Amsterdam drops plan to be Tel Aviv’s twin city after pro-Palestinian pressure
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive JNS.org) A plan to link Amsterdam and Tel Aviv as twin cities was dropped on Thursday after the Dutch capital’s mayor, Eberhard Van der Laan, came under fire from pro-Palestinian activists.
Van der Laan has been an outspoken admirer of Tel Aviv, often noting its impressive start-up scene and its gay-friendly atmosphere. He attended the annual Tel Aviv Gay Pride Parade earlier this month. But after announcing the twin cities plan, Van der Laan faced an extreme backlash from the pro-Palestinian community as well as the Dutch political left.
Dutch News reported that the left-wing GroenLinks party’s leader, Rutger Groot Wassink, said there would be no twin cities deal “as long as Israel occupies Palestine, structurally infringes human rights and continues its settlement policy.” He was echoed by members of the Labor and Socialist parties, who said they were also not prepared to support the twin cities arrangement.
In an effort to reach a compromise, Van der Lan suggested that Amsterdam could also become sister cities with the de facto Palestinian Authority capital of Ramallah, but his critics refused to accept the idea and the twin cities initiative was scrapped.
Van der Laan said he still plans to advance cooperation between Amsterdam and Tel Aviv, though the specifics of that cooperation have not yet been announced.
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Palestinian man opens fire on IDF soldiers at checkpoint
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive JNS.org) A Palestinian man opened fire on Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the Jordan Valley on Friday. The soldiers returned fire at the attacker, seriously wounding him. He later died of his wounds. No Israeli soldiers were wounded in the incident.
The shooting took place at the Beka’ot checkpoint in the northern Jordan Valley. The attacker got out of a vehicle and opened fire at the Israel Defense Forces reservist soldiers manning the checkpoint. The soldiers reacted quickly, taking out the attacker with their return fire.
After the shooting, the area was declared a closed military zone, due to concerns that the attacker had brought explosives with him.
The incident was the latest in a spate of attacks carried out inside of Israel by Palestinian terrorists. Last Sunday, an Israeli border policeman was critically wounded in a stabbing attack outside of Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. On June 19, an Israeli man was killed and another was wounded when a Palestinian attacker shot them in their vehicle near a spring in Samaria.
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Morocco to rehabilitate ancient Jewish quarter of Marrakech
(JNS.org) Morocco plans to rehabilitate the ancient Jewish quarter of Marrakech in an effort to boost tourism to the city.
Morocco World News, citing the Moroccan French-language newspaper L’Economiste, reported that the conservation plan is part of a jointly financed project by the country’s Housing Ministry and city of Marrakech. The project will cost around $20 million as part of larger $32 million rehabilitation of Marrakech’s old city.
The project in the ancient Jewish quarter—which is known as the “Mellah” and was built in the 16th century by Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition—will include plans to safeguard houses that are threatened with collapse, the rehabilitation of homes, and some demolition of properties.
Morocco was once home to more than 250,000 Jews, many of whom immigrated to Israel in the mid-20th century. The former Jewish quarter in Marrakech is now occupied by Muslims. Recent efforts have been made by Morocco to protect its Jewish history and to encourage Jewish tourism.
In 2013, the Moroccan government finished a two-year restoration project for the Slat al-Fassiyine (Prayer of the Fesians) synagogue in the historic city of Fez.
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Former Obama, Bush officials: Iran deal ‘may fall short’ of a good agreement
(JNS.org) Ahead of the June 30 deadline for a final nuclear deal with Iran, former senior members of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations who had previously worked closely on the Iranian issue wrote in a June 24 open letter to President Barack Obama that the emerging deal “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement.”
These U.S. officials include Dennis Ross, who served as a special assistant to Obama overseeing Iran policy; David Petraeus, who headed the CIA and directed covert operations against Iran; Stephen Hadley, former Bush national security advisor; and Robert Einhorn, a non-proliferation expert who advised Obama on Iranian sanctions; and others.
According to the former U.S. officials, several key components must be part of any final deal, including: monitoring and verification of all nuclear sites, including military ones; strict limits on advanced nuclear centrifuges; the lifting of sanctions only after compliance; and serious consequences for violations of the agreement by Iran.
Additionally, the former officials said the U.S. should also “bolster any agreement by doing more in the region to check Iran and support our traditional friends and allies,” by expanding U.S. engagement in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen as well as reaffirming “U.S. policy to oppose Iran’s efforts to subvert local governments and project its power at the expense of our friends and allies.”
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U.S. Congress passes trade bill with anti-BDS amendment
(JNS.org) The Trans-Pacific Partnership bill passed by the U.S. Congress on Wednesday includes an amendment requiring American negotiators to stipulate the rejection of boycotting Israeli products as a core principle in any trade talks with the European Union.
The trade bill—whose amendment takes a stand against the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement—initially passed with a majority in the House of Representatives last week, followed by Wednesday’s affirmative 60-38 vote in the Senate.
The goal of the anti-BDS amendment is to enshrine “a principal negotiating objective that reinforces our opposition to official actions that boycott, penalize, or otherwise limit commercial relations with the State of Israel,” U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said when introducing the amendment, the Jerusalem Post reported.
By passing the bill with the amendment, Congress “has completed a major step to defend Israel from pernicious economic efforts by foreign governments to unfairly target our democratic ally, and to protect American businesses operating in Israel,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee said.
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Hebrew U., Boston hospital create algorithm that scans genes for diseases
(JNS.org) The Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has collaborated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to create an algorithm that could scan as many as millions of genetic sequences from a variety of organisms for links that potentially indicate diseases.
This process could allow doctors, researchers, and patients to analyze a gene’s evolutionary profile and would “change the face of biomedical research by creating the ability to identify unique disease-related genes and predict their biological functions,” said the Israeli-American research team, headed by Dr. Yuval Tabach, a molecular biologist and researcher from Hebrew University’s Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Additionally, the development “opens the door to drug repositioning, which holds the promise of new treatments for genetic diseases or cancer,” the researchers said.
Tabach, whose research paper on the subject has been published in the Nucleic Acids Research journal, said that the technique “is simple and based on the fact that genes that work together or those that play an important role in biology will be present together in organisms that need them. Conversely, genes connected to a particular function like vision will disappear from species that have lost the power of sight (like cave fish or moles), and may therefore be identified by a comparison to the genes in normal animals.”
“The significance of this tool is that anyone, physician or researcher, can input results from genetic mapping studies concerning suspected genes, and the tool will identify evolutionary, and probably functional, connections to known genes with association to diseases,” Tabach said. “The process is rapid, without cost or time wasted, and enables the identification of genes responsible even for rare genetic diseases.”
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