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The war on Afghanistan is a profit driven “resource war”.

The post “The War is Worth Waging”: Afghanistan’s Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural Gas appeared first on Global Research.

In recent years, much fanfare has accompanied the “bromance” between Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu — and the nationalist leaders’ intensification of the long-developing pact between their countries. Now Azad Essa’s new book, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, brilliantly traces the history of their “strategic partnership.” Israel today has a far-right […]

Everyone has heard the cliches of life being full of surprises, and we never really know what can happen. There are few, however, who entirely understand the weight of these sayings until tragedy strikes, as it did for the family and friends of Ashley Murphy-Hayes. Ashley, a 26-year-old father, was described as “loved” and “respected” by those who knew him—an evening of fun in Bolton, England sadly ended in his fatal death in the early hours of January 7.

The night began as any other night, with Ashley Murphy-Hayes going out with his girlfriend, Kartina Kirkby, and a school friend, Paul Barrett. Barrett recalled Ashley being his “usual annoying self in a good way,” without warning of what would come. After they visited several dance venues, including ROC Night Club and Bamboogy, Ashley and Karina had a disagreement. It was then that Karina and Paul returned to Bamboogy while Ashley stayed behind.

At 4 am, passersby Mbekezeli Mayo and Jude Esan found the young father in the worst of circumstances. Ashley’s neck was stuck between railings, and he was unresponsive with no pulse. They quickly tried to free him from his terrifying predicament, and the nightclub manager called the police and emergency services. However, tragically Ashley was pronounced dead by the hospital an hour later due to asphyxia from neck compression.

At the inquest, police proclaimed no one else had been involved in the death – leading the coroner to classify Ashley’s death as an accident. His family said after the hearing that he was “respected and loved by many” and that “you knew when Ashley was in the room.”

The death of Ashley Murphy-Hayes conveyed clear messages of never taking life for granted, showing gratitude for the time we have with our loved ones, and being aware of the signs of distress in those we love. It is a reminder to always look out for each other, something the life we dearly miss demonstrated with not just his own family and friends but the ones he never had the chance to meet.

The IDF released a statement saying that the incident was under review.

By World Israel News Staff

An Israeli soldier was lightly injured in a car ramming attack in the Palestinian village of Huwara in Samaria on Monday evening.

The suspect sped off in his vehicle.

EMTs administered emergency medical care to the victim before evacuating him to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikvah.

The IDF released a statement saying that the incident was under review.

The incident comes less than two weeks after a similar attack in the same place, when a terrorist rammed his vehicle towards a group of IDF troops, injuring one soldier.

At the time, MK Danny Danon (Likud) called on the military to shutter all stores on Huwara’s main thoroughfare.

“Another attack in Huwara’s death corridor. Thankfully, there were no casualties, but the writing is on the wall. All businesses along the traffic route should be closed, and the entire length and width of the route should be secured. A zero-tolerance policy for terrorism is needed in Huwara.”

Huwara, near Nablus in Samaria, has been a hotbed of Palestinian terror for decades.

Over a month-long period earlier this year, three terror attacks took place.

At the end of February, two Israeli brothers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, were murdered in a drive-by shooting, prompting a riot by Jewish Israelis later that evening.  A poll later found that almost three-quarters of Palestinians supported their murder.

Two weeks later, former U.S. Marine David Stern was shot while driving through the town with his young children family. After being shot at at point blank range, Stern, a martial arts instructor, managed to shoot and neutralize the terrorist.

A week and a half later, two IDF soldiers were wounded in a shooting attack in the Palestinian town.

Also last month, an Israeli soldier was lightly wounded in a Palestinian stabbing attack in Huwara.

A day later, a pregnant woman miraculously escaped her car after it flipped over during a terror attack in the same place with nothing more than scratches.

The post IDF soldier injured in terror ramming in Huwara appeared first on World Israel News.

Continuing to advertise on Twitter would go against the brand’s “progressive values,” the ice cream maker said.

By Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner

Ben & Jerry’s will end all paid advertising on Twitter because of what it called the “proliferation of hate speech” on the social media platform since it was purchased by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the Vermont-based ice cream company announced last week.

