Monday, August 08, 2016
Khaled Abu Toameh: The "Anti-Normalization" Campaign and Israel's Right to Exist
For many Arabs and Muslims, the conflict with Israel is not about a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. These opponents have no intention of recognizing Israel's right to exist, even if it allows for the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.Settler leader intervenes as Palestinian loses job for saving terror victims
A leading cleric, Dr. Ali Daghi, Secretary-General of the International Muslim Scholars, wrote: "There is a consensus among Muslims, in the past and present, that if an Islamic land is occupied, then its inhabitants must declare jihad until it is liberated from the occupiers."
"Anyone who calls for peace with the Zionists should be brought to trial for high treason. Normalization is treason." — Ramzi Al-Harbi, Saudi writer.
Let us be clear: these are not fringe voices. This is mainstream Arab and Islamic society. What bothers them is not the "normalization" with the "Zionist entity," but the fact that Israel exists. For the masses, jihad against Israel is the solution, not another peace initiative endorsed by unelected Arab dictatorships.
A Palestinian man who saved the children of a West Bank rabbi after a deadly terror attack that killed him has been fired from his job, according to the head of Har Hevron Regional Council.
In a Facebook post on Sunday, Yochai Damri said that the man is now unemployed due to Palestinian opposition to his actions and should be assisted by Israel.
“I met with him and he asked me to help remove any obstacle preventing him from receiving a work permit,” Damri wrote. Such a permit would allow the man to obtain employment inside Israel.
Rabbi Miki Mark was murdered in the July 1 shooting, his wife Chava was seriously injured, and their two teenage children were also hurt. The Palestinian rescuer and his wife, residents of the Hebron area, helped the surviving members of the Mark family escape their overturned vehicle and administered first aid until first responders arrived at the scene.
Now, Damari wrote, Israel owes it to the couple to help them find work.
Combating Anti-Zionist Antisemitism
On Sunday, July 31, 2016, I drove down to Ithaca, NY to give a talk titled “Hate Speech and the New Antisemitism: Why Anti-Zionist Extremism is on the Rise and What We Can Do to Stop It”.
The lecture was sponsored by the Ithaca Area United Jewish Community (IAUJC).
The Ithaca Coalition for Unity and Cooperation in the Middle East (ICUCME), a local grassroots anti-racism organization, assisted with the event logistics and publicity.
A video of my 60 minute lecture is now available on You Tube (full embed lower in the post).
Below I highlight its main themes, breaking the hour-long lecture into segments so that readers can click on to those portions of the talk that are of most interest.
I also summarize several small-group discussion exercises that I moderated after the lecture with the nearly 70 people who attended the event.
Relevant images and hyperlinks to the sources cited in the video have been added to this post. References to prior Legal Insurrection posts that offer background information are also included.
Andrew Bolt: Who let them in? Now a spruiker for Hamas, the terrorist group?
Australia - Who lets these people in? Who invites them?Terrorist Who Attacked Belgian Officers Was Deported Twice
Are we really talking about a tiny, unrepresentative minority?
A fundamentalist Islamic preacher who says Hamas “are not terrorists, they are freedom fighters” is planning to come to Australia after being refused a visa earlier this year.
Sheikh Zahir Mahmood is headlined as a speaker at the upcoming United Muslims Association (UMA) conference to be held in Sydney on Sunday 14th August.
Zahir Mahmood made the claim about Hamas in Birmingham in 2009 at a meeting where he likened modern Israel to Nazi Germany.
Mahmood had attempted to come to Australia in May but was his visa was refused by the Department of Immigration. The UMA organised a conference where gender segregation was enforced, despite the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir losing a court case over the same issue. Other speakers at the conference include Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman and Bilal Dannoun. Sheikh Shady came to national attention recently for his comment that “homosexuality is spreading all the diseases “ describing them as “evil actions”. He is President of the National Imams Council, and was a guest at the Prime Minister’s recent Iftar dinner.
