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DEMOCRATS, IN THEIR ZEAL TO NAIL TRUMP, WOUND UP SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THEIR FOOT. NOW TRUMP HAS ARGUED ALL MEMBERS OF CONRESS SHOULD HAVE THEIR TAX RETURNS OPENED FOR PUBLIC VIEWING.
BECAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS GOOD FOR THE GANDER.
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The Trump Tax Return Precedent
Democrats shatter the privacy norm for no public benefit.
By The Editorial Board
House Democrats released Donald Trump’s tax returns to the public on Friday, four days before they lose their majority, and in the process did more harm to their reputation than to the former President’s. The dump is a violation of taxpayer privacy with no legislative purpose, and it could open an ugly new battlefield in American politics.
The Ways and Means Committee released Mr. Trump’s individual and business filings from 2015 to 2020. The release caps Chairman Richard Neal’s yearslong campaign, which he claims is meant to expose the Internal Revenue Service for slow-footing mandatory audits of the President. “Our review found that under the prior Administration the program was dormant,” Mr. Neal said in defense of the document dump.
The details of the returns will take some time to analyze, but the initial reviews are neither flattering nor particularly damning to Mr. Trump. His individual filings show negative taxable income in four of the six years and a total liability of about $4.4 million. That reflects a bumpy record in real estate and other ventures, though Mr. Trump chalked up his small tax bill to “depreciation and various other tax deductions” in a statement after the release.
Critics are making hay of Mr. Trump’s loans to his children and deductions for items like “helicopter expenses.” Yet these are the sort of issues that arise in most wealthy taxpayers’ returns, and they’ll be vetted, and perhaps argued about, in audits out of public view.
Mr. Trump appears to have hired legions of lawyers to exploit every possible loophole in the tax code. If Congress doesn’t like that, it can rewrite and simplify the code. But that would strip the Members of their power to do favors for, well, real-estate investors and other campaign contributors.
The actual point of the release is to embarrass Mr. Trump for refusing to release his returns. We criticized him for this, but it isn’t a legal requirement. Democrats needed a legislative purpose to pry private records from the IRS, and the best excuse they could manage was a desire to strengthen the agency’s presidential-audit policy. The weakness of that rationale was laid bare at the Dec. 20 meeting when Ways and Means approved the release
Karen McAfee, Democrats’ top oversight staffer, couldn’t explain how releasing the returns would affect legislation. Pressed by GOP Rep. Kevin Brady, she sputtered that Democrats want a bill “to make sure that the audits start on time.” No word on how speeding up audits requires broadcasting Mr. Trump’s finances to the world.
Rep. Neal has repeatedly claimed that the IRS didn’t begin its probe of Mr. Trump’s 2015 taxes until Ways and Means pressured it in April 2019, and he’s suggested that other reviews were also late. The agency disputed his complaint in a letter to the committee this month, saying it started the first audit in January 2018 and that its review of Mr. Trump’s 2020 return is still pending. Yet at the Ways and Means hearing, Mr. Neal maintained his original claim.
Thomas Barthold, chief of staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) who reviewed Mr. Trump’s taxes at Ways and Means’ request, told the committee that he’d never heard the IRS’s side of the story. Democrats rushed JCT to produce a summary in less than four days, and it echoed the Democrats’ claim of a late 2020 audit. If Mr. Barthold had seen the IRS letter, the JCT summary might have undercut Democrats’ “legislative” excuse.
The release sets a terrible precedent for the treatment of private information by Congress. The Supreme Court last month declined to block the Ways and Means seizure of Mr. Trump’s returns, holding that Congress can define for itself what legislative purposes are suitable to snoop on personal records. But until Mr. Trump, lawmakers maintained a high bar for doing so—and Congress has never before released a private citizen’s tax information.
If all it takes is an airy notion about reforming this or that policy, it won’t be hard for partisans to justify seizing and releasing anyone’s returns. House Republicans may cite this precedent next year in an effort to publish Hunter Biden’s tax returns, or those of any disfavored individual or group.
“This is a regrettable stain on the Ways and Means Committee and Congress, and will make American politics even more divisive and disheartening,” said Mr. Brady, who leaves office next week. “In the long run, Democrats will come to regret it.” And maybe not all that long.
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The End of Progressive Intellectual Life
How the Foundation-NGO complex quashed innovative thinking and open debate, first on the American right and now on the center-left
By Michael Lind
I have never liked the term “public intellectual,” but like its 19th-century predecessor, “publicist,” it describes a social type that plays a useful role in liberal democracies in which at least some government decision-making is influenced by open debate rather than secret discussions behind closed doors. To influence voters, public intellectuals write for a general educated public (not necessarily the less-educated majority) in ordinary language, not jargon. Like the policymakers whom they also seek to influence, they are necessarily generalists. In the service of what the Brazilian-American public intellectual Roberto Unger calls a strategic “program,” public intellectuals ponder connections among different policy realms—economic, foreign, and cultural—if only to ensure that one policy does not contradict another. Public intellectuals tend to annoy their own side by probing its internal weaknesses, while trying to convert members of the other team rather than simply denounce them.
