Scientists—Just Don’t Let on Who They Are—May Have Found a Surgery-Free Treatment for Prostate Cancer

Observing the media’s enthusiastic reporting of a new breakthrough in treating prostate cancer, Stephen Pollard notes an oddly consistent omission:

[Despite] all the coverage, you would [still] have to guess where the research was carried out: the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. . . .

I wish I could believe this is just an honest mistake—that, purely by chance, the Israeli origins of a medical breakthrough had been left out. But I’m afraid I don’t think that—and I don’t think you will, either. It happens too often and too regularly for it to be pure chance. It’s what I call the soft-boycott strategy.

The campaign for BDS is so obviously racist and anti-Semitic, singling out the Jewish homeland alone in the world for boycott, that some of those who would rather Israel didn’t exist choose an alternative approach—ignoring anything remotely positive about Israel and focusing only on bad news that fits their anti-Israel agenda.

And it is an unfortunate fact that many of those Israel-haters work in the media and have the ability to shape perceptions. So Israeli scientific breakthroughs . . . are reported as if they have simply happened by magic, with their Israeli origins ignored.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: BDS, Israel & Zionism, Medicine, Science

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society