11/24 Links Pt2: Netanyahu: 'This is What They Have to Do Now when the World is Exploding?'

From Ian:

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'This is What They Have to Do Now when the World is Exploding?'

In an interview on the i24news network, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu referred Sunday to the anticipated vote in the French parliament on recognizing a Palestinian state:
“Of course I'm worried about this because what they're voting on is Palestine without peace," he said. "That's what the Palestinians want. They want to have a state to continue, not to end the war with Israel, but to continue the war from improved boundaries. That's all they're saying. Look at what has happened. Every time we gave territory to the Palestinians, for example in Gaza, Iran walked in with its Palestinian proxies, fired thousands of rockets on our cities. Does anyone in Paris talk about this? This is what they have to do now when the world is exploding? When Islamist fires are sweeping throughout the Middle East? When every place that we vacate becomes a bastion for militant Islam and for Iran? This is what is going to produce peace?!? To ask Israel to put the suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the hands of Islamic militants?
"This is irresponsible. It's not conducive to peace. In fact, it hardens the Palestinian positions because it tells them, you get a state – which will be used to attack Israel – you don't have to give anything.

Catalan independence advocate looks to Israel, Germany for funding

Barcelona High Court Judge Santiago Vidal said in the November-December edition of the local Delta magazine that the "facts indicates" that within three years a Catalan state could establish independence through "legal, political and peaceful means."
Without initial membership in the European Union, an independent Catalan state could not appeal to the Central Bank of Europe to finance its debts, said Vidal, a member of a pro-Catalan independence expert group.
"But there is a solution for this," Vidal said in the interview adding that "another state with solvency, basically speaking of Israel and Germany, will serve as our temporary bank."
Vidal downplayed the interviewer's doubts over whether it was "risky" to believe Israel would back a country seeking independence, given the Palestinian issue.
He stated that "the Palestinian issue is characterized by violence. Whereas, the Catalan issue is characterized by civic lessons, pacifism and the doing of good things that we are giving to the whole world. And this is something the Israelis like very much."

Obama's Legacy (and Europe's)

However, relations between the United States and Israel have so deeply deteriorated since the beginning of the Obama presidency, that many Israeli diplomats think a U.S. veto uncertain.
In the context of Iran's unfettered pursuit of nuclear weapons, a "Palestinian state" in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would soon become a vital threat to Israel. Short-range rockets could hit Israel's main population centers. Israel would have to respond decisively. A regional war might well follow.
It is difficult to think that President Obama — or leaders in Europe — actually want their names to go down in history as those who legitimized a rogue entity such as "Palestine," or enabled Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. But just as Neville Chamberlain is looked on as the biggest laughing-stock in history for promising "peace" with Hitler, so can Obama's legacy be that of an even bigger fool. Chamberlain, after all, did not have a Chamberlain to warn him.

Waiting for a Palestinian MLK

In addition, today, Israelis -- correctly -- are most concerned about the rise of Iran as a nuclear power. Iran openly arms and encourages Palestinian militants. Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei has released a 9-point plan to destroy Israel by arming the Palestinians. He promoted this plan on Kristallnacht -- the anniversary of the beginning of the Holocaust. The timing was not lost on Israel.
Despite everything, in poll after poll, a majority of Israelis want peace talks with the Palestinians. On the other hand, Palestinians appear more divided. The majority favor Hamas' leadership while simultaneously 53 percent say they want a two-state solution. This is a far cry from U.S. President Obama's claim that the "overwhelming majority" of Palestinians want peace.
Peace will only come to Israel when new leadership arises from the Palestinian people. When a Palestinian Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi rises up and is able to lead the Palestinian people in non-violent action, the Israeli peace movement will also rebound. This Palestinian peace activist, who has yet to appear and capture the Palestinian people's imagination, will need to reject the arms of Iran and move her/his people beyond 1947. This leader will also need to be a religious leader, giving new spiritual direction and meaning to the Palestinian people. Until then, we can only expect more of the tragic status quo.
Recently, Middle East analyst Thomas Friedman and UN official Nader Mousavizadeh tried to simplify the conflict in the Middle East with this helpful bifurcation: there are arsonists and there are firefighters. Too often we confuse the two, hoping an arsonist will really be a firefighter.
Let us pray for real firefighters.

