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www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Lung cancer transplant patient receives his own lung. (TY David F) In a medical breakthrough, surgeons at Israel’s Beilinson hospital temporarily removed the left lung from a lung cancer patient. They then cut out a tumor from the lung that had been blocking the main airway and finally replaced the lung back into the patient.
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2020/02/28/medical-breakthrough-in-israel-a-lung-was-removed-from-the-body-of-a-cancer-patient-cleaned-and-returned/
 
Coronavirus vaccine news. Latest progress on the vaccine being developed by Israeli scientists at the Migal Research Institute in Kiryat Shmona on the border with Lebanon. Also, an article on how the vaccine works.
www.nocamels.com/2020/03/israeli-scientists-avian-vaccine-adapt-coronavirus/
https://www.financialexpress.com/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-outbreak-israeli-scientists-confident-of-breakthrough-in-developing-vaccine-for-covid-19/1886367/
 
Helping coronavirus patients breathe. (TY UWI) Doctors at Jerusalem’s Alyn hospital developed Coughsync some 10 years ago to help relieve lung congestion in physically challenged and disabled children. Now it is being mass-produced to help clear secretions from the lungs of Chinese coronavirus patients on ventilators.
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/New-Israeli-invention-used-to-treat-coronavirus-victims-in-China-617530  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyW027huElc
 
Breakthrough in generating heart cells. (TY UWI) Researchers led by Professor Lior Gepstein of Israel’s Technion Institute and Rambam Medical Center have generated heart cells from stem cells that can be either atrial (upper) or ventricular (lower) chamber cells. It has significant benefits for testing cardiac treatments.
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-researchers-build-3D-model-of-heart-tissue-from-stem-cells-617525
 
Sheba is now world’s 9th best hospital. Newsweek magazine listed Israel’s Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer as the world’s ninth-best hospital, up one place from last year (see here). Newsweek highlighted Sheba’s groundbreaking research in cancer, cardiology, brain diseases, genetics plus its global collaborations.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/276656
 
Contact lenses to correct color blindness. (TY Israel21c) Tel Aviv University researchers have developed customizable contact lenses that can correct deuteranomaly, a form of red-green colorblindness. Ultra-thin optical devices were incorporated into off-the-shelf contact lenses.
https://www.geek.com/news/these-high-tech-contact-lenses-correct-color-blindness-1819860/
https://www.osapublishing.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-45-6-1379
 

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/A-new-perspective-on-the-Jordanian-option-following-Trumps-peace-plan-620985

Rejection of President Trump’s “Deal of the Century” by Palestinian leaders has resulted in a stalemate that leaves Palestinians who desire national self-determination frustrated and angry. The problem is because of the fixation on creating a Palestinian state only west of the Jordan River. This has prevented thinking about any other options.

For the last three decades, based on the Oslo Accords, the international community has tried to resolve the dispute over Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) by creating an autonomous area for Palestinians under a “Palestinian Authority” – but not a state – while allowing for some Israeli settlements.

Promoted as a “peace agreement,” it soon proved to be a failure. The reason is that it was based on the false assumption that Arab and Palestinian leaders wanted peace with Israel. Rather than moving toward peace, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, Hamas and other terrorist organizations only made the situation worse. Unsatisfied with what they were given, local autonomy, they continue to condemn Israel and support terrorism.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/03/12/the-palestinian-right-of-return-is-really-about-destroying-israel/

On January 28, President Trump revealed his administration’s long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. As several commentators noted, the proposal explicitly states that there shall be no “right of return” — a key phrase with a very particular meaning that few analysts have carefully parsed out.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), the entity that governs the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, has continually demanded a “right of return” in nearly every negotiation that has occurred since the PA was created a quarter century ago. To understand the origin of this so-called “right,” one must first understand the history.

In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a partition plan for British-ruled Mandatory Palestine: Resolution 181, which called for the establishment of both a Jewish state and an Arab state. Arab states and Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it out of hand, choosing war over statehood. They violated Resolution 181 by attacking the fledgling Jewish nation. In the combat that followed, hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Jews fled. In some cases, they were forced from their homes in Mandatory Palestine and beyond.

Estimates of the original number of Arab refugees vary. The British Foreign Office suggested the number was between 600,000 and 760,000. A 1950 report by the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine endorsed an estimate of 711,000 refugees by an “expert of the Statistical Office of the United Nations.”

Many of these initial Arab refugees were set up in camps in Arab nations that typically refused to grant them citizenship or equal rights. Rather, they were treated as political pawns and overseen by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

In retaliation, some Arab nations punished their native Jewish populations by seizing their property and expelling them or forcing them to flee under threat of death or torture. Of the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees, nearly 600,000 settled in Israel.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Israel-vs-coronavirus-macro-genius-micro-idiocy-620772

Israel’s impressive initiative in the battle to contain the coronavirus pandemic is not surprising. Aside from directing scientists to develop a vaccine for the novel strain as soon as it emerged in China and began to traverse borders, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promptly adopted measures to slow its entry into and spread across country.
His efforts didn’t wane, even while campaigning for reelection, facing a looming court date for the beginning of his corruption trial and attempting to cobble together a coalition.

On the contrary, the pains he has taken to protect the public – from both illness and panic – have increased with every rise in the number of infected citizens and accompanying surge in home quarantines. Exhibiting true leadership, he has been giving press conferences to provide health directives and updates.On Wednesday alone, for example, he addressed the nation twice on this topic. First, he announced the injection of billions of shekels in aid to the health and small-business sectors, both of which are hurting from the current state of emergency.

