RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/its-time-to-give-netanyahu-trump-a-break-and-benefit-of-the-doubt-633661

Those in favor of the move expressed disappointment that it didn’t appear to be happening on schedule. Those opposed took the opportunity to ridicule Netanyahu.

Israelis across the spectrum were grumbling this week about the approach of the July 1 deadline that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had set for himself to begin extending sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and approximately 30% of Judea and Samaria.

Those in favor of the move expressed disappointment that it didn’t appear to be happening on schedule. Those opposed took the opportunity to ridicule Netanyahu for trying to wriggle out of his promise by orchestrating a fight with his coalition partner, Defense Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz, for internal political reasons. But all are accusing Netanyahu of capitulation or machinations, depending on their point of view.

Regional Cooperation Minister Ofir Akunis, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, told Army Radio on Wednesday that the issue will not be brought to a vote until US President Donald Trump – author of the “Peace to Prosperity” plan that includes the sovereignty move – makes an announcement on the matter. Akunis was alluding to Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s comment last week to White House reporters that she would “leave it to [Trump] to give you a big announcement” on the matter.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16173/israel-borders-islamic-law

This is where the plan for extending Israeli law over more territory becomes simpler to resolve both legally and morally. However many times the Palestinian Arabs have been offered a state, they have chosen to turn it down, rejecting generous peace offers. They have preferred to use terrorism and three wars launched from Gaza in pursuit of their fantasy of destroying Israel. By 2017, they had rejected no fewer than seven peace offers, and this year Mahmoud Abbas turned down the new US-Israeli peace plan.

Fortunately, if Israel were to extend Israeli law to more land, the move could present a great opportunity to end the conflict. The decisive end by Israel to a Palestinian fantasy that should never have been humoured in the first place might finally enable Palestinian leaders finally to start their citizens on a constructive — rather than a destructive — path.

In part one, we identified several ways in which international bodies, states, and individuals interpret the US-Israeli plan for Israel to extend Israeli law in the ancient Jewish homeland of Judaea and Samaria. There is widespread, and misguided, agreement that such a move would be illegal under international law, which regards occupation and “annexation of territory” in a negative sense.

However, as we have seen, much of this interpretation is based on confusion about the history of the region, the origins of the state of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian rejection of a state for their own people. It is also a contradiction between Western-inspired international law and earlier Islamic law.

Let us start with a look at the original 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, a territory designed to be administered by Great Britain until it could emerge as an independent state. Even a brief glance at a map of the territory shows that the Mandate made the whole of Palestine, including Gaza and what is now the West Bank with Judea and Samaria, the region designated for the future Jewish homeland. Writing in Israel Hayom recently, Dr. Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, argues that this original designation means that it is not appropriate to term Israel’s coming move to place the Jordan Valley of the West Bank an “annexation”. Aggressive annexation of territory through war is, he agrees, unacceptable and illegal — but Israel only entered the West Bank in 1967 during a defensive war.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-right-kind-of-gay-pride/

Israeli Public Security Minister Amir Ohana—a proud member of the LGBTQ community and equally proud member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party—has said that “being attracted to men doesn’t mean you have to believe in creating a Palestinian state.”

Ohana made that statement during an interview with The New York Times a year ago in June, when Netanyahu appointed him interim justice minister.

Ohana—a lawyer, a major in the reserves and a veteran of the Shin Bet—is hated by the left for the policies that he promotes and the bills that he has drafted. Among the latter is the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

But it is Ohana’s view of judiciary overreach that has earned him the greatest wrath among his detractors. When he was first appointed justice minister, he made a statement to the effect that not all Supreme Court decisions should be honored.

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In the wake of the ensuing uproar from the disingenuous “defenders of democracy”—those who don’t believe in the separation of powers as long as the judges that they deem politically correct are occupying the bench—Channel 12’s Amit Segal asked Ohana if he really meant what he had said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16172/israel-borders-law

Today’s Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews and glorify — and handsomely profit from — violence against them.

It is common today to find references to Palestine as a mainly Muslim Arab state that has supposedly been “stolen” by Jews, or promised but not given to those people who describe themselves as Palestinians. That is an immense misconception, albeit one that seems to influence political and legal thinking internationally, especially among people who would like to believe it.

In a clearer understanding [of international law], Israel’s planned move appears to be legal.

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism…. [T]he moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.” — PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 31, 1977.

In general, taking territory from another country is treated under international law as illegal. Much of our sense that such illegality is as much morally wrong as it is legally prohibited comes from historical realities in modern history. The Nazi German takeovers of numerous countries across Europe between 1938 and 1945, together with the brutality with which they were carried out, stand even today as notorious examples of unacceptable behaviour in an attempt to dominate other peoples without the least pretence of legality of purpose or practice. More recently, the Russian Federation’s 2014 invasion of Crimea has caused unnecessary conflict with Ukraine and damaged Russia’s own international reputation.