When the West and Arab nations differ

The list of terrorist organizations published on November 16 by the United Arab Emirates cabinet is causing acute embarrassment in the West, since the Muslim Brotherhood and all its offshoots, from the Middle East to Africa, Asia, Europe and the US, figure prominently there.
The UAE did not stop there and, alongside the usual suspects – al-Qaida and its affiliates, Islamic State, Boko Haram, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and the like, listed well-known Islamic organizations in Italy, Sweden, Finland, Serbia, Great Britain (four), Denmark, Norway, Germany, Belgium and the United States (two). Though all are NGOs operating as welfare associations or associations for the defense of the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries, they have strong ties to the Brotherhood. Some of these organizations were created by the first waves of Arab immigrants to Europe in the ’50s and were later taken over by the Muslim Brothers; others were created by the Brotherhood at the same time to make sure that the newcomers – students and workers – kept their Islamic identity and did not integrate into Western society.
The list has provoked angry reactions from European countries and from the United States because it includes powerful Muslim organizations such as the Council on American- Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS), or the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF). These organizations enjoy a fruitful cooperation with national governments, but according to the UAE, they are affiliated to the Brotherhood and are therefore terrorist organizations.

Palestinians to delay Security Council bid until after Iran talks

Ramallah has decided to delay submitting an appeal to the UN Security Council to set a timetable for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said in remarks published Monday.
Maliki told the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency that the Palestinians had decided to wait until after the end of the latest round of negotiations between Iran and world powers, and further noted that they had yet to secure a nine-vote majority in the Security Council on the proposal.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas vowed earlier this month to follow through on his plan to present a resolution to the UN Security Council in the coming month demanding a timetable for Israel to pull out of the West Bank by November 2016, and said “no pressure” would deter him from this course.
Maliki said the Palestinians were not delaying out of fear of sanctions by the US, which has come out against the move.

UN lines up parliamentarians from states with no rule of law to lecture Israel about obeying law

The UN Committee, created in 1975 to implement the infamous Zionism-is-racism General Assembly resolution, has held yet another Israel-bashing session. On November 21, 2014 the UN "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People" had what was billed as an "International Meeting of Parliamentarians in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace on 'The role of parliamentarians in ensuring respect for international law' in New York.
The meeting included Jens Toyberg-Frandzen, UN Assistant Secretary-General ad interim for Political Affairs, referring to "the suffering of the people in Gaza in the aftermath of the summer's brutal conflict." The UN spokesperson made no mention of any Israeli suffering from Hamas's rocket and terror-tunnel attacks. Hyperbole and demonization is the norm at UN events on Israel. Chairman of the UN Committee, Fode Seck of Senegal, said "Palestine" constitutes "a gaping 'black hole' on the map where international law and human rights seemingly do not apply." Parliamentarians from states which have no rule of law lectured the democratic state of Israel how to respect law. Nour Eddine Bouchkouj, Secretary-General of the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union - there being no democratic Arab state - promoted more Arab terrorism. He "called on the Palestinian people to maintain their struggle to attain all their rights." Syed Nayyer Hussain Bokhari of Pakistan, President of the Asian Parliamentary Assembly, accused Israel of "carnage in Gaza," and using "excessive and disproportionate force." A participant from Mexico's parliament called on Israel "to end acts bordering on genocide against the Palestinian people."

IsraellyCool: The Proper Response To J Street

J Street wants Israel to die. J Street doesn’t care who it takes down in the process. This is why J Street fights so hard to get inside the tent. It wants the Jewish State to disappear. It wants those Jews gone.
J Street wants the rape victim silenced. J Street feels no sympathy for the victims of the Har Nof Massacre, or their families. It is J Street’s nature to worm its way into our culture and kill us from within with its poisonous sting.
J Street lures us with promises of peace and harmony. It lulls us into thinking we will be safe if we give in to the rapist/terrorist. It tells us that we need to see beyond our own selfish will to live, to die for the sake of the other.
J Street is Arafat brought over from Tunisia by Peres. J Street is the expulsion of 8,500 Jews from their homes by Sharon. J Street is the Har Nof Pogrom that never had anything to do with land or self-determination, or sides in a conflict.
J Street is death.
Choose life.

