Monday, July 25, 2016
Palestinians gear up to sue the UK – over 1917 Balfour Declaration
The Palestinian Authority is preparing a lawsuit against the British government over the issuing of the 1917 Balfour Declaration that paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel.‘Know That I Died a Dreamer’ — Arab-Israeli Teen ‘Fearful, Yet Undeterred’ by Threats From Fellow Muslims, Palestinians for Outspoken Zionism (INTERVIEW)
The PA’s Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki told Arab League leaders gathered in Mauritania Monday that London is responsible for all “Israeli crimes” committed since the end of the British mandate in 1948.
Signed by British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour in 1917, the declaration was seen as giving the Zionist movement official recognition and backing on the part of a major power, on the eve of the British conquest of the then-Ottoman territory of Palestine.
The decision, al-Malki said, “gave people who don’t belong there something that wasn’t theirs.”
There was no immediate reaction from Britain.
A report in the official Wafa news agency did not note where the PA plans to file the lawsuit.
Last year, a group calling itself the Popular Palestinian Campaign to Sue the United Kingdom sued the UK in an Egyptian court.
In 2008, a Palestinian youth group said it would attempt to sue the UK over the Balfour Declaration in Britain or in the ICC.
It was not clear if either effort bore fruit.
A teenage boy from an Arab village in northern Israel told The Algemeiner on Sunday about the impetus behind a message he wrote describing the sense that he is about to be killed by angry Muslims for being a Zionist.
“I receive regular threats from both Arab Israelis and Palestinians, via social media and by phone,” said Mahdi Satri, 17, a resident of Jadeidi-Makr, east of Acre. “And I’m afraid, but I won’t let those who support terrorism and oppose peace deter me.”
Satri, whose father moved to Israel from Gaza 30 years ago and whose mother is an Arab from a village near Carmiel, explained that his views were shaped by his parents. “My father worked with the IDF and the Shin Bet,” he said. “And I am going to join the Israeli army when I finish my university degree.”
He was referring to the IDF’s Atuda program that enables high school graduates to defer the draft until after college and subsequently serve in a position commensurate with the studies they undertook.
Satri – the eldest of seven children – also told The Algemeiner that he is an activist in the youth movement of the Likud Party, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he supports. This is evident in many photos on his Facebook page, in which he appears with various political figures, among them Temple Mount activist MK Yehuda Glick, who entered the Knesset recently. Glick was the victim of a Palestinian assassination attempt, which involved his being shot at point-blank range.
“The Temple Mount is a holy site for Jews, Muslims and Christians,” Satri said. “The Arab and Muslim world is wrong when it says that it belongs only to Muslims. It is certainly wrong when it says that the Jews are trying to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
The Mottle Wolfe Show: Israel Betrayed
Alan Skorski’s new book is called, ‘Israel Betrayed: How the Democrats, J Street, and the Jewish Left have Undermined Israel and why a President Hillary Clinton would be Disastrous for Israel’. Alan Joins Mottle to discuss the upcoming DNC convention as well as his new book.
Congressman: Jewish Settlers Are Like Termites
A Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee compared Jewish Israeli settlers to termites on Monday while speaking at an event sponsored by an anti-Israel organization that supports boycotts of the Jewish state.NGO Monitor: German Federal Frameworks Involving Civil Society in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Rep. Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) launched into a tirade against Israel and its policies toward the Palestinians, comparing Jewish people who live in disputed territories to “termites” that destroy homes. Johnson also compared Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a remark that drew vocal agreement from those in the room.
“There has been a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on yourself, there has been settlement activity that has marched forward with impunity and at an ever increasing rate to the point where it has become alarming,” Johnson said during an event sponsored by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, an anti-Israel organization that galvanizes supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS.
