Israel
7 incredible new things the world can thank Israel for
By ANDREW TOBIN
TEL AVIV (JTA) – To build a Jewish state in the Middle East, Israelis had to be innovators.
Some of what they’ve come up with has been used mostly by their fellow citizens — think Hebrew slang, Bamba snacks and the Iron Dome missile defense system — at least so far.
But many other Israeli creations have changed the world: drip irrigation, the USB flash drive and actress Natalie Portman, among them.
Ahead of Yom Haatzmaut — Israel’s Independence Day, to be celebrated on May 2 — here are some incredible things Israel gave the world this year, its 69th year of independence.
A weed inhaler
Puff, puff, pass the inhaler.
In November, the Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva announced it would begin marketing a medical cannabis inhaler in Israel that delivers precise doses of the drug. Rambam Hospital in Haifa had already been using the device for more than a year, making it the first medical center in the world to prescribe cannabis as a standard medical treatment.
Perry Davidson, the founder and CEO of Syqe Medical, which developed the inhaler, said his company plans to eventually offer it around the world.
“Israel is clearly just the start,” he told Bloomberg. “We expect to be approved for use in other countries in due course. The U.S., as the biggest medical cannabis market, is an obvious target.”
The inhaler is far from Israel’s first marijuana-related innovation. In 1964, Raphael Mechoulan, a chemist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive constituent of cannabis. He went on to identify the endocannabinoid system upon which cannabinoids act on the body.
Last summer, the government approved a plan by Health Minister Yaakov Litzman to relax some requirements for obtaining medical cannabis. And in March, it decriminalized recreational marijuana use.
A binge-worthy series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Israeli TV drama “Fauda” has given the world a compelling look inside the conflict at the heart of the Jewish state.
Nearly two years after the show became a mega-hit in Israel, Netflix in December began streaming the first, and so far only season, in 130 countries. In the United States and elsewhere, English subtitles were added over the Arabic and Hebrew dialogue.
“Fauda” – Arabic for “chaos” – was informed by the Israeli military experiences of co-writers Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz. The show follows undercover Israeli soldiers as they pursue a fictional Hamas terrorist in the West Bank and also delves deep into the lives of the Palestinian characters.
Netflix previously bought the rights to other Israeli films and TV shows, including “Prisoners of War,” from which the hit U.S. show “Homeland” was adapted.
Reviewers and fans have lauded “Fauda” for offering an unusually complex and humane portrayal of Arab characters, even terrorists, and for capturing the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. Loaded with Arab actors, the show has won fans on both sides of the Green Line that demarcates the territories that Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.
“A sad reality,” one Arab Israeli viewer wrote on the official “Fauda” Facebook page. “I hope the day will come when Arab and Jews can live together in peace.”
A popular sport for middle-aged women
Popularized by Israeli moms in 2005, the women’s sport of catchball has recently gone global.
Catchball is like volleyball, but easier, because catching and throwing replaces bumping, setting and spiking. Israeli women adapted the sport from Newcomb, which some Americans may know from summer camp or gym class.
Meanwhile, catchball leagues in Israel boast more than 12,000 female members, almost all of them over 30. That is twice as many adult women as belong to basketball, soccer, volleyball and tennis leagues combined, according to data from Israel’s Culture and Sport Ministry.
“It’s like a disease among middle-aged women here,” said Naor Galili, the director-general of the Maccabi sports association in Israel. “We like it. We love it. We fully support it.”
The Israeli Catchball Association in recent years has promoted catchball in more than half a dozen other countries and helped launch a sister association in the United States. At the July Maccabiah Games, an Olympics-style event for Jewish athletes held every four years, an exhibition tournament will features dozens of teams from Israel, along with squads from Boston, London and Berlin.
Richard Gere playing a Jewish schlub
Richard Gere, a famously suave gentile, stars as a schlubby Jewish schemer in “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer.”
Perhaps only Israeli director Joseph Cedar could have given the world such a gift. The bitingly funny film follows Norman Oppenheimer as he aspires to serve as a fixer between New York’s Jewish community, into which Cedar was born, and Jerusalem, where he was raised.
Cedar knowingly — and often humorously — navigates the gaps between the two worlds. As NPR’s pop culture critic John Powers put it, “Cedar cheerfully skewers Israeli politics and its emotional relationship to American Jewry in a way that U.S. directors dare not.”
The director doesn’t worry whether the film is “good for the Jews,” Powers noted.
For better or worse, Gere apparently has no such hang-ups either. In Jerusalem last month for the local premiere of “Norman,” Gere told Haaretz that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are “an absurd provocation” and “this occupation is destroying everyone.”
Treatment for thousands of wounded Syrians
Officially, Israel has maintained a policy of non-intervention in the Syrian war and has not taken in any refugees. But the Jewish state has still managed to offer some help to its northern neighbors.
Since early 2013, the Israeli army has taken in some 3,000 wounded Syrians for treatment. Generally working at night, soldiers have provided initial medical care and then evacuated the wounded to nearby hospitals.