Presbyterian Peace Activists Bet on Iranian Good Will

Nevertheless, the geniuses at the PC(USA)’s Office of Public Witness have a different message for us: Don’t worry, be happy.
They make this case in an “action alert” that calls on Presbyterians to contact their lawmakers and “Speak Out for Diplomacy With Iran.” The alert states that negotiations with Iran “have resulted in the most extensive verification program in history.”
Never mind that the IAEA has said that Iran is blocking efforts to determine if it is attempting to use its program for military purposes.
To buttress its case, the Presbyterian alert invokes an overture approved at the denomination’s 2014 General Assembly that supports negotiations with Iran. It also links to a blog entry written by a Presbyterian peace activist associated with the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.” The entry, written by Don Mead asks if reconciliation with Iran is possible. Mead writes that the Iranians “are signatories of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which gives them full rights to a peaceful nuclear program,” and that the Iranians
"have repeatedly affirmed that they have no intention of building atomic weapons, and their Supreme Leader has stated that the use of nuclear weapons is forbidden to Muslims."
All this begs an obvious question: If the Iranians honestly have no intention of building atomic weapons, they why haven’t they resolved their issues with the IAEA?

Dismantling the Case for Academic Boycotts of Israel (REVIEW)

It is hard to know what impact a book like The Case Against Academic Boycotts will have. I said before that scholars as scholars withhold judgment when they are not confident they know what they are talking about. But in the present, heated atmosphere, in which a relatively small number of anti-Zionist students and faculty members are opposed by a still smaller number of students and faculty members, often but not always Zionists, onlookers who do not bother to inform themselves are likely to come away with the idea that Zionism is one suspect extreme in a quarrel between extremists. To prevent this consequence, scholars with no special interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be persuaded not simply to reserve judgment but to abstain, if they must abstain, loudly. That is, they must come to understand that it is important to speak publicly against attempts to commit schools and scholarly associations to causes neither students nor faculty can claim to know much about.
The premise on which such public speech would rest, that when we don’t know, we should inquire, is, of course, the premise on which the scholarly enterprise, whether it is practiced by natural scientists or philosophers, rests. Nelson and Brahm’s project supposes what Rousseau seems to deny, that intellectuals, whatever their susceptibility to the vanity, fear, and indolence to which everyone is susceptible, will in the end, when they understand what is at stake, defend their fragile enterprise against those who see ideas only as means to political ends. I think that Nelson and Brahm are right but that their success depends on reaching an audience—especially the scientists who have a stake in these debates but are usually left out of them—beyond the audience their collection is most likely to find. That will require a retail politics at colleges and universities, and within scholarly associations, that will be difficult and time consuming. But I know of no better guide than this book to the kinds of arguments one needs to make, or of any more heartening example of the diversity of voices and talents that can be drawn to the effort.

American Jews Are Funding Anti-Israel Activities

As Israel has seen a new string of violent and deadly terror attacks, a Knesset Member from the extreme left-wing Meretz party, Tamar Zandberg, went to Kafr Kanna to show her solidarity with the terrorist who was killed while trying to stab Israeli police officers – Khair al-Din Hamdan. She proclaimed that the officers who defended themselves were “part of the policy of racist discrimination directed against the Arab minority in Israel, a policy directed and implemented from on high by the Prime Minister and his cabinet.” Similarly, The Human Rights Defenders Fund (HRDF) recently called Israel an “apartheid regime,” has made statements referring to Israel as “racist” and “murderous,” and has called for “dismantling the Israeli apartheid regime.” This organization received $332,625 in grants from the New Israel Fund (NIF) from 2011-2013.
Similarly, NIF-funded organizations contributed to the infamous Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of “war crimes” and caused Israel problems worldwide on so many levels. These organizations are once again working towards a similar report at the United Nations, which they hope to publish in the spring of 2015. No supporter of Israel can believe that funding anti-Israel reports in the UN – or funding an organization that calls for a dismantling of Israel – is acceptable.
Against this backdrop, the New York-based New Israel Fund website claims they “…believe in an Israel where the Jewish people achieve self-determination in their homeland and where everyone participates in a shared and just society, predicated on the best values of Judaism, humanism and liberal democracy. Our ideals are equality, tolerance and social justice.” While many of their donors might support a two-state solution, they do not support the dismantling of the State of Israel.