“It has come to the point that occupation, with highways that cut through Palestinian land, with walls that go up, with the inability or the restriction, with the illegality of Palestinians being able to travel on those roads and those roads cutting off Palestinian neighborhoods from each other,” Johnson continued. “And then with the building of walls and the building of check points that restrict movement of Palestinians. We’ve gotten to the point where the thought of a Palestinian homeland gets further and further removed from reality.”
Johnson, who in 2010 voiced his fears that Guam would tip over and capsize if too many people resided on the island, said that “Jewish people” routinely steal land and property from Palestinians.
Executive Summary‘In choice between territories and peace, I prefer peace,’ Ben-Gurion said in 1968
The following report examines funding to organizations active in the Arab-Israeli conflict, allocated through the following German federal government frameworks: The Civil Peace Service (ZFD); The German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ); federally sponsored church aid; and the Institute for Foreign Relations (IFA). The report also examines funding allocated through German embassies and federally funded political foundations.
The involvement of civil society in government-level policymaking and implementation in the Federal Republic of Germany is unique, both in its extent and its nature. Through the abovementioned mechanisms, actors with openly political agendas are granted millions of euros by the federal government, which are in turn redistributed to local civil society throughout the world.
German federal funding is allocated to, amongst others, organizations that promote anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and “lawfare” campaigns, anti-Zionism, promotion of a “one-state” vision, antisemitism and violence.
German federal funding frameworks are severely lacking in terms of transparency and public scrutiny. Selection processes, precise amounts, project evaluations, and sometimes partner organizations are not made publicly available.
According to reports submitted by NGOs to the Israeli Registrar of Non-Profits, in 2012-2015 alone, €4 million of German taxpayer money was allocated to 15 Israeli NGOs (this may be a partial amount, as not all Israel NGOs adhere to the submission requirements); 42% of which went to organizations that promote BDS and/or “one-state” visions.
Click for PDF version of this report
A lost interview with Israel’s first prime minister, recently unearthed by an Israeli filmmaker, reveals a simple, unassuming side of the statesman revered by Israelis as the nation’s founding father.French PM: France will never deny Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem
The 6-hour interview, which David Ben-Gurion gave in 1968 to producers of a film about his life — a film that was eventually unsuccessful and which was quickly forgotten — was discovered by Yariv Mozer in the Hebrew University’s Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.
Mozer has now used the rare footage of the late prime minister to produce his own film, titled “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue,” which recently screened at Jerusalem’s International Film Festival.
In it, Ben-Gurion is seen in the years following his resignation from the premiership in 1963, after which he spent most of his time at Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev, a last homage to his dream of making the desert bloom.
The former premier is filmed living a charmingly simple life, working in farmlands of the community, taking daily strolls, even enjoying some time off at the pool with his wife Paula.
UNESCO’s Executive Board voted, with France’s support, on a resolution in April which ignored Jewish ties to its holiest site, the Temple Mount.PMW: Why Palestinians prefer to work for Israeli employers
Instead the resolution’s text referred to the Temple Mount and is adjacent Western Wall, almost solely by its Muslim names.
Valls apologized for the vote after it happened and he reiterated those words in his letter to Rabinowitz, who released some quotes in Hebrew from the document to the media.
"The language of UNESCO's decision was unfortunate and clumsy to the point of insult. I believe that this should have been avoided and that the vote should not have happened,” Valls wrote.
Rabinowitz’s office said it could not make the original text available to the media.
Valls told Rabinowitz that it was France’s long standing belief that Jerusalem was holy to all three religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He added that France was working to renew the peace process. Its the absence of such process that is fueling violence in Jerusalem Valls told Rabinowitz.
“There is no doubt that the Jewish people were deeply hurt by this vote,” Rabinowitz wrote Valls earlier this month.
A similar resolution on Jerusalem is slated to come before UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee when it convents in Paris in the fall.