Article 2 of the first chapter of the United Nations Charter declares:

“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

This was formulated in 1945, in a very understandable response to the aggressions by Nazi Germany. It remains a valid ruling on the dangers posed by powerful nations should they too choose to use force to take over neighbouring territories. Even so, Article 2 was contravened by China in 1959 when it overran Tibet; by Turkey in 1974 when it invaded northern Cyprus, and is constantly contravened by Iran — with the evident complicity of most of the members of the UN — in its expansions into Iraq, Syria, Yemen ad Lebanon, as well as its 41-year-long threats to obliterate a fellow UN member state, Israel.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/palestinian_intransigence_and_the_illusion_of_peace_enough_is_enough_.html

On Jan. 28, 2020, the long-awaited Trump Administration’s “Deal of the Century,” officially titled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” was made public.  The proposal aspires to reach the goal within its title after unfreezing and advancing negotiations between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The aim is to end a conflict as old as the State of Israel, and in some ways older.  The plan entails Israel replacing the present military law with its system of civil law in the still non-sovereign territory that Israel captured from the Jordanians and has administered since June 1967. The change would directly affect the lives of the estimated nearly 400,000 Israeli citizens who reside in this area. 

The plan allows Israel to execute this change only after July 1st and on no more than what constitutes 30 percent of the West Bank, or biblical Judea and Samaria. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently acknowledged in a meeting with the elected heads of a number of Jewish towns from these areas that the initial application of Israeli civil law would apply to only about 3% of the territory that constitutes 132 Jewish communities recognized by the state.  The remaining 27%, essentially the Jordan valley, would undergo the transition pending further negotiations with the Trump administration.

The plan also envisions a sovereign State of Palestine on the remaining 70 percent of this land, plus a small area of the western Negev Desert that is currently within the borders of Israel.  But the Palestinians stand to gain not only land.  The economic section of the plan that was rolled out at a multi-national workshop held in Manama, Bahrain, June 25-26, 2019, sets as an objective the establishment of a $50 billion international investment fund for 179 infrastructure and business projects within the nascent Palestinian state.  However, a sovereign Palestine with a national capital just beyond the border of East Jerusalem would receive recognition by the United States and Israel only if after four years from its acceptance of the plan the Palestinian Authority succeeds in meeting a number of criteria. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16167/palestinians-execute-unarmed-civilian

The two fatal incidents — the killing of the terrorist by the IDF and the killing of the unarmed, handcuffed civilian by the Palestinian security forces — are a perfect demonstration of how the Palestinians twist truth until it is utterly unrecognizable to the international media while hiding their own crimes against their own people.

The same Palestinian officials who are accusing Israel of carrying out “extrajudicial executions” are facing the same charge by Palestinian human rights organizations. That, however, is an inconvenient truth that the leaders of the Palestinians are striving to conceal from the eyes of the world.

The real problem, however, lies far beyond the con artists Erekat and Ashrawi: it lies instead with the attitude of the international media and community towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why are foreign media outlets who are reporting about the killing of a terrorist by Israeli troops ignoring the real “extrajudicial executions” — the ones that are carried out by the Palestinians who are again trying to conceal their crime by diverting attention (and outrage) against Israel?

If Palestinian officials, so called human rights organizations and international reporters are worried about “extrajudicial killings,”… they should talk to the family of Al-Amouri, human rights organizations and eyewitnesses — who can describe in detail how Palestinian security forces shot dead a handcuffed man in front of his elderly mother.

Two Palestinians were shot dead near Jerusalem on June 23 — one by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) near the village of Abu Dis and the other by the Palestinian Authority security forces in the town of Al-Eizariya.

The man killed by the IDF, 28-year-old Ahmed Erekat, was fatally shot after he attempted to carry out a terror attack against Israeli soldiers with his car. A female soldier was lightly wounded in the attack.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/06/28/netanyahu-is-a-peacemaker-and-dont-think-the-left-will-mention-it-n583470

The “last decade,” notes James Sinkinson in a perceptive article, has seen a “sea change” in Israel’s ties with “key Arab states.”

And that last decade is also the one in which Benjamin Netanyahu (again, after a stint in the 1990s) has been Israel’s prime minister — specifically since March 2009.

True, conditions for enhanced Arab-Israeli ties have been propitious — particularly the behavior of regional bully Iran, a common enemy; the Obama administration’s courting of Iran and signing of a nuclear deal with it that scared the wits out of both Israelis and Arabs; and the Trump administration’s ambivalence about the U.S. role in the Middle East. Sunni radicalism in the form of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others is another common enemy of Israel and Arab states.

Added to that are Israel’s ever-intensifying military activity against Iran, particularly in Syria, which Arab governments watch with approval, along with Israel’s dramatically growing military, economic, technological, and diplomatic clout in general, to the point that in 2019 US News and World Report ranked it — despite how tiny it is — the world’s eighth most powerful country.

But ripe conditions are one thing; the ability to convert them into results is another. And the repeatedly reelected Netanyahu is little less than a diplomatic genius, under whose tenure Israel’s ties have surged not only with Arab states but also with India, China, Russia, as well as East European, African, and South American countries — basically in every niche of the world.