Labor Solidarity Demands a “No” Vote on Israel Boycott

UAW Local 2865 represents approximately 13,000 student workers: teaching assistants, tutors, and readers at the University of California. On December 4, they will be voting on an academic boycott of Israel.
Via the Alliance for Academic Freedom (AAF), a group of over 120 liberal and progressive scholars, affiliated with The Third Narrative, who are dedicated to combating academic boycotts and blacklists, defending freedom of expression and promoting empathy and civility in the debate over Israelis and Palestinians.
Please forward to any graduate students you know at the University of California.

Wellesley College Students Fear Rise in Anti-Semitism After Jewish Staffers’ Firings

Several posters have been plastered on walls around the campus “with images of Palestinian children who were killed or wounded during the Gaza war.” Another poster in the student center asks, “What does Zionism mean to you?” Responses to that question that were subsequently written on the poster include “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “murder,” according to Haaretz.
Jewish students said they had turned to the school’s Hillel branch for support in their fight against campus anti-Zionism, but that those efforts were undermined by the school’s decision to fire Hillel director Patti Scheinman and Jewish chaplain David Bernat. School officials cited “restructuring” as the reason for the firings.
Wellesley Jewish students said the abrupt firings made them feel “like we just lost our support system and are on our own,” one student told Haaretz. Additionally, efforts by Jewish students to have dialogue with SJP were scuttled by SJP’s refusal to engage Jewish students, due to the anti-Israel’s groups policy of “anti-normalization” of Jewish and pro-Israel groups.

Anti-Israel activist still stoking fires in #Ferguson

One of the featured activists was Bassem Masri, someone active in the #Palestine2Ferguson movement to portray the Ferguson issues as somehow to be blamed on Israel.
His tactics are not mere protest, but pushing the confrontations with police into dangerous territory:
He’s still at it, recently being arrested during a confrontation with police.
This CNN interview demonstrates how Masri and his cohorts could easily turn the situation even more violent than it already is:

Philosophers Behaving Badly: Brooklyn College BDS Edition

Chopra does not mention that the “law professor” in question, Katherine Franke, is a boycott advocate, a leader in the effort to reinstate Salaita, and an adviser to Salaita’s legal team. The political theorist and “moderator,” Corey Robin, has “turned his blog into a Salaita war room.” One Salaita advocate adds that “we’ve all looked to him as a central source of information about new developments.” That advocate’s name, by the way, is Katherine Franke. I am sure the debate over who loved whom more got heated.
Say what you want about Students for Justice in Palestine. At least they forthrightly admitted that students were being invited to witness a “conversation” about “the constant push by Zionists to silence academic discourse relating to the Palestinian struggle and criticisms of Israel.” It’s not strange that the SJP, which is engaged in a propaganda campaign against Israel, would try to draw as many people as possible to an event that would further their delegitimization efforts. But it’s remarkable—and suggests that their department possesses not only philosophical acumen but also pedagogical creativity—that the philosophers of Brooklyn College saw SJP’s event as a great learning opportunity, worthy of support.

NY Times Public Editor Tackles Israeli-Palestinian Coverage

Margaret Sullivan, public editor for The New York Times, yesterday tackled the thorny topic of the paper's coverage of Israel and the Palestinians ("The Conflict and The Coverage"). By way of background, Sullivan mentions CAMERA's huge billboard hanging across the street from The Times building:
"The Times is biased, both sides charge. The Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, somehow manages to be — as the critics would have it — both wildly anti-Israel and practically a tool of the Israeli government.
One organization, Camera, even pays for a billboard across the street from the Times building to accuse the paper of regularly attacking Israel. And pro-Palestinian websites like The Electronic Intifada have detailed the ways in which, as they see it, Times coverage fails to do justice to an outcast people. Many readers have castigated me for not jumping into the fray to represent their position. I have searched for a way to write something useful and productive amid all this emotion and criticism, and have — until now — put it off."
Sullivan lays out a number of recommendations, among them:
"Diversify. Strengthen the coverage of Palestinians. They are more than just victims, and their beliefs and governance deserve coverage and scrutiny. Realistic examinations of what’s being taught in schools, and the way Hamas operates should be a part of this. What is the ideology of Hamas; what are its core beliefs and its operating principles? What is Palestinian daily life like? I haven’t seen much of this in The Times."
The above recommendation addresses one of CAMERA's primary concerns about Times coverage: that the paper consistently exonerates Palestinians of any culpability for the conflict and downplays their incitement.