PA Central Bureau of Statistics: Israelis pay Palestinian workers twice what they are paid by Palestinian employersPalestinian attorney: Israeli labor law is good but Palestinian middlemen steal women’s salaries
Israeli Arab attorney: The Israeli labor law is very good. Unfortunately Palestinian middlemen steal half or two thirds of women's salaries
Palestinian worker: Double salary draws Palestinian workers to Israel; in the PA they suffer exploitation
Statistic: "120,000 [Palestinians] work in Israel and the settlements" [Official PA TV, Workers' Affairs, May 11, 2016]
Conditions for Palestinians working in Israel and the settlements are much better than in the Palestinian Authority, according to an Israeli Arab labor lawyer and a Palestinian laborer in two interviews on the PA TV program Workers' Affairs. The laborer explained that conditions are so much better that many Palestinian workers prefer or are "forced" to choose to work for Israeli employers.
Israeli Arab labor lawyer Khaled Dukhi, who works with the Israeli NGO Workers' Hotline, stated on the PA TV program that Israeli labor law is "very good" because it does not differentiate between men and women or between Israelis and Palestinians. However, he explained that Palestinian workers who work in Israel or in the settlements still suffer because Palestinian middlemen "steal" part of their salary:
Democratic convention could feature discord on Israel
The Democratic National Convention, which begins in earnest Monday, has already gotten off to a rocky start.After playing anti-Semitism card against Trump, Wasserman Schultz sunk by aides’ anti-Bernie emails
Days after the Republicans finished their tumultuous confab in Cleveland, the Democrats were hoping to show themselves far more united. But after the party’s national chair resigned Sunday over leaked emails that revealed a preference for Hillary Clinton over primary rival Bernie Sanders, that objective may now be harder to achieve.
Major party conventions are largely massive exercises in managing optics and crafting an appealing narrative for voters. Last week, Donald Trump was tasked with presenting himself as a plausible commander in chief and leader who could bring together an intensely fractured GOP. A series of incidents that dominated the media coverage, however, diminished the real estate tycoon’s ability to deliver.
This week, Clinton needs to address concerns over voter perception that she’s not trustworthy, and it doesn’t help that hours before the opening gavel was to hit the strike plate, an email scandal emerged that shows the national party favored her in a contentious primary race with Sanders — despite repeated assurances of neutrality.
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a congresswoman from south Florida, became the target of severe criticism after the website WikiLeaks released thousands of hacked DNC emails that disclosed internal deliberations over how to tilt the primary election in the former secretary of state’s favor. The Clinton campaign responded Sunday by saying the leak was orchestrated by the Russian government to assist in the election of Trump.
Just last week Debbie Wasserman Schultz was playing the anti-Semitism card against Donald Trump. But in a startling turnaround, on the eve of her own party’s convention, it’s the South Florida congresswoman who is out as chair of the Democratic National Committee — over a Jewish-related controversy of her own.Kaine one of few senators not to sign letter to Obama urging increased MoU
At issue is a May 5 email leaked Friday by Wikileaks, in which Brad Marshall, the DNC’s chief financial officer, suggested that the party should “get someone to ask” about “his” religious beliefs. “It might [make] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief,” the message says, presumably referring to Kentucky and West Virginia. “Does he believe in a God? He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”
The email was sent to several top DNC officials — CEO Amy Dacey, communications director Luis Miranda and deputy communications director Mark Paustenbach. Marshall followed up two minutes later with this short message: “It’s these [sic] Jesus thing.”
Dacey’s response: “AMEN.”
For months, Sanders and his backers have wanted Wasserman Schultz to go, claiming that instead of playing referee, Wasserman Schultz and her team were using the powers of the DNC to help Hillary Clinton.
Presumptive Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine was one of only 17 senators in April not to sign a letter urging US President Barack Obama to increase the US military aid package to Israel.Exclusive: Oren turns down offer to advise Trump on Israel
The bipartisan letter, sponsored by Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), urged Obama to conclude a “robust” new military aid package “that increases aid to Israel and retains the current terms of the existing aid program.”
