RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Lessons in geography for some anti-Israel protesters.

First, to those calling for a two-state solution: Look at a map! Judea and Samaria (aka known as the West Bank) has an Arab city named Tulkarm which is only nine miles from the Mediterranean Sea which would give the “River to the Sea” barbarians an opportunity to divide Israel’s population with disastrous consequences.

Second, Israeli students should join the protests of Asians calling for race, gender, and ethnic neutral admissions to Harvard. Israel is in Asia, a fact that even some supporters don’t know. Duh!

Third, the moron of the week prize goes to a protester who recently declared: “If you can put a man on the moon, you can craft a cease-fire. Duh!

Michael Ordman’s weekly catalog of Israel’s dazzling contributions to humanity gives the lie to other shibboleths and outright lies about Israel. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
Christian Embassy donates 4 ambulances. The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem has donated four new ambulances to help replace the dozens of Israeli ambulances destroyed on and since Oct 7. One is an advanced military  ambulance for Gaza border communities. One will serve Holocaust survivors in the North.
https://www.jns.org/wire/international-christian-embassy-jerusalem-donates-four-new-ambulances-to-israel/
 
Reservists complain – let us fight. Israel’s military ombudswoman Brig. Gen. (res.) Rachel Tevet-Wiesel has found that most of the 1,316 complaints during the first three months of the war (Oct-Dec) were civilians seeking to return to reserve duty after receiving exemptions and reservists asking to be moved to a combat unit.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-ombudswoman-report-finds-rise-in-reservists-clamoring-to-be-allowed-to-fight/
 
The largest ever IDF enlistment of Yeshiva students. The upcoming IDF recruitment cycle will include a record 1,000 fighters from the Hesder yeshivot (300 to combat units); another 300 from Zionist yeshivot gevohot (post high school yeshivot); and hundreds more from religious pre-military preparatory schools.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/386759
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-confirms-1300-to-be-recruited-early-from-pre-army-programs/
 
Volunteering changed her life. On Oct 7 Yocheved Ruttenberg was in Dallas Texas waiting for her lone soldier brother to return from Israel so they could start a business in the USA. Now Yocheved is co-founder of NGO Sword of Iron – Israel Volunteer Opportunities, helping others organize their Israel volunteering trips.
https://www.israel21c.org/how-a-two-week-trip-to-volunteer-turned-lifechanging/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/353201190423242/
 
You need it, Ariel 3D-prints it. Ariel Harush is an engineering student at Israel’s Ben Gurion University. He 3D-printed a radio connector for a friend in the IDF and suddenly army commanders were asking for 1,000 of them. He and 400 volunteers have since printed 43,000 items, from knee pads to night-vision rifle adaptors.
https://nocamels.com/2024/03/volunteer-engineer-is-3d-printing-kit-for-israeli-troops-at-war/
                                                     
Latin America solidarity mission. A delegation of governors and mayors from Panama, Uruguay, Honduras, Chile, and Guatemala, traveled to southern Israeli cities targeted on Oct 7 and met with family members of Israeli hostages during their four-day trip.
https://www.jns.org/latin-american-local-leaders-pay-solidarity-visit-to-israel/
 
IFCJ funds 123 bomb shelters. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (FCJ) is funding more than one and a half million dollars to place 123 shelters alongside bus stops serving 42 northern Israeli communities, amid Israel’s ongoing conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah. 
https://www.jns.org/ifcj-funding-123-shelters-for-bus-stops-near-lebanon-border/
 
Sderot supermarket re-opens. The first supermarket in Sderot has reopened more than five months after the Israeli city was mostly evacuated due to the war with Hamas. Its owner, Prosper Peretz, said, “I worked throughout the war, even though my house was hit by a rocket. I didn’t give up and I didn’t leave the city.”
https://unitedwithisrael.org/sderot-supermarket-open-for-business-5-months-after-hamas-invasion/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Phage therapy combats antibiotic resistance. The Israeli Phage Therapy Center (IPTC), led by two Hebrew University of Jerusalem professors, has used a bacteriophage PASA16 on compassionate basis to treat tough Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in 16 patients. It has shown promising results with an 86.6% success rate.
https://en.huji.ac.il/news/anti-bacterial-virus-phage-pasa16-treated-antibiotic-resistant-infections-866
https://www.cell.com/med/abstract/S2666-6340(23)00225-8
 
How do some viruses get nasty? Tel Aviv University researchers discovered a mechanism used by viruses to decide whether to kill their bacterial host. These phages monitor the health of the cell they are occupying. They also check that there are no viruses residing in nearby cells that the phages wish to occupy.
https://foodsecurity.tau.ac.il/sbcr/news/how-do-viruses-choose-whether-to-become-nasty-or-not-16-1-2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01551-3
 