The numbers are a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands who have been killed and wounded in the fighting between soldiers loyal to President Bashar Assad and rebel groups. But they are significant to those whose limbs and lives have been saved, including hundreds of children.
During a visit this month to the Western Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin promised the country would “continue to do everything it can with responsibility and wisdom in order to alleviate the suffering of the people who experience daily slaughter here on the other side of the border.”
Israeli civilians have donated hundreds of thousands of shekels to help Syrian refugees, and there has been official talk of accepting 100 orphans, though nothing has come of it.
Self-driving cars
Your next car may very well come with an Israeli driver, though it won’t be human.
The U.S. chipmaker Intel last month bought Israel’s driverless technology company Mobile for $15.3 billion, the largest-ever purchase of a high-tech company in this country. In a joint announcement, the companies said the deal “is expected to accelerate innovation for the automotive industry and position Intel as a leading technology provider in the fast-growing market for highly and fully autonomous vehicles.”
Founded in 1999, Mobileye has supplied integrated cameras, chips and software for driver-assist systems — the building blocks for self-driving cars — to more than two dozen vehicle manufacturers. The company has already taken over 70 percent of the global market for driver-assistance and anti-collision systems. Mobileye was a supplier of vision systems to Tesla until the companies broke up last summer after a man died in a crash while his Tesla Model S was on autopilot.
Co-founder and CEO Ziv Aviram has said Mobileye, with its 660 employees, will remain centered in Israel, from where it will develop Intel’s first driverless car.
A Wonder Woman with weapons training
After first playing Wonder Woman in last year’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Israeli actress Gal Gadot will appear in her own DC Comics film this summer.
As a former Israeli soldier, Gadot has brought some unique skills to the role of Amazonian superhero. In March 2016, she talked to ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel about how her army service, saying, “The military gave me good training for Hollywood.”
In her previous “Fast and Furious” appearances (in which she plays an ex-Mossad agent), the one-time Miss Israel impressed director Justin Lin with her knowledge of weapons and performed her own stunts for the franchise. She also showed off her fighting abilities in last year’s “Keeping Up with the Joneses” as the better half of a suburban secret agent couple.
While Gadot’s films haven’t exactly been critically acclaimed, she has remained a national hero. Israelis have widely admired her for fulfilling her mandatory military service while fellow Israeli swimsuit model Bar Refaeli has taken some heat for avoiding enlistment.
Gadot is the first to play Wonder Woman on the big screen. Since superhero franchises never seem to end, Gadot — who has two daughters with husband Yaron Varsan, an Israeli real estate developer – is set to play the character in at least two more films this year.
Israel
Hamas murdered their friend. Now, they help Israeli soldiers to keep his memory alive
By VIRGINIA ALLEN (The Daily Signal) David Newman sent a text to a friend the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7. Something terrible had happened. Word quickly spread among Newman’s group of friends, who had known each other since high school.
Newman, 25, had traveled the night before to the music festival in southern Israel, close to the border with the Gaza Strip. It was supposed to be a fun weekend with his girlfriend “celebrating life,” something Newman, who served with the Israel Defense Forces, was good at and loved to do, friend Gidon Hazony recalls.
When Hazony learned that Newman, his longtime friend, was in danger, he and another friend decided they were “going to go down and try and save him.” Trained as a medic and armed with a handgun and bulletproof vest, Hazony started driving south from Jerusalem.
Hazony and his friend ended up joining with other medical personnel and “treated probably around 50 soldiers and civilians in total that day,” Hazony recalls, but they kept trying to make it south to rescue Newman.
But the two “never made it down to the party, and that’s probably for the best,” Hazony says, “because that area was completely taken over by terrorists. And if we had gone down there, I think we would’ve been killed.”
Hazony later learned that Hamas terrorists had murdered Newman on Oct. 7, but not before Newman had saved nearly 300 lives, including the life of his girlfriend.
When the terrorists began their attack on the music festival, many attendees began running to their cars. But Newman and his girlfriend encountered a police officer who warned them to run the opposite direction because the terrorists were near the vehicles, says David Gani, another friend of Newman’s.
Newman “ran in the opposite direction with his girlfriend and whoever else he could kind of corral with him,” Gani explains during an interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
“They saw two industrial garbage cans, big containers, and so David told everyone, ‘Hide, hide in those containers,’” Gani says. “And so what he did over the course of the next few hours is, he would take people and … he was this big guy, and he would just chuck them in that container. And then he would go in, wait, wait till the coast is clear, and then he’d go back out, find more people, put them in there.”
Newman’s actions that day, and the atrocities Hazony and so many others in Israel witnessed Oct. 7, led Hazony, Gani, and several friends to quit their jobs and set up a nonprofit called Soldiers Save Lives. The organization is working to collect tactical and humanitarian aid for the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF.
According to the group’s website, Soldiers Save Lives has supplied over 20 IDF units and civilian response teams “with protective and self-defense gear.”