The ice cream maker said that continuing to advertise on Twitter would go against the brand’s “progressive values” and that it has decided to take “a stand against these harmful changes” happening on the online platform. It explained that following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, which made him the company’s new owner and CEO, hate speech on Twitter “is up dramatically while content moderation has become all but non-existent.”

“In addition to the changes on the platform that have led to an increase in hate speech, Musk himself has doubled down on dangerous anti-Democratic lies and white nationalist hate speech,” added the company that was founded by Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, both of whom are Jewish. “The platform has become a threatening and even dangerous space for people from so many backgrounds, including people who are Black, Brown, trans, gay, women, people with disabilities, Jewish, Muslim and the list goes on. This is unconscionable in addition to being plain bad business.”

Ben & Jerry’s additionally slammed Musk and Twitter’s “toxicity and tacit endorsement of hate and violence,” saying it “goes against everything our company stands for.”

“Twitter must act today to end the extremist and violent content on the platform. Until that happens, Ben & Jerry’s will spend no money with Twitter and we call on all businesses and partners to do the same,” it concluded by saying. “For the time being, we will continue to maintain a presence on the platform to connect with our community, but will revisit that presence as needed pending developments in this space.”

In July 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would stop selling its ice cream in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, areas it called “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” because it was “inconsistent” with its company values. Its boycott decision resulted in major backlash in the US and a number of states — including Arizona, New Jersey, Texas, Illinois and Florida — moved to sell its investments in the ice cream maker’s parent company, the British conglomerate Unilever, in compliance with state laws prohibiting business with entities boycotting Israel.

Unilever then moved in June 2022 to sell the ice cream maker’s business in Israel to a local licensee, which would allow Ben & Jerry’s products to continue being sold or distributed in Israeli territories. Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit against Unilever in July of last year to block the sale but to no avail.

The post Ben & Jerry’s quit Twitter ads over Elon Musk’s ‘dangerous anti-Democratic lies’ appeared first on World Israel News.

“This decision, which defies all logic and reason, is an insult to the millions of Iranians protesting for their basic freedoms,” stated Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

By JNS

Following Iran—a country that executes its citizens for “blasphemous” social-media posts—gaining leadership over a U.N. forum based on promoting human rights through technology, the Islamic regime in Tehran has now gained another position of influence within the international body dedicated to fostering peace: vice president of the General Assembly.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry called it “a shameful decision.”

It said: “In addition to murdering its own citizens, attacking innocents around the world and racing towards a nuclear weapon with the goal of wiping Israel off the map, Iran will now serve in a senior U.N. position.”

The ministry noted that Iran advocates for the elimination of Israel, a fellow member of the United Nations, saying “this decision, which defies all logic and reason, is an insult to the millions of Iranians protesting for their basic freedoms and to the justice, peace and global stability that the U.N. is supposed to stand for.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a short video with a simple message: “I have heard all of the reports about Iran. I have a sharp and clear message for both Iran and the international community: Israel will do whatever it needs to do to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

Iran will serve in the position for a one-year term beginning on Sept. 5.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of United Nations Watch, reported the news and said, “This is a regime that defies U.N. arms embargoes, tramples the human rights of its own citizens and foments terrorism across the globe.

Michael Freund, chairman of Shavei Israel, tweeted: “The #Ayatollahs murder their own people, suppress democracy, threaten to destroy #Israel, sponsor #terrorism & are rushing to build a nuclear bomb. So today the #UN rewarded #Iran by electing them VP of the General Assembly. Insane! #DefundtheUN.”

In addition, Iran was appointed rapporteur of the Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Committee of the General Assembly.

In response to this decision, Ambassador Robert Wood, the Alternative Representative for Special Political Affairs, delivered a statement of protest that said, in part: “Given Iran’s persistent violations of U.N. Security Council resolution 2231, including pertaining to its ballistic-missile program, its ongoing efforts to undermine international security and its failure to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a representative of Iran’s government is unfit to serve in a leadership position within this committee, even if such a position is largely ceremonial.”

Zahra Hojabri, the U.N. correspondent for the Islamic Republic News Agency, tweeted that “the United Nations became the scene of victory for #Iran once again on Thursday after the Islamic Republic was granted two important duties at the international body.”