The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center-left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual.
If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st-century, intellectual life on the American center-left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism, Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.
Consider center-left journals of opinion. In the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center-left, from the technocratic neoliberalism of Washington Monthly to the New Left countercultural ethos of The Nation and the snobbish gentry liberalism of The New Yorker. Today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.
You cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star.
It is not surprising that the output of this billionaire-funded bureaucratic apparatus does not make for very interesting or original reading. Open any center-left journal at random and you will find the likes of this, from a recent interview of an academic named Wendy Brown in Dissent: “It is also important not to stay inside our tiny circles because most of our inherited traditions of political theory, including critical theory, have in them the masculinism, the whiteness, the colonialism, and, above all, the anthropocentrism that have brought us to our current predicaments with racism, with the planetary crisis, with democracy, with gender, which is still always a secondary consideration.” The only ingredient lacking from this NGO word salad is crunchy croutons, in the form of the acronyms that stud post-intellectual progressive discourse: DEI, CRT, AAPI, BIPOC, LGBTQ+. Wokespeak is Grantspeak.
Meanwhile, in one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism, Inc. has shut down debate on the center-left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and center-left editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGOsphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.
In the 1990s, you could be a progressive in good standing and argue against race-based affirmative action, in favor of race-neutral, universal social programs that would help African-Americans disproportionately but not exclusively. Around 2000, however, multiple progressive outlets at the same time announced that “the debate about affirmative action is over.” Today race-neutral economic reform, of the kind championed by the democratic socialist and Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the Marxist Adolph Reed, is stigmatized on the center-left as “color-blind racism,” and progressives in the name of “equity” are required to support blatant and arguably illegal racial discrimination against non-Hispanic white Americans and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, for fear of being purged as heretics.
Immigration policy provides an even more striking example of the power of Progressivism, Inc. to crush debate among actual progressives. Up until around 2000, libertarians and employer-class Republicans wanted to weaken laws against illegal immigration and expand low-wage legal immigration, against the opposition of organized labor and many African-Americans—who for generations have tended to view immigrants as competitors. The Hesburgh Commission on immigration reform, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and the Jordan Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton and led by Texas Representative Barbara Jordan, the pioneering civil rights leader who was left-liberal, Black, and lesbian, both proposed cracking down on illegal immigration—by requiring a national ID card, punishing employers of illegal immigrants, and cutting back on low-skilled, low-wage legal immigrants. As late as 2006, then-Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both voted for 200 miles of border fencing in the Southwest.
Then, virtually overnight, the progressive movement flipped and adopted the former talking points of the Chamber of Commerce cheap-labor lobby. While Democratic politicians deny that they oppose enforcing immigration laws, center-left journals and journalists keep pushing the idea of open borders, in alliance with crackpot free market fundamentalists. On April 12, 2022, David Dayen in the American Prospect wrote that “declining immigration rates since the pandemic have contributed to labor shortages in key industries and harmed Americans who rely on those services.” Dayen linked to an article in the libertarian Wall Street Journal bemoaning rising wages as a result of lower immigration. On February 20 of this year, The New Yorker published a long essay by Zoey Poll, “The Case for Open Borders,” a fawning profile of the libertarian ideologue Bryan Caplan, author of Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, which, appropriately, takes the form of a graphic novel—that is to say, a comic book.
Back in 2015, Ezra Klein, then editor of the “progressive” outlet Vox, asked Senator Bernie Sanders about the idea of “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders replied in alarm: “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.” The lobby FWD.us, funded by Facebook and other large tech corporations that prefer hiring indentured servants (H-1bs) bound to their employers instead of free American citizen-workers and legal immigrants, denounced Sanders for holding “the totally-debunked notion that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting Americans.” Vox then published an article by Dylan Matthews entitled “Bernie Sanders’s fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrong-headed.” “If I could add one amendment to the Constitution,” Matthews declared, “it would be the one Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley once proposed: ‘There shall be open borders.’” In 2018, the progressive author Angela Nagle was canceled by Progressivism, Inc. when she published an essay in American Affairs, “The Left Case Against Open Borders.” By 2020, when Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, published One Billion Americans, the purging of dissidents and the fusion of the Progressivism, Inc. party line on immigration with the anti-union, cheap labor policies favored by the Wall Street Journal and Silicon Valley was complete.
