Technion Scientists Create Breath Test for Cancer Detection

 

by Maayana Miskin

 

Scientists at the Technion in Haifa have created a device that they hope will be able to detect cancer with a simple breath test. In an initial trial, the “breathalyzer” test was able to detect lung cancer with 86 percent accuracy.

The new device was revealed this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Researchers hope the test will provide a simple, cost-effective and non-invasive method of detecting cancer. In addition, the test is capable of detecting cancers that are not yet large enough to show up on X-rays or CT scans, allowing for earlier diagnosis that could save lives.

The system works by testing for chemicals that tend to be present in lungs affected by cancer but not in healthy lungs. The Technion team decided to test for four such chemicals: ethylbenzene, decane, heptanol and trimethylbenzene.

Patients’ breath is sent over a circuit made of silicon embedded with gold nanoparticles. If the breath contains the organic compounds common to cancer sufferers, the circuit’s electrical resistance will change.

The research team was led by Hossam Haick. The team had developed a similar test in the past, using carbon nanotubes. The silicon-gold combination was found to be superior, they said. Unlike the device that used carbon nanotubes, the latest development is not sensitive to the water vapor found in lungs.

In addition, the latest version of the test works even on patients who have recently ingested alcohol, food, coffee or tobacco. Previous versions required patients to abstain before the test in order to avoid false results.

Haick and his team have patented their device, but will continue to work to perfect it. The device must pass further clinical trials before being put to use, at which point scientists will face the challenge of creating versions of the test that are simple and inexpensive enough to be used in day-to-day practice in hospitals and clinics.

Anne Frank Remembered Clip

Anne Frank Remembered Clip

Shared via AddThis

 

Thank you to  Arutz Sheva for the clip   

 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132923. 

As a teenager I attended Oriel girls school in Rhodesia.  I remember going to a school play one evening.  It was the story of Anne Frank.  I was both impressed, intrigued and saddened at the story that was enacted before my eyes. 

 

 

As a child of the sixty’s, born just 15 years after the end of the Second World War I was remarkably ignorant about the war that devistated so much of the world and the holocaust that took so many lives.  I learned nothing about it in school and this play, along with various hellfire and glory movies were the only things to informing me about this tragic part of  history.  I think perhaps the world was trying to heal itself by forgetting what had happened.  It certainly wasn’t being openly discussed or was it that the adults were trying to keep the shocking, bitter truth from their children and preserve the innocence of childhood?  I saw war movies for what they were, making something very nasty into something exciting and even glorious.  I was not a man or a soldier but  a little girl just like Anne Frank. 

I think her story touched me because I came to know about her when I was the same age as she would have been.  Like her, as well, I kept a diary from the age of eleven onwards and like her I shared my thoughts, feelings, dreams and hopes for the future with the little book.  Although from a different time and place we would have shared many similarities as all young girls do.  The play being done by and presented in a school was the story of a child, a young girl and a human being and yet I do think of her as a hero, my hero.  She didn’t fight in any wars or save the world but fought a kind of a battle for her own survival.  Sadly she lost and what she experienced in those last days or weeks of her life in the concentration camp was also lost with her death.  But, we still have her to remember through her writing, a very personal, innocent and honest account of her trials and tribulations.  I believe I not only saw the play but read a book about her as well as seeing a film made many years ago. Now she is remembered through the film and book based on her diary; a German postage stamp commemorates her would be 80th birthday; a pink rose Soverneir  d Anne Frank is named after her and in her home town a small statue remembers her.    She has become somewhat of an icon amongst the many who died in the Holocaust.  But, no drama or account can ever bring close the atrocity of what we today remember distantly as the holocaust. The numers and events too catastrophic to envisage but made a little comprehensible by the account of one sadly missed young girl.

The facts of the holocaust of which she was a victim are accounted in Wikipaedea as follows

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστον (holókauston): holos, “whole” and kaustos, “burnt”), also known as The Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, Latinized ha’shoah; Yiddish: חורבן, Latinized churben or hurban^[2]) is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, its allies, and collaborators.^[3] Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis’ systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, including ethnic Poles, the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents.^[4] By this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims is between 11 million and 17 million people.^[5]

 

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were crammed into ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany‘s bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called “a genocidal state”.^[6]

 ^{From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust}

^{May we never forget}

 

Sacred Memories – The meaning of empty shoes.

