RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15077/palestinians-internet-censorship

On the one hand, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) condemn Facebook for “surrendering to Israeli pressure” and taking action against those who incite terrorism and hate speech. On the other hand, the same PA leaders keep pressuring Facebook to silence Palestinians who demand an end to financial and administrative corruption in the PA.

“[E]very time Fatah posts a new terror message on Facebook encouraging violence or presenting murderers as role models, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are given more motivation to kill Israelis. Facebook still chooses to do nothing to stop it.” — Itamar Marcus, Jerusalem Post, September 11, 2019.

What Abbas and his senior officials apparently fear is that the current wave of anti-corruption protests sweeping Lebanon and other Arab countries may reach the West Bank. They appear nervous that their critics and political rivals will use social media to encourage Palestinians to revolt against corruption and tyranny.

For these leaders, when they turn to Facebook to clamp down on criticism and voices calling for reform and democracy, that is good government. However, when Israel tries to silence those who seek to spill more Jewish blood — well, that is criminal.

For the past few months, Palestinians have been accusing Facebook of “waging war on Palestinian content” by suspending dozens of accounts belonging to Palestinian activists and groups suspected of anti-Israel incitement and promotion of terrorism. The Palestinians even went as far as accusing the social media giant of being in collusion with Israel to “suppress the Palestinian narrative and conceal the reality of Israeli crimes.”

In the context of the campaign, the Palestinians used the hashtag #FBblocksPalestine to “reveal the double-standard policy of Facebook management in dealing with Israeli and Palestinian incitement on its site,” according to the Palestinian NGO Sada Social Center.

Earlier this month, Facebook further angered Palestinians when it deleted the page of the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center. Several Palestinian journalists, political activists and Hamas officials accused Facebook of serving as a “tool of suppression” in the hands of Israel.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/aliyah-seems-to-be-the-hardest-word/

A subtle yet significant gradual shift in the perception and description of the Jewish Agency’s job has coincided with the evolution of the concept of “Zionism.”

At its three-day board of governors meeting in Jerusalem this week, the Jewish Agency for Israel, which recently turned 90, revealed a new plan of action. Addressing the Jewish leaders who convened in the Israeli capital on Sunday, Jewish Agency chairman Isaac Herzog announced that the organization, which “founded the State of Israel and brought 3 million Jews on aliyah,” is now “refining our strategic mission for the coming decade, based on the challenges Jews are facing today.”

Herzog, who kicked off the event with a ceremony to honor and mourn the victims of last year’s attack on the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 Jews dead and six others wounded—explained the mission as one aiming to “provide concrete solutions to the greatest challenges facing the Jewish people at this time: mending the rifts among our people, building a two-way bridge between Israel and world Jewry, encouraging aliyah and providing security for Jews around the world.”

The only thing really new in this mission lies in its reduced emphasis on immigration to Israel. When it was established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency’s main raison d’être was aliyah, absorption and the building of communities in the Jewish state.

This subtle yet significant gradual shift in the perception and description of the Jewish Agency’s job has coincided with the evolution of the concept of “Zionism.” Once considered to be the ideological basis for Jews striving to live in their ancestral homeland-turned-state, it now is a general term denoting anything from a strong love or political backing for Israel to the wishy-washy, often veiled anti-Israel claim that it has a “right to exist.” As long as it behaves itself, of course.

http://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Leukemia treatment extends to solid tumors. (TY UWI) Tel Aviv University scientists have engineered the successful Israel-invented CAR-T cell therapy (see here) to also treat other cancers. They discovered a subset of immune system T cells (known as CD4+ T cells) will attract antibodies on solid tumors and destroy them.

https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-blood-cancer-treatment-could-also-kill-solid-tumors-new-study-603934  https://www.israel21c.org/engineered-t-cells-could-assassinate-solid-tumor-cells/

Breakthrough in search for a vaccine against Ebola. (TY UWI) Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute working with researchers in Germany have identified two antibodies that are effective in stopping one species of the Ebola virus. Research is ongoing to developing a multi-species vaccine.

https://www.israel21c.org/experimental-ebola-vaccine-offers-long-term-protection/

Another blood test for lung cancer. A team of Israeli (Weizmann Institute) and British scientists have devised a blood test that analyzes activity of three enzymes (OGG1, MPG and APE1) connected to DNA damage. They say it can “significantly improve current lung cancer risk prediction, assisting prevention and early detection.”