Clues may lead to a cure for Parkinson’s. Researchers at Haifa University have discovered that sufferers of Parkinson’s disease have brain cells that are deficient in mRNA and proteins that build the extracellular matrix (ECM).  It is the ECM that provides brain cells with structural and biochemical support.
https://www.israel21c.org/parkinsons-breakthrough-link-discovered-between-disease-and-brain/
 
500 doctors to make Aliyah.  Nefesh b’Nefesh’s Medex event held in Teaneck, NJ was a huge success. Nearly 500 medical professionals attended from 30 states and provinces in the US and Canada, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, dental hygienists, and many more. A European event is scheduled end-March.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/03/11/nefesh-bnefesh-inaugurates-international-medical-aliyah-program-to-combat-israels-physician-shortage/  https://www.jpost.com/aliyah/health-services/article-791431

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20495/hamas-strategy-atrocity-gaza-war

Hamas is perhaps the first regime in recorded history to fight a war designed to maximize casualties among their own population.

Failing to swiftly destroy Hamas and directly punish Hamas’s backers in Iran and Qatar will teach sympathizers in other parts of the Muslim world that strategies of atrocity should be added to the playbook of regimes challenging U.S. allies around the world. Even worse would be for Hamas to actually achieve a strategic victory and gain a Palestinian statehood; such an outcome would ensure that atrocity becomes a standard and widely used strategy for at least a generation to come.

The laws of war — primarily a Western innovation — are being weaponized by the enemies of the West, who do not subscribe to Western culture….. Today, the United States and our allies find ourselves at war with states and non-state entities who do not subscribe to the laws of war.

“[T]he Hamas terrorists killed by Israel in the ensuing war, and civilian non-combatants killed in the Gaza Strip while being used as human shields by Hamas. They are all considered “Martyrs” whose families are eligible to receive stipends of 1,400-12,000 shekels [$375-$3200] per month for life.” — Itamar Marcus; Founder, Palestinian Media Watch, palwatch.org, January 10, 2024.

The popular accusation of disproportionality is, in point of fact, aimed to prevent Western-aligned nations from achieving decisive victories. Even when the allies of the United States have the military capacity to break the will of the enemy, thereby imposing peace on the defeated, they will be forced to resort to fighting forever wars.

Why should the Israelis be compelled to allow aid into Gaza, when Hamas continues to hold hostage not just Israelis but also Americans? Under the guise of benevolence and generosity, international organizations promote forever wars.

If the type of warfare that we have seen from Hamas is allowed to succeed, and is not met with overwhelming violence and utter defeat, it will become the standard approach for those challenging Western dominance. If, however, we want to live in a world where the laws of war mean something, then the penalties for deliberately flouting them need to be terrible. Otherwise more regimes will be tempted to gain advantage through strategies of atrocity.

The US should stop imposing on our allies a doctrine of defeat.

Finally, the day after hostilities end, the Israelis must protect the new Gazan government from being undermined by renewed efforts to support terrorism and remilitarization.

The only path to peace, other than the destruction of Israel, is through a comprehensive Israeli victory and an unconditional surrender by Hamas in Gaza, and a post-war arrangement ensuring that the Gazans will not be able to commit such atrocities in Israel again.

Hamas is perhaps the first regime in recorded history to fight a war designed to maximize casualties among their own population. Pictured: Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen shows a photo of an Israeli soldier posing next to a Hamas weapons cache that was found at Rantisi Hospital in Gaza, at a press conference at the European Office of the United Nations in Geneva, on November 14, 2023. (Photo by Pierre Albouy/AFP via Getty Images)

“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.” — Niccolo Machiavelli.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/16/the-biden-administration-attacks-democracy-abroad/

A friend sent me a link that, upon opening it, I initially thought I had been directed to The Babylon Bee. I rubbed my eyes and pored over the blurb again. Amazed, I remembered Mr. Biden’s State of the Union declaration: “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack at—both at home and overseas at the very same time.”

Of course, I was aware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters have been assiduously attacking American democracy. Indeed, in recounting how the Democratic Party is anything but democratic, Victor Davis Hanson concluded:

The Left talks grandly of ‘democracy dies in darkness’ as Joe Biden beats the dead horse of January 6 to warn that democracy is in its greatest peril. But all such rhetoric is projection. The verbiage masks the most comprehensive effort in modern American history to radically change, destroy, or warp American laws, customs, and traditions for the short-term aim of gaining and retaining political power.

The rationale is that the left is of such superior morality and wisdom that it has the right to violate the Constitution or the hallowed traditions of the country to achieve the higher end of ensuring a progressive agenda.