The post Iran appointed as vice president of UN General Assembly appeared first on World Israel News.

Ontario’s doctor deficit has left 2.2 million people without a primary care physician. The shortage, a consequence of for-profit models, worsens health issues, strains emergency departments, and fuels the vulture-like leveraging of profit-driven “solutions.”

According to a new study, nearly 2.2 million residents of Ontario, Canada, do not have a family doctor. (Felix Man / Picture Post / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

A new study from the Ontario College of Family Physicians has found that 2.2 million of the 14 million residents of Canada’s largest and wealthiest province have no family doctor. The finding is a major indictment of the for-profit or fee-for-service model that is now being promoted as the go-to model for Ontario’s surgeries by the province’s conservative government.

“The number of unattached patients is growing across the province and region,” says Steve Gray, chief executive officer of Medical Associates of Port Perry. “The wait list at Medical Associates has never been so high and it will only grow further as our family physicians retire.”

According to the Ontario College study, over forty thousand Torontonians, five thousand Mississauga residents, and many more across the province lack access to a regular physician. Those lacking a family physician typically delay necessary follow-ups on serious health problems, resulting in these problems becoming markedly worse. This, in turn, places further pressures on other areas of the provincial health care system — especially Ontario’s overwhelmed emergency departments.

It is a problem of a snake-eating-its-own-tail variety. The lack of family physicians leads to delayed follow-ups on health issues, which worsens health problems, putting additional strain on the already overwhelmed emergency departments. The entire scenario jeopardizes the province’s health care system, providing the perfect opportunity for for-profit merchants to double down on their “solutions.”

Causes, Effects, and New Causes

Part of the cause of the drop in coverage likely comes from an overall drop in the total number of family doctors throughout the pandemic. Ontario had 12,247 active family doctors in 2019 but only 11,862 between March and September 2020. As CBC News reported, Ontario’s lockdown policies — which directed family doctors to refrain from seeing patients unless it was absolutely necessary — resulted in visits dropping by nearly 30 percent. As most family doctors and walk-in clinics are private operators, billing the province under the fee-for-service model pushed many to close up shop.

“For fee-for-service doctors, it meant a huge drop in their income all of a sudden,” Dr Tara Kiran, a family doctor and researcher at St Michael’s Hospital, told CBC News. “At the same time, they needed to pay their staff, pay their rent like every other small business.”

Making matters worse, as the Toronto Sun observed, “Ontarians are increasingly denied medical services paid for by their taxes [because] provincial governments of all stripes, have been decreasing the number of services and drugs covered by OHIP [the Ontario Health Insurance Plan] to save money.”

This was especially true of family doctors in more remote areas and with fewer than five hundred patients. “Rural areas have lower numbers of doctors to begin with, so a few of them leaving had a greater effect on those communities,” Kiran told CBC News.

But the trend precedes the pandemic. As the same CBC News article notes, in March 2020, 1.8 million Ontarians already lacked access to a family physician. More than a decade earlier, in 2008, a Health Policy study estimated that 7.8 per cent of Ontarians — roughly 0.9 million of 12.88 million — were “unattached” or lacked a family doctor.

This deficit, the Health Policy study notes, hampered the system’s ability to provide earlier treatment for potentially difficult conditions, provide preventative care (such as blood pressure checks, mammograms, and Pap smears), and manage chronic diseases. Largely, those without access are younger, poorer, and typically members of immigrant communities. Overall, this population has poorer health outcomes than middle-class Canadians.

As the Health Policy study observed:

Those without a family doctor were more likely to be male, younger or recent immigrants. Their employment status was more likely to be employed or unemployed, and they were less likely to report chronic conditions. Ontarians with a family doctor were more likely to be retired, have two or more children or be established immigrants. They were more likely to report they have confidence in the healthcare system and also more likely to have multiple chronic conditions.

Part of this may be explained by the fact that rich people have better health than poor people do, often living longer and experiencing less disability. Wealthier people often have the ability to take time off to see a family doctor, whereas the poor must rely on paid sick leave policies.

A Major Indictment of Privatized Health Care

Given that Ontario’s successive right-wing governments have historically relied on family doctors and preventative care as a tool to offset their cuts to hospitals and nurses, the family doctor deficit is clearly troubling.

