Israel Now

When Christian fundamentalists predicted that May 21 would mark the end of the world, Jews laughed. We know that the end of the world won’t happen until September, when the Palestinians bring their declaration of the statehood to the UN General Assembly. Or when the Iranians get the Bomb. Or whenever President Obama utters the word “1967” and is not referring to Haight-Ashbury or Carl Yastrzemski.

From an Israeli standpoint — and this is a non-partisan, across-the-board situation — the Middle East is heading toward crisis and disaster.

Just to list developments that are clearly happening is quite worrisome. The fact that the U.S. government doesn’t understand this long list of factors, nor do European governments, nor does almost all of the Western mass media, makes the problems far larger.

In the wake of the Arab Spring and winter sweeping the Arab world, Israel would be wise to keep its hopes and fears under control. There’s a great deal about these popular uprisings and those yet to come we obviously don’t know. With the devolution of authority comes confusion and the devolution of information as new players and old ones reconfigured step on the stage. It would be smart and prudent not to draw too many hasty conclusions.

T el Aviv — Israeli Science Minister Daniel Hershkowitz announced recently that the country was unintentionally subsidizing the entire Western world to the tune of some $3 billion with its exported brain power. 

“We have one tremendous resource and that’s our human capital,” Hershkowitz told a recent conference on education, basing his estimate on the amount Israel invests in training its academics, thousands of whom are working abroad. “But we are bearing witness to brain drain abroad.”