The Algerian man who attacked two Belgian police officers with a machete Saturday was in the country illegally, officials say.BDS movement endorsed by Canada's Green Party
The 33-year-old perpetrator stabbed two female officer in the city of Charleroi before getting shot to death by police. The man shouted “Allahu Akbar” before the attack, and Islamic State claimed responsibility Sunday. (RELATED: Refugee Stabs Belgian Priest After He Refuses To Give Money)
“There are indications that the attack may have been inspired by a terrorist motive,” the prosecutors said in a statement. “He is known to police for criminal acts, not for terrorism.”
Theo Francken, the Belgian secretary of state for Asylum, Migration and Administrative Simplification, revealed the man had been in Belgium since 2012 and has been deported twice. Illegal immigrants who commit crimes are prioritized among deportees, but his home country of Algeria has refused to help with the process.
“The government has already taken serious measures to accelerate the return of these criminals,” Francken said Sunday. “We must continue.”
Canada’s Green Party has voted to endorse BDS, making it the only political party in Canada to support the movement.Wasserman Schultz: Email questioning Sanders’ Jewish faith ‘unacceptable’
The pro-BDS resolution, which was launched by Green Party member and shadow justice critic Dimitri Lascaris and approved Sunday at a convention in Ottawa, supports BDS in the parts of the Israeli economy that allegedly benefit from occupied Palestinian territory. It further states that Israel is in violation of international law through its settlement in occupied Palestinian territory.
“Unless those who profit from the occupation incur significant penalties for violating Palestinian rights, then the occupation will not end,” Lascaris said. “Western governments have essentially immunized Israel from the consequences of its offenses against Palestinians.
A law that is never enforced is a dead letter. If human-rights laws are to afford real protection to Palestinians, then those laws must be enforced.”
The topic of BDS led to a heated debate at the convention, with some party members worrying that the endorsement could make the Green Party even more polarizing than it already is given that it is the Canadian political party most supportive of Palestine.
The party’s leader and only member to hold a seat at parliament, Elizabeth May, spoke out against the resolution and said she would rather support an “action that could work.”
“Every country has its issues,” Richard Zurawski, a former Green Party candidate, told reporters.
“When we specifically single out Israelis, I worry about the buzzwords and subtext and code language, which is anti-Semitic,” he said.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee over leaked emails, denounced an exchange between staffers that proposed questioning Bernie Sanders’ belief in God.UK Labour leader urged to explain donation from pro-Hamas group
“There was one very unfortunate, unacceptable, outrageous email exchange — that I was not a party to — that discussed using Senator Sanders’ faith, a faith which I share,” the Miami Herald quoted Wasserman Schultz as saying Thursday during a public address in Miami.
Wasserman Schultz was referring to an exchange, contained in the leaked emails, initiated by former DNC chief financial officer Brad Marshall. In it he claimed that then-Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, is an atheist. Marshall suggested that this information could be used to undermine his campaign among religious voters like Southern Baptists.
UK’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn faced criticism for an undeclared donation of £10,000 (NIS 50,000) for his successful 2015 leadership campaign raised by a pro-Hamas group.Campus Antisemitism Spike Sparks Record Attendance at Media Watchdog Conference
According to documents obtained by the Observer, a Palestinian group held a fundraising dinner for Corbyn at which it raised £10,000. However this donation from Friends of Al-Aqsa was never declared to the Electoral Commission.
Corbyn’s campaign claimed that the donation was not reported because the check bounced, according to the report Sunday. When asked what happened to the money that had been raised, a spokesman said: “I’m told a second check may have been sent but this was not received by the campaign.” He added, “There is nothing dodgy going on.”
In December the bank account belonging to the group at Britain’s Co-op Bank was closed, along with accounts of more than 20 other pro-Palestinian organizations. Although no official reason was given as to these closures, a spokesperson for the bank said, “For customers who operate in, or send money to, any very high risk or high risk location throughout the world, advanced due diligence checks are required by all banks to ensure that funds do not inadvertently fund illegal or other proscribed activities.”
Friends of Al-Aqsa is a UK-based organization which describes its mission as “defending the human rights of Palestinians.” However their founder, Ismail Patel, a commentator for the Guardian and other media, has praised the Islamist terrorist group Hamas in the past. Patel was aboard the MV Mavi Marmara during the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid. He was briefly arrested by Israeli authorities, then returned to London.
