Israel News for February 10, 2016

Terror Attack
A 28 year old Israeli man was stabbed in an apparent terror attack yesterday while jogging outside the town of Neve Daniel in the Gush Etzion area of Judea. The man, Tomer Ditur, said that the attacker fled in the direction of the nearby Palestinian town of Nahalin.

After searching the area for the attacker, IDF forces surrounded Nahalin and have closed all roads into the town, allowing only humanitarian cases to pass.

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Fence Building
PM Netanyahu announced yesterday that the government is preparing “a multi-year program to surround Israel with security fences in order to protect ourselves in the Middle East as it is today. In addition, we are preparing a program to close the breaches in the security fence in Judea and Samaria.”

You can’t go wrong by securing the borders, but is a fence really going to stop lone wolf terrorists who could be just about anywhere in Israel? There’s got to be a better solution (No, we don’t have one either).

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Tunnel Threat
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said yesterday that Hamas tunnels in Gaza have been Israel’s major security threat since 2013. He said that most of the resources entering Gaza are being diverted by Hamas towards building an underground infrastructure.

Eizenkot added that the IDF is concentrating intelligence and engineering efforts on the threat. “We have the most advanced capabilities in the world. We won’t let the quiet in the south deceive us. I think that 2015 was the quietest year since the 1970s. 23 rockets were fired from the Gaza strip into our territory by rebel and Salafi organizations.”

Only 23 rockets. So much for quiet.

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Western Wall
The compromise agreement allowing the construction of a new non-Orthodox prayer area along the southern part of the Western Wall has drawn protests from the Ultra-Orthodox, the Palestinians, and even some women’s groups. Now there’s one more group to add to the list: archeologists.

Nine senior archeologists warned PM Netanyahu in a letter yesterday, that the construction of the new prayer area would damage the “diamond in Jerusalem’s archaeological crown.” Signatories to the protest letter include Dan Bahat, who excavated the Western Wall tunnels; Ronny Reich, head of the Archaeological Council of Israel, who exposed part of the paved road beneath Robinson’s Arch; Jerusalem Prize winner Gabriel Barkay, who directs the Temple Mount Sifting Project; and Israel Prize laureate Amihai Mazar.

Now what?

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Hebrew Protocols
There are some books you’d probably never expect to see in Hebrew, usually due to their anti-semitic content. Well, you might soon be able to read one of the classics and favorites of Jew haters, in the holy tongue.

An initiative on the Israeli crowdfunding website Headstart.co.il is seeking funding to create the first full translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Hebrew. The project is spearheaded by Adi Amsterdam, a linguistics lecturer at the Weizmann Institute and the David Yellin Center who believes that the only way to counter the fictitious anti semitic claims the book makes is by being aware of its contents. The translation would include historical and linguistic notes that would expose all of the book’s lies and inconsistencies. So far Amsterdam has reached 43% of his 25,000 NIS goal.

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Startup Spotlight
An Israeli startup called Woo is working on disrupting high tech job recruiting and making it easier for employees to find just the right job. The woo.com website allows high tech talent such as developers, engineers, product managers, QAs, DevOps and designers to anonymously contact top tech companies to see what jobs are available and how much they pay.

Here’s basically how it works.The seeker creates a wishlist of criteria he wants in a job, something like a dating profile. But he remains anonymous. Then, the several hundred tech companies already using the site can view the “profile” and decide whether to show interest. If the seeker is also interested, he can reveal his identity and continue the process offline.

Job seekers can use the site by invite only. Companies using the site include Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, WIX, Vonage, just to name a few.

Woo was founded in 2015 by CEO Liran Kotzer and CTO Ami Dudu, and has raised $2.3 million in seed funding. The company currently has offices in Tel Aviv And San Francisco, and 25 employees, 23 of whom are in Tel Aviv.

Woo says that so far thousands of employees in Israel and the US have used the service and companies report that 70% of candidates contacted by them have responded. No figures are available for the percentage of actual hires.

So if you’re in tech and want to test the job waters, give woo.com a shot.

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