Eighty three senators signed it, but 13 Democrats, three Republicans and one Independent did not.
Among those who joined with Kaine in not signing were Vermont senator and Hillary Clinton’s challenger for the nomination, Bernie Sanders; Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer (California); and Republican Jeff Sessions (Alabama), the first senator to endorse Donald Trump and the person who formally nominated him at the Republican convention last week in Cleveland.
Former Ambassador to the US MK Michael Oren (Kulanu) turned down an offer to meet with Republican candidate for US president Donald Trump to discuss Israel, Oren said Monday.Daniel Pipes: Why I Just Quit the Republican Party
The invitation came from a member of the Trump campaign who advises the candidate on Israel, the MK said, but would not name him. The request was made two weeks ago, when Oren was in Washington D.C. to take part in a strategic dialogue at the Washington Institute, a think tank.
"I'm not going to get involved in this election in any way, period," Oren said.
The former ambassador's revelation came after columns in multiple American publications falsely accused him of giving Trump advice, based on a tweet by an Israeli freelance reporter contracting comments Oren made and taking them out of context.
The Republican Party nominated Donald Trump as its candidate for president of the United States — and I responded by ending my 44-year GOP membership.The MPACUK Momentum Fiasco
Here’s why I by bailed, quit and jumped ship:
First, Trump’s boorish, selfish, puerile and repulsive character, combined with his prideful ignorance, his off-the-cuff policy making and his neo-fascistic tendencies make him the most divisive and scary of any serious presidential candidate in American history. He is precisely “the man the founders feared” in Peter Wehner‘s memorable phrase. I want to be no part of this.
Second, his flip-flopping on the issues (“everything is negotiable“) means that, as president, he has the mandate to do any damn thing he wants. This unprecedented and terrifying prospect could mean suing unfriendly reporters or bulldozing a recalcitrant Congress. It could also mean martial law. Count me out.
Third, with honorable exceptions, I wish to distance myself from a Republican Party establishment that made its peace with Trump to the point that it unfairly repressed elements at the national convention in Cleveland that still tried to resist his nomination. Yes, politicians and donors must focus on immediately issues (Supreme Court justice appointments) but party leaders like GOP committee chairman Reince Priebus, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrongly acquiesced to Trump. As columnist Michael Gerson wryly notes, Trump “attacked the Republican establishment as low-energy, cowering weaklings. Now Republican leaders are lining up to surrender to him – like low-energy, cowering weaklings.”
The Daily Mail on Sunday released a story about the relationship between Momentum and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK.MKs, Christians and Israel supporters come together at the Knesset to condemn BDS
MPACUK was until recently founded and run by one Asghar Bukhari. A man who is certain that Mossad agents slip into his house to steal his shoes.
It is now run by Raza Nadim. He campaigns on behalf of terrorists, used to work for former Liberal Democrat MP David Ward and now spends his time campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn.
Both Momentum and MPACUK deny that they have been working together behind the scenes in order to get the Muslim Community to vote Corbyn. Not that MPACUK are influential enough to get the Muslim community to do anything. In fact MPACUK spend most of their time ranting against Muslims in the UK, but I digress.
Asghar Bukhari’s response is a pretty shocking rant even for him. He basically argues that it’s okay to be antisemitic to any Zionist Jew, divides Jews into the good ones and bad ones depending on whether they support Israel and then argues that people who aren’t Jewish but support Israel are actually part of a Jewish conspiracy whereby Jews pose as non Jews in order to attack Muslims.
I’ve picked out three quotes below but if you want to gain a window into the mind of a nutter check out the full piece:
Members of the Knesset and Israel supporters alike joined together to condemn the language of the BDS movement and to thank the Christian community for their ongoing support at an event at the Knesset on Monday July 25th, 2016.A blind spot of Diaspora Jews on Israel
The Knesset Christian Allies Caucus and the Delegitimization Caucus coordinated this event with the objective to discuss the “Defeat BDS” campaign, which has helped to enact anti-BDS legislation in 12 states across the United States.