More than 80 students from nearly 70 campuses will be in Boston, Ma. August 7-10 as part of a high-level training conference hosted by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) geared towards preparing students to respond to campus anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism.Israel seeks to deport, deny entry to BDS activists
“Students are coming from as far away as England, Scotland and Canada to attend our training program,” Aviva Slomich, CAMERA’s international campus director, said in a statement. “This in itself shows that campus anti-Zionism is a global problem, affecting many students.”
The CAMERA conference comes at a critical time for Jewish and pro-Israel students. A recent report by the AMCHA Initiative found an “alarming spike in campus anti-Semitism” during the first half of 2016.
“Nearly 100 more incidents of antisemitism occurred on campus during the first six months of 2016 compared with the 1st six months of 2015,” according to the AMCHA Initiative’s mid-year study.
Anti-Semitic activity “was twice as likely to occur on campuses where BDS [the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign] was present, eight times more likely to occur on campuses with at least one active anti-Zionist student group such as SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine], and six times more likely to occur on campuses with one or more faculty boycotters,” the report noted.
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Interior Minister Aryeh Deri decided Sunday to set up a joint taskforce that will work to deport boycott, divestment and sanctions activists operating in Israel, and identify other BDS activists and prevent them from entering.The Advantage of Surprise in the Battle Against BDS
The decision was made in a meeting of the ministers and Interior Ministry officials. Hundreds of BDS activists are currently operating in Israel.
"There are dozens of organizations in Israel today under a variety of umbrellas that are working to gather information and to use it to advance a boycott against Israel. Boycott activists frequently come to Judea and Samaria and agitate the local residents against security forces and disrupt their [security forces'] activity. This is something that the joint team will fight against," an Interior Ministry statement said.
Erdan said, "This is a necessary step in light of the malicious intentions of those working to spread lies and to distort the reality in our region. Soon the legal team I established will also present its findings, and we will implement additional recommendations for legal action and to have the authorities work against the boycott organizations and their activists. A price must be paid for the boycott."
Deri added that "it is our duty to do everything possible to dissolve the boycott and to say in a clear voice that will not allow harm to be done to Israel. Establishing a team [to deal with this] is an important step in this direction."
While war is unforgiving to the rash and the timid, nothing is more lethal to an army than being predictable. For if the enemy knows exactly where you’ll be, when you’ll be there, what you’ll have, and what you’ll do, it becomes child’s play either to avoid you if you’re strong, or decimate you if you’re weak.BDS = ‘Don’t Buy From Jews’
As noted previously, one of the perpetual debates we have when discussing how to fight against BDS is “going on the offense” vs. “playing defense.” That analysis highlighted that these terms might not mean the same thing in a siege war vs. a direct clash, but for now it’s worth noting how the tactics most often used by advocates of both offensive and defensive strategies suffer from the same fault: predictability.
Attend an “Israel-Apartheid Week” panel discussion or Student Senate divestment debate to watch our side make the same points that have been made at BDS-related debates countless times for years, or read those same points printed out on familiar-sounding 8.5” x 11” photocopied handouts.
You can decide if arguments about Israel’s legal rights, Israeli victims of terror, the fate of women and homosexuals in the Arab world, the Jewish state’s contribution to medicine and environmental technology, or how you’ll have to give up your cell phone if you want to truly boycott Israel are offensive or defensive in nature. But it’s likely that each of these arguments (whether spoken at the mike or printed on the page) will sound awfully familiar.
So familiar, in fact, that our opponents have a ready store of responses to neutralize such attacks, from ignoring them, to telling us “thanks for the desalination tech, but give us our freedom,” to accusing Israel and its supporters of “pinkwashing,” and so on.
