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Stand for Israel Blog

Two headlines that sum up a lot

March 9, 2010

Ha’aretz: Israel offers aid to Turkey after 41 killed in earthquake

Yediot Aharonot: Turkey rejects Israel’s offer of post-quake aid

Apparently, Ankara thinks it’s preferable for innocent people to die than to accept help from Jews.

Israel Develops Natural Gas

March 2, 2010

As Israel continues its quest to reduce its dependence on coal, a material it must import from external sources, an off-shore discovery could signal a vast new energy resource in natural gas.

This week, Noble Energy, a U.S. energy group with significant investment in Israeli off-shore production, said the natural gas reserves will be provided solely to the Israeli market. The two natural gas reserves confirmed off the coast of Haifa (in the regions nicknamed Tamar and Dalit) may together contain a two decade supply of gas based on projected needs.

According to the company, “The significant exploration discoveries at Tamar and Dalit will help meet Israel’s future energy needs and drive additional new uses for natural gas.” This could be a win-win situation for both Israel and Noble Energy. As Israel increases natural gas usage and reduces the use of coal, Noble Energy’s exploration group hopes to meet Israel’s growing need.

Everything the U.S. ever wanted to know about UAVs (unmanned drones), it learned from Israel

February 26, 2010

Earlier this week, we told you about Israel’s newly developed drone, The Eitan, the world’s largest un-manned aerial vehicle (UAV). (These are the drones that keep “eliminating” Taliban leaders and helping U.S. forces in Iraq without imperiling U.S. troops.)

What we didn’t tell you is that a significant part of the U.S. technology has come from Israel, which has been at the forefront of UAV development for decades. The U.S. Air Force did try using unmanned drones for reconnaissance in Vietnam, but eventually shut down all its UAV funding until Israel changed world opinion about UAVs in the early 1980s.

During the First Lebanon War in 1982, the IDF used small UAVs to trick radar installations into becoming active in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, thus revealing their locations. Once spotted, regular Israeli fighter places moved in to destroy the radar sites.

According to this interesting article in Popular Mechanics, the Bekaa Valley campaign convinced the Americans that UAVs had major potential. (They’re spending $5.4 billion on UAVs in this year alone!)

The article continues with specifics about how the Eitan might play into an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations:

The Eitan can carry a ton of payload and can reach Iran’s nuclear facilities, which the United Nations last week determined is hiding an active weapons program. But that does not mean these will be used as bombers. The IAF has been buying and upgrading airplanes specifically for long-distance strikes such as a potential attack against Iran. At least 50 F-15 Raam and F-16 Soufa aircraft have been converted by installing extra fuel tanks for greater range and countermeasures to defeat radar and missiles. So maybe the warplane/UAV tag team presented at the “operational acceptance ceremony” speaks to how manned and unmanned aircraft will work together on missions: The drone provides information while the manned airplanes drop the guided munitions.

Working from high altitudes, the Eitan will likely be used to provide prestrike information on targets, to eavesdrop on electronic communications and to send battle damage assessments back after an attack. It will also undoubtably be used to monitor any retaliation for the airstrike—seeking rocket launches and eavesdropping on Iran. The onboard power required to electronically jam radar and communications equipment is not in the Eitan, Israeli defense industry officials told the trade journal Defense News. But the ability to carry so much weight opens up questions about the drones’ ability to conduct long-range, high-risk bombing missions on their own.

Early literature suggested the Eitan would have a role in shooting down enemy missiles in flight as well as in bombing targets.

Former VP Gore invests in Israeli “green” company

February 25, 2010

Former Vice President Al Gore may have his hands full dealing with ongoing controversies arising from climategate, but his “green” venture capital fund is up to productive work: It just announced $10 million in funding for GreenRoad Technologies, an Israeli start-up company with technology that promotes safe driving.

Gore’s cleantech fund Generation Investment Management LLP announced the funding this week, joining other funders, including Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Ventures, Israeli business daily Globes reported Monday.

Founded in 2002, GreenRoad technology helps “drivers and fleets to reduce crashes, improve fuel economy and reduce overall vehicle operating costs,” according to the company’s website.

The company says that customers can realize a 50 percent reduction in accident-related costs and a 10 percent reduction in gas usage in the first year, Globes reported:

Like many Israeli high-tech firms, GreenRoad is headquartered near San Francisco but its research and development center is in Or Yehuda, a city near Tel Aviv. It also has sales offices throughout the US and UK.

Many firms choose to move headquarters overseas due to Israel’s prohibitively high taxes and difficult bureaucracy, but keep their research and development divisions in Israel.

