The son of a leading Hamas figure, who famously converted to Christianity, served for over a decade as the Shin Bet security service’s most valuable source in the militant organization’s leadership, Haaretz has learned.

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder and one of its leaders in the West Bank. The intelligence he supplied Israel led to the exposure of a number of terrorist cells, and to the prevention of dozens of suicide bombings and assassination attempts on Israeli figures.

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“Suddenly, at the age of 18, my life was turned upside down. To learn, out of nowhere, that your father was a Nazi officer – it’s hard to describe the shock.” The 67-year-old Didi Henke still finds it difficult to speak of the moment she learned that her father was a senior SS officer.

Following the earth-shattering discovery, Henke decided to move to Israel and dedicate her life to the State and the wellbeing of Holocaust survivors.

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In celebration of Israel’s 54th birthday, we present our readers’ “54 Ways You Can Help Israel” — in no particular order. And thank you to the hundreds of people who submitted ideas.

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It’s time to follow Israel’s El Al Airlines and profile, interrogate, and treat everyone with polite suspicion. I have been through their routine more times than I’d like to remember. It’s an enormous inconvenience but the procedure works. Getting up at 3 AM to prepare for a two-hour cross-examination isn’t a joyride, but there are no El Al plane parts floating in an ocean or embedded in the ground.

According to Global Traveler magazine, El Al is the world’s most secure airline. This is both despite and because her planes are assuredly the highest value terrorist targets in the air.

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Sara Roy, who holds a non-tenured “research” position at Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), claims to be a “political economist,” although she apparently has no training in economics or political science.  She also claims to be an expert in Middle East Studies, but has no degree in that either.  Her PhD is in Education.

Roy claims to be an expert on the political economy of the Gaza Strip, but her real expertise is in anti-Israel leftist political propaganda.  She worked on her doctoral dissertation in education part of the time while living for a while in the Gaza Strip, and got paid as a a research assistant by the West Bank Data Base Project, a propaganda project directed by anti-Israel radical Israeli non-academic leftists.

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Mark Twain, the famous American author, humorist, narrator, and social observer, had great personal problems with the religionists of his day and many other aspects of the world he occupied in the 1800s.

He was, however, fascinated by the Jewish people. To him, they were both an enigma and an inspiration. His description, in his book Innocents Abroad, of the Holy Land’s topography chronicled the land’s barrenness and apparent hopelessness and was a moving landmark in the Jewish people’s progression across the face of history and the Middle East.

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How one tiny, endangered nation became an economic giant.

People forget how small Israel is. Its entire population is a little more than 7 million — smaller than Lima, Peru. Its land area is about 8,000 square miles, smaller than New Jersey or Belize. By comparison, Jordan, its neighbor to the east, occupies 35,000 square miles; Egypt, its neighbor to the West, covers 386,000 square miles.

There are more than 20 Arab states, which have a combined population of 325 million, and more than 50 majority-Muslim states, which have a combined population of well over a billion. By contrast, Israel is the world’s only Jewish-majority state — and 20 percent of its population is Arab, most of them Muslim.

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Giving peace process a chance to do its worst

“They hate us. They want to kill us. So what are we going to do about it?”

These are not the words one would expect to hear about Palestinians at the Oct. 25-28 first annual conference of the left-tilting J-Street, let alone from a left-wing rabbi who has worked extensively for Palestinian human rights.

Rabbis for Human Rights Executive Director Arik Ascherman, though, believes that delusion serves no one’s interests, least of all those who genuinely want peace. His love for his adopted homeland of Israel was unmistakable, and he admits that his criticisms of Israel are because he’s a “Jewish racist” who’s “going to expect more of Jews.”

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(IsraelNN.com) The Central Bureau of Statistics has released the latest population figures for Israeli cities and towns.

Israel’s population as of June 30, 2009 stood at nearly 7.43 million – nearly three-quarters of a percent more than it was at the end of 2008. Some 623,000 people (8.4%) live in rural villages and towns of fewer than 2,000 residents.

Israel’s growth rate currently stands at an annual rate of approximately 1.5% – compared to 1.188% for the entire world in 2008.

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