A paper in Santa Monica, California published a piece of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) propaganda by someone called Kelley Hayes-Riatt. There was nothing remarkable about it. Designed to inspire opposition to a bill in the California legislature that would boycott the BDS boycotters, and adorned by a picture of two armed Israeli soldiers confronting a Palestinian, it featured the usual charges about water and electricity theft, made much of illegal hilltop settlements and referred to videos of Palestinian schoolchildren being stoned by settlers. It also enlisted BDS and the “socially conscious” organizations that support it in the calendar of saints like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In other words, the usual tripe.Boston Globe Recycles Anti-Netanyahu Propaganda
In focusing on the “evil occupation,” Hayes-Riatt, like all the BDS-ers, counts on her readers not to have noticed the three refusals by the Palestinians to accept the end of the conflict, since ending it by making peace would require them to live with a Jewish state. She counts on them being soothed and uplifted by references to Gandhi, and not to know what it means that Mr. Abbas is planning to challenge the Balfour Declaration in an international court, thus again making clear the Palestinian rejection of any Jewish rights in Israel. She counts on her gullible readers not knowing that the chief of BDS, Omar Barghouti, has made very clear that Israel has to disappear. She cants on about the occupation because her real case — the destruction of Israel and likely its six million Jews — would shock even those she hopes to make her tools.
However, this particular propagandist was eager to show off her historical knowledge, and in doing so, she let the cat out of the bag. Thus, she informs her readers: “The term ‘boycott’ was coined in Ireland in 1880 when poor farmers were evicted from their homes by a land agent named Charles Boycott. Calls to shun him were so successful that his farm, stable and house workers refused to work, local businessmen refused his business, and even the postman refused to deliver his mail!”
In one piece of misplaced erudition, she thus reminded her readers of the real purpose of a boycott, which is to vent moral indignation, to stigmatize the object of the boycott as someone to be shunned, expelled from the human community, as a pariah, a leper, someone unworthy of ordinary human contact. The purpose isn’t economic so much as moral and even quasi-religious. A boycott says implicitly that even to buy and sell with such people is a pollution that no decent person would allow. The Nazi boycott of Jews made the same point — these people are beyond the pale. “Kauft nicht bei Juden! [Don’t buy from Jews!]” meant “Jews are filth.” So, too, did the counter boycott of Nazi Germany. Only then, there was excellent cause for moral indignation, as the Nazis really were filth, and certainly not only because of how they treated the Jews.
Did Benjamin Netanyahu, in the 1995 election campaign against Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, refuse to denounce virulent critics of Rabin, who termed him a traitor for agreeing to turn over territory to the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo Accords? And did Netanyahu's failure help create the violent atmosphere that contributed to Rabin's assassination?Telegraph book review legitimizes appalling anti-Israel propaganda
The answer is that Netanyahu absolutely denounced such charges, and there's documentary evidence, including video, to prove it. But this hasn't stopped some pundits from recycling the already discredited charges.
The latest is Sherman Teichman, the founding director emeritus of the Institute for Global Leadership of Tufts University. In a Boston Globe op-ed trying to establish a parallel with various harsh critics of Hillary Clinton, including, of course, Donald Trump, Teichman argues that:
it's important to appreciate the possible consequences of this type of toxic discourse. It's sobering and instructive to look to another pivotal political moment, in another fractious and imperfect democracy, Israel. (Trump, Rabin and the danger of indecency, Boston Globe, August 7, 2016)
Teichman then goes on to allege that in that 1995 campaign:
... protests were marked by a drum beat of venomous personal attacks directed at Rabin. Zealous and frenzied protesters chanted "Death to Rabin" and brandished posters of him in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. They called Rabin a murderer and depicted him in a Nazi uniform.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition Likud party and Rabin's main political rival, vigorously denounced the Oslo initiatives at a series of large rallies, which some warned him would lead to violence.
Even by the low standards we’re accustomed to in our continuous monitoring of the British media’s coverage of Israel, the uncritical review of Ben Ehrenreich book, The way to the spring: life and death in Palestine, which appeared in the Aug. 6 print edition of The Telegraph, is appalling.BBC again creates false linkage between Israel and attacks on hospitals
Similar to the Economist’s review of the same book that we posted about last month, the Telegraph reviewer shows extraordinary credulousness in the face of Ehrenreich’s Pallywood tale featuring the Tamimis of the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh.
