RUTHFULLY YOURS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Israeli government’s decision to apply to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), despite Washington’s displeasure, is an expression of Israel’s strong interest in increasing its economic engagement in Asia.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his capacity as minister of finance, signed a letter of application to join the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) on March 31, despite Washington’s displeasure. Fully aware of Washington’s failed attempt to convince its allies not to join the AIIB, the decision to apply demonstrates Israel’s understanding of the rising importance of Asia, especially China, to Israel’s economy.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: China’s “New Silk Road” is Beijing’s latest project aimed at creating a belt of railroads, highways, pipelines and broadband communications stretching through China to the West, and a “maritime Silk Road” combining sea routes with port infrastructure from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. This project comes at a point where the role of the US in the Middle East is declining, and it is likely that China will aspire to adopt a larger role in the region. Israel’s geographical position and technological advances makes it possible for Israel to play a bridgehead role in the project, and the opportunity to shape Chinese thinking and strategy in the region for decades to come.

China’s “New Silk Road” might become history’s most ambitious investment in infrastructure. Some Chinese strategists predict an Israeli role in the project on par with, or possibly even more important, than that of Turkey. China calls the project “One Belt and One Road,” referring to a belt of railroads, highways, pipelines and broadband communications stretching through China to the West, and a “maritime Silk Road” combining sea routes with port infrastructure from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.

SIGNAL, Sino-Israel Global Network & Academic Leadership, (中 以 学术 交流促进协会) is an action-oriented institute enhancing China’s and Israel’s strategic, diplomatic, cultural and economic relationship through high level interchange. SIGNAL has established significant, long-term alliances between China and Israel that serve as the foundation for mutually beneficial and broad-based cooperation between the two nations.

Aims and Objectives

SIGNAL, Sino-Israel Global Network & Academic Leadership, was founded with the aim of focusing on the realm of academia to enhance China’s and Israel’s strategic, diplomatic, cultural and economic relations. Significant, long-term academic alliances between China and Israel will surely cement and promote mutually beneficial and broad-based cooperation between the two nations.

China’s importance on the global scene cannot be overemphasized. Israel excels in innovation and creative solutions. Thus far, the absence of an established platform for leading professors and academic analysts in Israel and China to exchange views and knowledge on the intellectual plane has undoubtedly limited the kind of concentrated, innovative thought and cooperation that can advance local and global stability. A well-conceived program that opens an ongoing academic dialogue between these two nations, which share so many historical, cultural and contemporary parallels, is therefore bound to engender tectonic, positive changes.

Both China and Israel realize they have much to gain by enhancing their academic relations. Scholars, leaders of academic institutions and experts from both nations have expressed great interest in developing closer academic ties through SIGNAL’s various programs, such as:

The Virtual Resource Center – the first Chinese-language source of both introductory and scholarly materials on Israel and its people.
The historic establishment of the first Israel Studies Program (ISP) at a Chinese university – Sichuan International Studies University in Chongqing.
A series of China-Israel strategic studies seminars, conferences and workshops.
Scholar and student exchanges, promoting the pursuit of academic degrees in Israel by Chinese and in China by Israelis, facilitating relationships between Israeli and Chinese authors and publishers, and many more programs.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, quondam secretary of state and presumptive heir to the presidencyof the United States, spent Monday, April 13, in her Secret Service van heading out to Iowa. She was undoubtedly preparing diligently for several hours of arduous mixing and mingling with “everyday Americans.” We don’t know whether she had time that morning to take a look at the Wall Street Journal, with its report that “the Kremlin has formally lifted its own ban on the delivery of S-300 missiles to Iran, setting the legal groundwork for the possible Russian sale of a powerful air-defense system to Tehran.”

We do know that the delivery of the S-300s had been suspended under pressure, first from the Bush and then from the Obama administration. And we do know that, as Foreign Policy magazine reported in 2010, the S-300 success was being “touted by the White House as a new dawn in the U.S.-Russia relationship.” As Elliott Abrams put it last week in recounting this history, “Oh well: That was then and this is now.”

India’s IT firm Tech Mahindra is partnering with US-Israeli technology company Comverse Inc. to set up a research and development centre in Israel.

Tech Mahindra provides IT and Networking solutions to telecom companies worldwide. Comverse Inc. offers business solutions to telecom service providers. Its portfolio includes value added services, revenue and customer management.

Tech Mahindra is part of Mahindra Group, a $16.5 billion Indian multinational. The technlogy company employs more than 98,000 people in 51 countries.

