SHARE: Your Advocacy Experience

This is your space as ambassadors of Israel to share your experiences defending Israel, petitioning BDS resolutions, debating Anti-Zionist voices, and anything else in the trenches of our on-campus battles. Let’s help each other with advice and share stories so we can all better advocate for Israel.

8 responses to “SHARE: Your Advocacy Experience”

  1. I was in Israel visiting family when Operation Protective Edge began. I returned home to Houston, Texas a few days later, shaken up by being within rocket range in Be’er Sheva one day and having extended family members in the reserves that were thrown out of their daily routine to defend our family and nation. The first day I was back home, I was in the car near the Israeli embassy and saw a pro-Palestinian protest. Because of my raw emotions from my recent experiences, I began screaming facts at the protestors from my car. It was all a blur in hindsight, but I argued about the evils of Hamas, human shields, and Israel’s right to defend itself. They responded with weak arguments and I drove away with my mind racing with anger.
    After that incident, I knew that I shouldn’t have engaged with these protesters. They were not interested in hearing my side of the story or condemning Hamas as a terrorist organization. Sometimes, it’s not worth the dialogue we tend to strive for.
    A week or so later, I attended a pro-Israel rally on a busy intersection in Houston. There were many pro-Palestinian protesters on the other side, yelling anti-Israel and anti-Semitic phrases, such as the popular death-to-Jews chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Many of the Palestinian supporters would drive by our side of the intersection screaming profanities and flashing inappropriate and even showed the sickening and deranged three finger symbol representing the support for the murder of the three Israeli boys, Gilad, Eyal, and Naftali who were murdered by pro-Hamas terrorists. It triggered my emotions once again, from anger, to horror, to sadness. These emotions were further triggered by seeing anti-Israel and completely inaccurate Facebook posts that likened Gaza to a concentration camp and brought my emotions further to the surface.
    What’s important to remember in this type of conflict is the famous 5-90-5 rule. On either side, it’s safe to assume there are approximately five percent of people who will not change their mind no matter how strong your argument is. We need to focus on the 90 percent. We need to find those people who see the conflict on CNN and think about Israel with a twisted perception, instead of those who are past the point of no return. Dialogue is important, but in this war, so is choosing our battles.

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  2. This Sunday I was asked to speak at the Leeds Memorial Event for Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel. I gave a speech to the 200 people from the community in attendance including community leaders and our local MP. I was about we will overcome and how I felt that it could have been me in their place. The speech was well received and I lit a candle of rememberance afterwards.
    The message is a) we should not forget this tragic incident and b) Israel advocates should not go global before going national, and they should not go national before going local. That applies to campus’, towns and states.
    This week was my home town, next week who knows?

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  3. My Junior year there was a mandatory assembly that featured a showing of a part of the movie Miral, a movie based on Rula Jebreal’s young adulthood. Israeli Arab author and journalist, Rula Jebreal, then held a speech for the junior class that was meant to open our minds to a global issue–that issue was the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The movie had portrayed scenes of Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinian houses, a friend of Jebreal’s being shot at a demonstration (or riot), and it also shows Jebreal associating herself with members of terrorist organizations. After the movie, Jebreal continued speaking and made rather outlandish comments such as “the intifadas were between the Palestinian people and the Israeli Army, no Israeli civilians were involved”. Unfortunately, this isn’t true of course evidenced by the numerous terrorist attacks that occurred during both the first and second intifada.
    So how did the other pro-Israel students and I respond? Immediately after the Junior Class Forum, there was an outburst of debate on Facebook. Students resolved to e-mail our school’s headmaster explaining there disappointment with the one-sidedness of the Forum. However, one student and I decided to contact our local town newspaper and ask if they’d be willing to give two students the opportunity to respond to our school’s mandatory forum. The result was the following Op-Ed article: http://www.greenwichtime.com/opinion/article/Op-Ed-GHS-forum-fostered-bias-not-dialogue-3653030.php
    In the article, we criticized not Rula Jebreal, but rather the set-up of the Forum and our school’s approach to the issue. We received a lot of positive response, but also some negative attacks. An example was an article written by a teacher in which he directly criticized us for deriding what he considered a “forum”. I decided to actually meet with the teacher one-on-one and it turned out he had been misinformed about the nature of the Forum (he hadn’t been in attendance himself) and it turned out we were both interested in the same thing; dialogue. The story continues with a little more controversy, including an angry e-mail from Rula Jebreal herself—but also received positive reinforcement from community leaders and our school’s own headmaster. The happy ending was that ultimately I and the other author of the Op-Ed piece received the Lillian Davey Butler Award for Journalism, an award given each year to the best student-authored newspaper article that year.

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  4. On December 23rd 2013 there was a bus bombing in Bat Yam. One police officer was injured but due to passanger awareness no one on board was injured. I went on BBC News website and found, after several hours no mention of this story, despite them posting other suicide bombing stories from other countries. So I wrote them an email explaining to them what had happened in Israel. When I woke up the next day it was one of the front page stories on the website.

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