The Telegraph review begins thusly, treating as serious journalism Ehrenreich’s risible propaganda:
Ben Ehrenreich describes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as “a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair”. It is “not just the settlements and the soldiers in their hilltop bases”, the American journalist writes, “but the checkpoints, the travel restrictions, the permits, the walls and fences, the courts and the prisons, the stranglehold on the economy, the home demolitions, land appropriations, expropriation of natural resources, the entire vast mechanism of uncertainty, dispossession and humiliation that for four decades has sustained Israeli rule by curtailing the possibilities, and frequently the duration, of Palestinian lives”.
Devoid of even the bare minimum of nuance, context or critical scrutiny, Telegraph readers would read these passages and no doubt conjure images of a cruel and sadistic Israeli goliath orchestrating a totalitarian nightmare for inhabitants of the Palestinian territories – a narrative which could have been written by the Propaganda Ministry of the Palestinian Authority.
As was noted here the last time the BBC amplified Nott’s long mileage story of an ‘attack’ on a hospital that never happened:Not just anti-Semitism: New boss seeks to broaden ADL’s reach
“Shifa hospital was of course not attacked on that day or any other and – despite what Nott was told at the time – it was in fact considered to be one of the safest places in the Gaza Strip, as reported by the BBC’s James Reynolds just days later:
“…just to explain where we are; we’re at the Shifa hospital here in the centre of Gaza. When you speak to ordinary people here, they feel that this is about the only safe place that there is in this strip of land – this or the grounds of the other hospitals here – because they believe that Israel will not target hospitals. There are actually some families sleeping outside the hospital – again, they believe that they won’t be hit here….””
During the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas the BBC repeatedly amplified false claims that Israel had attacked medical facilities without due cause and it has since failed to clarify or correct the inaccuracies which appeared in numerous reports.
The fact that the corporation has showcased David Nott’s story twice in two months – in both cases omitting information which would have prevented audiences from being misled – does nothing to enhance the impression that the BBC’s approach to this topic is rooted in a commitment to accurate and impartial reporting. Rather, it suggests that the corporation is more interested in perpetuating a myth.
For more than a century, the Anti-Defamation League has been known as a group that combats anti-Semitism. But one year after taking the group’s helm, Jonathan Greenblatt wants it to focus on more than just the Jews.One of last Sobibor death camp survivors dies at 90
Greenblatt’s predecessor as ADL national director, Abraham Foxman, became known during his decades at ADL’s helm, as an arbiter of what was and was not anti-Semitic, as well as a pro-Israel advocate who did not hesitate to criticize Jewish groups he saw as damaging Israel. Upon his retirement in July 2015, some called him “the Jewish Pope.”
But to woo millennials to the ADL, Greenblatt wants to stress the group’s work among other minority communities, which has long been a part of its agenda. This emphasis comes as the Jewish community’s relations with minority groups has become strained by anti-Israel sentiment among many left-wing activists. Just this week, the main movement opposing police violence against black communities, Black Lives Matter, released a platform accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians.
While the ADL focuses on many issues Black Lives Matter addresses, it has not collaborated with Black Lives Matter, and called the genocide accusation “repellent and completely inaccurate” in a blog post on Medium on Thursday.
As part of its renewed outspokenness on issues beyond those directly impacting Jews, the ADL has emerged in the past year as the only legacy Jewish organization to consistently criticize Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by name when he makes controversial statements about Mexicans, Muslims or other groups. And Greenblatt wants the ADL to take a leading role in addressing mass incarceration and police violence in black communities.
Philip Bialowitz, one of the last four survivors of the Sobibor death camp, died on Saturday at age 90 in Florida.Kafka’s manuscripts are Israel’s property, court rules
Bialowitz was part of the small group of Jews who, in 1943, staged a revolt in Sobibor, setting close to 300 prisoners free from the death camp.
According to his son, Joe Bialowitz, Philip was the last remaining Polish Jew to have survived Sobibor.
“When the revolt at Sobibor began, he was standing with his fellow prisoners when he saw the revolt’s two leaders stand upon a table and call out to everyone: ‘If you survive, bear witness! Tell the world about this place!’” Joe wrote on Facebook in a post announcing his death.