http://nocamels.com/2019/10/israel-british-scientists-blood-test-lung-cancer-screening/

http://www.weizmann.ac.il/WeizmannCompass/sections/briefs/dna%E2%80%99s-smoking-gun

Good trial results for presbyopia treatment. (TY WIN) As reported previously (Sep 2018) Israel’s Orasis has developed CSF-1 (eye drops) to treat presbyopia – age-related far-sightedness. Results of Phase 2b trials of CSF-1 showed “significant improvement”, together with “exceptional safety and tolerability”.

https://www.orasis-pharma.com/orasis-pharmaceuticals-announces-csf-1-eye-drop-successfully-met-primary-endpoint-in-phase-2b-clinical-study-in-presbyopia/

The signature of cancer cells. Researchers at Israel’s Technion Institute have used artificial intelligence and big data to decode the unique signatures of certain cancer cells. The resulting technology – dubbed a “computerized pathologist” –could significantly boost development of personalized cancer treatments.

https://www.israel21c.org/deep-learning-tech-reveals-personal-id-of-cancer-cells/

Israeli cancer survival rates rise significantly. Five-year survival rates for Israelis (Jews & Arabs) diagnosed with all types of invasive cancers have increased significantly over the last decade. For example, of Jewish women diagnosed in 1996 only 63% survived five years or more. From 2011 this rose to 71%.

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Cancer-survival-rates-among-Israelis-rise-significantly-over-last-decade-605547

New Israeli record for blood donations. (TY UWI) Israelis donated 1,567units of blood in one day at the Magen David Adom station at the Samaria Regional Division. They broke the previous Israeli record of 740 units in a 2014 Tel Aviv session. Donors included residents and soldiers from the IDF’s Samaria Division.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/269823

Closing openings in Panama. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Gordian Surgical is to provide thousands of its TroClose1200 access-closure systems to public hospitals in Panama. Gordian’s distributor PanaFarma won the tender to supply the post-operation surgical closure system (see here) to Panama’s social security hospitals.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gordian-surgicals-closure-system-used-in-panama-by-panafarma-300929570.html

What the microbiome has taught us. Dr Elan Elinav and Prof Elan Segal of Israel’s Weizmann Institute have made many medical discoveries from microbiome (gut bacteria) research. They include artificial sweeteners’ link to obesity / diabetes and gut microbes’ impact on ALS. There are 40 scientists in their research lab.

https://www.israel21c.org/is-the-microbiome-about-to-change-medicine-for-good/

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-What-Gantzs-speech-revealed-605718

Upon officially receiving the mandate from President Reuven Rivlin to take a stab at establishing the next government, Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz put on a noteworthy performance.

After spending the past four weeks refusing to accept any of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposals for a national-unity coalition, Gantz took to the podium at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday night with the peculiar air of someone who had just won a landslide victory, yet delivered what can only be described as a campaign speech. He couldn’t have been more blatant about his belief that a third round of Knesset elections is in the cards if he had said so in no uncertain terms.

But then, waxing poetic and disingenuous is something at which Gantz has grown proficient since he first threw his hat in the ring ahead of the April 9 elections, and on which he greatly improved before the September 17 do-over – even with the occasional malapropisms that have provided the public, punditry and cast of the political satire TV show, Eretz Nehederet, with fodder for laughter, if not ridicule.

There was nothing funny about his mandate-acceptance address, however. On the contrary, it was a well-rehearsed exercise in feigned statesmanship with deadly serious flaws. Chief among these was Gantz’s effort to present himself as all things to all people: to the Israeli populace and the whole Jewish world, to the periphery and the center, to the ultra-Orthodox and National-Religious; to Arabs and Druze, to members of the LGBTQ community, and to the country’s young men and women whose military service earned them the right to enjoy chilling out at bars.

Gantz described Blue and White as a faction that came into being eight months ago to tackle “the schism and rift in Israeli society, out of a deep sense of responsibility on my part and on the part of my co-leaders, Yair Lapid, Moshe ‘Bogie’ Ya’alon and Gabi Ashkenazi. We put aside every personal consideration… and made a commitment to put Israel before all else.”

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/anti-zionism-and-anti-semi

Anti-Zionism is a flourishing politics today on many university campuses and on parts of the left, and the standard response from many Jewish organizations and from most of the Jews I know is to call it the newest version of anti-Semitism. But anti-Zionism is a subject in itself; it comes in many varieties, and which ones are anti-Semitic—that’s the question I want to address here. I take “Zionism” to mean a belief in the rightful existence of a Jewish state, nothing more. Anti-Zionism denies the rightfulness. My concern here is with left-wing anti-Zionism in the United States and Europe.