The energy debate provides another example of the closing of the progressive mind. As recently as the early 2000s, some environmentalists favored reducing atmosphere-heating carbon emissions by expanding nuclear power, replacing coal with lower-carbon natural gas, or both. By 2010 these positions had been thoroughly anathematized by Progressivism, Inc. Not only all fossil fuels but all nuclear energy—which provides 20% of utility electric generation in the United States, roughly the same as all renewable energy sources put together—must be completely eliminated from the energy mix, according to the Green commissars. Insofar as only around 11% of global primary energy, and only around a quarter of global electricity, comes from renewable energy (chiefly hydropower, which has limited potential for expansion), the Green fatwah against nuclear energy seems self-defeating—as well as certain to shovel American money to China, which holds near-monopolies on the rare earth metals and production facilities used to make things like solar panels and lithium batteries. China also happens to be a major source of the fortunes of some of the billionaires who fund progressive media and NGOs.
At this point in history, the foundations and advocacy nonprofits of Progressivism, Inc. do not even bother to go through the charade of public debate and discussion before imposing a new party line. Half a century of debate, discussion, and activism gradually led to a majority consensus among American voters in favor of “negative liberty” for gay men and lesbian women, whose right to be free as individuals from discrimination in employment, housing, and military service does not require other Americans to undertake any actions, and leaves people perfectly free to oppose homosexuality on religious or other grounds.
In striking contrast, in a few years the ideology of gender fluidity went from being an obscure strain of thinking on the academic left to becoming the centerpiece of a radical program of social engineering from above carried out simultaneously by progressive, corporate, and academic bureaucracies. During President Obama’s second term, Americans were startled to be told by the federal government that Title IX, a civil rights law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, actually required gender dysphoric teenage boys to join girls’ sports teams and shower with girls, and that all public school bathrooms had to be rebuilt to be unisex. States that resisted this bizarre misreading of Title IX, which eliminated legal distinctions grounded in biological sex that the statute was written to protect, found themselves boycotted by multinational corporations and sports leagues. Corporate employees and university personnel who questioned the New Party Line now did so at risk of being fired or punished. All of this happened just between 2012 and 2016, with no public debate or discussion within the progressive camp, and no attempts to persuade conservatives, libertarians, liberals, or even pre-2012 progressives—only a sudden diktat from above, accompanied by contemptuous threats of punishment. In 2012, progressives were allowed to agree with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the time that marriage should be between a biological man and a biological woman. By 2020, you were a hateful reactionary conservative bigot if you did not agree that some men can be pregnant and some women have penises.
Who decides what is and is not permissible for American progressives to think or discuss or support? The answer is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.
The center-left donor network uses its financial clout, exercised through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats, to impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees. The methods by which they enforce this discipline can be described as chain-ganging and shoe-horning.
Chain-ganging (a term I have borrowed from international relations theory) in this context means implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee. At a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation that I attended more than a decade ago, an African-American community activist complained to me privately: “Immigration is hurting the people in the neighborhoods we work in. The employers prefer illegal immigrants to young black workers. But if we say anything about it, Ford will cut off our money.”
Shoe-horning is what I call the progressive donor practice of requiring all grantees to assert their fealty to environmentalist orthodoxy and support for race and gender quotas, even if those topics have nothing to do with the subject of the grant. It is not necessary for the donors to make this explicit; their grantees understand without being told, like the favor-seeking knights of Henry II: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” In the last few years, even the most technocratic center-left policy programs—advocating slightly higher earned income tax credits or whatever—have often rewritten their mission statements to refer to “climate justice” and “diversity” and routinely sprinkle Grantspeak like “the racial reckoning” and “the climate emergency” throughout their policy briefs in the hope of pleasing program officers at big progressive foundations.
Thanks to the takeover of the American center-left by Progressivism, Inc., there is literally nothing for a progressive public intellectual to do. To be sure, there are plenty of other kinds of mental work that you can perform as a member of the rising generation of young progressives even in the absence of a functioning public intellectual sphere. You can keep your head down and doubts to yourself, as you work on the technocratic policy that appeals to you the most: raising the minimum wage or free school lunches, perhaps. Or you can write endless variants of the same screed denouncing Republicans and conservatives as rabid white nationalists threatening to create a fascist dictatorship right here in America. Or you can join mobs on Twitter and social media to take part in Two-Minute Hate campaigns against individuals or groups singled out for denunciation that day by Progressivism, Inc. Or you can try to obtain fame and bestseller-status and wealth and tenure by getting the attention of the MacArthur Prize committee and editors at The Atlantic by auditioning for the role of Designated Spokesperson for this or that “protected class” or minority identity group (non-binary Middle East or North African (MENA), for example, not low-income Scots-Irish Appalachian heterosexual Pentecostalist).