“Philip devoted much of the rest of his life to performing this sacred duty. He traveled the world, relating his eyewitness account to thousands of children and adults, and honoring the memories of the 250,000 Jews who perished and the few who survived thanks to what he called ‘the fighting spirit of the Jewish people.’” After escaping Sobibor, Bialowitz said he ran into a group of Polish partisans, who were not happy to be harboring Jews. So he escaped again, and ending up hiding out the rest of the war along with his brother with a Polish farmer called Mazurek.
Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that Franz Kafka’s manuscripts are the property of the National Library of Israel, ending a lengthy legal battle, judicial sources said on Monday.Jerusalem’s chief rabbi among 220 naturalized by Spain
The nation’s top court on Sunday rejected an appeal by the heirs of Max Brod, a friend of the Jewish literary giant and the executor of his estate to whom he had willed his manuscripts after his death in 1924.
Kafka, the Prague-born, German-language novelist and short-story writer, had instructed Brod to burn the manuscripts after his death, but his friend did not honor that request and took them with him when he fled the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and emigrated to Palestine.
On his death in 1968, Brod bequeathed the papers to his secretary Esther Hoffe, with instructions to give them to the “Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the municipal library in Tel Aviv or another organisation in Israel or abroad.”
But Hoffe, who died in 2007, instead kept them and shared them between her two daughters — sparking multiple legal battles.
The Sephardic chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Shlomo Amar, was among the latest group of recipients of Spanish nationality under that country’s law of return for descendants of Sephardic Jews.Life-saving Israeli app makes appearance at Olympics
The Spanish nationality was conferred on Amar Friday, according to the EFE news agency, along with 219 others. They were made Spanish nationals by a decree as per legislation that passed last year, under which descendants of Sephardic Jews with proven ties to Spain may naturalize as Spanish citizens. Over 4,300 have been awarded Spanish nationality under the law.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Spain after 1492, when the Catholic Church and the country’s royal house instituted a campaign of persecution, forced conversion to Christianity and dispossession against Jews known as the Spanish Inquisition.
Spanish officials said they enacted a Sephardic law of return to correct that historical wrong. The legislation in Spain followed the 2013 passing of a Sephardic law of return in Portugal, where the inquisition began in 1536.
Portugal’s law for naturalization of the descendants of Sephardic Jews is less strict than Spain’s, which requires applicants demonstrate knowledge of Spanish culture and language. The Portuguese law makes no such requirements.
As the world looks to Brazil for Olympic games, an Israeli startup is there to improve the safety of millions.Major security flaw in 900m Android phones, tablets, says Check Point
SayVU is an application that sends a distress signal to an emergency call center from any phone, even if it is locked.
SayVU established a center in Rio, where the technology is now handling emergency and distress calls.
The company was selected as part of the Olympics’ comprehensive security network, along with Israeli firms International Security & Defense Systems and Safe City in a Box.
“We see the Olympics as a main stage for global exposure of the unique technology we developed,” SayVU CEO Amotz Koskas said.
The app cuts response time and brings assistance more rapidly from emergency services, including police, firefighters and first responders.
Nearly a billion Android phones and tablets are vulnerable to malware that could allow hackers “complete control of devices and access to sensitive personal and enterprise data on them,” according to Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point.12 Israeli sensor technologies that will rock your world
The hacks are possible due to a series of four vulnerabilities — dubbed QuadRooter — affecting Android devices built on Qualcomm chipsets, which are found in nearly two-thirds of mobile devices. “If any one of the four vulnerabilities is exploited, an attacker can trigger privilege escalations and gain root access to a device,” said the Check Point research team that discovered the problem.
Unlike most malware, which can be rooted out or at least detected by antivirus software, there’s little users can do except wait for Qualcomm to issue patches to fix the problem, according to Check Point. The vulnerabilities are in the chipset’s software drivers – the basic operating system-level programs that provide usability to the chipsets – which control communication between the chipset components.
As such, the vulnerability is on the hardware level, built into the device itself – and accessible only through software packages that update those drivers. “Pre-installed on devices at the point of manufacturing, these vulnerable drivers can only be fixed by installing a patch from the distributor or carrier. Distributors and carriers can only issue patches after receiving fixed driver packs from Qualcomm,” according to Check Point.
