I must admit that last month I spent an hour a day watching the news. I am not in the mood to comment on current events, so I would write how an Israeli thinks Americans see Israel. There are many foreign issues that come up in the news, but Israel is something that never goes down for long. It is surprising how much people heard about Israel. One of my housemates is a Vietnamese student. He heard about Rabin, Barak, Netanyahu, Sharon, Mofaz, and of course, Peres. He heard about Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, you name it. Can you tell one Vietnamese figure? Can you tell the prime minister of Canada? Recently people were asking me who is this Olmert. I guess they got an answer quickly.
Many people have strong emotional attitude towards Israel. Some people are ready to believe that Israelis are torturing Palestinians is their basements. They just don't know that typical Israeli houses don’t have basements, they have shelters. More seriously, people are asking why this little country is causing such big troubles. Other people I met adore the IDF in the 67 war. It doesn’t matter they were not born yet - the stories keep on running. The problem is that when people get information fragments from TV narrators who have no clue about the names and places they read from a monitor, history gets mixed up in their mind. I wouldn’t say the media is deliberately biased, but it is definitely heavily distorted. The result is that many people are projecting their opinions based on their local life experience to a region that runs by very different rules.
Most Americans have no military experience. The young ones get their ideas from computer games programmed by people who got their ideas from TV narrators. Perhaps the closest thing they interact with is the paramilitary medical establishment. Here doctors are like officers in Israel. The tiny difference though is that medicine cures whereas army is about killing. During my army service I learned there is something called military thinking. An example from recent events: when there is a ceasefire agreement, common sense says there is no point continuing fighting. Military reasoning says war goes on at least until the deadline. I am not dismissing this reasoning completely, since there are many military justifications that don’t come up in civil life. However, for most western people this reasoning is out of the scope of their world. Don’t even bother to explain it to them. It is more effective to use cliches.
Another influencing factor on people’s attitude towards Israel is their interaction with local Jewish and Muslims. What they don’t know is that Israelis are very different. I mean, how many Woody Allens can you find in Israel? Most Canadians believe that Israelis are more religious than Canadian Jews while in reality it is exactly the opposite - Israel is way more secular. They think Israel society is unified while in reality it is very divided. From distance, internal differences that seems huge to Israelis are below the resolution of foreign observers.
I was thinking for some time why Israel attracts so much disproportional attention. The best explanation I have is that Israel has got a unique story. Unlike Hollywood or Wall-Street which also produce stories constantly, this story is real. It is a mix of history, religion, and power struggles. Exotic and different enough from their ordinary life yet not too remote like wars in Africa. For Americans, Israel has always been a good source of bad news.
