• Elul rolls on, and so does GN Israel, gathering up another week's worth of good news from a country that never seems to run short of it.
• The economy just delivered its loudest answer yet to anyone still asking how Israel is holding up: GDP grew at a 15.4% annualised rate in the second quarter, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported this week, a sharp rebound from the contraction seen in the first quarter and comfortably ahead of JPMorgan's forecast of 11%. The recovery from the spring's conflict with Iran has been faster than after previous rounds, driven by a resumption of the consumption and construction activity that had been paused during the fighting. The IMF still expects Israel's economy to outgrow every other G7 country this year.
• KKL-JNF has announced a NIS 284 million investment in developing southern Israel, with NIS 110 million of that earmarked for communities along the Gaza border and a further NIS 15 million toward the memorial plan for Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Money alone doesn't rebuild a community, but it's a serious vote of confidence in the Negev's future from an organisation that has spent over a century turning "no" into "not yet."
• Israel's classrooms had their own good month. Students trained at the Future Scientists Center brought home 13 medals, including five golds, from this summer's International Physics, Biology and Chemistry Olympiads, held across Colombia, Lithuania and Uzbekistan against fields of 80 to 90-plus countries. Tenth-grader Ruth Kozlovsky took gold in physics; Olga Besova and Yehuda Lester struck gold in biology. A small country, it turns out, keeps producing an outsized number of very sharp teenagers.
• And then there's the marathon team. At the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham, Israel's men took team gold in the marathon, edging out Germany by 34 seconds over the combined times of three runners — the country's first medal of the championships. Gashau Ayale led the way with an individual bronze, just ten seconds off the course record. Ayale, Tadesse Getahon and Haimro Alame all came to Israel from Ethiopia as teenagers; asked about the closing stretch, Ayale said he told his teammates it was time to give it everything they had left in their legs. They did.
• The season itself keeps offering its own quiet encouragement: a country mid-way through forty days of taking stock, and still finding plenty worth adding to the ledger on the good side.