Last September, Ontario’s hospitals were overwhelmed by influxes of RSV and COVID-19 patients. Instead of reversing the government’s cut to health care wages, Ontario health minister Sylvia Jones worked to deflect attention from the government’s cuts — by insisting that family doctors would step up.

“We need to make sure that primary care practitioners are seeing their patients before they have to go to an emergency department or a hospital,” Jones said. “We have a robust system when all of the players are working together. And we need all those parts to be basically operating at 100 per cent.”

Elsewhere, others in the health care administration have promoted this same fee-for-service system, where doctors run effectively private but publicly insured facilities, as the model for how privatizing other services would supposedly improve access.

The most visible moment of the crisis thus far occurred earlier this year, when the government responded to soaring backlogs and wait times by pushing to move surgical procedures — chiefly cataract surgeries, MRIs, CT scans, and hip and knee replacements — from hospitals into mostly for-profit “Independent Health Facilities” (IHFs).

“Let’s get the cataract surgeries, get the backlog there. Let’s change people’s lives, and take care of the hip and knee replacement surgeries,” Ontario premier Doug Ford said. “You add ’em all up, what I understand is that’s 50 percent of the surgeries.” The privatization scheme has been punctuated by a massive spike in hospital emergency room closures — totaling over 184 days of lost service, across the province, from March 2022 to 2023.

Despite these sorts of catastrophic developments, free-market proponents remain undeterred. Andrew Pak of the Ontario Medical Association told the Globe and Mail, “Your family doctor’s office is a for-profit business. . . . It’s a private business within a publicly administered health care system.” Indeed, the call may be coming from inside the house. As the National Post observed, “The outpatient plan is supported by the Ontario Hospital Association, the Ontario Medical Association and multiple hospital CEOs. Don’t be surprised if it’s hospitals themselves that lead the way by establishing satellite surgery centers.”

For-Profit Entities Cannot Provide Universal Care

The battle with champions of private care is one that goes back to the earliest days of Canada’s Medicare program.

In the early 1960s, Saskatchewan’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) government expanded its provincial health insurance plan with the Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Bill. Immediately afterward, lobbying, threats, and walkouts by for-profit doctors worked to stop the government from employing physicians in public clinics like the one in Swift Current.

Advocating for the initial CCF position, spokesperson Dr Hugh MacLean said in a 1937 radio address:

In our present system of practice, preventive medicine is largely neglected because the members of the [medical] profession are almost wholly engaged in the curative end of practice, so that preventable deaths are not being prevented and correctable conditions are not being corrected because the people are not in a financial condition to have their condition discovered.

Instead, the right-wing Keep Our Doctors campaign famously led the fight to prevent a salaried system and defend their private facilities and payments. Warning of the dangers of “socialized medicine,” they firmly opposed calls for “an exclusively salaried service” and pushed instead for “state-aided health insurance on a fee-for-service basis.”

Eventually, the CCF government capitulated. The result was that family doctors and hospitals in Canada are not public institutions. They are private facilities that offer publicly insured services — and they often play the part to the hilt. Both the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) and Ontario Medical Association (OMA) have supported privatization efforts in the past. In the 1980s, the OMA’s federal counterpart, the Canadian Medical Association, was adamant, according to former health minister Monique Bégin’s account, that “all sources of private financing of health insurance should be permitted.” Since then, a good number of medical professional associations have been quick to champion privatization.

In the 1990s, then OHA CEO David MacKinnon declared that the drive to partner with the private sector was already “guiding our hospital system.” This was made easier, he noted at the time, by the fact that “many members of hospital boards and a disproportionate number of the board chairs are business people.”

The principle of universal health care dictates that those who are sickest are most in need of care. That requires accessible health care, free at the point of use. Leaving this aim to small businesses, which operate with famously tight margins, and a network of private fiefdoms may be one of the worst ways to achieve this end.

Private health care providers are beholden first and foremost to the drive for profit. Their unequal provision frequently reflects social inequalities. Such inequalities are the very thing that a universal health system — especially one that purports to provide preventative care — aims to prevent. A properly universal program is a public program. Public health care, with full ownership and provision of services, can execute its directives independently. It is free from the capricious needs and irregularities of the market. It is the only sane and efficient answer to the crisis of Ontario’s family doctor deficit.

