Arab Knesset member Haneen Zoabi compares Israel to Nazis
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Member of Knesset Haneen Zoabi (Joint Arab List), a frequent harsh critic of the Israeli government, compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust and refused to attend Israel’s upcoming national Holocaust memorial assembly.
Zoabi was invited to the annual ceremony, to take place on the Yad Mordechai kibbutz, along with a host of other public figures. Rejecting the invitation, the Arab lawmaker also wrote an angry letter stating why she would not be attending.
In her letter, Zoabi stated that the Israeli government, military, and other public figures are standing by idly as “Palestinians are executed without trial.” She went on to describe what she claimed is the connection between Nazi Germany and the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians.
“You cannot teach the lessons of the Holocaust when you do not see the shocking similarity between what is going on around us and what went on in Germany in the 1930s, and that is where the danger lies: Execution without trial, detention without trial, torture, gag orders, persecution of protesters and political activists,” she wrote. “You cannot teach the lessons of the Holocaust to increase motivation to defend yourself via humiliating and oppressing the other.”
The theme for this year’s Holocaust memorial ceremony is “Journey to the heart’s desire.” It will address how Jews dealt with the war and the subsequent journey to Israel. Among the main speakers will be Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Yesh Atid party leader MK Yair Lapid.
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Israel’s Iron Dome intercepts drone in U.S. test
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) In the latest breakthrough for the Israeli defense industry, a missile belonging to the Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted a drone in a test carried out by the American military in the United States.
According to a statement from Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the Israeli developer of the Iron Dome, the intercepting missile was fired from a multipurpose launcher belonging to the U.S. Army, and it hit the drone target successfully.
The test marks the first time the Iron Dome has intercepted a drone on U.S. soil. The Iron Dome boasts a 90-percent success rate and has intercepted more than 1,300 rockets since April 2011.
Israel Defense Forces Col. (res.) Pini Youngman, head of Missile Defense Systems at Rafael, said that another series of tests will be carried out as adjustments are made to alter the system per the requirements of the U.S. missile program.
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Israel provides intelligence to Jordan and Egypt for fight against Islamic State
(JNS.org) Israel is providing intelligence assistance to Jordan and Egypt in the fight against the Islamic State terror group, a senior Israeli military officer said on Wednesday.
“Egypt fights the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula. Jordan is terrified by the presence of the Islamic State in Jordan’s cities and towns. And we try to work with them in order to contribute something to their security,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan, deputy commander of the IDF, told reporters from Israel’s Foreign Press Association on Wednesday.
Golan added that he wouldn’t describe cooperating with Egypt and Jordan “as some sort of reconciliation between the people [of those countries and Israel]. But it is a good starting point and I’m quite optimistic concerning that.”
Intelligence information, he said, is “the most important element in the whole system” of fighting off insurgency. Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab countries that have peace treaties with the government of Israel, but as Golan mentioned, those nations’ general populations still harbor hostility towards the Jewish state.
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Israel’s secular schools set to launch new curriculum on Jewish-Israeli culture
(JNS.org) Israel’s Education Ministry on Wednesday announced that it will launch a new curriculum in secular schools that seeks to strengthen students’ Jewish-Israeli culture from a young age.
“The Jewish story that has been passed down from generation to generation should continue to be told. We should not cut the link. This is what was done,” Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett said Wednesday.
The program, called “Israeli Jewish Culture,” will replace the Jewish Heritage and Culture curriculum that is currently being taught in grades 1 to 9. The aim of the program is to introduce students to Judaism through Jewish literature, traditions, and more.
“To know who we are, to know or forefathers, Maimonides, Yehuda HaLevi’s songs, and also the life of Nahman Bialik and the writings of Ehad Ha’am, to understand the issues of the [Passover] seder, and what the fast of the 17th of Tamuz is. {Editor’s note: It begins a mourning period remembering the destruction of the First and Second Temples}. All are important no less than mathematics. This we will do,” said Bennett.
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Palestinian Fatah video glorifies ‘martyrdom’ and Jerusalem bus bombing
(JNS.org) Two days after a bus bombing attack in Jerusalem in which 21 people were wounded, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah political party uploaded an online video that glorifies “martyrdom” and calls for renewed Palestinian stabbing and car-ramming attacks against Israelis.
Titled “Martyrdom-seeking unites us,” the 9-minute video—produced by Fatah’s Shabiba student movement at Birzeit University, and posted on the official Fatah Facebook page on Wednesday—shows a staged car-ramming and stabbing attack at the Atara checkpoint near Ramallah. Three Palestinians are seen killing two Israeli soldiers. All three Palestinian attackers then become “martyrs” for being shot by IDF soldiers during the fake attack.
In the background, a song plays with the words, “There is no God but Allah, and the Shahid (Martyr) is Allah’s beloved,” Palestinian Media Watch reported.
The video was uploaded days after Fatah had already posted praise for the Jerusalem bus bombing on its Facebook page. According to Palestinian Media Watch, a division of Fatah’s military wing, the Gaza-based Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, wrote that it blesses “the self-sacrificing operation (i.e., bombing of a bus on April 18) in Jerusalem. For our Jerusalem and our Al-Aqsa Mosque, the good news of victory keeps arriving today, in a display we have not seen in a long time—a bus bombing operation in the occupied city of Jerusalem, in which dozens of Zionists were injured.”
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Professors sue American Studies Association over boycott of Israel
(JNS.org) Several members of the American Studies Association (ASA) announced Wednesday that they are suing their own academic association for its boycott of Israel, arguing that the boycott violates a District of Columbia (DC) law that applies to non-profit organizations.
“Until a handful of zealots appropriated our learned society, the ASA was the leading organization for the study of American culture,” said one of the plaintiffs, Professor Simon Bronner. “Yet in 2013, a handful of anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists aggressively steered the ASA to an organization of social change pushing a narrow political agenda.”
