Moving to Israel

Always searching for good reasons to convince people to move to Israel, I was unfortunately hit over the head with a fantastic reason this morning when I read Noam Bedein’s chilling article on his 13-day coast-to-coast visit to Canadian college campuses.

It seems that college students, more than ever, are dealing with a completely inaccurate (to put it mildly) view of the situation in Israel. Whether this distorted view they have is due to being misinformed or just plain disdain for the Jewish State, it is a sad fact that Bedein talks about in his description of his tour that he used to try presenting the human side of the Israeli town of Sderot and the western Negev communities.

“Palestinians” and others clearly have no interest in any “peace treaties” with Israel and reading this article is a painful reminder that the battle is not just here in the Middle East but even with many of our “friends” in North America.

Ari

Although this is a blog that attempts to encourage people to move to Israel, we usually attempt to do it in a positive way. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and today this is one of those situations. Today I would like to bring a disturbing article to your attention that will probably make one think about moving to Israel but through negative events coming out of the United States.

The article, printed in the World Tribune and brought to my attention by Tamar Yonah, talks about the cool reception received by  Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi upon his visit to Washington. It talks of how the new administration in the United States has viewed Israel of more of a problem in the Middle East than a friend and solution and notes how America has not been very encouraging towards Israel in regards towards Iran.

These are disturbing events and, again, although we prefer to not use fear as a tactic to try and bring Jews home to Israel, sometimes the facts speak for themselves. Please read the article and after viewing it and others like it, it would not surprise me to see many Americans making the move towards Aliyah without much else being said.

Ari

As concerns have grown regarding the new American leadership with regards towards their policies with Israel, there has been at least one encouraging piece of news. The U.S. has anounced that it will be boycotting the Durban II conference on racism unless there are significant changes to what the State Department called “unsalvageable” anti-Israeli resolutions. Israel has been concerned by the new American government’s change in policy to participate in preliminary committee meetings for the convention, which is to be held in Geneva but bears the name of the South African city where the first meeting was held in 2001. The United States walked out of it because of harsh anti-Israeli resolutions.

With the conference planning a clearly anti-Israel agenda the State Department announcement came after growing domestic protests of the Obama administration’s participation in the planning committee.

While it is still too soon to see how the new administration will be working with Israel in the long term, this is a piece of good, encouraging news to let Israelis know that, at least for the moment, America still understands the amount of vitriol that that the world is armed with towards their best friends in the Middle East. Let’s hope this is a sign of things to come for the next four years.

 Ari

I mentioned the other day how some of Israel’s greatest battles during these trying times would be fought in the PR arena and how important it would be to publicize as many of the pro-Israel sources out there as possible to combat the various anti-Israel rhetoric that will make their way into the public.

Following up on this, I want to point out a great site by Barry Rubin. It is a site updated all the time with news and fantastic editorials covering Israel and the Middle East. Every time I read one of Barry’s columns it seems to touch a nerve in me and I know this is the type of content we absolutely need the public to see.

Please help spread the word: www.gloriacenter.org

 Ari