Educators From Israel

"My research interests span the range from distributed systems to tightly coupled multiprocessors. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical study of asynchrony and its effects in systems (both shared memory and message passing based)"

"I am looking for excellent full-time or part-time graduate students to research cutting edge topics in networking and cyber security."

"My research interests span from distributed systems to tightly coupled multiprocessors. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical study of asynchrony and its effects in systems (both shared memory and message passing based), in concurrent programming (concurrent data structures and transactional memory), and in networking (network security, protecting against denial of service attacks and routing). I often examine synchronization and coordination problems in these areas using tools and models from theoretical computer science and related disciplines."

"The Riverhead Guard, our flag product, protects thousands of sites (including some from fortune-5, and many from fortune-500), keeping them up and running despite massive multi Gbps attacks over long periods of time. Riverhead was acquired by Cisco in 2004, after which I remained a director in Cisco until May of 2009. I have since then returned to a full time professorship position at Tel-Aviv University. 2014 -- 2016 Head of the Blavatnik School of Computer Science Tel-Aviv University."

"(The Sufis) established their khanaqahs on the sites of Buddhist shrines, and (it) fitted well into the religious situation in Bengal."

"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes."

"My turning point began after 2000. I wasn't a great optimist even before that. True, I always voted Labor or Meretz or Sheli and in 1988 I refused to serve in the territories and was jailed for it, but I always doubted the intentions of the Palestinians. The events of Camp David and what followed in their wake turned the doubt into certainty. When the Palestinians rejected the proposal of [[[Ehud Barak|prime minister Ehud] Barak]] in July 2000 and the Clinton proposal in December 2000, I understood that they are unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all: Lod and Acre and Jaffa."

"The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction.... Palestinian society is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers. Maybe over the years the establishment of a Palestinian state will help in the healing process. But in the meantime, until the medicine is found, they have to be contained so that they will not succeed in murdering us.... Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

"Thus, as already mentioned, the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Israel’s leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a good thing—just as, in his view, the 'annihilation' of Native Americans was a good thing—that, legally, Palestinians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel’s big error in 1948 was that it hadn’t 'carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country—the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan' of Palestinians."

"Historians who have examined Israeli history, as they would any other, trying to disentangle myth from fact and challenging accepted wisdom, have similarly found themselves in a minefield. The “new history” by historians such as Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris is, said Shabtai Teveth, a journalist and biographer of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, “a farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications.” Israel, as we shall see, is by no means the only society to have its history wars, but because so much is at stake there, from the very identity of the nation to its right to exist on its land, the conflict can get ferocious."

"His 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, drove a coach and horses through the claim that the Palestinians left Palestine of their own accord or on orders from their leaders. With a great wealth of recently declassified material, he analysed the role that Israel played in precipitating the Palestinian exodus. … The hallmark of his approach was to stick as closely as possible to the documentary evidence, to record rather than to evaluate. While his findings were original and arresting, he upheld the highest standards of historical scholarship, and he wrote with almost clinical detachment. ... The message, pithily summed up in a long interview that Benny gave to Yediot Aharonot about his highly publicised conversion, is that 'the Arabs are responsible'. Where no evidence is available to sustain the argument of Arab intransigence, Benny makes it up by drawing on his fertile imagination. … His post-conversion interpretation of history is old history with a vengeance. It is indistinguishable from the propaganda of the victors."

"There was no Zionist 'plan' or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of 'ethnic cleansing'" and "the demonisation of Israel is largely based on lies—much as the demonisation of the Jews during the past 2,000 years has been based on lies. And there is a connection between the two."

"I don’t see how we get out of it", he says in reference to Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. "Already today there are more Arabs than Jews between the [Mediterranean] sea and the Jordan. The whole territory is unavoidably becoming one state with an Arab majority. Israel still calls itself a Jewish state, but a situation in which we rule an occupied people that has no rights cannot persist in the 21st century, in the modern world. And as soon as they do have rights, the state will no longer be Jewish." He added: "The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective. They see that at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win. In another 30 to 50 years they will overcome us, come what may" and "Those among the Jews who can, will flee to America and the West.""

"A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

"No reasonable person still believes that there were no acts of expulsion and massacre by the Jewish side in the 1948 war, which was launched by the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states and which in my view was a justified war in defense of the Jewish community. It was a war in which the Arabs also committed massacres (at the Haifa refineries and in Kfar Etzion) and expulsions (from the Jewish Quarter in the Jerusalem’s Old City, for example), though to a lesser degree."

"Unfortunately, the universe does not come with an instructor’s manual and technical support is as hard to get as it is for some software packages."

"Until creationists accept that their claims must be falsifiable and show how they could be falsified, creationism cannot be said to be a scientific theory."