In the imbroglio over Picasso’s misogyny and many personal flaws, the memory of his unabashed leftist politics has been lost — and with it our ability to fully consider his place in history.

Little of the renewed discussion on painter Pablo Picasso focuses on his anti-fascist and communist politics. (RALPH GATTI / AFP via Getty Images)

Has the Brooklyn Museum reached peak girlboss self-parody? Comedian Hannah Gadsby has a small exhibition criticizing the iconic Pablo Picasso called It’s Pablo-matic. It is sponsored by the Sacklers, one of America’s most brutally destructive capitalist families.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Picasso’s death, many are discussing his artistic career and personal life, especially his sexism. In addition to the Sackler-sponsored exhibit in Brooklyn, Claire Dederer’s recently released book, Monsters, also explores this terrain. (The best headline on this belongs to a review by Julie Phillips in 4Columns, taking off from the famous Modern Lovers song: “Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, but Claire Dederer thinks it’s not too late to start.”)

The Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler-sponsored approach — e.g., simply refusing to take his work seriously — has plenty of critics, including in the New York Times. Picasso needs no defense from Jacobin — he surely was sexist and, in any case, he has long received plenty of global recognition, appreciative as well as moralistic, including exhibitions dedicated to his work at New York’s Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, in Paris at Musée de l’Homme and Musée Picasso, and at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía.

But relatively little of the renewed Picasso discussion focuses on his politics. He was a committed anti-fascist and a communist. Those facts do not excuse Picasso for being a jerk, but they are worth noting. That they are so absent from discourse about an artist our elites can’t stop talking about seems a symptom of the ruling class’s capture of the cultural sphere.

In a time when the most visible art we consume is sponsored by horrific profiteers like the Sackler family, whose greed has fueled an opioid epidemic that has killed more than six hundred thousand Americans, Picasso’s communism should not be forgotten. To obscure his communism shortchanges the serious politics of much twentieth-century art, and also occludes feminist history, reducing it to personal grievances and rendering radical women artists and their movements invisible. 

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby at the Brooklyn Museum has received criticism in the art world and across the political spectrum. (ED JONES / AFP via Getty Images)

Picasso’s anti-fascist sympathies informed his first political work. He drew a series of satirical illustrations called The Dream and Lie of Franco, which were sold as postcards at the 1937 World’s Fair in order to raise money for the Spanish Republican cause. Art historian Patricia Failing told PBS that doing work for a political cause pushed Picasso in new directions creatively; in this world, he experiments with burlesque, caricature, and “obviousness,” elements “you don’t find in his other work.”

He also painted the much better known Guernica, a mesmerizing antiwar and anti-fascist painting, and an explosively angry response to Francisco Franco’s brutal bombing of the Basque village, for the same World’s Fair.

In 1944, Picasso told L’Humanité,

I have wished, by drawing and by colour, since those are my weapons, to reach ever further into an understanding of the world and of men, in order that this understanding might bring us each day an increase in liberation. . . . Yes, I am aware of having always struggled by means of my painting, like a genuine revolutionary. But I have come to understand, now, that that alone is not enough; these years of terrible oppression have shown me that I must fight not only through my art, but with all of myself. And so, I have come to the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since in reality I was with it all along.

After Guernica, he was asked to design an image of peace. His resulting 1949 painting, Dove of Peace, became the logo for the First International Peace Conference in Paris that year and was then adopted as an international communist symbol. The Soviet government recognized him with its national peace prize twice, in 1950 and 1962.

Picasso’s communist and antiwar commitments led him to oppose the US intervention in the Korean War and inspired his 1951 painting Massacre in Korea, which shows women (including pregnant women) and children facing men with guns.

Some of Picasso’s contemporaries doubted his politics. Salvador Dalí once said, “Pablo Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.” For his part, Joseph Stalin took a dim view of the lack of realism in Picasso’s cubist art. (While the Soviets held and cared for a vast collection of Picasso’s works, for years they did not display them to the public.)

His fellow communists didn’t grasp even his most political works. The French Communist Party found Massacre in Korea too ambiguous in assigning blame for the violence, and the Soviets reacted similarly to Guernica.

Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea (1951). (Wikimedia Commons)

But Western authorities took Picasso’s communism seriously. Many in the United States considered Massacre in Korea a work of communist, anti-American propaganda, and the artist was intensively surveilled by the FBI. He was also spied upon by European governments; France refused his application for citizenship in 1940 because the secret police worried about his “extremist ideas evolving toward communism.” Due to similar anti-communist sentiment, Massacre in Korea was not shown in South Korea (despite some museums’ attempts for decades) until 2021.

The disappearance of Picasso’s communist, antiwar, and anti-fascist politics from our public discussions of him means that we aren’t fully considering his place in history. But Picasso isn’t the only artist who gets lost in this righteous hubbub. Women do too.

The New York Times review of Gadsby’s show argues that the focus on Picasso as “problematic” shortchanges the women artists in his orbit. The Times reviewer, although he does not point out Picasso’s politics, intriguingly notes in passing Picasso’s influence on Soviet women artists who “put Picasso’s breakdown of forms in the service of political revolution.” These Soviet avant-garde women were the subject of a Guggenheim exhibit called Amazons of the Avant-Garde in 2000. One of the most political of these artists was Varvara Stepanova, who explored materialism during the Bolshevik Revolution through a new art movement called constructivism (which under Stalin was supplanted by socialist realism).

This isn’t a matter of elevating “the political” over “the personal.” An insight of second-wave feminism is that the two are intertwined. Picasso’s personal life is of interest. But communism is part of that life and was deeply personal to him, as it was to most mid-century party members. As he explained to L’Humanité in 1944,

Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier? Is it not the Communists who have been the most courageous in France as in the USSR or in my own Spain? How could I have hesitated? For fear of committing myself? But on the contrary I have never felt freer, more complete!

…

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“Why is my husband forbidden from staying in the ward but a pair of homosexual men can even though nothing has happened in their bodies?”

By World Israel News Staff

In a groundbreaking policy shift, Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva will admit gay couples and single men whose infants are born via surrogate into its maternity ward, Israel Hayom reported on Monday.

Under the new policy, one of the partners in a gay couple or the single father will be admitted into the maternity ward following the birth of their baby via surrogacy. The other partner, in the case of couples, will assume the role of the escort. The surrogate mother, on the other hand, will be admitted into the women’s gynecological ward.

“We’ve been waiting for a long time for a process that will allow couples to bring children into the world through surrogacy,” Dr. Rony Chen, head of Beilinson’s maternity wards, told Israel Hayom.

“As a member of the LGBT community, I understand the depth of the adaptations we need to make. The hospital is a home for all new families, for all the gay couples and single fathers. They will receive the treatment and the special support we’ve created for them, which is adapted to the needs of the growing family.”

Viyulan Karasik, head nurse at the maternity ward, emphasized the goal of strengthening the initial bond between the newborns and their new parents.

“The natural connection created during pregnancy between the parents and the embryo takes place differently during surrogacy. In order to ease the process of connection between the fathers and the baby, we need to think creatively. We are guiding and accompanying the parents in their new families,” Karasik said.

The hospital encourages prospective homosexual couples to familiarize themselves with its services and facilities. A hospitalization period of at least 48 hours after the birth is common in most Israeli hospitals, and includes close guidance on initial care for the baby.

“After the Surrogacy Law was approved in Israel for gay couples and single parents, it was clear to me that we needed to lead the issue,” said Professor Asnat Walfisch, head of Beilinson’s Helen Schneider Hospital for Women. “I am proud to be a partner in the innovative model which we have built here.”

Eliraz Fine, a digital creator and spokesperson for “Fathers for Justice,” raised concerns about the policy. “Why is my husband, who is also an emotional new father, not allowed to come in and stay at my side during the hospitalization after the birth, other than during visiting hours, and certainly not overnight – but a pair of homosexual men can stay on the other side of my curtain even though nothing has happened in their bodies?!”

Fine’s objections also touched on issues of privacy, modesty and religious observance, particularly for religiously observant Jewish and Arab women. Her post, tagged “don’t give birth in Beilinson,” argued that if the hospital feels the need to provide these services to homosexual men, it should open a dedicated ward for them.

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