Courage Under Fire

I'm long overdue for a blog update and while I was going to write about our group's wonderful 3-day tiyul to the south of Israel that happened a couple of weeks ago, it seemed more pressing that I talk about the issues Israel is facing at the moment.

Israel is no stranger to bad press and controversy. Everyone and their dog has an opinion (good or bad, and often misinformed) about the Jewish State. And this is fine, I don't have a problem with people having opinions that are different to mine, unless, like in this scenario, their opinions have been formed on anti-Israel reporting, propaganda and years of ignorance.

When the newspapers hit the stands early on Tuesday after the disaster that was Monday morning, the headlines screamed "Bloodshed on the High Seas". I was sitting on the train on my way to Brighton and saw the front page of The Guardian with an equally dramatic headline and asked the passenger opposite me if I could have a look. After reading the front page I passed it back to him and clearly looked shocked, but not for the reasons he thought because he said to me, "yeah, it's pretty bad huh?"

I've gone from being sad to frustrated to plain old mad with the way the Gaza flotilla incident has been reported across the world. First we hear it's 19 people killed, then 15, then 10. I believe the final number is nine now? The world is told how Israel "stormed the flotilla" without being given the surrounding circumstances leading up to the soldiers coming on board. In the race to have their articles out first, the truth and all the facts got lost along the way. People read one article, from early on in the piece, and think they're experts on the matter.

I've had several discussions with people I've encountered here in England about the topic, and they just don't have all the information because they read just one paper, or one source, rather than trying to get the whole picture. No one wants to give Israel a chance, and all the Israel-haters start to crawl out of the woodwork again because they feel they can freely criticise Israel at these times without reproach. Because why should they get in trouble when the reporters and politicians don't get reprimanded for their uninformed accusations?

This is nothing new for Israel, or for the Zionist/pro-Israel Jews out there who have been fighting the bad publicity battle in the Diaspora. So the struggle continues. The best thing to do is to arm yourself with knowledge and facts. Don't fight back with mud-slinging or get too emotional. As my dad once told me, knowledge is power, and the most effective way to combat the nay-sayers is to throw facts at them, because they can't argue with fact. The truth will come out eventually and the world will open its eyes and see what we've been seeing all along.