[Elder of Ziyon] Friday morning snippets (Zvi)

From Zvi:

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This year, Israel issued 200,000 entry permits to Palestinians for Eid al-Fitr and Ramadan

"Israeli authorities issued 130,000 entry permits to Palestinians to observe the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting. Even young men, whom Israelis normally regard with suspicion as potential militants, were permitted entry....Tallied with entry permits issued during Ramadan, the number of permits reached 200,000."

This figure is interesting. 200,000 entry permits constitutes roughly 10% of the entire Arab population of the West Bank.

[AP says that "Israel has allowed the entry of over 1 million Palestinians from the occupied West Bank since the beginning of Ramadan due to improved security." It sounds like Palestinian Arabs used their permits multiple times. - EoZ]

Add this to your list of Israeli goodwill gestures that the PA will throw back in Israel's face, and which will be completely ignored by most of the world's media.

Apparently, a lot of the visiting Arabs made straight for the beach. I hope that they had fun.

The move was initiated by Israel's Defense Ministry, which Israel-haters and various western news media consistently paint in terms that recall the Nazis.

The world is a very different place from the world as portrayed by the BBC or Human Rights Watch... .

Israel saving the world again... .

"Taking the idea of solar thermal hot water heaters to the next level is Tigi Solar, a new Israeli company that was inspired by the busy bee.The inside of Tigi's solar energy collector looks like a honeycomb. This unique shape helps collect more sun power more efficiently than regular solar collectors -- so efficiently that boiling hot water made from the sun can even be piped in to heat homes."

Israel and Germany team up to help Kenya

"Israelis, Germans and Kenyans have teamed up to increase the tilapia (St. Peter's fish) population and improve wastewater treatment in Lake Victoria.Last week, high-level representatives from the three parties signed a trilateral agreement in Kenya for a project that has been in the works for roughly a year, to upgrade commercial fishery and wastewater purification systems in Africa's largest lake, officials from the Foreign Ministry told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday... .If successful, the team may carry out similar projects in Uganda and Tanzania, both of which also rely on the lake, and representatives have already started talks with Ugandans about the idea."

Israel and the US are Natural Allies

Just what it says!

"An honest American broker would no longer ignore blatant Palestinian myopia. Just this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared Jerusalem a Muslim and Christian city, insisting that there will be no peace until the Jewish occupiers depart. The Jews, he said, wish to "destroy the Al Aqsa mosque and build the alleged Jewish temple.""

Eyesight for Israel's Blind

In this column, a person who has internalized a bogus caricature of Israel is surprised to find that the scene in an Israeli hospital demolishes that caricature - but then fails to draw the obvious conclusion and crawls back inside his shuttered world-view. What a shame... .

Warning - the column demonstrates in many places that the author simply doesn't "get" Israel or the local Arabs.

"This distrustful ignorance of the other can be found everywhere in Israel. Or almost everywhere, for there is a place that escapes this reality: the hospital. Because of an urgent eye problem upon my arrival in Israel in late June, I had to spend seven hours in the ophthalmology department of the Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, which is the main centre of treatment, teaching, and research in Jerusalem.What I saw during those hours were, despite my personal condition, the most comforting and hopeful signs that I have encountered in the entire region in many years. Arab citizens of Israel – that is, Palestinian doctors and nurses – were treating Jewish and Arab patients. Israeli doctors and nurses attended to Arabs' needs. I even saw some inter-action among patients themselves. Old Israelis who had clearly come from eastern Europe before the Second World War were playing with very young Palestinian children. There was an atmosphere of reassuring tolerance of the other....What I encountered that day in Ein Kerem was the best of Israel – and a direct rebuttal to the frequent accusation that Israel is an 'apartheid state'. "

The author is wrong to think that this scene is unique; there are scenes in many places in Israel - and not only in medical settings - where cooperation and tolerance are the rule. But he is right that Israel's doctors represent [some of] the best of Israel and that the scene at the hospital blows out of the water the ludicrous claims about "apartheid." The story also reminds me a bit of Yaakov Lozowick's blog post about a hospital emergency room.

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Posted By Elder of Ziyon to Elder of Ziyon at 8/24/2012 05:16:00 AM