Few days ago, I witnessed a new twist of this cliché.
Recently, I started working for another company, meaning that I have new co-workers.  One day, at lunchtime, one of them remarked to me how fortunate am I, as a deaf person, to have no use for cellphones.  Obviously he got tired of the constant interruptions due to cellphones.

With glee, I pulled out my cellphone and showed him that I, too, was assimilated by the culture of the cellphones…

Now he knows what he needs to know about SMS and 3G video chats.

In the photo, you can see a fenced park.  The park had to be fenced in order to ensure that everyone who enters it gets searched for explosives, as a measure against entry of suicide bombers.

Rachel Corrie gave her life in an attempt to prevent the destruction of homes of Palestinian terrorists in Gaza Strip. As you can see from the photo, one can say that she won the effort to force Israelis to forsake open parks if they want to defend themselves against suicide bombers.

There are also guide dogs for deaf and deaf-blind people.  Those dogs are trained to alert their masters when there are some important environmental noises.

Those who serve deaf-blind people are also trained to pick up things, which are dropped on the floor, and bring them back to their masters.  This is useful since when, for example, a deaf-blind person loses his keys, he doesn’t hear the noise of their dropping on the floor and once he notices the loss, cannot easily look for them by sight.

People, who need to have such dogs trained in Israel, can contact the Ali Hope nonprofit, which specializes in such a training.

The most recent twist is the accusations that Israel utilizes the medical aid to Haiti as a pretext to steal organs for transplanting.

The best response to this accusation and others related to Israeli aid to Haiti, which I saw so far, is in  http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/Israeli-Aid-to-Haiti.aspx. The writer challenges the accusers to compete with Israel and overshadow its aid efforts by efforts of their own.

Then do something to ameliorate those circumstances.  Sometimes you can do a lot for the price of a single meal for a group of people.

I suspect that several responses will go along the following lines.

• People past retirement age - why couldn’t they save in their retirement funds?  Probably they saved and lost the money to crooks or bad investments.
• People with disabilities - what inaccessible places and circumstances prevented them from exercising their full earning potential?
• Unemployed - probably need vocational training to train for an occupation with higher demand.  The expense consists of both tuition, free time for study, and stipend to live on while studying.

Some people will turn out to be lazy bums with feeble excuses - they should NOT be fed.

If you have a lot of money to donate, usually the best way to use it to help those non self-supporting people - is to make it easier for them to train for a better paying occupation.

Fast forward three years.  The Israeli government is trying to build a biometric database with data about all Israeli citizens, and concerned people are protesting this plan.  The strongest argument against the database is the risk of data leak, which may lead to rather adverse consequences.

To prove that the government does not know to protect its digital assets, the above domain was hijacked when its registration expired because someone in the government forgot to renew the domain registration.  The Website now contains a statement against the biometric database.

Twenty years later, as one of his former M.Sc. students, I was invited to a workshop, which was dedicated to his 60th birthday, and which was held between 21-23 June this year.  I was happy to attend it, soak some science, and meet old acquaintances.

The workshop was relatively small and intimate.  There were few tens of participants, and several of them also lectured and presented posters.  Most of them were students, collaborators or colleagues of Prof. Klein.  At the workshop’s end, people remarked about the high quality of research described in the lectures.  Scientists were also not afraid to venture forth from their zones of comfort and discuss also subjects about which they did not have all the answers.  So one could notice that some post-lecture questions were answered by “I do not know”.

Rachel Yerushalmi-Rozen, one of the workshop organizers, arranged for me full coverage of notetakers so that I could follow all lectures.  They did good enough work so that I was not bored, even though fundamental cognitive and motor limits of humans prevented them from writing down everything that was being said during the lectures.  The notetakers had to be proficient with the terminology used in the lectures, so they were students of the workshop’s organizers.

The first part of the workshop was held in Schmidt Auditorium in Weizmann Institute of Science, and when it ended, a group photo of the participants was taken.  Such group photos often end up in biographies of scientists, who participated in them.  The caliber of the workshop’s participants was such that several of them are current or future prominent scientists.

In one of the evenings we were treated to a dinner and a rare night visit in the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo (see also in the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Biblical_Zoo).  After the night tour, still in the zoo, Prof. Klein blew out candles on his birthday cake and we were treated to a presentation of photos of highlights of his life, so that the 3-day workshop would qualify also as a birthday party.

The one-day trip to Petra from Eilat is OK for people who can afford only to have short vacations.  You spend a full day and pay hefty border-crossing fees just to see ancient Petra for two hours.  Ancient Petra has enough stuff to keep you exploring it for hours, and several people prefer to sleep overnight in one of the hotels in the newer part of the city.

Speaking of the newer part of the city, one of the things they don’t tell you is that the city has some very steep roads.

When planning the trip to Petra, S. and me inquired and found that the logistics (low frequency public transportation and border opening hours) make it mandatory to join a guided tour if we want to accomplish it in a single day.  We registered for the tour operated by Desert Eco Tours, even though it was a bit more expensive than tours organized by other operators.  It was indeed well-organized - we got across the border in the morning without undue waiting in queues.

A view of the Petra Treasury from angle not usually found in tour books and brochures:

I do not think that the Israeli Left lost the elections due to leadership failures, divisiveness or other nonsense.

I think that it was a victory of the Palestinians in their war against the Israeli Left, pure and simple.

• After Rabin’s murder at November 1995, there was widespread support for Shimon Peres (who advocated the same pro-Palestinian policy, which caused Yigal Amir to murder Rabin). Until the elections were at last held at 1996, the support passed to Bibi Netanyahu and he won landslide victory in the elctions. Who helped him? All those Palestinian terrorists, who exploded busses during the months between murder and elections.
• One of the consequences of the Al-Aqsa intifada, which started at 2000, and which included terror attacks committed by suicide bombers almost every day, was that several people from the Israeli Left felt that they no longer have a partner in the other side, and withdrew support for policy of appeasement toward the Palestinians.
• The third round of the war between the Palestinians and the Israeli Left was held during the years from the Disengagement until now. The By continuing to launch missiles from Gaza Strip into Israel, the Palestinians provided ammunition to those forces in the Israeli Right, who opposed the Disengagement and demonstrated and blocked roads in an attempt to stop the Disengagement.

After such battles, which ended with unequivocal victory of the Palestinians, why does anyone still wonder that the Israeli Left lost its influence over Israeli politics?