However, I was unaware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters had been attacking democracy abroad. Of course, I knew the Authoritarian Axis of communist China, Putin’s revanchist Russia, terrorist-state Iran, and the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships had been persistently attacking democracy. But none of these rouge states besieging free peoples were the target of the Biden administration’s call for regime change.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20486/biden-should-threaten-qatar

Biden’s reported threat to halt or suspend US military supplies to Israel if the IDF enters Rafah is what encourages Hamas to continue fighting and reject every proposal to release the hostages. When Hamas leaders hear that Biden is threatening Israel to prevent the IDF from entering Rafah, they must say to themselves: “Why should we make any concessions to Israel? America doesn’t want the Israelis to destroy the four remaining battalions. The US administration is opposed to Israel’s plan to eliminate Hamas, so let’s wait!”

A total defeat means the elimination of all of Hamas’s battalions. An Israeli victory will never be complete as long as one, or even half, a Hamas battalion remains intact.

Biden is actually sending a message to Hamas and Iran’s other terror proxies, including Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis, that America is about to throw Israel under the bus. Cutting off US weapons supplies to Israel is the ultimate fantasy of the terrorists.

The administration could show impressive leadership and in fact “bring this to an end as quickly as we can” — not just for Israel but for all in the region who are seeking peace — by encouraging Israel to take out the terrorists in Rafah without delay.

Instead of pressuring Israel, Biden should be pressuring his friends in Qatar to force their Hamas puppets to hand over the Israeli hostages and surrender. Instead of threatening to cut off weapons supplies to Israel, he should be threatening the leaders of Qatar with the withdrawal of US forces from the country’s Al Udeid Air Base and to officially designate Qatar as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (for its funding of Hamas, Hizballah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Shabab, Al Nusra Front, among others).

This is the way – the only way – to end the war quickly, as well as to send a signal to America’s adversaries looking on, that the US is prepared to uphold the values of civilization, not the values of terror.

US President Joe Biden will consider conditioning military supplies to Israel if the Israeli army moves forward with a large-scale invasion of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, according to four US officials.

Biden has also told MSNBC that a Rafah operation would cross a “red line,” although he balanced that statement with a commitment to support Israel’s right to self-defense.

https://www.newsweek.com/zone-disinterest-oscars-opinion-1878405

When a British writer-director accepted an Oscar Sunday night for Zone of Interest, a fictional movie set against a backdrop of the very real Holocaust, he showed that his own grasp of reality is dangerously lacking.

In repugnant, victim-blaming remarks, Jonathan Glazer said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”

Note to Glazer: No one is hijacking your Jewishness or the Holocaust. That idea is an antisemitic myth popular among some deluded people who call themselves “progressive.” It’s a myth that fuels terrorism and attacks on Jews all over the world.

The differences between the real world and the imaginary one that Glazer described could not be more stark. In his imaginary world, an “occupation” somehow “led to” the October 7 terrorist attacks. In the real world, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, and the Palestinian Authority has long controlled Palestinian areas of the West Bank. Hamas, backed by Iran, carried out the most unimaginably evil terrorist attacks of modern times because years of brainwashing children in UNRWA-backed schools and training them to seek Jihad have created a radicalized population that celebrates the slaughter of Jews with candy and fireworks.

In Glazer’s imaginary world, the Holocaust is “hijacked.” In the real world, Jews (the people of Judea) have spent centuries trying to return to Israel, their indigenous homeland that they were expelled from by empires—long before the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed. The largest population in Israel is made up of Jews who had to flee Arab nations (not Europe) for their lives, losing everything.

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-the-holiday-from-history-is-over?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPT:

Like everyone paying close attention to this war, I am thinking about the future or death of the two-state solution. I am thinking about Hezbollah in the north and when that front might explode. I am thinking about the impossibility of a nuclear Iran. I am thinking about the Red Sea and Rafah and the young men setting out to those places. I am thinking about the innocents killed in Gaza. I am thinking about the women and children trapped there by terrorist leaders and the kidnapped Israelis still held there—all of them hostages. 

But the questions that echo inside me since I returned home—flying from a country living inside history to a country where many people believe we are still outside of it, immune to it—are more basic ones.

Questions like: What would I do? What would the people I know do if we were thrust into a near-death experience? If we had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? The kind of seriousness I saw in ordinary Israelis—where does it come from? Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came? Or would we be like the Americans in this recent poll who admitted that they would flee rather than fight? 

Those are questions whose relevance grows more urgent by the day for those of us living in the free world.

I asked Haviv Gur if he thinks that a similar waking-up moment will come for America and Americans.

“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a long period of time when there was nothing in the Pacific that could have stopped a Japanese landing in California. And that sense of vulnerability created what Americans still today think of as the greatest generation,” Gur said. “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20481/palestinian-authority-revitalized-hamas

For [Palestinian] leaders, revamping the Palestinian Authority means forging an alliance with Hamas by inviting the terror group to be part of a new governing body that would rule the Gaza Strip in the post-war era.