      

 Empty Shoes

One of the most poignant monuments in the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the mountainous display of empty shoes. Thousands and thousands  of ownerless shoes; old people’s shoes, young people’s shoes, sturdy shoes, torn shoes, large shoes, little shoes and even infant shoes. All are empty; their bearers never to walk again.

This jarring image brings the Holocaust home with a vengeance. It does not just tug at the heart, it figuratively tears it apart. Each one of these  shoes was worn by a vibrant, breathing, creative human being. The souls that inhabited the shoes were cruelly driven from the Earth before their time; the shoe, forlorn and alone, is left to bear witness. The image is jarring precisely because the shoes remind us that we too bear witness. We are living testimony to a vibrancy that would have been. The emptiness of these shoes invokes our sacred responsibility to fill a yawning gap that never should have been.

The shoes are jarring for yet another reason; they proclaim the sanctity of this place. Where six million die there is horror. Where innocent souls  are shattered there is tragedy. Where human beings are transformed into gruesome piles of bones and charred flesh there are no answers. There is no room for musing, no room for understanding; travesty numbs the mind.

 There can be no thought; there can be only reverence. Six million souls demand stillness and respect; acknowledgement of  G-d’s infinite vastness.  

 The room is sacred; the memories are holy. As G-d said to Moses, “Remove your shoes, you tread on hallowed ground.”

It might have been a fitting tribute for all visitors to remove their own shoes and leave them beside this display. We are not more worthy than they; our shoes no more deserving than theirs. Yet we don’t do that, and for good reason. Our creed does not celebrate death; we mourn it. Our response is not to join the ranks of despair, but to commit to ever more vibrant life. We are determined to move forward; we are determined to fill our shoes and in the process to fill theirs too. Their memory is hallowed, their death tragic, but we aim to sanctify it, by allowing it to energize us in life.

 Priestly Shoes

      When Jewish priests ascend the synagogue’s podium to bless the congregation they too remove their shoes. The blessing of the Jewish people is a sacred affair and the priests dare not tread on this hallowed ground with shoes. Yet, the image of their shoes lined up against the wall evokes a completely different response. What is the difference between the empty shoes of blessing and the empty shoes of death? Don’t they both denote holiness?

Rabbi Pesach Crone offers the following response.(1) The shoes of the priests will soon be worn again; they will carry their bearers to yet another mitzvah (good deed). One will carry its owner to Bible studies, the other to visit the ill, yet another to offer charity and another to pray to G-d. These shoes are temporarily bare while their owners bless the children of Israel; the other shoes will remain empty forever.  Never will they carry their owners to the performance of a good deed; never will they enable their owners to worship G-d. A life story has ended abruptly; a symphony of good deeds was silenced before it reached its crescendo.  Those lives will never be reclaimed, but the music of their worship need not stop. It is up to us to continue their song, to pick up where they left off. This is perhaps the most poignant message of the empty shoes.

 

 Six million lives forever gone, twelve million shoes forever empty, but the music of these souls need not end. We can perpetuate their memories through our prayers and good deeds. We might perform a mitzvah in their memory or pray on their behalf. We might give to charity in their honor or dedicate our spiritual growth to their inspiration. In this way, their shoes  will take up the walk; their rhythmic sound of falling footsteps will echo once  again. The flow of their good deeds will spring back to life.

     

Kaddish

This, suggests why the preeminent Jewish memorial prayer, the Kaddish, contains no mention of the deceased’s name. The Kaddish is  not only about remembering, it is also about restoring. Every life is a tribute to the creative power of G-d. As we recognize our debt of gratitude to the Almighty we sanctify His Divine name. Our passing leaves an undesired and unintended, but very real, hole in the sanctification of the Divine. It is left to the living to fill this gap.

 

When our loved ones recite Kaddish in our memory, our soul’s sanctification of G-d continues. The Kaddish does not contain the name of  the deceased because it is not about the deceased; it is about G-d who was sanctified through the life of the deceased and after life through Kaddish. Furthermore, through the Kaddish the deceased continues to live, albeit on a higher and holier plane. 

 

It is our destiny to walk in their footsteps. It is our responsibility to resume the song that was prematurely muted. It is our sacred duty to honor the empty shoes by restoring the vibrancy of their owners’ souls.

Yitagadal veyitkadash shmei rabbah….

 

 Footnotes

1) His moving essay, “Soulless Shoes,” can be found in a book called In The Spirit of the Maggid.

 

Rabbi Eliezer (Lazer) Gurkow, currently serving as rabbi of

congregation Beth Tefilah in London, Ontario, is a well-known

speaker and writer on Torah issues and current affairs.

The Art of Growth

by Rabbi Avi Shafran

Human nature isn’t a dichotomy.

 

I don’t often ride the New York subways, but not long ago I found myself leaving a train deep beneath Brooklyn, at the borough’s cavernous Atlantic Street station. And I was surprised to be greeted, amid all the usual squalor and bustle, by a large and exquisite reproduction of “The Starry Night,” Vincent Van Gogh’s eerie painting. I’m no art aficionado, but the famous rendering of a haloed moon and stars in a swirling blue firmament has always moved me. What in the world – or underworld – though, was a copy of the painting doing on a subway station wall?

 

Then, turning to find the track I needed, I found myself face to face with an unmistakable Monet pond-scene. Nearby, I noticed with increasing amusement, were cubist visions by Picasso, Warholian soup cans and various other copies of paintings, drawings and photographs whose originals hang in museums.

Or, as I discovered, a museum – New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The posters were part of an advertising campaign to lure subway riders to visit the originals.

Clever, I thought, and a nice touch for a famously unrefined environment. Then my thoughts drifted.

The reproductions before me were, at least to untrained eyes like mine, virtually indistinguishable from the originals. I’m sure the textures of the brush strokes are evident in the actual paintings; and they alone, after all, were produced by the artists’ hands. But great pains had been taken to present subway patrons with top-notch copies of the MOMA possessions; and the results, had they been hanging on a museum wall, could probably have fooled most people.

Yet the originals are, well, authentic, and priceless; and the copies, mere copies, worth only their printing costs (and copyright fees).

People, too, I ruminated, can be real or ersatz. Some are just what they seem. Others, though, are, in effect, cheap copies, pretending to be what they project, but lacking authenticity of character, the brush strokes of the soul.

There are, for instance, genuine leaders dedicated to advancing the interests of those they lead, and shameful imitations, demagogues donning mantles of power for their own personal gain. There are true scientists, open to wonder and dedicated to discerning natural truths; and there are counterfeit ones, duly credentialed, but without the sense of objectivity that underlies the genuine pursuit of truth. There are deeply religious people, who understand that there is a greater Power than any temporal one, whose will human beings must strive to discern and follow. And there are charlatans, pretenders to spirituality, sometimes obvious, other times not. It is no different in the observant Jewish community, where there are sincere men and women pledged to the laws and ideals of the Jewish religious tradition, but also people who dress the part, but whose clothes are just costumes.

But those are the extremes; human nature isn’t a dichotomy. There are also leaders who want to do what is right, but succumb at times to doing what’s best for themselves; scientists who are basically objective, but occasionally allow their biases reign; religious people whose deepest desire is to serve G-d, but who are vulnerable to laziness, jealousy and anger.

That describes many of us, I think. But we aren’t fakers for the fact. There is a great difference between pathology and imperfection, between being hypocritical and being human.

The Talmud relates how, for a period of time, under the leadership of the illustrious sage Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh, the study hall was open exclusively to students whose “insides were like their outsides” – who were precisely what they purported to be, righteous scholars.

Rabban Gamliel’s successor, however, loosened the requirement – for the better, the Talmud implies.

So it would seem that even those of us who are less than perfectly coherent need not despair. My revered mentor, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, of blessed memory, noted that the Talmud’s wording is instructive. We are not exhorted to bring our “outsides” into line with our “insides” – to achieve spiritual purity and then adopt its signifiers – but

rather the other way around. We are permitted, even required, to outwardly emulate those more spiritually accomplished than we, to embrace acts of observance and goodness, even if our souls are not yet as pure as our clothing. “A person is acted upon,” in the words of Sefer HaChinuch, “by his actions.”

And yet, the “insides like outsides” ideal clearly remains the ultimate goal, not only for scholars, but for us all. We may not yet have achieved – and, as the imperfect creatures we are, may never achieve – full coherence, but we must strive for it all the same. The only excuse for not being there is that we’re trying to get there. And as long as we are honestly working toward our goal, our efforts bring us closer.

How fortunate are we humans. A copy of a Van Gogh cannot ever, no matter how hard it tries, grow into the real deal.

Shavuot: Rising Above the Senses

A few place names set the scene for the whole of Judaism. Moriah, Jerusalem, Sinai, Masada – they evoke overwhelming thoughts and emotions. Shavuot, of course, turns the spotlight on Sinai. The greatest event in history took place there, but the rabbinic sages were adamant that it was and remains a rather ordinary mountain, unimpressive in relation to the majestic peaks elsewhere.
The place was not as important as the message; the lesson mattered more than the locale. After the Six Day War, we were able see the mountain that is reputed to be Mount Sinai close up, and the rabbinic notion that this was no grand, remarkable peak was proved over and over again.
So if we cannot and do not concentrate on the venue, what of the message with which it is associated?
The message is Revelation – God revealed Himself to Moses and the assembled multitude of Israel. A difficult concept, for God is infinite and non-physical, and yet He was able to communicate with finite, physical mankind. Of course, nothing is impossible for God, but our human reason cries out to understand how the Revelation could have happened.
“No man can see Me and live,” says God (Exodus 33:20); and yet human beings perceived something of Him, even if it was with the mind’s eye and not in the normal sense, and they lived. The people said to Moses, “You speak to us and we shall hear: let not God speak to us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:30), and yet God did speak to them, and they did not die.
“The people saw the thunder” (Exodus 20:15); the rabbis remarked, “They saw that which is normally heard, and they heard that which is normally seen.” It seems that the demarcation between the senses fell away. All five senses combined in a unique experience. There was no longer a dividing line between sight and hearing, smell and touch, feeling and any of the other senses. Man rose above his normal self. His elevation removed him from the constraints of earthly life. His ecstasy brought him into higher realms. For a moment, man was in Heaven, and lived. Moses had feared that the moment would bring destruction: “Let them keep away, lest they break through to see God, and many will perish” (Exodus 19:21) – but they survived.

There may be a parallel in a story told of four rabbis who entered “the garden (of spirituality)” and only one – Rabbi Akiva – “entered in peace and emerged in peace.” (Chagigah 14b) The miracle of the Revelation at Sinai is that a whole people entered in peace and emerged in peace. What actually happened we cannot discern with the regular apparatus of human reason and logic, but our ancestors knew that they had perceived a glimpse of God and had heard His voice.
What Sinai teaches us is that earth-bound mortals, however rarely, can reach out to the Ineffable and rise above the limitations of their physical senses. It teaches us, too, that in an ethical sense we can rise above the defects and drawbacks of being human, and achieve a world in which love, truth, peace and justice are actualities and not just dreams.

Rabbi Dr Raymond Apple AO RFD is Emeritus Rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney. He is now retired and lives in Jerusalem, where he publishes OzTorah, a weekly email list and website with Torah insights from an Australian perspective.

The Diaspora Matrix 04 May 2009

For me, the most poignant event of this year’s Israel Independence Day was attending the memorial ceremony at my children’s religious grade school. Two of my sons, along with a large cast of other 10-12 years olds, told stories about brave Israeli soldiers who had fallen defending our cherished homeland, the greatest sacrifice and sanctification of G-d that a Jew can make. Others acted out the famous battle of Givat HaTachmoshet, one of the decisive battles of the Six Day War. After the profoundly moving two-minute long siren that is sounded all over the country, the children paraded with Israeli flags around the auditorium in tune to the rousing Israeli melodies of the school band.Thank you, G-d,” I said quietly.

“Thank you for taking me out of America. Thank you for erasing all of the American garbage and tapes and TV shows in my head. Thank you for making me realize that George Washington isn’t my real forefather, and that the Boston Tea Party has nothing to do with my past.\”

\”Thank you G-d for rescuing me from a false identity and a foreign land. Thank you G-d for bringing me to the Land of the Jews and teaching me the true meaning of Torah, which isn’t just performing individual mitzvot, like kashrut and Shabbos, but helping to build the Jewish Nation in its Holy Land. Thank you G-d for giving me healthy, wonderful children who are all growing up as Jews through and through, celebrating Israel’s independence, and not someone else’s, and honoring Jewish soldiers who died in the realization of a 2000 year old dream and not cowboys, wrestlers, and movie stars.”

Only an immigrant who lives in Israel can appreciate the incredible difference between religious kids who grow up in Israel with their Diaspora counterparts. My children are a different species of child, a totally different breed. Sure they like candy and Coke and playing basketball like all children, but their heads are completely different.

The wars they learn about are Jewish wars. Their war heroes are Israeli. Their flag is the Star of David – not the Stars and Stripes of someone else’s country. Their songs of patriotism are Israeli. They celebrate Israel independence and not the Fourth of July. The history they learn is the history of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and King David, Rabbi Akiva and the Macabbees. Instead of growing up being American kids who are Jewish, they are Children of Israel, just as we are called in the Bible.

Say what you will, Jewish life in the Diaspora is like M&M’s, Jewish on the inside and sugar coated on the outside. For example, whether Jewish children in America be completely secular, reform, modern Orthodox, or Haredi, their souls may be Jewish but their heads are sugar coated with the gentile culture that surrounds them. They think like Americans, speak like Americans, act like Americans, dress like Americans, identify with America, like American things, think Washington DC is their capital, and celebrate the Fourth of July.

Here in Israel, I meet a lot of wonderful, young Jewish Americans who come for a year of study. No matter what religious group they belong to, or how many years they’ve been in yeshiva, their heads are 100% pasteurized, homogenized American. Religious-wise they are all good, well-meaning Jews, but their heads have been grafted with all of the history and folklore of America, from Betsy Ross to Sylvester Stallone and jokes about Obama. Who isn’t familiar with the silly giggles and loud juvenile chatter of American Jewish girls on Israeli buses? “Oh cool, oh colossal, oh Julie, what a freak out, hee hee hee!” While Israeli kids their age are going into the army or some other meaningful national service.

Thank G-d my kids are growing up in Israel. Thank G-d for opening my eyes that being Jewish means being absorbed in Jewish history, and celebrating Jewish independence, and living in the Jewish Land, and performing the mitzvot in the place they were meant to be performed, and actualizing the goal of our prayers by living a life of Torah in the Land which You gave to our Forefathers.

Thank you G-d that my children are growing up as Children of Israel, and not children of America or Australia or France. Thank you G-d that my children will marry Jews. Thank you G-d for enabling me to understand the amazing difference between being here in Israel, Your chosen Land, even with all of the challenges and difficulties, rather than living out an unreal Matrix identity in some gentile foreign land.

Thank you G-d for rescuing me from the Matrix and for bringing me home.

by
Iyar 7, 5769, 5/1/2009

Israel Report on Iran\’s plan to Attack US, 27 04 2009

Study: Iran to Attack US, Israel

 

 by Malkah Fleisher

  

 

Just two days after US President Barack Hussein Obama shared a controversial and landmark handshake with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has released a study analyzing the flowering alliance between the increasingly anti-Western Latin America and the virulently anti-Israel Iran

 

 

The study was conducted at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), a non-governmental organization dedicated to Israeli intelligence and terrorism issues.

According to the study, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is using anti-Western Hugo Chavez as a springboard into several Latin American countries, such as Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, where he intends to establish a religious, terrorist, political and economic foothold in South America. Iran has already made major inroads in its relationship with Venezuela and Bolivia, largely based on shared anti-American sentiments.

Iran will utilize this developing relationship to challenge the United States, parts of Asia, and Africa, said the study.

 

The Islamic Republic will also leverage petrodollars and Muslim operatives positioned throughout key Latin American countries to implement a radical anti-Western agenda, fight America‘s anti-nuclear policy, and to slash international economic sanctions according to the IICC.

 

In addition, the report warns that Iran

 

may launch anti-American and anti-Israel terror attacks through intelligence and terror networks in South American countries.

 

Ahmadinejad, who hosted a “World Without Zionism” conference in 2005, promoting his goal to “wipe Israel off the map”, has already succeeded in wounding Israeli diplomatic relations in the region, with Israel‘s diplomatic core being forced out of Chavez’s Venezuela and Bolivia during the anti-terror Operation Cast Lead in January 2009.

 

Khomeini-inspired Shi ‘ite Islamic and Iranian revolutionary propaganda is being exported by Iran into non-Muslim and Muslim communities in Latin America,  in large part through its terror proxy, Hizbullah, which is raising funds for operation by uniting with South American drug and crime cartels.

 

The IICC report cites several U.S. intelligence and military officials expressing concern over rising Iranian activity in Latin America, and increasing numbers of converts in the region to Islam.

 

Chavez and Obama exchanged a warm greeting on Friday, and again on Saturday, at which time Chavez presented Obama with a book on American and European imperialism in South America

 

 

 

Chavez, who said being in Iran‘s capital city of Tehran made him feel “like arriving at one’s own home”, told reporters he shared a good moment with Obama, who he called “intelligent.” The Venezuelan dictator once referred to former US

President George W. Bush as “the devil” at a meeting of the United Nations.