The membership of the ASA, the oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history, in 2013 voted to endorse the ASA’s participation in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The vote had attracted the largest number of participants in the 5,000-member organization’s history, but even while 66 percent of those who voted supported the boycott, there were only 828 total pro-boycott votes—less than 20 percent of the ASA’s membership.
“Academic associations should think twice before abusing their missions and betraying the lawful purposes for which they were established in favor of the personal political agendas of their noisiest and most politicized activist members,” said Kenneth L. Marcus, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB) and one of the attorneys on the case. LDB assembled the team of lawyers to represent the American Studies professors.
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs say that at the time of the boycott, the ASA’s constitution stated that “the object of the association [is] the promotion of the study of American culture through the encouragement of research, teaching, publication…about American culture in all its diversity and complexity.” Therefore, the boycott of Israel was outside the scope of the constitution and antithetical to the association’s stated goal of promoting knowledge, the plaintiffs argue.
The ASA’s constitution also states that the association’s goal is “the strengthening of relations among persons and institutions in this country and abroad devoted to such studies,” which the plaintiffs say is also the exact opposite of what the boycott of Israel aims to achieve.
Further, as a tax-exempt non-profit, the ASA reports documents annually to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In those IRS documents, the ASA describes its mission as “the nation’s oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history,” with the specific purpose of “advancing the study of American culture.”
Prof. Bronner is joined in the lawsuit by three other plaintiffs: Professors Michael Rockland, Michael Barton, and Charles Kupfer. The four plaintiffs say they have unsuccessfully tried to address the issue of the Israel boycott directly with the ASA numerous times since 2013, and chose to now sue the association as a last resort.
“This appears to be a clear example of a small group misappropriating assets raised for an agreed-upon purpose and illegally using the organization to advance a completely separate and personal agenda,” said University of California, Berkeley Law School Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon, a corporate law expert who advised the litigation group representing the plaintiffs.
Northwestern University Pritzker Law School Professor Eugene Kontorovich, a legal expert who also advised the litigation group, added that “to be clear, this is not about silencing or stopping criticism of Israel, or in any way discouraging it. It is about non-profit corporations abiding by their own rules.”
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French film industry mourns Israeli actress and filmmaker Ronit Elkabetz
(JNS.org) As Israel mourns the death of renowned Israeli actress and filmmaker Ronit Elkabetz on Tuesday, international expressions of condolences are also pouring in, particularly from the French film industry, in which Elkabetz was active.
Elkabetz—who had won multiple Israeli Ophir awards (the equivalent of America’s Oscars) and most recently was nominated for a best foreign film Golden Globe award in 2014 for the movie Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, in which she starred and co-directed with her brother—died from cancer at age 51. She is survived by her husband Avner Yashar and 4-year-old twin sons. She was buried on Wednesday at the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in northern Tel Aviv.
Former Israeli president Shimon Peres mourned her death by calling her a “cultural ambassador” of Israel. But Elkabetz was also widely known and admired in the French film industry, having acted in many French films and being a regular fixture at the Cannes Film Festival for about 15 years.
“Elkabetz—generous, inspired, demanding—was a great friend of France,” said French Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay in a statement reported by the French newspaper Le Figaro and translated by JNS.org. “Actress, screenwriter, and director, she was one of the brightest figures of the Israeli cinema, one of its greatest ambassadors worldwide. She loved working with French cinema and she still had beautiful projects planned. She defended a certain idea of cinema, independent and engaged, looking at the entire world and addressing it by touching on topics anchored in the reality of her own universe.”
Other condolence messages from French actors and filmmakers have continued pouring in. Gilles Jacob, a renowned French film director, critic, and former president of the Cannes Film Festival, tweeted, “Sadness. The death of Ronit Elkabetz, a great Israeli actress, script writer, and director, at the age of 51 from cancer.”
Daniel Shek, the former Israeli ambassador to France, also tweeted that “the flame of Ronit Elkabetz, great lady of cinema, beautiful person, friend, has extinguished at only 51 years. What sadness.”
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Israeli doctors harness cord blood to fight cerebral palsy
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) A day after she was born, Noa had a stroke and began convulsing. Now, two years later, a promising new treatment at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, outside of Tel Aviv, could help her battle cerebral palsy (CP).
Noa, whose real name is being withheld at the request of her family, is the first patient to undergo this special treatment at an Israeli hospital. It involves a cord-blood transfusion from siblings or a suitable match, and it is performed only on children and babies. It was approved specifically for use on Noa due to the unique circumstances of her case, in what is often referred to as “compassionate use.”
“Studies have shown that cord blood, and the stem cells it may contain, can help to treat brain injuries,” said Omer Bar-Yosef, a pediatric neurologist and at the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital at the Sheba Medical Center.
“It was tested on animal models where the offspring was hurt at birth and consequently suffered from CP, be it because of compromised blood flow to the brain or for other reasons. In those cases, transfusions of umbilical cord blood during the first hours or days after their birth had a positive effect on the brain tissue and on performance. Now this method is being tested on humans,” he said.
The trial is run jointly with Taburit, a company that preserves umbilical cord blood.
Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, a professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine who is considered the world’s leading expert in this field and directs the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank, one of the largest cord blood banks in the world, also found in one of her clinical trials that children who received cord blood transfusion improved their motor skills by 30 percent when compared to the control group.
According to Bar-Yosef, those born with CP currently have no available treatment, and only rehabilitative care such as physiotherapy and speech and language therapy, But this new method “appears to yield positive results.”
“She still has CP, so this is not a 180-degree turnaround, but we have begun to see her cognitive skills develop, and she uses many more words,” said Noa’s mother, Tamar.
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