How the media storm looks from inside Israel

Everybody has heard about last week's events, that is, one of its various versions. Obviously, seen from Israel, the situation is a totally different one  than seen from the outside, even though it is quite obvious even from inside Israel that there are very different and diverging points of view.

The most striking thing, at first, was the astounding discrepancy between what so many people here knew right away -  because so many people here in the country have a relative or an acquaintance who knows someone who is a friend of one of the soldiers or of someone well informed: young Israeli soldiers who had been instructed to gently, but forcefully stop western leftist activists on their route to Gaza, after numerous warnings, had been brutally and viciously attacked and lynched by professional Muslim mercenaries, while the whole world seemed to go crazy while adamantly accusing Israel of having massacred peaceful activists...



Many around me were left with a paralyzing feeling of screaming the facts without being heard. As if the whole world, Westerners included, where out on a new Pogrom against Israel. In the eyes of those Israelis whole felt like this, the "enlightened" world had now shown its real - and ugly - face: "They hate us, they simply hate us all, nothing has changed, antisemitism is live and kicking!"
 
Last Wednesday evening my partner was late on his way back home - when I called to find out what took him so long  to make the way from the office, he explained that he had the bad idea to pick the route alongside the sea shore, to avoid the evening traffic jams on the main north-south axis of Tel Aviv and that now he was stuck in a huge traffic jam cause by a large demonstration in front of the Turkish embassy.

Later on we were informed in the TV news  Many that thousands of people had spontaneously decided, after word had been spread in the news that the Turkish prime minister had decided to call back his ambassador from Tel Aviv to Ankara, to go to the Turkish embassy on Hayarkon st., nearby the sea, in order to vent their anger and their fury about such terribly unfair and false accusations held against Israel.

A friend of mine explained me: "This is when I am recalled about the ghetto my parents escaped from in Poland: I feel that although I live here in Israel, I am in a ghetto, that we are on our own here. Although you have been living here for more than 30 years now, you don't know the feeling of it!"

A cartoon graffiti representing Herzl, the Seer of the Jewish State: 

"If you don't want to, you don't have to ..."

A leftist friend of mine tells me, as I asked her about her view on the situation: "It's all terribly sad and depressing." Ever since I live here I have known leftist Israelis who continuously feel that the Israeli leaders and politicians are nothing but a bunch of arrogant schlemiels who keep making one mistake after the other, while lacking a broader view or vision about where they wish to lead the country to. My friend says that she doesn't take the world's accusation personally: "It's a trend", she says, "just the same as it is now fashionable to display awareness for environmental questions, there is now a trend to identify with the Palestinians, that's perfectly normal, the same as years ago we used to accuse South Africa of Apartheit as something unacceptable. People are not interested with details, it's just a global tendency - and our Israeli politicians just keep messing up and getting it all wrong!"

I have no doubt that it is almost every Israeli's deepest wish to find a way to live in peace with our Palestinian neighbors, whatever their political beliefs, and yet in such moments this seems to be ever more out of reach...