The Post the NYT Public Editor Didn’t Want to Write

Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor of the New York Times (yes, that’s right — the one we always ask readers to contact about anti-Israel bias in the Times) starts this week’s column about coverage of Israel with:
"This is the Post I didn’t want to write."
Why did she not want to write it? Because, she was forced to admit that there are indeed problems with the way the Times covers Israel.
So why did she write it? Quite simply, so many people wrote to point out problems with Times coverage that she had no choice but to respond. If you have ever written to public@nytimes.com to complain about anti-Israel coverage, good work.

Johnny On The Spot Blames It All On Illegal Jews.

John Lyons appears to have such limited sources for a professional journalist. He will take as gospel (I suspect literally) anything he is told by one side, even Hamas, with perfect credulity while his idea of Israeli input is to pick among the flash, fury, flotsam and jetsam of a free and open society for material for his case. He regards official Israeli sources with contempt. He has a tin ear for tales that ring about as true as tinnitus. There is no evidence he has ever sort a contrary view on his favourite themes (settlements, settlers, Jerusalem, international law, etc ) . There is no evidence that he understands that he is just an instrument of war in that part of the world or he does not care. As a consequence he makes appalling errors of fact in a dangerous game.
Ergo no credibility.
From his latest piece in the Australian.
“Over the last week both sides have targeted a place of worship for the other — last week Jewish settlers set fire to a mosque and this week the two Palestinians rampaged in the synagogue."
Is even that true?
Not that it matters at all but it is not. It was a suspected price tag attack but it is only an allegation. There’s a fire in a vacant mosque so it has to be the Jews. End of story. No one hurt but obviously an inflammatory religious thing, like murdering rabbis at prayer, so there’s the moral equivalence and the much vaunted “cycle of violence” rolled into one.
This is how this works. Your crackpot settlers torch a mosque in the night? They share the blame for the murder of the rabbis and so do you. This is how the Lyons mind works but it gets worse.

Times of London claims (as fact) Israeli bill will ‘make Arabs second-class citizens’

In early August, amidst the fighting in Gaza, we demonstrated that a headline used by Times of London editors in an article by Gregg Carlstrom included a charge – that Israel “admitted” to violating a truce with Hamas – which wasn’t accurate, and (just as importantly) wasn’t even minimally supported by the subsequent text.
Following our communication with newspaper editors, they eventually revised the headline accordingly.
Today, editors again chose a headline for an article by Carlstrom which leveled a charge not supported by the text, and which mischaracterizes a proposed bill designed to enshrine Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”.
In fact, the article actually notes that – under the version of a bill Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to approve on Sunday – “equal individual rights for every citizen” will reportedly continue to be protected, and that the law is specifically designed to establish “national rights” for the Jewish people, such as the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel.

Indy buries the lead on Arab Jerusalemite support for synagogue massacre

Though Ben Lynfield’s report on the row in The Independent, titled, ‘Synagogue attack: Israeli mayor accused of racism after suspending 30 Arab workers for ‘security’ reasons‘, was straight forward enough, there was an extraordinary sentence buried without comment in the second paragraph:
"The step by Itamar Shimoni, mayor of the coastal city of Ashkelon, comes after a wave of attacks, mostly in Jerusalem, triggered largely by the Palestinian perception of an Israeli threat to al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site. The synagogue assailants are widely viewed in Arab East Jerusalem as “martyrs” who acted in defence of the mosque. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will not make changes in the mosque compound, sacred to Jews as the Temple Mount. But provocative visits by right-wing Israeli politicians have more weight in Arab eyes than the premier’s declarations."
Is this an accurate statement by Lynfield? Do Arabs in east Jerusalem – most of whom are permanent Israeli residents – support the Palestinian terrorists who butchered innocent Jews (while they were at prayer at synagogue) with axes and knives?

Is Tennessee Teaching Its Children to Hate Jews?

PJTN charges the textbooks violate both the U.S. and Tennessee Constitutions because they teach the “dogmas of one religion” – Islam – and contain anti-American and anti-Christian content as well.
Cardoza-Moore asked Governor Bill Haslam to carry out a “full and thorough” review of actions of the state’s recently-resigned education commissioner Kevin Huffman.
Parents in two school districts in the state have also asked the group about a presentation in their children’s classrooms teaching about Islam. According to PJTN, five of the slides used in the presentation were attributed to CAIR (Council of Arab-Islamic Relations), which recently was listed by the United Arab Emirates to its official list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Last year PJTN pressured to remove a social studies textbook because it promoted moral equivalence between Palestinian Authority terrorism and actions by Israel’s government.