In the Arab sphere, as Sinkinson notes, “Israel’s cooperation and communication with the leadership of eight…nations — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan — is greater than ever.”

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

World’s first passive immunization. Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital is cautiously optimistic after the world’s first passive immunization of a critically ill coronavirus patient. After an injection of Kamada’s IgG antibody product (see here), a CT-scan of the lungs showed some improvement and doctors are hopeful of a recovery.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/505083

https://hadassahuk.org/new-innovative-hyperimmune-therapy-for-covid-19-at-hadassah/

Why some Covid-19 patients get blood clots. Dr. Abd Al-Roof Higazi at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital has found that high levels of peptide Alpha-defensin in some Covid-19 patients cause blood clots in their lungs. He is now testing the medication colchicine for dissolving the clots, as standard anticoagulants are ineffective.

https://www.israel21c.org/hadassah-researchers-find-source-of-corona-blood-clots/

Israeli facemask effective against Covid-19. Internationally-conducted tests on the facemasks produced by Israel’s Sonovia (reported here previously) have proved that the metal-oxide coated masks destroy the novel coronavirus. Sonovia produces several thousand masks per day and has sold several hundreds of thousands.

https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-sonomasks-confirmed-effective-against-covid-19/

Remote monitoring of chronic patients. The original glucose monitor of Israel’s DarioHealth (reported here previously) is now MyDario – a full Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) device. DarioHealth has just been approved by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dariohealth-announces-two-remote-patient-monitoring-rpm-agreements-and-commences-enrollment-301074359.html

Fighting immune system overreaction. In Covid-19 and autoimmune diseases, the body’s immune system goes out of control. Israeli biotech Stero uses CBD to reduce and even replace the usual steroid treatment for these diseases. With funding from Israel’s Clalit, it is trialing CBD on 30 Crohn’s steroid-dependent patients.

https://www.israel21c.org/cbd-may-improve-steroid-therapy-in-autoimmune-covid-19-patients/

http://sterobiotechs.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nw9ss2c-ns

Intel wins Sheba’s Covid-19 challenge. The Coronavirus Data Challenge by Israel’s Sheba Medical Center was reported here previously. It was won by Intel’s Analytics AI group’s system to predict patients with life-threatening reactions or needing ventilators. It will be implemented at Sheba and at Mount Sinai in New York.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/sheba-medical-center-names-winner-of-coronavirus-data-challenge-632115

Positive results in MS study. Doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital used a nano-engineered supplement made from high antioxidant pomegranate oil to treat 30 multiple sclerosis patients. In just 3 months, the patients already significantly improved their learning ability, text comprehension, word recall and categorization.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/nano-engineered-pomegranate-oil-holds-hope-for-brain-disease-study-shows/

Combining non-cancer medicines to kill cancer. A 3-year study by Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists has discovered that a combination of an antiviral AIDS treatment and another to treat memory loss was effective in fighting liver and skin cancers. Separately, the medicines had no effect on the cancer.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-breakthrough-paves-the-way-to-chemo-free-cancer-treatment/

Neuroscience competition winner. A team from Bar-Ilan University was one of four winners of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research DREAM Challenge. The Israelis were the only non-US winners from the 43 competing teams. Their winning entry focuses on movement disorders resulting from cell damage.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/282310

Leading the way in psychiatric treatment. This video highlights the enlightened approach and up-to-date facilities for psychiatric care at Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak.  Also, during the Covid-19 epidemic, the hospital successfully adopted tele-psychiatry – the new norm for patient-practitioner meetings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFsLXSeFvuc&t=163s

A Medtech degree course. Israel’s Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) is launching in October a new bachelor’s degree program in Medical Technology (Medtech). The first 60 students will study digital medical technologies, including telemedicine, smart medical systems, and big data.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3831931,00.html

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-lefts-message-of-peace-with-the-palestinians-is-brainwashing-633009

For half a century the Left has been brainwashing us with a simple but devious message: “Peace with the Palestinians instead of war.” Ignore the reality that the Arab and Muslim world, aided by the Soviet Union sought Israel’s destruction, and still does. Peace now! It was a powerful drug that continues to numb our critical thinking.

Although enticing, however, peace campaigns were not about peace; they were about creating a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. The first stage was accomplished beginning in 1993 with the Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority run by the PLO, and the withdrawal of Israeli control from large sections of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and eventually from the Gaza Strip. None of this brought peace, of course, but the opposite: waves of terrorism. Solemn commitments made by PLO leaders were meaningless, a subterfuge to advance their agenda to destroy Israel. Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups were clear and explicit. The guarantors, the European Union and UN, went along with the hoax.

The basic problem, however, remained: most of the international community considers any Israeli presence beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines to be “illegal” and a “violation of international law” – as they interpret it. Major organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the designated authority of the Fourth Geneva Convention, an important basis for humanitarian law, declared Israel was “occupying Palestinian territory.” The UN, the EU and of course the entire Arab and Muslim world agreed; the ICJ and ICC gave it their “judicial” support.