Israel's new electric car initiative was presented to a US congressional committee this week in hopes of garnering investment in a project that could ease financial troubles caused by rising oil prices.
Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi, who has teamed with Renaul/Nissan to introduce electric cars to Israel on a massive scale in the coming years, told the congressional Committee on Energy Independence that investing in the Israeli initiative will be good for America in several ways.
First, most of the infrastructure for the project, which will require battery swap stations being built throughout Israel, will be built in the United States, creating jobs for Americans.
More importantly, if the project proves successful in Israel, it will provide a model for more wide scale electric car use in the US.
Agassi noted that operating an electric car costs about six cents a mile, whereas a gasoline-powered car costs 16 cents a mile to operate.
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A senior Palestinian Authority official on Thursday said the regime of US-backed Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is pulling for Democratic candidate Barack Obama to win the upcoming US presidential election.
PA Planning Minister Samir Abdullah told reporters on a visit to Tokyo that the assumption in Ramallah is that Obama will win the election, and once inaugurated will immediately set in motion the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian Arab state on the biblical Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria.
"[Obama] promised that he will not wait until the end of his term to launch negotiations and he will make it happen from day one," said Abdullah, referring to current US President George W. Bush's unfulfilled promise to oversee the birth of "Palestine" during his time in office.
Israel's leadership has expressed a willingness to give the Palestinian Arabs a state, though they have never exercised sovereignty over any part of the Middle East, but are reluctant to do so until the Palestinian Authority proves itself capable of effectively ruling and preventing its citizens from attacking the Jewish state.
Palestinian leaders hope the next US president will pressure Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria even without those obligations being met.
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Yesterday morning, I listened to Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman describe the terrorist attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian construction worker suddenly turned the bulldozer he was driving into traffic, crushing everything (and everyone) in its path.
The attack took place on one of Jerusalem's busiest streets. Ambassador Gillerman noted sarcastically that the driver "courteously" stopped to let a car pull in front of him, which he then ran over and crushed, killing a woman and her baby. In another car, a woman threw her baby out the car window before the bulldozer crushed her to death. (The baby survived, the ambassador said, but was "gravely wounded.")
According to Gillerman, the construction worker was an Israeli-Arab who worked for an Israeli Arab. "He took the bulldozer, with which he fed his own wife and family, and used it to crush other families to death, simply for being Israeli Jews."
Gillerman described the attack as typical of the Palestinian contribution to the world. Of course, the ambassador was angry (who wouldn't be?). But he went on to argue his point, reminding the audience that it was the Palestinians who invented airline hijackings. The long lines at airports are another Palestinian contribution ...   more »

Herb Keinon
There is a real concern that the Jewish community in the Former Soviet Union (FSU), which today is estimated to number some 500,000, could disappear in a generation if steps are not taken to curb rampant assimilation there, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday.
Olmert's comments preceded a briefing on the state of the Jews in the FSU, and the 600,000 from there who left between 1989 and 2007, but did not immigrate to Israel. More than one million immigrants did come to Israel during the same period.
According to figures presented at the meeting by the Jewish Agency and the Absorption Ministry, there are between 900,000 to a million people in the FSU eligible to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return, of whom 470,000 are not Jewish according to Halacha. The Law of Return grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent.
The ministers were presented with numbers showing that immigration from the FSU has fallen from 34,000 in 2001 to 6,700 in 2007, an 80 percent decrease. In addition, some 83,000 immigrants who arrived from 1989 to 2005 have left the country, and some 50,000 to 100,000 former ...   more »

Jerusalem Post
Although Iran's leaders are relentlessly dismissing the notion that the West, including Israel, would dare attack its nuclear facilities and/or other targets, they are actually profoundly concerned by the prospect of a strike designed to achieve regime change.
To ensure their continued hold on power in the event of such an attack, therefore, they have been gradually introducing a comprehensive emergency plan, called "Passive Defense," according to a report issued Thursday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
MEMRI said the "Passive Defense" plan has been drawn up on the orders of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and its provisions indicate "that the regime's main fear is of an attack on Iran's vital infrastructures which would ultimately lead to its downfall."
"Passive Defense" seems to constitute the kind of homeland security program that was notably lacking in Israel during the Second Lebanon War. It places prime responsibility for managing the home front in the event of a war on Iran's Basij militia - which comprises some 12.5 million volunteers, almost half of them women - operating via a "region-based apparatus" that has already been set up in coordination with the country's Interior Ministry.
Overseeing the plan is Gholam ...   more »

By Amir Oren,
Tehran will consider any military action against its nuclear facilities as the beginning of a war, Iran's official news agency IRNA reported Friday.
The commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, was quoted as saying that any country that attacks Iran would regret doing so.
According to the report, Jafari has warned that such a step would be the beginning of war.  
However, the general was also quoted as saying that he considers it unlikely Iran's adversaries would attempt an attack.
In a newspaper interview last week, Jafari warned that if attacked, Iran would barrage Israel with missiles and choke off the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a narrow outlet for oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf.
Israel carried out a large military exercise last month, seen throughout the media as a rehearsal for an attack on Iran.
U.S. admiral: Iran likely to attack Israel
Meanwhile, a U.S. admiral warned earlier this week that Iran is likely to launch ballistic missiles against Israel and the United States and the NATO alliance should prepare for it.
In recent years, the missile boats of the Sixth Fleet practiced intercepting Shahab-3 missiles from Iran aimed at Israel, along ...   more »

By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.
It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.
Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the ...   more »