You can even be a professor. High-profile American progressive academics like Paul Krugman and Jill Lepore and Adam Tooze who moonlight as public affairs commentators are not public intellectuals—they have the pre-approved left-liberal opinions on all topics that are shared by nine-tenths of the U.S. academic bureaucracy, from the richest Ivy League superstars to the lowliest adjunct at a commuter college. Back in the early 1990s, when as a young neoconservative Democrat I worked for The National Interest, our publisher Irving Kristol exploded in comic exasperation one day: “People are calling professors intellectuals! Professors aren’t intellectuals. Intellectuals argue with each other in cafes and write for little magazines. Professors are boring people who take out their dusty 20-year-old notes and give the same lecture over and over again.”
Unlike academics who recite the approved current center-left positions on all issues, genuine intellectuals, even if they happen to be employed by universities, are unpredictable and aggravating. They criticize their own allies and appreciate what other schools of thought get right. They do not indulge in contrarianism for its own sake but tend to be controversial, because they put loyalty to what they consider to be truth above party or faction. Needless to say, such people tend to perform quite poorly when it comes to the boot-licking, rote repetition of political slogans, acronym-juggling, groupthink, and “donor servicing” that constitute the forms of intellectual activity favored by big foundations and NGOs, whether of the right or of the left.
Young progressives who remain invested in the life of the mind rather than the life of the party may take some solace from the fact that we have lived through this kind of foundation-driven extinction-level event in our nation’s intellectual life before. In “Why Intellectual Conservatism Died,” published in Dissent back in 1995, I wrote that “instead of boldly attacking falsehoods wherever they are found, conservative editors tend to print only what they believe will confirm the prejudices of the program officers. The addiction to foundation dollars has reinforced the disastrous ‘no enemies to the right’ policy. The last thing the foundations want is for one set of grantees to criticize the policy views or intellectual standards of other grantees.”
Sound familiar? In hindsight, the end of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush witnessed a golden age of discussion and controversy on the American right, as neoconservatives debated paleoconservatives and religious right thinkers, and national security hawks debated isolationists and foreign-policy realists. Around 1992 that window suddenly closed, as right-wing foundations like Bradley and Olin made it clear that the only nonprofit organizations and journals that would receive funding would be those that espoused a new version of “fusionism”—uniting neoconservative fantasies of American world domination in foreign policy, libertarian fantasies about privatizing Social Security, and religious-right wishful thinking about a Christian or Judeo-Christian revival.
Thanks to blacklisting and censorship, foundation-imposed groupthink triumphed on the right, consolidating Conservatism, Inc. and driving away those of us who sought to put the life of the mind above the life of the party. A decade later, President George W. Bush attempted to implement fusionist conservatism with a rigor that Reagan never attempted. In foreign policy, the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq and attempted to realize the conservative fantasy of an American global empire, plunging the Middle East into chaos and bringing Iraq War critics Barack Obama and Donald Trump to power. In domestic policy, Bush tried to partly privatize Social Security, creating a voter backlash. The 2004 Bush-Rove campaign against gay marriage, calculated to bribe working-class Evangelicals into voting for the party of tax cuts for the rich, backfired and led to majority acceptance of gay men and lesbians and the defection of many younger Protestant Evangelicals.
On today’s center-left, as on the bygone center-right, the groupthink imposed by behind-the-scenes donors and their favored nonprofits and media allies is resulting in electoral disaster—this time, for Democrats. The progressive foundations, billionaires, and woke corporations backed a California initiative to legalize anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination; it lost, in part because so many Black and Hispanic Americans support the ideal of a color-blind American society. Democrats underperformed dramatically in 2020, even after COVID killed the economy and terrified most Americans, because the slogans of foundation-backed nonprofits—like Defund the Police and comparisons of the U.S. border patrol to the Gestapo—alienated many Democratic voters as well as swing voters. Black Democrats have favored candidates like Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Eric Adams who oppose anti-police radicalism. And a major reason for the political shift of Hispanic voters in Texas border counties is their opposition to the Democratic Party’s toleration of mass illegal immigration, summed up in the fatuous slogan “No human being is illegal.”
Conservatism, Inc., including flagship journals like the National Review and flagship think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, remains a museum of mummies. Today, Progressivism, Inc. is equally brain-dead. What survives of intellectual politics in the United States today consists of a growing number of exiles from establishment wokeness on Substack and a growing number of dissident leftists, conservatives, and populists, some of whom have come together in new publications like American Affairs, Compact, and The Bellows, and in quirkier couture shops like Tablet.
Having watched from up close over the last four decades as cliques of foundation program officers, individual billionaires, and their nonprofit retainers lobotomized first the American right and then the American left, I hope that I may live to see the American center-left free itself from top-down orthodoxy and welcome dissension, discussion, and debate once again. But I doubt I will live that long.