Along with speeches from several MKs, the event featured two key speakers: Joseph Sabag, who has been a U.S. leader in the fight against BDS with the Israel Allies Foundation and Eugene Kontorovich, who is a university professor at Northwestern University and an expert in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“The Delegitimization Caucus is here to fight the threats that generations and generations have brought against us, but the Christian supporters are her because they realize it’s God that has defended Israel and delivered us from their hands,” said Josh Reinstein, the Director of the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus.
“It’s exciting to see both caucuses together. This is a first. We’ve never seen this before.”
The well-meaning voices who fight against Israeli actions in the West Bank tend to embrace discriminatory structures and elites within the Green Line that perpetuate racism. Ask yourself why it is that no one in Israel or in the Diaspora speaks out against the use of blackface by Israeli comedy shows such as Eretz Nehederet? When Haaretz published an op-ed claiming a security guard had a “black color [that] looked very shabby, tattered and stained with evil,” there wasn’t one letter to the editor objecting to this racist phrasing. The same voices that condemn Donald Trump as a racist won’t condemn these kinds of racism in Israel.South African Diplomat Supports Terror and BDS Against Israel
To apply the same social justice and equal rights concepts that are applied to supporting the Palestinians to supporting Israelis in their struggle for equality in Israel would mean calling into question many sacred cows in Israel that the Diaspora have become beholden to. For instance some voices want to support Beduin land rights in the Negev. To do so would mean challenging the land regime under which large swaths of the Negev were set aside for small Jewish-only kibbutzim, while Beduin were systematically denied rights to land. The very same kibbutzim that host liberal-Jewish tours of Israel are the ones that maintain segregated schools and segregated, gated communities. These same gated communities have discriminated against Jews of color in Israel for almost 70 years, making it virtually impossible for Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries to live in rural communities or be “members” through the complex and discriminatory acceptance committees they have to screen members.
Poverty is an issue that is a constant blind spot in Israel. During the recent “Freedom Summer” tour of the West Bank by Jewish activists, Peter Beinart wrote, “The activists I met weren’t speaking, and singing, about Judaism because they thought it was savvy public relations. They were doing so because Judaism is the language of their lives.” He writes poetically about a “Palestinian boy,” who, “smiling broadly, nonetheless ran over to us with cups of water.”
These activists find beauty and exoticism in the poverty of Palestinians. They find human warmth and compassion and they want to highlight their individual lives. What’s missing from this is any attempt to try to shed a human light on individuals living lives of poverty and neglect in Israel. Jewish tours of Israel and the West Bank tend to be bifurcated between presenting Israel as a wealthy high-tech country with villas and swimming pools, and the crushing hardships Palestinians face.
This narrative feeds an ignorant unwillingness to see Jewish people in Israel as facing similar hurdles and struggles as Palestinians. To humanize them, in fact.
It’s hard to know where to begin after reading former South African ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia’s vicious diatribe against Israel in the Pretoria News print edition of July 22. Considering he lived in Israel during his diplomatic posting, one wonders whether he actually bothered to get to know the country properly or if he took his lead from the Palestinian Authority or even Hamas.Economist cartoonist evokes Al Durah in depiction of ‘inevitable’ Palestinian violence
Coovadia’s piece is a laundry list of outrageous accusations and smears including advocating for BDS and even thinly disguised support for terrorism against Israelis.
Most international relations are governed by interests, be they economic, diplomatic or military. Israel has historically suffered in international fora such as the UN. Entire geographical blocs have voted en masse against it, sometimes influenced by relationships with Arab states and the oil they supply.
In early 2014, the Economist was forced to apologize for – and, indeed, subsequently removed – a cartoon by Peter Schrank echoing a disturbing tradition of antisemitic imagery in suggesting that Jews, or the Jewish lobby, were trying to sabotage a peace agreement between the US and Iran.The PA terror monument and the former BBC interviewee
Two days ago, the Economist published an article (The enemy of my enemies, July 23),which includes a new Schrank cartoon.
