Not all news from the Near East is tragic and awful

Sometimes the news media reports about a spark of light coming out of the darkness to show us what is possible to hope for in the future.

In the 2015/2016 academic year, 14.4% of bachelor’s degree students in Israel will be Arabs, a rise of over 40% compared with 9.8% 16 years ago. In the same period, Arab master’s degree candidates tripled from 3.6% to 10.5%, while Arab Ph.D. candidates doubled from 2.8% to 5.9%.

The number of Technion students who are Arabs doubled from 9% to 19% in the last 12 years.

Last year, Prof. Hossam Haick of the Technion taught the first ever open online course on nanotechnology in Arabic. Haick is an Israeli Arab from Nazareth. Almost 4,800 registrations from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen, the UAE and the West Bank were accepted.

Haick, 38, whose Ph.D. is from the Technion, where his father also graduated, is a science prodigy. He and the Technion already have a start-up company together, developing a sensory array that detects unique markers in exhaled breath that reveal different cancers in the body.