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GOOD NEWS ISRAEL/MICHAEL ORDMAN
We leave 2022 looking forward to another year of Israeli innovations, discoveries and positive achievements. This newsletter publicizes new Israeli therapies that allow us to look forward to eradicating solid tumors; to safer spine operations; to printing spare parts for the eye and other organs; and the elimination of pathogens altogether.
We appreciate the forward-thinking of the many Israeli Arabs and Jews working together for a better future; the new programs that encourage more Israeli Arabs to benefit from Israel's hi-tech sector; and the leaders of Israel's main religions who can agree to move forward on important common issues.
We anticipate the future success of the Technion's new sustainable research program; the worldwide adoption of Israeli drought-resistant crops; reduced food waste thanks to Israeli bio-friendly fruit preservation; and less vital resources spent on raising animals for their meat, thanks to Israeli plant-based alternatives. The Israeli economy looks to have a bright future, with dozens of Israeli companies understanding the importance of partnerships to develop and implement new technologies; building more Israeli homes; new Israeli airline routes; and investment from novel international sources.
Finally, we expect to uncover more archaeological evidence of the deep, unbroken bond of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and to see the continuation of the return of its exiles.
The photo shows the 2019 display at Ben Gurion Airport of the achievements of the Jewish Agency. Its forward thinking and activities since its founding 93 years ago enabled Israel last year to bring home over 70,000 new immigrants - a 23-year record.
Please recommend www.verygoodnewsisrael.
If this email arrives in your spam / junk folder, please mark it as "not spam".
Wishing all my readers a Very Good 2023.
- A successful Israeli Covid-19 therapy has now begun trials as a cancer treatment.
- An Israeli bio-tech 3D-prints spare parts for the eye.
- 8 Israelis with cerebral palsy have realized their ambition to serve in the IDF.
- Israeli drought-resistant corn is successfully grown in India.
- An Israeli robot is guiding visitors at an Israeli hospital.
- Israel’s personal electric plane completed its first test flight.
- 70,000 new Israeli immigrants in 2022 – the most in 23 years.
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com
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Cancer therapy that could change the world. (TY Atid-EDI) Allocetra from Israel’s Enlivex (see here previously) saved many patients suffering from Covid-19 and sepsis. Clinical trials have now begun, using it to treat patients with advanced solid tumors. Allocetra reprograms immune system macrophages that cause cancer.
https://www.jpost.com/
Unusual brain surgery. Neurosurgeons at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center operated on a two-year-old girl to correct a congenital defect where part of her brain was descending into her nasal cavity. The defect was diagnosed from a blue mark on the bridge of her nose that doctors previously thought to be a birthmark.
https://worldisraelnews.com/
Revolutionizing spinal surgery. Dr. Cezar J. Mizrahi, 36, a new immigrant from Brazil, has performed the first robot-assisted anterior lumbar spine fusion in Israel. Read how Dr Mizrahi compares Brazil, Australia (where he learned how to do complex and minimally invasive spine surgeries) and intense, passionate Israel.
https://www.jpost.com/aliyah/
Eliminate pathogens forever. Israel’s Nanosono has developed an antimicrobial platform based on zinc oxide and copper oxide that permanently eliminates disease-causing pathogens from products and surfaces. Nanosono has partnered with Israel’s Gadot Group, which will build Nanosono’s production line infrastructure in Israel.
https://nocamels.com/2022/12/
https://www.calcalistech.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
100,000 new (harmless) viruses. A study led by Tel Aviv University scientists has uncovered nearly 100,000 types of viruses that were previously unknown to science. The discovery may help in the development of antimicrobial treatments and in protecting against agriculturally harmful fungi and parasites.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/
https://english.tau.ac.il/
Pandemic research partnership. Back in 2020, Israel’s Sheba Medical Center partnered with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH – see here previously) to research Coronavirus treatments. They have now extended their partnership to include any emerging pathogens and the rapid deployment of scientific tools to fight them.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
Israeli influential Covid-19 studies. (TY Hazel) Some 15 percent of the world’s most influential studies on COVID-19 vaccines were written by Israeli scientists - 536 from Jan 2020 to Jun 2022. In the major medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine), Israel was third and fourth respectively.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
https://ijhpr.biomedcentral.
Watch this Covid-19 study. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Tel Aviv University equipped some 4,700 Israelis with smartwatches and monitored them physiologically over two years. None of the 2,000+ who received the coronavirus booster vaccine registered or reported heart-related or other serious side effects.
https://www.jpost.com/health-
https://english.tau.ac.il/
Printing parts for the eye. (TY I24 News) Israel’s Precise Bio is developing 3D-printed synthetic corneas and retinas to enable visually impaired people to see clearly again. Precise Bio takes donated cells, grows them in the lab, and then 3D-prints them onto a biological scaffold. Looking forward to news of future clinical trials.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
USA approval for cellulite treatment. (TY Dr Salem) The US FDA has cleared the SUPERB™ technology of Israel’s Sofwave Medical (see here previously) for the short-term improvement in the appearance of cellulite. The approval followed a successful multi-center US efficacy and safety trial.
https://sofwave.com/news/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
More efficient clinical trials. (TY Atid-EDI) YonaLink bridges the gap between patient care and clinical research, providing the missing link in clinical trials data collection by connecting the patient’s Electronic Health Record (ERC) to the clinical trials’ data capture system, without disrupting the trial.
https://yonalink.com/yonalink-
Arava emergency response center. (TY ILTV) The JNF-USA has established an emergency response center in Sapir in the Israel’s southern Arava / Negev region. The new state of the art command station will provide tourists and residents in this desert region with rescue, fire-fighting and other emergency services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
ISRAEL IS INCLUSIVE AND GLOBAL
8 teens with cerebral palsy join the IDF. Eight wheelchair-bound teens with cerebral palsy from Herzfeld Special Education School in Holon celebrated their long-awaited induction into the Israel Defense Forces. It concluded two years of intensive training to improve their physical, cognitive, and social skills.
https://www.
Changemaker. (TY UWI) Yoseph Haddad, founder of Israeli Arab changemaker group Together Vouch for Each Other, has just won the Menachem Begin Heritage Center’s 2022 Begin Prize, recognizing people or organizations making an extraordinary contribution to Israeli society.
https://www.israel21c.org/i-
In agreement. The heads of Israel’s four major religions attended a conference on breastmilk for newborns in need. Chief Rabbi David Lau, Qadi Eiad Zahalka (head of Sharia Courts), Archbishop Dr. Yousef Matta (Greek Catholic Church), and Qadi Abu Ayash (Druze) all supported the use of donated milk for premature babies.
https://www.
More funds for Arabs to work in hi-tech. (TY Hazel) Last week Israel’s Innovation Authority allocated NIS 17.6 million to train 2,500+ new immigrants and ex-pats in hi-tech (see here). Now a further NIS 21.6 million will fund 12 programs to train and place 2,200+ Israeli Arab men and women in hi-tech over the next two years.
https://www.algemeiner.com/
International Herbal Conference. The Second Annual Ancient Roots Israel (ARI) International Herbal Conference (Jan. 22 – 24) at the Ana Poriya Resort near Tiberias.
https://www.
https://www.
The first cotton fibers. Israeli archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence of cotton in the ancient Near East during excavations at Tel Tsaf, a 7,000-year-old town in the Jordan Valley. The site has provided a wealth of discoveries, including the earliest example of social beer drinking and ritual food storage.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
Rare white wolf seen in Israel. (TY UWI) A wolf with rare white fur was photographed roaming the Negev region. Making it still rarer is that it’s not an albino. The rare breed has been seen before in Israel, including in 2012 in Evrona, a nature reserve near Eilat, and in 2015 in Mishor Yemin, a nature park in the northern Negev.
https://www.jns.org/rare-
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Millions for sustainability research. Israel’s Technion Institute has received a $50 million donation for research into innovations to maintain global growth while protecting the planet for future generations. Projects include sustainable, cost-effective, and efficient ways to reduce environmental harm.
https://www.calcalistech.com/
Energy ratings for new apartments. New Israeli apartments must now be marketed with an energy efficiency rating to enable prospective buyers to calculate their likely energy costs. Residential buildings account for some 30 percent of Israel’s total electricity consumption. Green building standards became mandatory in March.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
Successful drought-resistant crops. (TY UWI & I24 News) Israel’s PlantArcBio (see here previously) has announced positive results of its trials in India to grow drought resistant traits and increase yields of corn. Even in drought conditions PlantArcBio’s Dead Sea derived varieties, produced increased yields up to 250%.
https://finance.yahoo.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Bio-friendly fruit preservation. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s ICL Group (see here previously) has launched FruitMag - a sustainable, fungicide free solution for post-harvest citrus fruit treatment. It uses a food-grade magnesia product to eliminate toxic materials and reduce product losses, while increasing shelf life.
https://investors.icl-group.
Chickpea ice cream. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s ChickP (see here previously) has partnered with ice cream manufacturers Vaniglia to create a prototype of plant-based ice cream based on ChickP’s protein isolate. It is non-allergenic, non-GMO, eco-friendly, and compares well with dairy equivalents in taste and creaminess.
https://www.