The article argues that warming relations between Egypt and Israel “has left the Palestinians, whose fate once topped the Arab agenda, feeling abandoned”. It also ominously warns that “with the Arab world focused elsewhere, America in the throes of a presidential race and progress towards a two-state solution halted, [Palestinians] may see no other way to capture the world’s attention” other than a to start a new violent intifada.
Although there is nothing novel about the fact that the BBC elected to ignore this example of glorification of terrorism just as it has countless others, in this particular case we know that the corporation is well aware of Ahmad Jabarah’s resume of terrorism because it not only covered his release from prison (as a ‘goodwill gesture’ to the PA) in 2003 but even saw fit to broadcast what one BBC journalist termed “a really remarkable interview” with him on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme.PreOccupiedTerritory: Amid Software Failure, Haaretz Must Manually Generate Anti-Israel Headlines (satire)
But while the PA keeps up its practice of making national heroes of dead terrorists with monuments, street namings and sports tournament dedications, the BBC continues to indoctrinate its audiences with the notion that the prime ‘obstacle to peace’ is Israeli building.
Two days into a malfunction of one of the publication’s most intensively-used applications, the organization’s staff has been forced to perform the work the software would otherwise do: create headlines that extract from their respective articles the most damning, anti-Israel slant possible.March in Warsaw commemorates ghetto doctors, nurses
Haaretz’s offices have been grappling with an apparent bug in the headline-generating algorithm since Sunday afternoon. Editors first noticed the failure when a blatantly anti-Israel opinion article featured a bland headline, and traced the problem to the application, called the Lexical Intelligence Brief Extract Labeler (LIBEL). Sometime in the mid-afternoon, LIBEL began applying headlines at odds with the publication’s editorial guidelines, a phenomenon the staff noticed when an article about an increase in the number of Palestinian patients from Gaza in Israeli hospitals was given a headline that did not use the words “siege,” “Apartheid,” or “the most densely-populated area on Earth.” As a result, Haaretz writers and editors must manually generate the proper headlines, using valuable time and energy that could otherwise be used to generate anti-Israel angles in the articles themselves.
“All I can say is we’re working on it,” said a worried Amos Schocken, the paper’s publisher. “I can’t say when it will be resolved. Both the print and online versions of Haaretz make liberal use of LIBEL, so this is slowing us down. Our technical consultants are doing what they can. Unfortunately, LIBEL is proprietary software that we commissioned several years ago. That means we’re dependent on a very specific team of developers to fix it. We haven’t had such a problem until now – LIBEL performed exceptionally well to date.” Schocken said it was not yet known whether the malfunction resulted from errors in the LIBEL code, some accidental modification to it, or malicious activity, but that the latter possibility should not be discounted.
Some 700 people marched through the streets of Warsaw to commemorate those who worked in the Warsaw Ghetto as doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, helping those in need and, when necessary, helping them die.Dutch businessman shocked by family’s Nazi-era history
The march began on Friday at the monument at the Umschlagplatz. Participants were welcomed by the director of the Jewish Historical Institute, Pawel Spiewak; vice ambassador of Israel, Ruth Cohen-Dar; and Marian Turski, vice president of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute.
“This year we go there where the doctors and the medical service of the Warsaw Ghetto worked, the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital,” said Pawel Spiewak. “We’re walking there to show that we remember those sacrifices that were completely helpless, powerless in the face of what happened then in Warsaw.”
“We are gathered here to remember the names of our sisters and brothers who were killed in the largest genocide of contemporary humanity. We are here to remember each one of them,” said Ruth Cohen-Dar.