Haifa team’s medical discovery holds hope for tens of millions of those with late-stage kidney disease

February 19, 2010

A new find by scientists at the Technion Institute–the world-class research university in the northern Israeli city of Haifa– holds new hope for the 40 million Americans who have end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). ESKD is what happens when chronic kidney disease progresses to the point where the only hope for the patient’s long-term survival is a kidney transplant — which is costly, dangerous to already ill patients, and only possible when there’s an available kidney that is compatible with the patient.

Not always good odds.

But the research team–led by Prof. Karl Skorecki–isolated a method of genetic screening that can identify those at high risk for kidney disease, thereby allowing clinicians to treat them before their kidneys ever get anywhere near the point of failing, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The team’s work, which is due to be published in the prestigious medical journal, is expected to lead to future research that might be able to identity to specific genetic glitch that leads to ESKD as well as help doctors understand how the kidneys gets irreversibly damaged — which may lead to better or new medical treatments for those who do develop the condition.

If Skorecki’s name sounds familiar to you, it may be because we wrote about his “hobby” back in November. Although trained as a specialist in treating the kidney, Skorecki taught himself about genealogy and made a big splash when:

…he showed that Jewish men who had been told by their fathers that they were of the priestly tribe shared the same type array of six chromosomal markers in their Y chromosomes. These patrilineal markers were found in both Sephardi and Ashkenazi kohanim, pointing to a common priestly tribe population origin before the Diaspora during the Roman Empire.

The kidney disease Skorecki’s team may be helping affects black and Hispanic Americans at twice the rate it affects Caucasians. About 5,000 Israelis suffer from it.

Israel’s enemies will do anything to turn a “good” into a “bad”

January 27, 2010

Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz is one of Israel’s most indefatigable advocates. He is skilled at making the case not only for her right to exist, but for her virtue –and he is particularly skilled at doing so in the belly of the beast, deep among the anti-Israel left among academics and others of the self-designated “cultural elite.”

He’s a prolific author and writer and blogs regularly on “The Huffington Post,” a massive group blog that caters to Hollywood types and the intellectuals who love them. He marvels that while:

most objective observers throughout the world marvel at Israel’s efficiency and generosity in leading the medical aid efforts in Haiti, some bigots insist on using these efforts as an occasion to continue their attack on the Jewish state. Both the neo-Nazi hard right and the neo-Stalinist hard left cannot help but to demonize Israel, regardless of what Israel does.

Critics, he says, complain that Israel shouldn’t be sending medical assistance to such a faraway place as Haiti but should instead be sending it to nearby Gaza:

They fail to note the difference between Haiti and Gaza. Haiti is not at war with Israel. Haiti has not pledged itself to Israel’s destruction. Haiti has not fired 8,000 rockets at Israeli civilians. Gaza, on the other hand, has a popularly elected government that has done and continues to do all of the above.

Moreover, there is no comparison between the tens of thousands of Haitians who died as a result of a natural disaster, and the people of Gaza — who suffer far less from what is, essentially, a self-inflicted wound.

Nor, do Israel’s perennial enemies make notice of the huge gulf between tiny and resource-poor Israel, and the resource-rich Arab and Muslim nations:

While Israel digs deeply into its treasury and manpower to send medical assistance a quarter of the way around the world, Arab and Muslim nations are generally missing when it comes to relief efforts. Israel is sending more aid per capita than any country in the world.

Most saliently, he says that:

Israel will be extremely generous to the people of Gaza if and when they stop supporting attacks on Israeli civilians, stop making martyrs of their suicide murderers, and stop encouraging their children to don suicide vests. The peace dividend the Palestinian people will reap from making peace with Israel is incalculable.

So good to have him on our side!

Israeli green firm scores $350 million in funding

January 26, 2010

Two years ago, the Israeli-led firm “Better Place” (weird name, we know) was founded to produce technology that reduces dependence on fossil fuels. One of their first major projects has been solving one of the main barriers to getting electric cars into mainstream use: The fact that, while the technology to manufacture non-gas-powered cars exists, no car maker is going to mass-produce them because the necessary infrastructure to support them doesn’t exist (think corner gas stations with the ability to quickly re-charge electric batteries).

The firm plans to market electric cars similar to the way that cellphones are marketed:  The consumer signs a service contract that provides him with subsidized hardware (a cellphone or, in this case, an electric car) and then pays a monthly fee (airtime for a phone, mileage for a car). Better Place partnered with Renault and Nissan to produce the cars, and they’re producing the batteries.

Besides the obvious environmental and political benefits (um, does anyone really want to be sending money to Saudi Arabia or Iran?), the plans would negate consumers’ worries over fluctuating gas prices.

Unstable (and generally sky-rocketing) oil prices have wreaked havoc over the last few years: American consumers went nuts when average gas prices topped $4/gallon in 2008 — though Americans pay far less than in many other parts of the world. At the end of 2009, Israelis paid the equivalent of around $6.20/gallon, while Americans were paying only around $2.65.