Plant-based meat and cheese. (TY I24 News) Ronny Reinberg, CEO and Co-founder of Alfred's FoodTech, (see here previously) joins host Natasha Kirtchuk in the I24 studio to discuss his plant-based meat and cheese alternatives that are planned to hit the shelves next year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Reinventing the computer. Scientists including from Israel’s Technion Institute have developed a structure for computers based on that of the human brain – combining storage and processing on a single chip. They built a neural network into the hardware of a chip and, as a proof of concept, taught it to recognize handwritten letters.
https://www.jpost.com/science/
Training for Moon landing. Israeli startup Sim.space has developed a hybrid laboratory that will allow Israel’s IsraelIL to simulate the 2025 Beresheet 2 mission to land on the Moon (see here previously). The advanced infrastructure will allow the team to practice operational commands and procedures in real time.
https://nocamels.com/2022/12/
https://www.jpost.com/science/
MyHeritage’s “time machine”. Israeli genealogy company MyHeritage.com has released AI functionality that (for a fee) simulates how you would look if you lived during the past or at some future time. It offers to show you in a variety of roles, such as a French royal. Simply upload several photos of yourself from various angles.
https://www.israel21c.org/i-
AI for handwritten manuscripts. The European Research Council has awarded 10 million Euros for the National Library of Israel to develop AI-based computational analyses for 95,000 old manuscripts and fragments. It will fund a consortium including Israel’s Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan, and Haifa universities.
https://www.israel21c.org/
Gary the robot gets his first job. Gary (see here previously) - the robot developed by Israel’s Unlimited Robotics – is now working at Beilinson Hospital, in Petach Tikva, guiding visitors around the hospital and helping with inventory management. See him in action in both Youtube videos below.
https://nocamels.com/2022/12/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Award-winning cyber security. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Seraphic Security has been named a Gold Winner in the 2022 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards from American Security Today for its innovation in Cyber Security Risk Management. Seraphic protects any web browser from attacks that other security software cannot.
https://seraphicsecurity.com/
https://seraphicsecurity.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?
BGU Webinars. You may wish to register to watch these interesting webinars from Ben Gurion University.
Jan 19 - Transforming Eilat Through Sea Tech and More. Feb 9 - How Israel is Leading the Way in Water Renewal. https://americansforbgu.zoom.
https://americansforbgu.org/
ECONOMY & BUSINESS
The 4th best performing economy. (TY Ken K) The UK Economist magazine ranked Israel the fourth best performing economy of the top 34 countries in the OECD. It was based on five macroeconomic indicators - GDP growth, annual inflation, inflation breadth, share prices, and government debt.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
https://en.globes.co.il/en/
Increase in building new homes. Home-building in Israel jumped by 15.6% between Oct 2021 and Sep 2022, with over 70,000 housing starts recorded – the highest for four years. 50,000 apartments were completed in the same period, up 4% on the previous year.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
Israeli airline resumes flights to Turkiye. Israir Airlines will start operating five flights a week from Israel to Istanbul starting this Monday, after 15 years in which Israeli airlines did not fly to Turkiye. Istanbul is one of the most attractive destinations among Israelis who enjoy the short flight, hotels, entertainment, and shops.
https://www.
New technology consortiums. The Israel Innovation Authority is investing NIS 150 million in three new tech consortiums. Integrated silicon photonics (4 companies already selected), metamaterials and meta-surfaces (8 companies), and black soldier fly farming for animal feeds and breaking down organic waste.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
New Jerusalem rail stations will link to Tel Aviv. Jerusalem is set to extend fast train services to and from Tel Aviv into the capital with plans to deliver two more stations in central Jerusalem. They will extend the link from Jerusalem’s Navon station firstly to King George Street and then finally on to the Khan Theater.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
IAC National Summit. The Israeli American Council (IAC) National Summit (Jan 19-21) in Austin Texas is celebrating “Israel. Together”. It also marks Israel’s 75th Birthday, and will host the Israel America Business Playground, bringing together Israeli and American business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators.
https://events.bizzabo.com/
https://www.iacbizplayground.
Israeli personal plane is now flying. Israel’s AIR has conducted the first forward horizontal test flight of its AIR ONE prototype electric flying vehicle (see here previously). It follows July’s successful hover test. The latest test carried 150kg simulating the weight of passengers in addition to the plane’s 1,100kg unladen weight.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
https://nocamels.com/2022/12/
https://www.reuters.com/video/
Qatar invests in Israeli cyber company. The recent $196.5 million funding round in US-Israeli cyber startup Snyk (see here previously) was led by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of a Gulf country with which Israel has no diplomatic relations.
https://www.israel21c.org/
Jack Ma surfaces in Israel. (TY JNS) Alibaba founder Jack Ma has been recently seen several times in Israel. He has interests in over two dozen Israeli startups including Twiggle, Infinity Augmented Reality, Lumus and ThetaRay. https://www.timesofisrael.