A Dutch textile magnate who initiated a probe into his family’s exploitation of Jewish competitors and laborers during the Holocaust said he was shocked by the findings.Toy car collectors get new model: Iron Dome
Dutch entrepreneur Maurice Brenninkmeijer, from one of Europe’s richest families, has become the latest business leader to confront his family’s Nazi-era history. In an interview with the Zeit newspaper, published July 13, Brenninkmeijer – owner of the Dutch-German C&A chain of department stores, which Forbes magazine recently called “one of the most secretive companies in the world” – said revelations about the company’s Nazi-era use of slave labor and its profiting from the forced sale of Jewish property were “disturbing and shocking” for his family.
The self-searching was triggered by a 2011 exhibition marking the centennial of the business, which revealed some details about the firm’s dealings during the Third Reich. The family hired historian Mark Spoerer, professor at the University of Regensburg, to probe the firm’s archives. “We wanted to be sure that we really know our family history,” Brenninkmeijer told Zeit.
The resulting book is to be published in the coming days.
Toy car hobbyists are getting a new model for their collections – the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system.Nanotech breakthrough prints human tissue from stem cells
The advanced missile interception system reached heroic status during Israel’s 2014 conflict with Gaza, as it shot down rockets fired by Hamas into Israel. Now, the defense solution — designed and programmed by Elta, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israeli company mPrest Systems – is joining other mini versions of tanks and military vehicles on toy store shelves.
Hanan Shpetrik, a local toy car designer, came up with the design for the miniature version of the Iron Dome model. According to an article in Yediot Aharonot, Shpetrik is also behind toy tank models of IDF battle tanks MERKAVA Mk.III and MERKAVA Mk.IV.
“This is an accurately designed miniature representation of the original and is meant for children or toy car collectors,” Shpetrik told the Hebrew daily.
The Iron Dome replica model is built to scale at 1:72, and is made of plastic and metal. The design and development was done at the Israeli Mathov Design company.
It’s the stuff of science fiction: technology that can print a human organ. But the first step towards turning big-screen fantasy into everyday reality has been taken by Israel’s Nano Dimension, which makes 3D printers.Israeli-Beduin film 'Sand Storm' to be released in US
Through a collaboration with another Israeli company, biotechnology firm Accellta of Haifa, Nano Dimension has been able to mix human stem cells into its 3D printer ink. When expelled through the more than 1,000 tiny nozzles of a Nano Dimension DragonFly 3D printer, the ink can form into human tissue.
While the technology is still at the proof-of-concept stage – and going from simple tissue to a full organ is a daunting and uncharted process – the possibilities for saving lives by “printing” a new liver or lung are staggering.
CEO Amit Dror stressed that Nano Dimension is not the only company to offer biotech printing. The difference is the speed and print resolution.
“No one else is using inkjet technology,” Dror told ISRAEL21c. “We’re the first to do it really fast and really accurately.”
Elite Zexner’s Sand Storm, a feature film about the struggles of two Beduin women, will be distributed by the Kino Lorber company.Israel Only Mideast Country to Join UN Battle Against Homophobic Bullying in School
It will be released in New York in September and then in other locations throughout North America.
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The movie, which stars Ruba Blal (The Bubble, Thirst), Lamis Amar and Hitham Omari (Bethlehem, Mountain), won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year in the World Cinema — Dramatic category, as well as the New Directors Competition at the Seattle International Film Festival and the First Look Rotor Film Award at the Locarno International Film Festival, among other awards.
The movie will open throughout Israel later this year.
Israel is the only Middle Eastern country to join a major United Nations agency in the fight against homophobic bullying in schools, Israel Hayom reported on Sunday.
According to the report, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett joined counterparts around the world to support the initiative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). But the Jewish state was the only country in the region to do so.
Israeli Ambassador to UNESCO Carmel Shama Hacohen said, “Israel is among the leaders of the pro-LGBT coalition and supports the idea and the community at every opportunity, especially when it comes to the struggle against violence and abuse within the education system.”
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