Hamas video raises concerns of possible train attack
(JNS.org) A new train line from Ashkelon to Sderot may be vulnerable to missile fire from Gaza.
The train line was built to link the southern city of Sderot to the center of Israel, and all of its stations are fully protected against missile attacks. But new Hamas video footage reveals that Palestinians are monitoring the train line from a vantage point several hundred meters from the border.
An unnamed official involved in the incident told Israel Hayom that Israel recovered the footage after an arrest of a senior Hamas operative.
Following a 2011 attack in which terrorists fired an anti-tank missile at a school bus near the Gaza border, the Israeli army has made sure to remove trees and shrubbery from the area to prevent Hamas from setting up observation posts and firing missiles at vehicles. But the train line, according to the video, is vulnerable to such attacks.
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Israeli mikvehs going solar
(JNS.org) Israeli Deputy Religious Services Minister Eli Ben-Dahan has instructed the country’s religious councils to transition all mikveh (Jewish ritual bath) operations to greener and cleaner energy, Israel Hayom reported.
According to Ben-Dahan’s instructions, the mikveh water will be heated using solar energy in efforts to reduce pollution and energy costs. In the overcast winter months, mikveh facilities will use a backup system of gas-powered heating.
“The objective is to make religious services more innovative and more inviting,” Ben-Dahan explained. “Even in terms of environmental protection, we aim to prevent pollution and to reduce the expenses so that we can redirect the funds to adding additional new services and expanding the basket of services available to every citizen.”
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Israel passes U.S., Europe in plastic bottle recycling
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Israel has surpassed the U.S. and Europe in recycling plastic bottles, according to a recently released report by the ELA Recycling Corporation, a private organization that works to promote bottle recycling in Israel.
The report said 54 percent of Israel’s plastic bottles were recycled in 2012, compared to 31.8 percent in the U.S. and 52.4 percent in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
Data from 2013 shows that Israel recycled 56 percent of its plastic bottles, though figures for the OECD and the U.S. have not been released yet.
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Netanyahu: Anyone who views Israel’s creation as ‘catastrophe’ doesn’t want peace
(JNS.org)Days after “Nakba Day” (“Day of Catastrophe”)—the annual Palestinian commemoration of displacement in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at his Sunday cabinet meeting, “Anyone who views the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe does not want peace.”
Netanyahu cited a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League that revealed Palestinian-controlled territories to be home to the world’s highest concentration of anti-Semitism. In the survey, 93 percent of respondents from the West Bank and Gaza held anti-Semitic views.
“This unfortunate fact is the result of incessant incitement by the Palestinian Authority, distorting the image of Israel and the image of the Jewish people, as we have seen in other places in the past,” Netanyahu said. The fact that Palestinians “regard the existence and establishment of the state of Israel as a catastrophe” must be corrected, he added.
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Israeli journalists attacked by Palestinian mob near Ramallah
(JNS.org) Two Israeli journalists were attacked Friday by a Palestinian mob near the West Bank town of Beitunia while covering local Palestinian riots, Israel Hayom reported.
The Times of Israel journalists, Arab affairs reporter Avi Issacharoff and a photographer who accompanied him, were asked to leave the scene of a protest in the area, just west of Ramallah, while about a hundred Palestinian protesters hurled rocks at Israeli security forces and burned tires. When the men refused, a group of masked assailants attacked them, hitting and kicking them from behind.
Plain-clothed Palestinian Authority security officers quickly intervened and escorted the Israeli team to safety. Dozens of Palestinian youths continued to throw rocks at the vehicle transporting them away from the scene.
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Israel’s ‘Paris on the Water’ wins students film Oscar
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) “Paris on the Water,” the final project by Tel Aviv University master’s degree film student Hadas Ayalon, is one of three winners in the foreign film category of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 41st Student Academy Awards competition.
The 27-minute narrative film tells the story of Batya, a formerly famous actress who after years of frustration gets an opportunity to return to the screen. But an unexpected event on audition day forces her to deal with her husband and her priorities.
The awards ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on June 7. Ayalon’s film will be named either the gold, silver, or bronze winner in its category.
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Reform Jews accuse movement’s head of ‘divisive’ leadership over J Street issue
(JNS.org) More than 40 Reform Jews accused the head of the movement’s umbrella organization of “divisive” leadership over his response to the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations’ rejection of J Street’s membership application.
Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) President Rabbi Rick Jacobs, a former member of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet, stated following the Conference’s vote, “We may choose to advocate for a significant overhaul of the Conference of Presidents’ processes. We may choose to simply leave the Conference of Presidents. But this much is certain: We will no longer acquiesce to simply maintaining the facade that the Conference of Presidents represents or reflects the views of all of American Jewry.”
An advertisement signed by 41 Reform Jews that appeared in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles said, “We told you that [Jacobs] would use his position to bolster the anti-Israel J Street… But we did not know quite how divisive Rabbi Jacobs would be. We did not expect that when he failed to persuade the Conference of Presidents to accept J Street as a major Jewish organization—which it is not—he would threaten to take URJ out of the Conference and ask others to leave, too, over differences about Israel foreign policy.”
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Event glorifying Holocaust denier canceled by London college
(JNS.org) King’s College London canceled a May 19 lecture intended to glorify a Holocaust denier.
The event was organized by the pro-Hamas publication Middle East Monitor Online to honor the late Egyptian Holocaust denier, Abdelwahab Elmessiri, and was going to feature speaker Azzam Tamimi, who is reported to be Hamas’s “special envoy to the UK.”
Elmessiri led the opposition organization Kefaya in Egypt until he died in 2008. In his book, Zionism, Nazism and the End of History, he wrote, “The Nazis desperately needed workers, why would the war machine waste its time destroying millions instead of using them as slave laborers?”
Tamimi was the director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, a leading Muslim Brotherhood organization. He is known for using glorified rhetoric when speaking about Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.
Members of the King’s College London Students’ Union Israel Society helped bring about the event’s cancelation by writing a letter that stated, “We feel that, whilst the College has a duty to uphold free speech, this constitutes incitement, and thus a vitiation of the well-being of our Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist students at King’s.”
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