Gani, board chairman, chief financial officer, and chief technology officer of Soldiers Save Lives, and Hazony, president of the organization, recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to raise support and awareness for their mission to provide IDF troops with needed supplies.
If you would like to find out more about Soldiers Save Lives or donate to them, go to https://www.soldierssavelives.org/
Reprinted with permission.
Israel
Our New Jewish Reality
By HENRY SREBRNIK Since Oct. 7, we Jews have been witnessing an ongoing political and psychological pogrom. True, there have been no deaths (so far), but we’ve seen the very real threat of mobs advocating violence and extensive property damage of Jewish-owned businesses, and all this with little forceful reaction from the authorities.
The very day after the carnage, Canadians awoke to the news that the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust had inspired sustained celebrations in its major cities. And they have continued ever since. I’d go so far as to say the Trudeau government has, objectively, been more interested in preventing harm to Gazans than caring about the atrocities against Israelis and their state.
For diaspora Jews, the attacks of Oct. 7 were not distant overseas events and in this country since then they have inspired anti-Semitism, pure and simple, which any Jew can recognize. Even though it happened in Israel, it brought back the centuries-old memories of defenseless Jews being slaughtered in a vicious pogrom by wild anti-Semites.
I think this has shocked, deeply, most Jews, even those completely “secular” and not all that interested in Judaism, Israel or “Zionism.” Jewish parents, especially, now fear for their children in schools and universities. The statements universities are making to Jewish students across the country could not be clearer: We will not protect you, they all but scream. You’re on your own.
But all this has happened before, as we know from Jewish history. Long before Alfred Dreyfus and Theodor Herzl, the 1881 pogroms in tsarist Russia led to an awakening of proto-Zionist activity there, with an emphasis on the land of Israel. There were soon new Jewish settlements in Palestine.
The average Jew in Canada now knows that his or her friend at a university, his co-worker in an office, and the people he or she socializes with, may in fact approve, or at least not disapprove, of what happened that day in Israel. Acquaintances or even close friends may care far more about Israel killing Palestinians in Gaza. Such people may even believe what we may call “Hamas pogrom denial,” already being spread. Many people have now gone so far in accepting the demonization of Israel and Jews that they see no penalty attached to public expressions of Jew-hatred. Indeed, many academics scream their hatred of Israel and Jews as loud as possible.
One example: On Nov. 10, Toronto officers responded to a call at an Indigo bookstore located in the downtown. It had been defaced with red paint splashed on its windows and the sidewalk, and posters plastered to its windows.
The eleven suspects later arrested claimed that Indigo founder Heather Reisman (who is Jewish) was “funding genocide” because of her financial support of the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides scholarships to foreign nationals who study in Israel after serving in the Israeli armed forces. By this logic, then, most Jewish properties and organizations could be targeted, since the vast majority of Jews are solidly on Israel’s side.
Were these vandals right-wing thugs or people recently arrived from the Middle East? No, those charged were mostly white middle-class professionals. Among them are figures from academia, the legal community, and the public education sector. Four are academics connected to York University (one of them a former chair of the Sociology Department) and a fifth at the University of Toronto; two are elementary school teachers; another a paralegal at a law firm.
Were their students and colleagues dismayed by this behaviour? On the contrary. Some faculty members, staff and students at the university staged a rally in their support. These revelations have triggered discussions about the role and responsibilities of educators, given their influential positions in society.
You’ve heard the term “quiet quitting.” I think many Jews will withdraw from various clubs and organizations and we will begin to see, in a sense like in the 1930s, a reversal of assimilation, at least in the social sphere. (Of course none of this applies to Orthodox Jews, who already live this way.)
Women in various feminist organizations may form their own groups or join already existing Jewish women’s groups. There may be an increase in attendance in K-12 Jewish schools. In universities, “progressive” Jewish students will have to opt out of organizations whose members, including people they considered friends, have been marching to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and similar eliminationist rhetoric, while waving Palestinian flags.
This will mostly affect Jews on the left, who may be supporters of organizations which have become carriers of anti-Semitism, though ostensibly dealing with “human rights,” “social justice,” and even “climate change.”
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg took part in a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm on Oct. 22 in which she chanted “crush Zionism” along with hundreds of other anti-Israel protesters. Israel is now unthinkingly condemned as a genocidal apartheid settler-colonialist state, indeed, the single most malevolent country in the world and the root of all evil.
New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens expressed it well in his Nov. 7 article. “Knowing who our friends aren’t isn’t pleasant, particularly after so many Jews have sought to be personal friends and political allies to people and movements that, as we grieved, turned their backs on us. But it’s also clarifying.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.
Israel
Former Winnipegger Vivian Silver, at first thought to have been taken hostage, has now been confirmed dead
Former Winnipegger and well-known Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver has now been confirmed as having been killed during the massacre of Israelis and foreign nationals perpetrated by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Vivian, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri was originally thought to be among the more than 1200 individuals who were taken hostage by Hamas.
To read the full story on the CBC website, go to https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/israel-gaza-vivian-silver-1.7027333
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