“Corona is greatly affecting the global economy and our economy as well, [but] we are entering this crisis in a good situation,” he said. “The Israeli economy is in a better situation than most economies in the world. Unemployment is low, growth is high and the debt-to-GDP ratio is good. However, we have a great challenge here that we all are feeling and of which we are all aware. In our view, we can also deal with it in a way that will allow us to get through it successfully in peace – not without difficulty and not without sacrifice – but ultimately in peace, and I think that we can do this together in the best way possible.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/gantz-shows-netanyahu-was-right-about-bibi-or-tibi/

His having revealed that even an anti-Zionist partner is preferable to being second in a rotation as prime minister with Benjamin Netanyahu has done him the kind of harm that could cost him his short-lived political career.

 It appears that Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz has called his own bluff. Yes, the true colors of the so-called “center-left” Israeli party that has been trying desperately to wrest the reins from Likud leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bleeding all over its pearly white facade.

Ironically, this is not due to Netanyahu’s repeated warnings during the campaign ahead of the March 2 Knesset elections that a vote for Gantz was tantamount to a ballot for Ahmad Tibi, a prominent member of the Joint Arab List.

Tibi heads Ta’al, one of the four parties that makes up the Joint List. A veteran member of the Knesset, he was an adviser to and close confidant of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

“Bibi or Tibi” was a rhyming slogan that aroused the gleeful ire of both the Joint List and Blue and White, for ostensibly opposite reasons. The former called it “racist”—a typical Netanyahu “scare tactic” aimed at underscoring the treasonous disloyalty of Israel’s Arab citizens. The latter referred to it as “fake news.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15697/palestinians-blood-libels

Earlier, the Israeli authorities announced that they had facilitated 105,495 humanitarian crossings for Palestinians to receive medical treatment in Israel during the last week of February.

Yet, rather than showing gratitude toward the Israeli authorities for their assistance, the Palestinian Authority and its media outlets and officials are continuing their campaign of incitement against Israel.

If, as the Palestinians claim, the Jews have been using wild boars for the past two decades, why has no one snapped even one photo of an Israeli truck carrying the animals into Palestinian villages?

What about the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the West Bank? How come they too have not been attacked by wild boars? And how are these wild boars able to distinguish between Arabs and Jews?

While this sort of perverse Palestinian payback is nothing new, it nonetheless ought to interest anyone in the international community who is considering contributing to the Palestinian cause.

Israel is making a massive effort to help the Palestinians contain a coronavirus outbreak after several Palestinians in Bethlehem tested positive for the disease. In return, the Palestinians are continuing to spread blood libels against Israel and the Jews.

On March 5, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced that it has been working in the past two weeks to assist the Palestinian Authority in “curbing and preventing a coronavirus outbreak” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli authorities have transferred 250 coronavirus test kits from Israel to the Palestinians. Furthermore, joint training sessions for Israeli and Palestinian medical personnel were organized for the professional study of the virus, the protection of medical personnel, and the testing of patients suspected of being virus carriers.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Coronavirus-and-Israeli-electoral-ills-619929

It is unclear which achievement will come first: the formation of a solid, right-leaning government, or the coronavirus vaccine that dedicated, innovative Israeli scientists are busily developing.

The biggest news in the Jewish state this week should have surrounded the Knesset elections. Instead, it focused on a different cause for mass hysteria: the coronavirus pandemic.

Yes, while 16 people in Israel out of a population of nine million are suffering from what all report to be mild-to-moderate cold-like symptoms, the rest of the country is gradually being subjected to home isolation, increasingly stringent directives aimed at preventing the spread of the contagious flu, and panic-inducing warnings about the death toll certain to come.It’s one way to alleviate the nausea induced by the ills of the political system. After all, it was the third time in less than a year that we Israelis were called upon to go the polls. The first two hadn’t worked out so well where coalition-building was concerned.

The nationwide hope, laced with pessimism, was that Monday’s vote would put an end to the deadlock. The only question was which bloc – that of Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, leader of Likud, or that of Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz – was going to garner enough mandates to establish a stable majority government.

Though the months following the September election were relatively sleepy from a campaign perspective – with a weary public loath to going through the whole process yet again – renewed energy entered the scene a couple of weeks ago, when Netanyahu suddenly surged in the polls.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/netanyahu-at-the-cusp-of-a-dramatic-comeback/

Israel went to the polls on Monday. By Tuesday morning, as vote-counting proceeded, it appeared all but certain that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Likud Party, and his right-wing bloc had scored a dramatic comeback victory.

First it will help to recap.

Netanyahu was prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and again consecutively from 2009 to 2019, winning elections in 2009, 2013, and 2015. When he ran again in April 2019, it seemed he’d won again handily as the right-wing bloc took 65 seats out of Israel’s 120-member Knesset (to win you need 61).

But something happened on the way to coalition-forming. Avigdor Liberman, head of a secular-hawkish faction, demanded that Netanyahu stop making concessions to two ultra-religious parties that had been part of his coalition since 2015.

It was a demand Netanyahu had to refuse, since his ultra-religious coalition parties held far more seats than Liberman’s faction, which had won all of five seats. But when Liberman pulled out of the coalition, it was left with 60 seats—one short of the 61-seat minimum. Israel has been in electoral limbo ever since.

Especially because in the September 2019 elections, Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc—sans Lieberman’s faction—slipped even further to 55 seats. Netanyahu’s main challenger, former chief of staff Benny Gantz, led his centrist Blue and White party to an impressive performance—but his bloc, like Netanyahu’s, fell way short of 61 mandates. (If you’re wondering about the arithmetic, the remaining mandates went to the Joint List, an Israeli Arab party that’s hostile to Israel as a Jewish state and not grist for anyone’s coalition.)