Israel Update 17.10.19

I wish all my readers Chag Sameach.

IRAN

A team of British experts arrived in Iran on Monday to begin work to upgrade the Arak heavy water nuclear reactor. While Iranians breach the nuclear deal, the British embassy says ‘we are upholding our obligations to cooperate’. Iran’s latest move was to fire up advanced centrifuges to boost its enriched uranium stockpiles on September 7. Read more here

German soccer coach Winfried Schafer, who managed the Iranian club Estqelal FC for almost two years, said: “I never met a person who was in favour of the regime – and I speak of people, young or old, from very different backgrounds: industrialists, academics, football players, taxi drivers and even ministers.” Read more here

GAZA

Ahmed Abu Artima was one of the founders of the “Great March of Return,” the weekly protests along Gaza’s frontier with Israel, but these days he mostly avoids the demonstrations. He is among a growing number of Gazans who believe the protests have lost their way.With little to show from 18 months of demonstrations beyond hundreds of people killed or wounded, many Gazans are beginning to question and even criticize the Hamas-led protests. Read more here

Over 4,000 Palestinian demonstrators took part in weekly protests last Friday along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, with several hundred rioting and clashing with Israeli troops. Rioters threw rocks and explosive devices at troops who responded with tear gas and live fire. Read more here

Israeli troops on Thursday identified and shot down an unmanned drone that entered Israeli territory near the Gaza border…A month ago, a terrorist cell tried to attack an army patrol near the Gazan border using an explosive device attached to a drone. Read more here

THE UK

Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket with more than 3,000 stores, has invested an undisclosed amount in Trigo Vision, an Israeli technology firm which has developed technology that allows consumers to pick items from the shelves and walk out without passing though a till or automated checkout. Each item picked is added to a “virtual basket” on the shopper’s phone, and the bill for groceries is automatically charged to the card saved on the customer’s account once they leave the shop. Read more here

CYPRUS

Doctors from Israel’s Sheba hospital saved a woman from Nicosia who suffered a major heart problem during childbirth. Within 7 hours, four heart specialists brought specialist equipment to Cyprus, stabilized the patient and flew her to Israel where she is now recovering. (TY Michael) Read more here

TURKEY

P.M. Netanyahu said last Thursday: “Israel strongly condemns the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas in Syria and warns against the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds by Turkey and its proxies. Israel is prepared to extend humanitarian assistance to the gallant Kurdish people.” Read more here

JORDAN

Dozens of Israeli farmers are facing an uncertain future after being informed that the two parcels of agricultural land that they have been working for decades will soon be handed back to Jordan. A special clause in the 1994 peace treaty between the countries allowed Israel to retain use of the land for 25 years, with the understanding that the lease will be renewed as a matter of routine. However, in October 2018, amid domestic unrest in Jordan, King Abdullah II announced plans to terminate the lease, and despite lengthy efforts by the Israeli government, negotiations to guarantee continued access to the areas failed. Read more here

UNITED NATIONS RELIEF & WORKS RELIEF AGENCY FOR PALESTINE REFUGEES. (UNWRA)

“Direct pressure” by donors is the most likely way to induce UNRWA to change, former UNRWA general counsel James Lindsay said, adding that only 10% of UNRWA’s current budget goes to basic immediate needs…UNRWA’s major structural problem, he said, is its unique definition of who qualifies as a refugee. Palestinians who have citizenship in their host countries, including 1.8 million Jordanian citizens, are still classified as refugees. “UNRWA persists in falsely identifying people who are citizens of states as ‘refugees,’ perpetuating a sense of helplessness, victimhood and revanchism,” he said. Read more here

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

As part of the move that recently enabled the transfer of tax receipts to the P.A., Israel agreed to reopen the Protocol on Economic Relations. The sides agreed to disagree on the issue of payments to terrorists, and Israel will continued to deduct NIS 40 million monthly, in accordance with the law it passed last year. According to a senior Palestinian source, there is already agreement on a number of important changes that will enable the PA to make progress towards economic independence.The Israeli defence establishment believes that the quiet in the West Bank is the outcome of a reasonable economic situation, and that a stable Palestinian economy is in Israel’s interests. Nearly 200,000 Palestinians who work in Israel inject $3.5 billion into the Palestinian economy from the wages they earn. Read more here