Most versions of anti-Zionism first appeared among the Jews. The first, and probably the oldest, takes Zionism to be a Jewish heresy. According to Orthodox doctrine, the return of the Jews to Zion and the establishment of a state will be the work of the Messiah in the days to come. Until then, Jews are required to accept their exile, defer to gentile rulers, and wait for divine deliverance. Political action is a usurpation of God’s prerogative. Zionist writers hated the passivity that this doctrine produced with such passion that they were called anti-Semites by orthodox Jews, who would never have given that name to their own rejection of the Zionist project.

“Waiting for the Messiah” has a left version, which might be called “waiting for the revolution.” Jews (and other minorities) were often told that all their problems would be solved, and could only be solved, by the triumph of the proletariat. Many Jews took this to be an expression of hostility, a refusal to recognize the urgencies of their situation. But I don’t see anti-Semitism here, only ideological rigidity and moral insensitivity.

The second Jewish version of anti-Zionism was first proclaimed by the founders of Reform Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. There is no Jewish people, they insisted, only a community of faith—men and women of the Mosaic persuasion. Jews could be good Germans (or good citizens of any state) since they were not a nation like the other nations and did not aspire to a state of their own. Zionism was perceived as a threat to these good Germans, since it suggested that they had an allegiance elsewhere.

Many leftists have adopted this denial of Jewish peoplehood, and then they go on to claim that a Jewish state must be a religious state, something like a Catholic or Lutheran or Muslim state—political formations that no leftist could support. But Reform Jews adopted this position knowing that most of their fellow Jews didn’t share it. If the nation is a daily referendum, as Ernest Renan said, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the great majority, were voting every day for peoplehood. They weren’t all looking for a homeland in the land of Israel, but even the Bundists, who hoped for autonomy in the Tsarist empire, were Jewish nationalists.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israels-holiday-government/

It’s not an electoral impasse per se, but a month of Jewish festivities in September and part of October that shuts everything down for a month.

While the world oohed and aahed with the news that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was returning his coalition-building mandate to President Reuven Rivlin—who, in turn, would offer it to Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz—Israelis reacted with a shrug and a nod. During the weeks since the second round of Knesset elections on Sept. 17, it became increasingly clear that Netanyahu, the head of Likud, would not be able to cobble together a government under the current circumstances.

Netanyahu’s pact with the right-wing/religious parties that they would be part of a “package deal” in any coalition negotiations was unacceptable to Blue and White, which rejected any such “preconditions,” while also asserting that it would not join a national-unity government with a party led by someone under indictment. This is in spite of the fact that Netanyahu has yet to be indicted on any of the flimsy charges for which he has been under investigation.

Be all that as it may, Gantz probably won’t be able to succeed where Netanyahu failed, making a third round of elections likely, if not inevitable. Most Israelis have resigned themselves to such a scenario. Even Hebrew news outlets started relegating items about coalition-building to below-the-fold, inner-page or last-spot-before-the-weather-report exile. Until Monday evening, that is, when Netanyahu effectively placed the ball in Gantz’s court.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-netanyahu-says-hes-failed-to-form-new-government-11571679595

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday he failed to form Israel’s next government after a September election that saw no clear winner, giving rival Benny Gantz the opportunity to create a coalition that could end the tenure of the country’s longest-serving premier.

President Reuven Rivlin said he would begin consultations with the parties in the Knesset to initiate Mr. Gantz’s 28-day turn at trying to form a majority government of at least 61 seats in Israel’s parliament. However, Mr. Gantz will face many of the same political hurdles that sidelined Mr. Netanyahu’s efforts.

Mr. Gantz’s Blue and White party won the most seats in the September elections, 33 to Likud’s 32, but Mr. Netanyahu was given the first chance to form a government because he had more support from other smaller parties elected to the 120-seat Knesset. He faced a deadline later this week to form a government or return the mandate.

Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement, on his 70th birthday, marks a setback for the prime minister who has earned the nickname “the magician” for his ability to wiggle out of tight spots in a political career spanning three decades. After the attorney general announced in February his intent to indict Mr. Netanyahu on corruption charges pending a hearing, Mr. Netanyahu campaigned on his security credentials and strong relationships with President Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders. But he failed to form a government after the April elections, triggering the second vote.