Jerusalem
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom has been operating in Israel since 1982 and began its Palestinian work in 1994. With an Israeli-Palestinian team in a joint office in Jerusalem the foundation aims to be a platform of innovation for enhancing freedom in society, strengthening dialogue with the European Union and contributing to the advancement of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Together with our partners, we want to strengthen liberal values like the rule of law, respect of human dignity with civil and human rights, market economy principles and entrepreneurship and a democratic culture of tolerance and pluralism.
News
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Request for Proposal: 8 Economic Radio Shows
The Jerusalem office of Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom needs a service provider specialized in the socio-economic situation of Palestine, that during the year 2022 can provide a maximum of 8 economic radio shows by inviting high ranking guests and specialists from the economy and entrepreneurship scene. In addition, the service provider should plan, organize the 8 radio shows, prepare and publish those episodes on YouTube and social media.
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Another Round of Early Elections in Israel – How Will it Look?
While United States President Joe Biden was scheduled to meet PM Bennett in Jerusalem, Yair Lapid was already able to show diplomatic qualities on the world stage as new Prime Minister of Israel in his stead. If this government proved more stable, Lapid would have only become Prime Minister next year. Nevertheless, with the Israeli Knesset voting unanimously to disband on June 30, 2022, November 1, 2022, was set as the date for early elections and Lapid became PM.
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Voices from Israel: Regional Impact of the Russian War in Ukraine
On February 24, 2022, the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin began. The actions of the State of Israel since then have been like walking a tightrope: On the one hand, it has joined a condemnation of Russia's actions by the United Nations General Assembly; on the other, it has not joined Western sanctions. It provides humanitarian aid but excludes arms deliveries.
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Israeli Government Loses Majority: One Final Crack in an Already Fragile Coalition?
On June 13, 2021, the current Israeli government was formed in hopes of ending a political crisis that had dragged Israel through four national elections in two years. After less than a year, this government has lost its slim majority of 61 of the 120 seats in parliament and has shrunk to 60 seats. This means that the coalition's ability to pass legislation has weakened.
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Between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: An Overview of LGBT+ Life in Israel
In 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu wrote that he was proud to be the Prime Minister of a country which “consistently upholds civil equality and civil rights of all its citizens regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation”. He did so in a letter to the World Congress for GLBT Jews after they accused him of “attracting international gay tourism in the country at the same time they discriminate their own LGBTQ citizens”.
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Israel's Bennett-Lapid Government is a Victory for Democracy
The new and most ideologically diverse government in the history of Israel does not raise high expectations. It seems neither Left nor Right expect paradise from a coalition built on so much compromise. Yet to the polarized political climate of recent years, this is revolutionary. Only a month ago Israel faced one of the worst eruptions of communal violence in years.
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The Illusion of Peace without the Palestinians Is Fading
Ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the Islamic Jihad so far holds after more than 4,000 rockets at Israel, with 12 dead, according to Israeli sources, and Israeli air strikes on more than 800 targets in the Gaza Strip, with more than 240 dead, according to Palestinian sources. Military experts believe that Israel achieved in one week as many tactical objectives in Gaza with targeted air strikes, as it did in seven weeks of a costly ground offensive in 2014.
Social Media
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Our partner FLOW Accelerator conducted the third CyberFest Bootcamp on Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning! Many topics were discussed, including deep learning and neural networks in text mining theories, Pytoch and creating tensors, matrix multiplication, backpropagation by auto-differentiation. Also, an explanation was given on the process and approaches of teaching a machine, with coaching the participants on training the machine using a set of data to solve a classification problem. Other topics presented were introduction on NLP and the importance of big model like GPT-3, BERT and DALLE.2, concluding the topic with a workshop on problem classification, grammar checking and how to tune hyper-parameters. Moreover, the participants got to know more about deep learning, terminologies in vision-based applications from Image Classification, Key point detection, object detection, image segmentation, data gathering and labeling. The bootcamp successfully ended with a workshop on problem classification, image processing and deep fakes explaining auto encoders. More info on: https://www.facebook.com/accelerator.Flow/
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After a relatively quiet year, the recent violence reminded us once again how fragile and unstable our situation is. While we hope the cease-fire holds, we understand that only a permanent agreement between Israelis and Palestinians can bring lasting peace to the region. We encourage both sides to use the same communication channels that enabled the cease-fire, and restart peace talks!
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Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss from Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) joined us on August 2nd. In her interesting lecture on the history of Turkish - Israeli relations, she emphasized the importance of green politics and climate change. #israturk
