A major New York Times article on Israel from the end of October has provoked a wave of pro-Israel reactions in recent days in which many Americans and Israelis upload pictures of themselves from around the country expressing their love and joy for life here and Israel's moral and mental condition.
These are hundreds of exciting pictures from all over the country and from the large and happy public that lives there.
The wave of reactions follows a large article by newspaper reporter Patrick Kingsley and photographer Leticia Wankon, who surveyed Israel from Metula to Eilat, via Tiberias, Haifa, Givat Amal in Tel Aviv, the settlement of Tekoa, Kiryat Gat, the unrecognized Bedouin settlement of Arkiv and Eilat, A place of neglect, discouraging gaps between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular, between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis, between Palestinians and Israeli Arabs and the rest of the population, and between the Russians and Ethiopians and the ordinary Israeli public.
Along the way, throughout the article, the occupation and the systematic erasure that Israel carried out during the War of Independence for the Arab residents of the country, according to the reporters, is emphasized.
In fact, all the interviewees in the article express an alienation from the Zionist idea, the establishment of the state and point out the discrimination they suffer from when their difficult feelings are described at length without any consequence or conflicting attitude on the part of happy and satisfied Israelis.
In this respect, the article paints life in the country in despairing shades when every public living in it feels threatened by the rest of the Israelis, discouraged by its situation when the Nakba is beneath everything. The culmination of the article is a resident of Eilat who states that "Eilat and its public can live in any country and not necessarily in Israel because it is not nationalism that matters."
It is no coincidence that the headline of the depressing article is "Whose Promised Land?" When the main theme in the article is that the answer to this is that the land today is in fact not guaranteed to anyone, that the vision of the prophets did not come true, that the Jewish state expelled the original inhabitants and also failed to build a melting pot.
The article provoked harsh reactions among many right-wing Americans and among Jews who began posting many pictures and comments on Twitter that show the reporter's one-sidedness and his demonstrable disregard for the joy of life and the flourishing of Israel.
Under the hashtag #SadSadIsrael, pictures of smiles were uploaded from places in the country, from marriage proposals, from family trips to many places of entertainment as well as pictures of flourishing sites and happy people all over the country.
At first, most of the respondents under this hashtag on Twitter were Jews and Americans who traveled the country and enjoyed it, but recently journalist and publicist Hanan Amior also called on Israel to join the campaign and reveal the beautiful face of the country.
In a series of tweets on Twitter, he wrote: "Hello to all lovers of Israel here, right and left, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs, ugly and handsome. Let's do something important, just, fun and cool together. And please retweet, our power in being many."
Hello to all lovers of Israel here, right and left, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs, ugly and handsome.
Let's do something important, fair, fun and cool together.
And please retweet, our power in being many.
The story goes like this:
Last week the New York Times published a major cover story titled "The Promised Land for Whom? A Journey to Polarized Israel."
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Hanan Amiur Hanan Amiur (@hananamiur) November 2, 2021