Days after the Technion announced that a team led by Nobel Prize laureate Professor Aaron Ciechanover had discovered how proteins could be used to suppress cancer and control tumor growth and development, the institute revealed that it had entered into an exclusive agreement with India’s Sun Pharmaceuticals — the world’s fifth-largest specialty generic pharmaceutical company and India’s top pharmaceutical company.

Under the agreement, researchers from the Technion and Sun will conduct studies on how high concentrations of two proteins can protect tissue from tumors. A study published in the medical journal Cell this week discussed how the proteins can suppress malignancies.

Along with Ciechanover, the research team included Dr. Gila Maor and Professor Ofer Binah. In a statement, Ciechanover said that the research held a great deal of promise of an effective drug for treating cancer, “although this is not a certainty, and the road to such a drug is long and far from simple.”

WE HAVE ENTERED a state of emergency. The Obama admin­istration is pursuing policies that effec­tively serve the pur­poses of one of Amer­ica’s greatest foes and treat one of America’s dearest friends as though it were an adversary. The White House has implicitly taken up the cause of normalizing Iran and has become at the very least complicit in the international goal of isolating Israel.

Barack Obama has decided the key to his legacy is a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran that will en­shrine its nuclear capacity but delay its ability to build and deploy a bomb for a time—that is, assuming Iran doesn’t cheat, which is an assumption that requires a leap of geopolitical faith Blaise Pascal would have blanched at. Meanwhile, 970 miles from Tehran, the State of Israel finds itself the unwanted focus of another Obama legacy effort: the effort to drive a wedge be­tween the two countries and thereby realign America’s interests in the Middle East away from Israel’s interests.

This is from December 2009 but Holocaust Memorial Day sirs memories of these events….rsk

Sheldon Roth is training and supervising psychoanalyst emeritus at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East and was an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is currently retired and lives in Los Angeles.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact. I had read the script, been informed by my son Eli that he was going to “shoot Hitler in the face until his head exploded,” discussed the murder with the film’s director Quentin Tarantino, even watched filming in Berlin on the very stages where Nazi minister Josef Goebbels made his monstrous propaganda films.

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, “Inglourious Basterds.” I watched my son, as his character of “The Bear Jew,” machine gun the Fuhrer’s face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

Many friends have told me of similar personal, powerful emotions in response to this film, emotions that were also joyously pleasurable. Yet, I have listened to many post-screening Q-and-As and heard the confused questions of those who are puzzled, distanced by the film because it is “fantasy.” It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one’s life. Feelings are just as much a reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real — they cannot be dismissed because the story is “historically inaccurate.” Quentin Tarantino understood it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded and dies a forgotten work. So, where do “Inglourious Basterds” and my reactions fit into this picture?

In 1950 as a young girl I visited Israel for the first time…a tiny Israel with porous borders, ringed by implacable enemies. This was only five years after one in every three Jews in the world were killed-among them all my relatives-every single one- leaving only my parents, my brother and some very distant relatives in America.

When our car broke down in Beersheba we heard the whir of airplanes above. They were in formation but small and looked as if they were held together with chewing gum and scotch tape. But, on the underside of the wings there was a Star of David, and my little brother began to jump up and down shouting “Jewish planes- Jewish Planes” and my father in true form stood at attention and saluted. He had been an army officer in Bolivia where we lived during the Holocaust.

Those little planes morphed into a state of the art Israel Defense Force able and ready to defend the Jewish people and offer us sanctuary from every harsh corner of the Diaspora.

And so, dear e-pals, the best answer and memorial to our martyred brethren is:Support Israel in every way proudly and defiantly. rsk

On Wednesday evening and Thursday, Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day—a somber and deeply authentic commemoration of the victims of the Nazi genocide. Ceremonies are held, places of entertainment are closed, and TV and radio almost solely offer Holocaust documentaries, discussions, and interviews with survivors.

This year’s commemoration was marred by an incident in Jerusalem on Wednesday evening in which a car hit two pedestrians. One of them, 25-year-old Shalom Yohai Sherki, was killed; the other, a 20-year-old woman, was seriously injured. Police now strongly suspect [1] that the driver of the car, a 37-year-old Palestinian Arab from the Jerusalem area, acted out of terrorist motives.

Among other things, they note that last fall saw a spate of car-ramming terror attacks [2] in the Jerusalem area.

If the incident was an attack, then it can be assumed to have been timed for Holocaust Remembrance Day—a ubiquitous phenomenon that, if you’re in Israel, you simply can’t miss.