Better Place posits that running their cars will be significantly cheaper:

“With $100 a barrel oil, we’ve crossed a historic threshold where electricity and batteries provide a cheaper alternative for consumers,” Founder Shai Agassi told the New York Times. “You buy a car to go an infinite distance, and we need to create the same feeling for an electric car — that you can fill it up when you stop or sleep and go an infinite distance.”

Better Place lithium-ion batteries are expected to run 124 miles per charge, but the even more important vision is creating and building the infrastructure necessary to keep the cars going — whether parking meter-like plugs on city streets or service stations along highways, where, in a structure like a car wash, exhausted batteries will be removed and fresh ones inserted.

The firm got a huge vote of confidence–along with fresh resources–with a $350 million venture funding investment to build networks of charging stations:

The Series B funding round, which includes a $125 million investment from HSBC Group and values the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company at $1.25 billion, will allow Better Place to expand into Asia and Europe where countries are laying down incentives for electric-car development. Chief Executive Shai Agassi tells VentureWire Better Place has signed up 50 corporate customers in Israel, and expects to have about 90,000 drivers paying for its battery power by the end of 2010 in both Israel and Denmark. That would mean at least $27 million in monthly revenue coming online by the end of the year, given his estimates. This is only the start – Better Place, which has so far raised $700 million in capital, will likely need billions of dollars to saturate the market.

Looks like they’re off to a good–green–start!

Israel in Haiti shows who Israel really is

January 23, 2010

Rabbi Eckstein’s message for this week:

Nine days ago, Haiti was struck by a strong earthquake. Since then, the media has been full of images from the island nation that show devastation on a scale that is truly hard to imagine. Hundreds of thousands are feared dead, and hundreds of thousands more face the grim prospect of hunger and disease.

The humanitarian response has been swift. Relief workers from around the world have been streaming in to Haiti, and charitable donations to organizations doing work on the ground have skyrocketed. Among the nations to offer aid was Israel. Soon after the quake, Israel dispatched military and civilian medical professionals and search and rescue experts to Haiti. The field hospital Israel quickly set up is state-of-the-art, and was the first facility equipped to handle complex surgical procedures required by some of the earthquake’s most badly injured victims.

One U.S. doctor commented on Israel’s relief efforts: “I’ve been here since Thursday; no one except the Israeli hospital has taken any of our patients,” she said. “It’s like another world here compared to the other hospitals. They have imaging… they have [scanning] machines here, operating theaters, ventilators, monitoring. It’s just amazing.” Israel’s efforts have also earned the respect of the Haitian people. Last Sunday, a woman who gave birth to a baby boy at the Israeli field hospital said she would name her son “Israel” as a gesture of gratitude.

The quickness and efficiency of Israel’s response to the disaster in Haiti is rooted in the sobering fact that Israel is accustomed to having to cope with unexpected disasters. Through the years, the ongoing threat of terrorism has forced Israel to find new and creative ways to save lives and give relief to the injured. Now, Israel gladly shares its knowledge in Haiti, just as it has in years past when other humanitarian needs have surfaced throughout the world. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summed it up: “This is the true heritage of the State of Israel and the Jewish people… We may be a small country, but we are a country with a big heart. This is the expression of Jewish ethics and heritage—to help others.”

It is difficult to find any comfort in disasters such as this, where the scope of devastation is truly beyond our imagining. But I am reminded of the words of the Psalmist, who spoke of God’s presence even in the midst of darkness and despair: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there… If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (Psalm 139:7-8, 10-12)

Sure of the promise that God is with all of us, in good times and bad, let us pray fervently for the people of Haiti who have suffered so greatly, and who will face daunting challenges in the months and years ahead as they seek to rebuild shattered lives. Pray, too, for the relief workers of all nations who have gone to Haiti to try to in some measure alleviate that suffering. And let us continue to pray for the day when God blesses all his people with shalom, peace.

Life-saving center in Haiti provides model communications center

The world has heard about the life-saving work being done at the IDF field hospital in Port-au-Prince (at a time when no other mission has been able to get on its feet) — but not much attention has been paid to the Israeli innovations and planning that allowed the medical team to set up a serious communications center where no one else even has electricity.

Prior to the departure of the main team last Friday, a five-man unit went to scout out locations and arrange logistics. Part of their arrangements included ensuring that the IDF teams would have wireless Internet and 24-hour access to one of Israel’s Amos communications satellites. They also set up video conference systems in surgery rooms so that surgeons at the field hospital could consult with experts back in Israeli hospitals.

The communications work was done by reservists from the IDF’s C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) branch

While the communications center is there for the benefit of the medical and rescue personnel, it’s had one unexpected benefit: The wireless Internet has attracted journalists from around the world who come to send their materials back to their editorial offices. Hopefully, reporters will remember the real Israel when called upon to cover happenings closer to the Holy Land.

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