Venezuela and Israel enjoyed a strong relationship in the past, with Venezuela voting in favor of Jewish statehood at the United Nations on November 27, 1947.

 

 

Entry for 25 April 2009

Does PA Really Want a State?
by Yehudah Lev Kay 

An editorial in the latest issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly posits that the Palestinian Authority may never have a state because it does not want one. Writer Robert Kaplan claims that statelessness has more appeal to the PA than statehood.

Kaplan’s ideas are based on a recent study by John Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel in which he claims that in the modern era, technologies have given minority groups more power to communicate and commit violent acts without the need for a formal state. He claims that the lack of a state, rather than being a detriment, enables the group to maintain its extremist views while avoiding the complicated task of governing.

Grygiel cites as a case in point the Hizbullah terrorist group. “Though probably capable of taking over the weak central government of Lebanon, Hizbullah has preferred to maintain its sub-state role, thereby limiting its responsibility and hence its vulnerability to attacks,” he writes. “Having a state would most likely weaken the ability of Hizbullah to attack Israel, whose military forces could find easy targets.”

“Statelessness provides impunity from the retaliatory actions of a powerful state,” Grygiel points out, in one of the main thrusts of his study.

Hamas, once it gained independence from Israel, faced exactly the problem Hizbullah chooses to avoid, according to Kaplan. “It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in…Gaza…that made it easier for Israel to bomb it,” he explains.

The implications for the Palestinian Authority are just as clear. “Statehood would mean openly compromising with Israel,” he writes. “Better the glory of victimhood … As a stateless people, Palestinians can lob rockets into Israel, but not be wholly blamed in the eyes of the international community. Statehood would, perforce, put an end to such license.”

As proof that the Palestinian Authority prefers to remain stateless, Kaplan points out that although former Prime Minister Ehud Barak made vast concessions to late PA Chairman Yasir Arafat at Camp David in 2000, the PA leader chose not to compromise. As Kaplan explains, Arafat “may have seen that as a more morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion to a life of statelessness than that of making the unenchanting concessions association with achieving statehood.”

Arab Faces Death for Land Sale 24 April 2009

As a Palestinian Authority Arab faces the death sentence for selling land to Jews, a civil rights group asks Prime Minister Netanyahu to demand that PA rescind death penalty for the “crime.”

The Yesha (Judea and Samaria) Civil Rights Organization has written an urgent letter to Binyamin Netanyahu and ministers in his government in light of the opening of the trial this week. According to PA law, the defendant faces the death penalty if convicted.

The letter, addressed to Netanyahu and the Ministers of Justice, Defense, and Public Security, states, “The Land of Israel is now the only place in the world where the law officially bans the sale of land to Jews because they are Jews. Even worse, the punishment for violators is actually death.”

The organization says that Netanyahu’s government must set an ultimatum: “No negotiations with the Palestinian Authority until this anti-Semitic law is rescinded. This demand takes precedence even over the insistence that the PA recognize Israel as a Jewish state.”

The trial of the Hevron resident in a special PA court began on Tuesday, with the defendant accused of having sold land in the Hevron area to Jews. The Yesha group asks Netanyahu and the ministers to step in to save the man, who is being charged with treason.

Israel’s intervention in the past has caused the PA to release others who had been jailed on suspicion of selling land to Jews. These include Arab-Israelis living in eastern Jerusalem.

Strook: “Such a Law is a Red Light for Diplomatic Relations“

Orit Strook of the Jewish Community of Hevron, the director of the Yesha Civil Rights group, says, “Israel would never have diplomatic relations with any country that has on its books a law forbidding the sale of land to Jews.”

Her organization’s letter states that the confiscation of Beit HaShalom (Peace House) from its rightful Jewish owners in Hevron several months ago is directly related to the fact that Arabs must fear for their lives when selling to Jews: “The Israeli authorities act as if the Arab sellers are free people, when in fact a gun is pointed at their heads and they must do everything they can to hide their actions – and this is why they claimed after the sale of Beit HaShalom [to Jew that they never sold it.”

“So long as the ‘Palestinian rule of law’ is not uprooted from its source,” the letter concludes, “all the talk about Israeli rule of law in Judea and Samaria has no foothold in reality.”

by Hillel Fendel