was the Republican governor of Israel). 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/unusual-new-israeli-government-joseph-puder/

The unusual happened at the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in Jerusalem on Sunday, June 13, 2021. The bloc of Change (the anti-Netanyahu bloc) was able to form a coalition government with less than the required 61 Knesset members voting their confidence in the government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. The vote was 60 for the new government and 59 against. Lapid, the force behind the Change Bloc, and the alternate Prime Minister in rotation with Bennett, had to summon Labor Knesset member Emilie Moatti from her hospital bed to vote while lying on a stretcher, just to make it 60… The Arab Islamist list (Ra’am in Hebrew), part of the new coalition government, had one of its four members abstain. Without Moatti’s vote there would have been no Lapid-Bennett government. Naftali Bennett will be leading the most diverse coalition in Israel’s history.

Another unprecedented fact about the incoming government led by new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is that he leads a party of only six Knesset members in the unicameral Knesset of 120 members. The outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest serving PM in Israel’s history (15-years in total, and last 12 consecutive years) leads the largest party in the Knesset with 30 members. Amichai Chikli of Bennett’s Yamina party voted against his own leader, pointing out that he could not bring himself to sit in the same government with the far-left Meretz party that is part of the new coalition.

The new coalition government has one binding issue in common; all eight parties wanted to get Netanyahu out of office. There is little else they share. Yair Lapid’s (57) center-left party, Yesh Atid (17 seats in the current Knesset) has a liberal agenda on domestic-economic affairs; its platform says little on foreign and security affairs. Interestingly, while its platform calls for an effective government with no more than 18 ministers, the current Change Bloc that Lapid has concocted has 27 ministers. Yesh Atid, a secular, Tel Aviv centered party believes in drafting Haredi boys into the IDF, and the integration of the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community into Israeli society. Lapid served as Finance Minister in 2013, under Netanyahu, who subsequently fired him. Lapid was also a member of the security cabinet. A former journalist and a TV host, Lapid shares President Biden’s commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians, but he opposes the division of Jerusalem. Lapid is now Israel’s Foreign Minister and is slated to rotate with Naftali Bennett and become the Prime Minister in 2023.