"Popper’s attempt to construct a methodology from falsification may have been flawed, but the concept is central in the demarcation of science from nonscience. No matter how strong one’s convictions, a true scientist will always allow for the possibility that her results may be falsified; if she denies this possibility or refuses to abandon or modify a theory in the face of repeated falsifications, you can be sure that you are dealing with pseudoscience, not science."

"Scientists refuse to study astrology, not because of prejudice or because there is a conspiracy afoot, but simply because there is not a shred of evidence that would justify the expenditure of valuable time from a career."

"Enormous resources are invested in pseudoscience that could be better invested in improving the health and education of the public."

"If ghosts and witches are not yet altogether exploded, it is the fault, not so much of the ignorant people, as of the law and the government that have neglected to enlighten them."

"The charm of our studies, the enchantment of science, is that, everywhere and always, we can give the justification of our principles and the proof of our discoveries."

"Just because people doing science are embedded in a particular social and cultural milieu, it doesn’t follow that science is not universal."

"Science has also been analyzed by sociologists, political scientists and literary critics, who make little or no effort to understand the scientific subjects that they are analyzing. These critiques, known under the umbrella label of postmodernism, are seen by scientists as uninformed and pernicious in their effects on the real problems that arise in the relationship between science and society."

"The scientific point of view is that such claims of postmodernism are a travesty that comes from mixing ideology and politics with science."

"Our existence in this world seems insignificant within the extent of space and of time. Therefore, nonreligious people have to come to terms with living in a world full of uncertainty and unknowns. Nevertheless, many people prefer facing the uncertainty, rather than believing in a certainty that makes no sense to them."

"If the Moon is made of green cheese, then Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. We would be committing this fallacy (i. e., affirming the consequent) if we used this sentence to claim that the Moon is made of green cheese. Pseudosciences employ this fallacy frequently, because it enables you to claim the truth of any premise you wish simply by choosing a true conclusion."

"Why was progress in computing technology so fast compared with the lack of progress in space travel? The reason is very simple: computing technology is only now approaching scientific limits such as quantum uncertainty and the speed of light, while space technology has already run into its limits that derive from the basic principles of physics and chemistry."

"It is clear today that modern science developed when people stopped debating metaphysical questions about the world and instead concerned themselves with the discovery of laws that were primarily mathematical."

"Modern science explicitly and emphatically rejects teleology."

"A scientific theory is a concise and coherent set of concepts, claims, and laws (frequently expressed mathematically) that can be used to precisely and accurately explain and predict natural phenomena. A theory should include a mechanism that explains how its concepts, claims, and laws arise from lower-level theories."

"A good rule of thumb for diagnosing an activity as pseudoscientific is the existence of ad hoc explanations: “my telepathic powers aren’t working today because of a force field emanating from the hostile talk-show host.” There are no “bad-gravity days” and there are no days when your TV set stops working because electromagnetic waves feel hostility."

"Concise and coherent is not the same as “simple and obvious.”"

"The statement “I don’t see how X could have evolved” simply means that you cannot see how X evolved, not that X could not have evolved."

"To brand evolution as “just a theory” is the finest compliment one can confer on it!"

"ID (intelligent design) is essentially a total failure of the imagination; just because you do not see how something could have evolved, doesn’t mean that it didn’t."

"Needless to say, there is no formal or mathematical content to ID—a “theory” that explains everything, explains nothing, and predicts nothing. ID cannot explain why millions of species were created and then became extinct. Even more importantly, it cannot explain “mistakes” in the design of living organisms such as us."

"Intelligent Design is simply a dead end; it does not deserve to be called a theory."

"We can define a fact as an observation backed up by such a preponderance of evidence that no useful purpose would be served by doubting it."

"It is important to distinguish between the scientific concept of law as a generalization, and the social concept of law which is prescriptive and normative. A desire for tolerance in respecting the laws of different social systems must not lead us into the mistake of attributing volition to the entities of science or relativism to scientific laws."

"The difference between these beliefs and the beliefs of religions is that scientific beliefs are methodological, not propositional...It is the absence of propositional beliefs that distinguishes science from a belief system. There is no proposition of the content of science that is accepted upon belief alone."

"Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account."

"Social Darwinism and eugenics are unscientific in two aspects. First, they commit the naturalistic fallacy, which is the assumption that what is, must be. The fact that the natural environment selects for reproductive advantage does not mean that we, as humans, should be forcibly selecting people according to some preconceived notions. The second nonscientific aspect of these movements was their narrow interpretation of the meaning of fitness. In evolution, this simply means fitness to survive and reproduce, not fitness according to some externally imposed criteria. Darwin himself never engaged in these speculations, nor did he support these perversions of his theory."

"Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison."