We all know Jewish state’s enemies are always talking about just how nasty and racist those pesky Israelis are. But we don’t think so.
Latest example? A woman named Futna Jabber, “a proud Arab Muslim who prays five times daily, calls the Koran her favorite book, obsessively puffs on a hookah pipe and proudly wears a keffiyah,” has been voted one of the finalists on Israel’s version of Big Brother.
One of the more routine–and dangerous–endeavors IDF battalions engage in is entering Palestinian villages to capture wanted terrorists. Soldiers do all they can to protect civilians–who are often used by the terror heads as human shields–while still nabbing the bad guys.
Imagine – soldiers in camouflage, sneaking stealthily through a village, bodies tense with readiness… when one whispers, “Wait! I gotta update my facebook status!”
Apparently, something not so far from this happened recently in the Binyamin region, which stretches north of Jerusalem and east toward the Dead Sea. After a soldier updated his facebook status that a force from his battalion was due to arrive in a Palestinian village, the commander aborted the mission, Yediot Aharonot reported:
The decision was made by Judea and Samaria Division Commander Brigadier-General Nitzan Alon, who feared that the leaked information may put the force in danger.The soldier’s commanders were informed of the incident as well and decided to put him on trial. Military officials noted that this was a serious incident which may have put the troops in danger had it not been revealed on time.
The operation was held several days later and deemed successful, while the soldier was judged and incarcerated.
The affair began when a soldier wrote in his Facebook status that the force was slated to arrive in the village and leave a day later. The Judea and Samaria Division’s information security officer learned about the leak and informed the division’s commander, who decided – in an unusual manner – to cancel the operation so as not to put the force at risk.
Maybe facebook needs to add another privacy protection option for when one is posting classified information.
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.
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.
We’ve reported before how many Israeli Arabs not only oppose the violent actions of Palestinian terrorist groups, but deeply value their citizenship in the Middle East’s only free country, even serving with valor and distinction in the IDF — sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice, as First-Sgt. Muhammad Ihab Khatib did last week.
Just this week, the IDF Home Front Command announced the established of two new search and rescue units composed entirely of Arab citizens of Israel who chose to volunteer their services.
Each unit will have about 25 volunteers, mostly men. The new recruits spent last week at the Home Front Command training base, where they went through a series of training exercises simulating emergency situations. The units were trained to rescue wounded victims from rubble that could result from a rocket attack, bombing, or even a natural disaster like an earthquake.
Israel’s worst civil disaster occurred in 2001 when a poorly constructed events hall in Jerusalem collapsed in the middle of a wedding party. As a camcorder recorded the events–which was later broadcast across the shocked country–the dance floor on the hall’s third floor simply gave way. Twenty-three people were killed and 380 were injured. Were Israel’s emergency services not so well trained, many more would undoubtedly have died or been more seriously injured in the tragedy, or in any number of other non-civil tragedies since.
The two new units will operate mostly in the Arab areas in Israel’s north, Cpt. (res.) Sami Halabi, Deputy Commander of the Unit said, but they’re ready to go wherever they’re needed.
“If God forbid an unfortunate event will happen, we can operate anywhere in Israel, also in the Jewish cities,” he said.
More than a few Israeli eyebrows were raised this week by the Coke ad that ran during the Superbowl. As Yonit Levy, the popular anchorwoman for Israel’s Channel 2, incredulously put it during a broadcast, the commercial was “very similar” to a 2002 commercial for the Israeli dairy company, Yotvata.
In the American ad, a man sleepwalks through a scary-animal-filled desert wilderness to get a coke. In the Israeli ad, a man sleepwalks through the Negev desert to get to a Yotvata store. Both ads use Ravel’s “Bolero” as background music and have similar looks and feelings.
The striking similarity–some would say copying–made headlines across Israel (and, as evidenced by the links above, even made national broadcast news). The American ad was made by Portland, Oregon-based ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. The Tel Aviv-based Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Young & Rubicam agency, which created the 2002 Yotvata ad, didn’t comment.
Dr. Yaron Timmor, the head of the marketing communications program at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, told the Jerusalem Post that copying in ads isn’t all that unusual, but “… for an American ad from a company of the stature of Coca-Cola to be based on an Israeli ad would be ‘puzzling and strange.’ ”
“When a company is accused of copying ideas from an outside source, it attracts criticism from both the client and the public, who expect original and innovative ideas,” explains Timmor. “The need to copy usually stems from inferiority and a lack of creativity.”
Timmor suggests that in this instance, “there might be an ad that Yotvata also copied from.”
Lots of American-Israelis manage to watch the Superbowl on satellite or the web each year, along with plenty of Israelis who are fans of American football.
Sara and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flank their 15-year-old son, Avner, as he is named winner of the Jerusalem Bible Quiz. Photo: Isranet
One of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s sons beat out 50 other teenagers to win the Jerusalem region Bible quiz. Avner Netanyahu, 15, will represent the city at the Israeli national competition, where he will compete to represent the Jewish state at this year’s International Bible Quiz, an annual worldwide contest on knowledge of the Hebrew Bible.
The contest includes contestants from Jewish communities around the world and covers the whole of the Hebrew Bible. It is held in Jerusalem each year on Yom Ha’aztmaut, Israeli Independence Day. Since Israelis win so often, there is a separate contest for the top non-Israelis as well.