From Biden’s perspective, it is as though Netanyahu and the Israelis are responsible for the devastation in the Middle East since Hamas’s October 7 carnage, and not Iran, and Hamas’s main sponsor, Qatar, whose “protection money” evidently came “without protection.” As such, it would be no surprise if the Biden administration were to welcome a “Palestinian unity” agreement between Abbas’s Fatah faction and Hamas – a deal that would be no doubt presented to the world as the US-made revitalization plan; in reality, just a tee-up for the next war.

Would the Biden administration like to stop the war this week?

All the US would have to do is to inform Qatar that it was cancelling the agreement the Biden administration signed in January — in return for nothing -– to extend for another ten years America’s use of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the forward headquarters of CENTCOM, and move it to a Middle Eastern country that does not, as Qatar does, have record of supporting Islamic State (ISIS/Da’esh), Hezbollah, al Shabab, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al Qaeda as well as Hamas.

In addition, the United States could simply tell Qatar that, regrettably, the US has no choice but officially to change Qatar’s designation from “major non-NATO ally,” which it is not, to State Sponsor of Terrorism, which it is. The US could have the war over and all the hostages — not just the Americans — released in a minute.

The Biden administration — or simply concerned citizens — could also demonstrate with placards advertising Qatar’s support for terrorism, a public relations campaign it might not relish.

By stationing its forces at Al Udeid Air Base, the US is doing Qatar a monumental favor, not the other way around. Without the US airbase, Qatar is just a rich, extremely vulnerable sandbar, as its rulers are undoubtedly aware.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/biden-revises-history-to-shame-israel/

Trying to pressure the Jewish state into ending its war on Hamas by appealing to America’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is breathtakingly cynical.

For the better part of a month, Joe Biden’s anxious Democratic allies had indulged the fantasy that the president could shore up his ailing support among what should be his base voters if only he did more interviews. The president took their advice over the weekend. But in sitting down with Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, even for the tightly edited ten-minute interview NBC News released, Biden demonstrated why he is better off sticking with the teleprompter.

Rich delved into the president’s self-abasing effort to walk back the strongest moment of his State of the Union address — an ad lib in which he displayed a small measure of the passion shared by the millions of Americans for whom the migrant crisis over which Biden has presided has become intolerable. And Phil identified the incoherence in Biden’s attempt to placate the unappeasable rabble for whom the exercise of Israel’s right to self-defense is anathema. But it’s also worth pointing out that in trying to reconcile his desire to see Hamas defeated with his desire for Israel to stand down before that objective is achieved, Biden descended into a historical revisionism that serves only to indict the country that made him president.

In his insistence that Israel’s effort to neutralize Hamas has gone too far, Biden has presented himself as the Jewish state’s best friend — devoted only to dispensing “tough love” to America’s wayward ally. In his interview with Capehart, Biden noted that his advice is a product of America’s experience in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

“Don’t make the mistake America made,” Biden began. “We went after Bin Laden until we got him, but we shouldn’t have gone into Ukraine – I mean, we shouldn’t have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary. It just caused more problems than it erased — than it cured.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-the-gaza-ministry-of-health-fakes-casualty-numbers/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The Jewish publication Tablet has a feature from Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, digging into why the Hamas-compromised Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers are highly suspect. Even for the innumerate English major (such as myself), Wyner’s work is digestible, incrementally working through what data are available. Perhaps best of all, he makes no claims as to what the casualty numbers might be in actuality (Netanyahu’s figures suggest 1–1.5 civilian deaths per Hamas militant killed; for reference, there were 15 million combat casualties and 38 million civilian casualties in WWII) and instead focuses on his area of expertise to enlightening effect.

Wyner writes:

Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

https://worldisraelnews.com/senator-fetterman-blasts-hamas-cowards-hiding-behind-ramadan/

Pennsylvania Democrat says Hamas ‘must be destroyed,’ gives backing to Israel’s counter-terror campaign.

Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on a Jewish holiday on Oct. 7—50 years and a day after a group of Arab nations launched a surprise attack on the Jewish state during the High Holiday of Yom Kippur.

Many world leaders, including in Washington, are saying that Israel should halt attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is not one of them.

Sharing a Wall Street Journal article titled “Hamas bets on Ramadan to help it survive Israel’s assault,” Fetterman wrote, “Of course. Hamas cowards hide in tunnels, hospitals, schools and refugee camps. Now, behind a holy time.”

“Hamas must be destroyed, and Sinwar brought to justice or eliminated,” he added, of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. “I fully support Israel’s campaign to achieve this.”

David McCormick, a Republican candidate for the other Pennsylvania senate seat, agreed with Fetterman. “He’s right,” McCormick wrote. He added of his opponent, “It’s past time for Bob Casey to agree.”

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, also responded to Fetterman’s post.