Poll: More Americans support than oppose Netanyahu’s Congress speech
(JNS.org) More Americans support than oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech before a joint session of Congress on the Iranian nuclear threat and radical Islam, a new poll released by Rasmussen Reports revealed.
Forty-two percent of respondents agreed that Netanyahu “should accept Republican congressional leaders’ invitation to address Congress about Iran even if President Obama does not want him to come,” while 35 percent disagreed and 23 percent remained undecided.
“I can assure you that millions of Americans will be paying close attention to the prime minister’s words,” U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Israel Hayom.
Netanyahu said Thursday that it is his obligation to speak before Congress, despite protests from the White House and congressional Democrats, due to the threat posed to Israel by the potential for a bad nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 powers.
“Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the nuclear talks with the world powers are progressing in the path Iran has planned,” Netanyahu said. “That path leads Iran to becoming a nuclear threshold state with international approval, and all the economic relief. This means Iran will be relieved from all pressure and will be able to arm itself with nuclear bombs. This is very dangerous for Israel, for the region, for peace and for the entire world, and it is my duty as prime minister of Israel to warn of this danger and do everything I can to prevent it from happening.”
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Israeli Christian leader calls out teachers’ union pamphlet that incites against IDF
(JNS.org) Father Gabriel Nadaf, who advocates for Christian enlistment into the IDF as the spiritual leader of the Israeli Christian Recruitment Forum, has raised concerns with Israeli Teachers’ Union Chairman Yossi Wasserman and the Israeli Education Ministry about an Arabic-language union pamphlet distributed to teachers that includes a story encouraging readers to harm Israeli soldiers.
In a complaint, Nadaf wrote, “To my astonishment, I came across the July-August 2014 edition of a pamphlet called the ‘Echo of Education,’ written in Arabic, and published by the Teachers’ Union and funded by the Education Ministry, in which, on Page 26, there is a story more inciting than any Palestinian resistance literature I have seen. … It is a story in which the protagonist is an 8-month-old fetus in the womb of a Palestinian mother, ‘who, like all the other women in the village, stands before wild soldiers armed with lethal weapons.’ The author writes that if the fetus could express itself, it would say, ‘Oh Mother, I am an 8-month-old fetus but I would love to die as a martyr in the struggle against the occupation. I don’t want my mother to die at the hands of the soldiers, which would make me only a passive martyr.”
The head of the planning department at the teachers’ union, Ziyad Majadlah, said the story’s publication was a “grave mistake” that occurred during the editing of the pamphlet.
“The story was published with no intention of malice,” he said. “It is certainly a story that could offer legitimacy to Israel’s enemies who may hurt the country’s citizens. We apologize for this mistake and for its publication.”
The Education Ministry said it does not fund the pamphlet’s publication.
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Israeli Navy installs advanced underwater AquaShield detection system
(JNS.org) During Operation Protective Edge last summer, a small force of Hamas naval commandos managed to approach the Israeli coast from the sea, undetected by military surveillance until the group reached the shore. That event, which was thwarted due to the alertness of an Israeli Navy spotter, is not expected to repeat itself because the Israeli Navy has installed the AquaShield Diver Detection Sonar system, which makes it possible to identify individual divers underwater from a far greater distance off the coast.
The navy has already installed the system—manufactured by DSIT Solutions—along the sea border with the Gaza Strip, and is in the process of installing it along Israel’s northern sea border, Israel Hayom reported. A senior navy officer said, “The chances of a diver infiltrating the system are zero. The system is proven and constitutes a sea barrier for Israel.”
AquaShield is built to detect divers and provide protection for vital infrastructure located at sea and on the coast, such as gas rigs and ports. During the Gaza war, the Israel Defense Forces was forced, for the first time, to contend with the threat posed by Hamas’s unit of underwater divers. One group managed to infiltrate Israel near Kibbutz Zikim, and was spotted and killed. Had the AquaShield system been deployed prior to Operation Protective Edge, the terrorists would likely have never reached the beach.
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Iraqi Assyrian Christians form militia to fight Islamic State
(JNS.org) Iraqi Christians have formed a militia to take back their Nineveh Plains homeland from the Islamic State terror group.
According to the U.K.-based Catholic Herald newspaper, Iraqi Assyrian Christians have formed the Nineveh Plains Protection Units (NPU), which has about 500 Assyrian Christians stationed in Christian towns in the Nineveh plains to defend them against Islamic State. An additional 3,000 Christian men are registered to be trained, while 500 are already being trained for combat.
The NPU was founded by the Assyrian Democratic Movement, the largest ethnic Assyrian political party in Iraq. Last summer, Islamic State jihadists conquered wide swaths of northern Iraq, displacing more than 1.8 million Iraqis, including Yazidis, Christians, and other minorities.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the new Christian militia has been permitted to train at an old U.S. military facility outside the city of Kirkuk in northeastern Iraq. It is unclear whether or not the Christian militia will be able to obtain funds from the U.S. government. Approved last December, the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act named local security forces in Iraq as potential beneficiaries of up to $1.6 billion in aid to fight Islamic State. The funding should go to “local forces that are committed to protecting highly vulnerable ethnic and religious minority communities in the Nineveh Plain and elsewhere,” the legislation said.
Currently, the NPU is largely aided by Assyrian diaspora communities in the U.S., U.K., and Sweden.
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Moshe Ya’alon to become first Israeli defense minister to visit India
(JNS.org) Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon is scheduled to visit India later this month, marking the first-ever visit by the holder of his office to that country.
Ya’alon will meet with senior Indian counterparts and visit the Aero India defense trade exhibition in Bangalore from Feb. 18-21.
Last fall, Israel and India reportedly inked a $525 million deal to buy the “Spike” anti-tank missiles from Israel. It is expected that Ya’alon’s visit could lead to future security deals, which could bring in billions of dollars to the Israeli economy.
Under the leadership of new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ties with Israel have increased as the two countries seek common ground on issues like security, technology, and the environment. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Modi met for the first time on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last September.
Modi, who served as chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat from 2001-2014, forged strong ties with Israeli businesses during that time. Under his leadership, Israeli companies poured billions of dollars of investment into Gujarat in areas like industrial research, solar and thermal power, pharmaceuticals, infrastructure, water recycling, and desalination.
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Cuneiform tablets reveal life of Jews exiled to Babylon
(JNS.org) A new Jerusalem exhibit that opened on Feb. 2 is displaying ancient clay tablets found in Iraq that reveal what life was like for Jews exiled from Judea to Babylon more than two millennia ago. The 100 cuneiform tablets show transactions and contracts between Jews who were forced into exile by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar around the year 600 BC.
The tablets belong to the Al-Yahudu archive, named after the city that the exiled Jews settled in southern Iraq. Purchased by an Israeli collector in London two years ago, each tablet is no bigger than a hand palm and focuses on one Judean family over four generations, all of whom had biblical names.
“It was like hitting the jackpot,” said Filip Vukosavovic, an expert in ancient Babylonia, Sumeria, and Assyria who curated the exhibition at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum, according to Reuters. “We started reading the tablets and within minutes we were absolutely stunned. It fills in a critical gap in understanding of what was going on in the life of Judeans in Babylonia more than 2,500 years ago.”
“They were free to go about their lives, they weren’t slaves,” Vukosavovic added. “Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t a brutal ruler in that respect. He knew he needed the Judeans to help revive the struggling Babylonian economy.”
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