The PA has financed the rebuilding of the home of a terrorist who also has five terrorist brothers – all of whom murdered Jews. The mother of the terrorists is the focus of constant PA attention and pride, simply because she is the mother of multiple murderers…the PA pays the family $10,800 a month. Over the years, the PA has paid the family over $1 million. Read more here

ENVIRONMENT

Israel is to build its first waste-to-energy power plant which will serve as the primary waste treatment facility for the Jerusalem metropolitan area. The site will be home to an innovative waste sorting facility and an advanced energy recovery facility, producing electricity from waste under stringent environmentally-friendly conditions. Read more here

MEDICAL INNOVATION

Israeli biotech startup Betalin Therapeutics has created an artificial pancreas to help monitor sugar levels and release insulin into the patient’s bloodstream. Board member Prof. Sidney Altman, a Nobel laureate, said: “I have Type 2 diabetes and right now, I take two injections per day of insulin and this new product will eliminate that. [People] won’t have to take injections anymore….I’ll just have an implant and that will be good for several months.” Read more here

Israeli researchers have found that a treatment used for the blood cancer leukaemia could be an effective way to treat other cancers. While chemotherapy, is the most commonly used cancer treatment, it does collateral damage to non-cancerous dividing cells. Immunotherapy, on the other hand, is a kind of cancer treatment that helps the body’s own immune system fight off the cancer itself.Read more here

DEFENCE

Israeli defence electronics company Rafael has delivered a first consignment of Trophy anti-missile protection systems to the U.S. Army for Abrams tanks and armoured personnel carriers. The system has been in operational use with the IDF since 2011 and has on many occasions intercepted missiles fired at Israeli armoured vehicles.The U.S. Army will also use Israeli company Elbit’s Iron Fist system for protecting Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. Read more here

COUNTER-TERRORISM

Israeli security forces have arrested three Palestinians who were in possession of explosive devices in the West Bank for suspected terror activities.Read more here

VIDEO

Tens of thousands of Jews from Israel and around the world gathered at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem Wednesday morning for the traditional mass Priestly Blessing during the festival of Succot (Tabernacles) Watch here

UK SCHOOL GCSE TEXTBOOK CRITIQUE

David Collier: I have been working through the opening section of a school textbook that is used to teach 16-year olds in the UK about the Arab Israeli conflict. It is part of the GCSE curriculum… The central messages are those that you would find inside an anti-Israel propaganda book…. it rewrites history – it whitewashes anti-Jewish violence – and every child who has studied from it – has been exposed to hard-core anti-Zionist revisionist material. …Here is one example from the book. The year is 1929.

‘In August 1929, angry clashes occurred over holy sites in Jerusalem. These grew into 4 days of bloody riots and mob violence throughout Palestine, leaving 133 Jews and 116 Arabs dead.’

That is how the ‘school’ book describes the bloody massacres of Jewish communities as Arab mobs ran riot throughout Mandatory Palestine. As ‘Arab / Jew’ clashes.

The comparable fatality count is more than deceptive. The reason 116 Arabs died, is because the British killed them as they tried to stop them massacring Jews.

COMMENT & OPINION

Jonathan S. Tobin: Wiping Israel off the map has been a staple of Iranian political rhetoric for decades, with the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, saying last month that Iran had “managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the imposter Zionist regime.”
Why are Iran’s European trading partners unwilling to confront the fact that they are still seeking to cultivate good relations with an Iranian regime that embraces genocide of Jews as a legitimate policy goal? Read more here

Gerald Steinberg: …the BDS movement was officially launched in 2001 at the NGO Forum of the anti-Semitic UN World Conference on the Elimination of Racism, held in Durban. The instigators were a group of radical NGOs that demanded “the complete international isolation of Israel as an apartheid state.” A few months later, the first boycotts began when Trotskyite cells in the British academic unionmanipulated votes to get support for boycotts of Israeli universities… BDS was and remains largely a Western anti-Semitic movement led by NGOs and financed by European governments. Read more here