Investment in Israeli startups to 1/1/23: Biomica raised $20 million; Highcon raised $8 million from US’s SEE; YonaLink raised $6 million;
CULTURE, ENTERTAINMENT & SPORT`
Golden hotel. Israel’s Jaffa hotel, south of Tel Aviv, was included in this year’s Condé Nast Traveler’s “Gold List,” - a prestigious annual roll call of the luxury travel magazine’s top places to stay in the world. The hotel is a converted and renovated 19th century convent and is described as “a thrilling mix of old and new”.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
https://www.cntraveler.com/
Innovation on the bar. ILTV News reported on a series of events organized by Israel’s Innovation Authority. Israel’s leading innovators and entrepreneurs have been visiting bars in Tel Aviv to provide their insights into Israel’s thriving startup eco-system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
THE JEWISH STATE
2nd Temple-era tomb discovered. A 2,000-year-old Second Temple-Period burial cave, one of the most impressive burial caves discovered in Israel, is being uncovered in the Lachish Forest. It was still in use in the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods and became known in Christian tradition as the Salome Cave.
https://www.
Uncovering the Pool of Siloam. The Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel National Parks Authority, and the City of David Foundation have begun excavating the 2,700-year-old Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, described in the Bible in the Book of Kings II, ch20: v20. The excavation site will soon be opened for tourist access.
https://www.
The mystery of the Carmel-Sapphire. (TY TPS) The discovery of the previously unknown gemstone Carmel-Sapphire was reported here previously. This article explains how it was found - due to a famous Rabbi’s comment and an Israeli jeweler who unraveled the text in the Book of Deuteronomy, Ch 33, verse 19.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/
Jewish mothers leave conflict to visit Israel. Momentum, a group for Jewish mothers, brought 200 women from Ukraine, Russia, the Baltic states, and Germany for an eight-day visit to Israel. Momentum deliberately chose to bring Russian and Ukrainian women on the same trip, as an opportunity for Jewish unity.
https://www.jns.org/russian-
1,000+ French-speaking Jewish students visit Israel. 1,125 students from 27 schools in France, Switzerland, and Morocco participated in the "Seniors in Blue and White" program, in which students explore options for continuing their studies in Israeli higher learning institutions in Jerusalem.
https://www.
70,000 new immigrants. Some 70,000 people from 95 countries immigrated to Israel in 2022 – the most in 23 years. Over half came from Russia; 20% arrived from Ukraine, thanks to an unprecedented rescue operation involving dozens of Israeli organizations. Nefesh b’Nefesh helped over 3,500 North Americans make Aliyah.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
https://www.jns.org/nearly-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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By Reuters
A Chinese military plane came within 10 feet of a US air force aircraft in the contested South China Sea last week and forced it to take evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision in international airspace, the US military said on Thursday.
The close encounter followed what the United States has called a recent trend of increasingly dangerous behavior by Chinese military aircraft.
The incident, which involved a Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet and a US air force RC-135 aircraft, took place on Dec. 21, the U.S. military said in a statement.
“We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law,” it added.
A US military spokesperson said the Chinese jet came within 10 feet of the plane’s wing, but 20 feet from its nose, which caused the US aircraft to take evasive maneuvers.
The United States has raised the issue with the Chinese government, a separate U.S. official said.
The Chinese embassy in Washington D.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the past, China has said that the United States sending ships and aircraft into the South China Sea is not good for peace.
U.S. military planes and ships routinely carry out surveillance operations and travel through the region.
China claims vast swathes of the South China Sea that overlap with the exclusive economic zones of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Trillions of dollars in trade flow every year through the waterway, which also contains rich fishing grounds and gas fields.
In a meeting with his Chinese counterpart in November, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin raised the need to improve crisis communications, and also noted what he called dangerous behavior by Chinese military planes.
Despite tensions between the United States and China, U.S. military officials have long sought to maintain open lines of communication with their Chinese counterparts to mitigate the risk of potential flare-ups or deal with any accidents.
Australia’s defense department said in June that a Chinese fighter aircraft dangerously intercepted an Australian military surveillance plane in the South China Sea region in May.
Australia said the Chinese jet flew close in front of the RAAF aircraft and released a “bundle of chaff” containing small pieces of aluminum that were ingested into the Australian aircraft’s engine.
In June, Canada’s military accused Chinese warplanes of harassing its patrol aircraft as they monitored North Korea sanction evasions, sometimes forcing Canadian planes to divert from their flight paths.
Relations between China and the United States have been tense, with friction between the world’s two largest economies over everything from Taiwan and China’s human rights record to its military activity in the South China Sea.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August infuriated China, which saw it as a U.S. attempt to interfere in its internal affairs. China subsequently launched military drills near the island.
The United States has no formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan but is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.
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