Sensors are the hidden brain in everything from precision agriculture to connected cars, home appliances to security systems, smart cities to digital health.New offices in Peru, Chile cement trade alliances for Israel
“A sensor is anything that translates a physical phenomenon to a measurable signal or other information. For example, in the past they used canaries as sensors for poisonous gas in mines,” explains Amichai Yifrach, an Israeli expert in military and civilian sensor development.
“Using that definition, Israel is on the cutting edge of technology in all aspects of sensors,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “A lot of it is related to our capabilities in sensing things that others cannot, especially in relation to border security and airport control.”
Historically, Israel’s edge in sensor technology comes from defense needs and much of the sector is still focused on military applications, with companies such as Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Seraphim Optronics in the lead.
But as in many other fields, knowhow from the military gave a huge boost to Israel’s civilian sensor industry. “On the consumer side, we’re strong in image processing and algorithms. We have very good chemists, too,” says Yifrach.
With the opening of trade offices in Peru and Chile earlier this month, Israel is on track to greater integration with the Pacific Alliance – a trade group that includes both countries, as well as Colombia and Mexico – bringing trade opportunities for Israeli firms in South America and beyond.Education Ministry to revise curriculum to include history of Jews from Islamic countries
Over the weekend, Peru’s Production Minister Bruno Giuffra met with Israeli Ambassador to Lima Ehud Eitam and the embassy’s business attaché Ariela Rada to discuss ways of partnering with Israeli companies. According to Peruvian news sites, Giuffra is seeking to work with Israeli startups and veteran firms to enhance the country’s tech economy, as well as connecting with Israeli entrepreneurs to learn how they helped create Israel’s famed startup economy.
Israel has been an observer in the Pacific Alliance since 2012, and since then has been working on developing business relations and free-trade agreements with each of the four member countries. Israel already has an FTA with Mexico, and agreements with Panama and Colombia have been completed, but have yet to be ratified by their respective governments.
The combined GDP of Pacific Alliance nations is approximately $3 trillion and constitutes 40% of Latin America’s GDP. If they were a single nation, the alliance would form the world’s sixth largest economy, according to the World Bank.
Middle and high school history curriculum will be required to include the study of Jews in Islamic countries beginning the upcoming school year, the Education Ministry announced on Monday.In Saudi Arabia, Jewish sites with ancient resonance beckon
The decision aims to implement one of the recommendations of the Biton Committee, released in July, which was tasked with empowering Eastern Jewish cultural studies within the general education curriculum.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett launched the committee some five months ago, and appointed as its head, Erez Biton, the first poet of Mizrahi descent to win the Israel Prize in Literature (2015).
Biton was tasked with empowering the identity of the Mizrahi Jewish community - including immigrants from Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia and Libya - within the education system.
Saudi Arabia is not high on the list of Jewish travel destinations.
There has been no organized Jewish activity in the country for 70 years. Even though a Saudi delegation visited Israel last month, anyone with an Israeli passport is banned from entering the country, as the two countries don’t have diplomatic relations. As of 2014, Jews are now apparently, unofficially, allowed to work there, though not to hold prayer services.
Yet 3,000 years ago, around the time of the First Temple, there was a strong, vibrant Jewish community in the area of what is today Saudi Arabia.
And in the sixth and seventh centuries, there was a considerable Jewish population in Hejaz, mostly around Medina, Khaybar and Tayma. Hejaz makes up most of the western part of modern-day Saudi Arabia and is centered on the two holiest Muslim cities, Mecca and Medina.
The medieval Jewish traveler, Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela in Spain, during an 1165-1173 trek to the Holy Land, made his way to the far-flung Jewish communities that are now in the geographic area of Saudi Arabia.
He cataloged his trip, describing the places he visited and the people he met and providing a demographic rundown of Jews in every town and country. Tayma and Khaybar, where he visited, are two oases that became populated communities because they were along a key land route between the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula and the Nile Valley.
Historical sites pertaining to the ancient Jewish experience still exist. With the Saudis just possibly warming their ties to Israel — ex-Saudi general Anwar Eshki, who led the recent delegation to Israel, also met publicly in the US last year with Foreign Ministry chief Dore Gold — the day may be drawing near when these locales will be more accessible.
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