European MP: EU Parliament Ignores Anti-Semitism

European Parliament Member Bastiaan Belder of the Netherlands has urged the parliament to hold a debate on anti-Semitism. "It's a shame that this has not been done before,'' he said.
Belder made his latest comments in an address at the annual conference of the European Coalition for Israel (ECI), a Christian initiative promoting European-Israeli cooperation. The session took place in the European Parliament on Thursday.
Following the synagogue slaughter in Jerusalem last week, the ECI called upon the European Union to halt its funding to the PA until incitement to violence by PA leadership stops.
MP Belder deplored the situation in which ''living in fear is almost normal life for Jews in Europe,'' and denounced what he called the ''Israelisation'' of anti-Semitism. Several speakers stressed that it is dangerous these days to wear a Star of David or a yarmulke in the streets of Europe.

Swiss museum accepts Nazi-era art collection

A Swiss museum said Monday it would accept a German recluse’s bequest of a spectacular trove of more than 1,000 artworks hoarded during the Nazi era.
The decision, announced at a press conference in Berlin, covers priceless paintings and sketches by Picasso, Monet, Chagall and other masters that were discovered by chance in 2012 in the Munich flat of Cornelius Gurlitt.
Christoph Schaeublin, president of the Board of Trustees at the the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, pledged to work with German authorities to ensure that “all looted art in the collection is returned” to its rightful owners.

National Archives opens postwar Shanghai visa records

The US National Archives is opening to researchers postwar visa application records from the US consulate in Shanghai, a potential trove for information about Holocaust refugees in that city.
“This collection adds to the extensive Holocaust-related records holdings at the National Archives,” according to a November 20 statement from the archives.
“From 1938 on, an estimated 20,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria escaped to Shanghai, the only place in the world that did not require a visa to enter,” the statement said. “Between 1939 and 1940, nearly 2,000 Polish Jews escaped to Shanghai, avoiding certain death.”
The 1,300 case files for applicants for US visas covers the period 1946-1951 and could provide a window into the postwar movements of the refugees.

From Silicon Valley to Silicon Wadi

Just elected as state treasurer of California, John Chiang sits down with the ‘Post’ to discuss Israel, the Asian-American community and California.
Chiang discussed the previous partnerships between Israel’s prime ministers and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said there are connections relating to technology and Silicon Valley and the California-Israel Chamber of Commerce.
“It is important, such as issues like retirement security,” he said. “I sit on the two largest defined benefit plans in the US. Part of what the 21st century is [about, is] investing in economies and companies – and you need that spark, and Israel has that spark.”
That is important business for CalPERS, the California pension fund that manages $295 billion in assets. Chiang is one of its board members. It currently has $545 million invested in Israel through public-equity, fixed-income and private-equity investments, according to Face of Israel. In addition, CalPERS, a teacher’s retirement system, has $281m. invested in Israeli public and fixed-income securities. Overall, California’s exports to Israel exceeded $23b. in 2013.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak joins Primary Data as chief scientist

Data virtualization company Primary Data has announced that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will serve as chief scientist of the Israeli-American data virtualization company. Wozniak, who is fondly known as ‘Woz’, will counsel Primary Data on technology vision and architecture, and advocate the company’s story with technology innovators around the globe.
“Innovations like wearables, digital assistants, and the Internet of Things are making computing more and more transparent in our lives, and for technology to remain accessible, we need to ensure data remains seamless as it serves us information,” said Wozniak. “Primary Data uses data virtualization to dynamically place data anywhere as applications demand. I’m excited to share our data virtualization platform with the world.”
Primary Data CEO Lance Smith and Wozniak announced the Silicon Valley icon’s new position at DEMO Fall 2014.
“Woz has a unique way of seeing the world through the eyes of both an engineer and a visionary, and his energy, curiosity, and excitement about technology is inspiring,” said Smith. “At Fusion-io, he helped us showcase the breakthroughs possible by adding flash in the enterprise, and we’re excited to have him on the team at Primary Data as we focus on how data virtualization can deliver intelligent data mobility that evolves with the needs of modern enterprises.”