The Bible contest is a national cultural event founded by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister: Contestants come to Israel for special events in the weeks before and after the quiz, traveling through the Holy Land, meeting dignitaries, participating in special programs, and going through preliminary tests that winnow the contestants down to the finalists, who appear on the nationally televised quiz. The International contest is always held in Jerusalem, while the Diaspora contest travels to different cities around the country.
The International contest’s winner receives a four-year college scholarship to Bar Ilan University, Israel’s one overtly religious university, which is located just outside Tel Aviv.
The Prime Minister usually asks at least one question during the contest, so Netanyahu may end up quizzing his own son.
Lovers of Israel usually know about the daring airlifts that brought tens of thousands of Jews home to Israel from Arab countries, often in secret and in the dark of night. Lesser known is another daring airlift that brought home natives of Israel, but these weren’t Jews — they were fallow deer, a type of deer once indigenous to Israel that had disappeared from the Holy Land by the time the modern state of Israel was re-founded.
The 1978 Iranian “deerlift” remains one of the most daring feats and biggest successes of one Israeli general who retired from the military and applied his battlefield zeal to Israel’s then-burgeoning conservationist movement, according to a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal.
A Bibilical Animal
The Five Books of Moses set out dietary laws that govern what sorts of animals observant Jews may or may not eat. In Leviticus 11:3 and Deuteronomy 14:6, the Torah explains that animals that chew their cud and have cloven hoofs are kosher and animals lacking both signs are not kosher, and therefore cannot be eaten. Deer are among those permitted by the Bible:
These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roe deer, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope and the mountain sheep. You may eat any animal that has a split hoof divided in two and that chews the cud. However, of those that chew the cud or that have a split hoof completely divided you may not eat the camel, the rabbit or the coney. Although they chew the cud, they do not have a split hoof; they are ceremonially unclean for you. The pig is also unclean; although it has a split hoof, it does not chew the cud. You are not to eat their meat or touch their carcasses.
(Rules governing fish and fowl also are covered in the same sections.)
Over the years, some of those animals once abundant in the Holy Land–including the fallow deer–were hunted to extinction or otherwise disappeared from the borders of ancient Israel. In the late 1950s, however, the species was rediscovered in Iran. Says the WSJ:
The Persian fallow deer stands about 3 feet tall at the shoulder, with a tawny coat, white spots and flattened antlers like those of a small moose. In the book of Deuteronomy, the deer was listed as one of the hoofed animals the Hebrews were allowed to eat. The Book of Kings says the animal was tithed to King Solomon by his subjects.
A General’s mission
Gen. Avraham Yoffe, commander of the army division that captured Sharm al-Sheikh in 1956, had been named head of the newly created Israeli Nature and Parks Authority. In the mid 1970s, he began courting Iranian officials, including the brother of the Shah, the then-leader of the Persian state.
Yoffe eventually got permission to capture a few of the fallow deer and re-introduce them to Israel, but his own health and the then-simmering Muslim revolution stymied efforts to get the deer back to Israel. As the Ayatollah Khomeini prepared to wrest power from the Shah, Israeli officials were (appropriately) more concerned with the fate of Iranian Jews than with a few deer. But Yoffee remained focused on the Biblical animal:
At the Israeli Embassy in Tehran, diplomats and intelligence agents were frantically shredding documents and trying to evacuate the 1,700 Israelis living in Iran, says Mr. Segev. For Gen. Yoffe, the clock was ticking since his deal for the deer would collapse with the shah’s government.
At pretty much the last moment, the General–working with Mike Van Grevenbroek, a Dutch zoologist living in Israel–was able to capture 4 deer and, using fake documents showing that they were going to Holland (since the ayatollahs were, er, less friendly to Israel than the Shah had been), got them airlifted home.
Thirty years later, several more of the fallow deer have just been taken from a nature reserve near Haifa in and released into the Judean hills around Jerusalem, where they’ve joined a herd of a few dozen that’s been living there for the past few decades.
In Jerusalem itself, residents can occasionally glimpse the deer running through the long greenbelt that begins with the enormous Gan Sacher park in central Jerusalem and runs south toward the Malcha area, where the Jerusalem mall and a large technology park are located.
To read more about the deer and about the general, who died in 1983, read the rest of the WSJ article here.
Esti Ginzburg may have started modeling at the age of 8 and signed a contract with the prestigious agency Elite Models at the tender age of 14, but she doesn’t think that being an international supermodel exempts her from serving in the Israeli Defense Forces.
The 19-year-old, who has appeared for Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry, is in the midst of a two-year enlistment in the IDF, though she continues to juggle some modeling work during her off-time.
Ginzburg’s army duty has her advising high-school students about their options in the service. It’s a far cry from the exotic photo shoots, glittering events, and designer clothes she’s used to, but Ginzburg told Israel 21C that she doesn’t mind.
“If you live in this country and you grow up in this country then you have to serve and do the minimum,” she said. “It’s the values I grew up on and I always knew I was going to go in, even though it’s hard.”
Late last year, she made waves when she criticized Bar Rafaeli, another Israeli supermodel known for dating actor Leonardo DiCaprio, for avoiding army service (through a quickie marriage to a family friend, which she publicly acknowledged as a ploy to avoid service). “In order to contribute and help, in order to be part of the state,” Ginzburg told an Yediot Aharonot, “enlisting is a duty, not a choice. There are a million things I don’t feel like doing, but I do them because I have to.”
Watch this video from Israel21C in which Ginzburg discusses her commitment.
(By the way, “Esti” is a nickname for “Esther.”)