Israel Active

Shefa Weinstein is CEO of Israeli start-up Shopetti – one of the 13 start-ups participating in the second round of companies enrolled in the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure. An American immigrant to Israel, she will shortly launch “the next big thing in online shopping”.

This year’s Israel Air Force Flight Academy graduates included Tamar, the IDF’s first religious woman navigator. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "Tamar is an example of the equality between the sexes in Israel and proof that in the IDF there is place for all parts of Israeli society.”

The Technion Sparks program enables 200 Israeli-Arab Druse high school students to take special science and technology courses at Israel’s Technion Institute. The project is the brainchild of Brig.-Gen. Hasson Hasson – the first Druse to serve as a military aide to a President of the State.

Sixty-six post-doctoral scholars from India will travel to Israel in the coming months to pursue research at top universities. The government of Israel announced three-year scholarships grants for outstanding Indian scholars.

Top Greek officials have been visiting Israel and presenting opportunities to invest in and own Greek infrastructure. Israel’s Elbit won the tender to buy the old Athens airport. Israelis have purchased a number of Greek hotels, and an Israeli company is in talks to buy Greece’s national oil company.

Canada and Israel have agreed to work together on international development and aid projects. Canadian minister Julian Fantino said that greater co-operation between their aid agencies, “will help those most in need and contribute to “a more secure and prosperous world.”

Sajid Javid, Economic Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Bromsgrove, described himself as a “proud British-born Muslim” and announced that if he had to leave Britain to live in the Middle East, then he would choose Israel as home. Only there, he said, would his children feel the “warm embrace of freedom and liberty.” For him, only Israel shared the democratic values of the UK.

This important fact was missing in most other media reports on the recent International TIMSS scores for Israeli school children. Israeli-Arabs have improved so much that their math, science and reading standards now exceed those of Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.

The Nazareth Hospital has become the first non-Jewish hospital to receive the annual Chairman of the Knesset award for its service to the predominately Arab community in Northern Galilee region of Israel.

A two-year old Palestinian Arab boy underwent a bone marrow transplant at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv. The Israeli Government funded the procedure in order to save the boy’s life, after the Palestinian Authority declined the family’s request to pay for it.