In a classic moment of Israeli TV, the anchorman of the top-rated talk show interviewed his father in February 2003, and asked him the same question he asked almost everyone else he interviewed: “What is ‘Israeli’ in your eyes?”
Speaking three days before he became justice minister, Yosef (Tommy) Lapid responded to a remarkably young-looking Yair Lapid: “You,” making the 39-year-old anchorman blush.
I understand that father-child dynamic more than ever, now that I have a daughter doing national service, a son who volunteers on ambulances, and a younger daughter, who unlike all her older siblings, prefers to speak in Hebrew.
They are what is most Israeli in my eyes, and I am very proud of them.
I feel Israeli, too, sometimes, though I will never give up watching Cubs baseball games and Bears football games, and even after living here for 27 years, I still find it painful to watch soccer.
My most Israeli moments are my adventures with my little one all over this beautiful country.
Many sabras are finally realizing what has been so obvious for so long
WHEN DO I feel least Israeli? When I talk to people born here about the world around us. Especially now.
Lately, it seems that many sabras are finally realizing what has been so obvious for so long: That Israel is facing a colossal problem on the world’s stage.
They have known for a while that we are not as welcome abroad as we used to be; for instance, Eurovision rules keep changing to prevent us from winning the song contest. But it seems like the extent of the problem is finally hitting home.
And that makes me ask: Why did it take you so long to get it? Why did it take a 25-minute standing ovation for an anti-Israel film and a nasty song from Ed Sheeran’s opening act to finally realize the extent of the problem?
Why have too many Israelis only woken up now and smelled the botz? (Both the coffee they drink and the mud we are mired in?)
The first possible answer is that until recently, they were genuinely too busy dealing with the other war – the one on the seven military battlefields – to deal with the eighth, ninth, and tenth, which also intensified on Oct. 7, in mainstream media, social media, and college campuses and communities in America and throughout the world.
In their action-packed new book, In the War Room, authors Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman artfully described how the leaders who ran the war painstakingly tried to handle one massive challenge at a time. Perhaps now that the military battlefields have relatively calmed down, the time to deal with the media battlefield and the narrative war that are still raging has finally come?
That would appear to be the case if you look at last week’s prime-time newscasts and Hebrew newspapers, which repeatedly led with the ramifications of the movie NAZA, which won the special jury prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.
For instance, top-circulation newspaper Israel Hayom had a lead headline about the 8200 intelligence unit demanding to reveal which reserve soldiers spoke out against the IDF in the film, and another headline was about IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir calling the movie a blood libel.
Let’s hope this newfound interest in how we look abroad will not be a fleeting and temporary phenomenon. It’s time for parties across the political spectrum to make it a central part of their campaigns – and keep their promises if elected.
Israelis believed the current anti-Israel wave was just a temporary fad
A SECOND answer could be that many Israelis had believed the current anti-Israel wave was just a temporary fad, as it was several times in the past, when international support for the Jewish state eventually recovered. After all, this is not the first time that public opinion polls in the United States indicated diminishing public approval for Israel during a war.
This is part of the traditional Israeli optimism characterized by the axiom “yihiye beseder,” best translated as “it will work itself out,” which is usually accompanied by the appropriate dismissive flick of the wrist.
A third and final explanation could be that too many Israelis have resigned themselves to the axiom that the international community will always hate Israel and the Jewish people, no matter what the Jewish state does, no matter who is in power here, and no matter how unjust it is.
“Kol ha’olam negdeinu (the entire world is against us),” they lament, in a self-defeating attitude that has unfortunately become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The truth is that while there are more people who hate us than before, there are also plenty who don’t, and there are countless people who don’t feel strongly one way or another and can be persuaded to back our side, with a serious effort that must take place as soon as possible.
The significant rise in funding for public diplomacy in the state budget is a welcome step in the right direction that the next government must continue, no matter who wins the election.
More efforts can be made to be proactive, which apparently no one was before NAZA won the award, and not only reactive, as the IDF, Foreign Ministry, and others were, rather effectively, but way too late.
That was what I made sure happened last year, when there was concern that The Voice of Hind Rajab, a movie about a Palestinian girl killed in Gaza, would win an Oscar. HonestReporting worked together with the Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and promoting arts as a bridge for peace.
CCFP sent a critique of the movie, sensitively written by HonestReporting’s Rachel O’Donoghue, to hundreds of Academy members. The movie had no distributor in Israel or the US, so I arranged for O’Donoghue to see it at the home of an Academy member in Tel Aviv, in order to have her article online and ready to be read around the world when the film’s Oscar nomination was announced with great fanfare.
All three of those explanations could be true, but at least Israelis have finally woken up.
The Hebrew phrase used for someone taking too long to realize the obvious is “Boker tov, Eliyahu” (literally, “Good morning Elijah”). According to linguist Ruvik Rosenthal, the phrase traces back to Safed, where synagogue caretakers struggled to wake residents up for early slihot prayers, especially a guy named Eliyahu Slonim. The phrase was then used for other Safed residents not named Eliyahu, and then in other places in the country when the synagogue caretakers moved.
That was how a literal wake-up call became the term used in Hebrew slang today.
So, Boker tov, Eliyahu! Is there anything more Israeli than that?■
The writer served as the chief political correspondent and analyst for The Jerusalem Post, and as executive director of HonestReporting. He has lectured about Israel in all 50 US states.