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A Note From Israel: When the Media Battlefield and the Home Front Collide
The body of a motorist lies on a road following a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel October 7, 2023. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
A significant part of my professional life has been spent at HonestReporting. I’ve worked through far too many crises, including several major IDF military operations, mass-casualty terror attacks, and numerous incidents that made the front pages of every international newspaper around the globe.
In this sphere, you have to come to grips with the constant fight ahead. You may win critical battles, but the war itself — a war beyond the military battlefield — is one you may never fully win.
This is a fight for Israel’s legitimacy and its right to be treated as simply another state among the nations.
The past year has been one of the hardest I’ve ever experienced, not just because of the relentless attacks in the international media on Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas terrorists who carried out the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It’s also the overwhelming antisemitism and abuse that floods social media — things I force myself to see and respond to every day.
It’s the inability to separate my work from the harsh reality that Israelis are living through — because I’m one of them.
In a country this small, it’s almost a cliché to say everyone is connected to someone directly affected by the situation. But it’s the truth.
I live in Modi’in, a city of 100,000 people situated exactly halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It’s a place proud of its distinction as having the highest percentage of 18-year-olds answering the mandatory call to serve in the IDF.
Tragically, in the days after October 7, it became clear that several of those young soldiers had been brutally killed inside their bases, including some from my own neighborhood.
I’ve lived in the same house for 14 years, yet had never met the neighbors two doors down — until I attended the shiva for their teenage granddaughter who fell that day. At other times, the streets of our neighborhood would fill with residents standing silently, holding Israeli flags, as convoys carried the families of the fallen to lay their loved ones to rest in the local cemetery — a heartbreaking scene echoed across the country.
In my late 40s, I’m at an age where the soldiers on the frontlines are both my peers and the children of many friends and acquaintances.
In my position, I receive constant updates from various governmental and non-governmental organizations, including the IDF, police, and Magen David Adom emergency responders. Far too often, I’d wake up to an IDF notification about the latest casualties. Sometimes, a name would stand out and I’d pray it wasn’t the child of a friend or colleague. Tragically, sometimes it was.
The husband of a former colleague and the son of a family friend were both killed in Gaza. A cousin from my extended family was stabbed to death while serving as a Border Policewoman in Jerusalem’s Old City. The pain and grief are beyond words.
HonestReporting is a microcosm of the country as a whole. One colleague has been on army reserve duty for over 200 days, leaving his wife and two small children to manage without him, while our organization is left without a key team member. Another colleague’s husband has spent many days in uniform, leaving her to care for their baby alone. Everyone is affected in some way, and we are no different from countless workplaces disrupted by the mandatory call to serve.
I will always consider it a privilege to have a level of insider access that many Israelis don’t. At the end of November, I was invited to a breakfast at a foreign ambassador’s residence, alongside colleagues from other organizations and some family members of the hostages.
We sat and listened as the families shared the stories of their loved ones, still held captive in Gaza.
At one point, an attendee broke down in tears. She quickly apologized, wondering aloud how she could be the one crying when others in the room had brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and children being held by Hamas — yet somehow, they managed to keep their composure while fighting for their release.
There was no shame in her tears. It’s hard for those outside to fully grasp the deep bonds that connect both Israelis and the broader global Jewish community, or the simple truth that this catastrophe touches nearly every one of us in some way.
In the weeks following October 7, I had the opportunity to visit Sderot and several kibbutzim near the Gaza border. It felt like stepping into a vast crime scene, frozen in time since that horrific day. Many of HonestReporting’s staff have been there, witnessing the devastation firsthand, so we can accurately convey to the world the barbarity of what happened there.
Israel is a country still gripped by trauma, and there’s no sign of it easing. Behind every article, video, and social media post is a member of HonestReporting’s staff, living the reality of a nation at war — where the frontlines are also the home front. Workdays spent behind computers are often interrupted by sirens and frantic runs to safe rooms.
A job focused on handling bad news becomes indistinguishable from the constant barrage of terrible events that flood our senses.
In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ rampage, I believed Israel might have three or four days before the global narrative turned against us. In truth, I’m not sure we even had that.
Today, we continue fighting against media bias and anti-Israel slander — not just because it’s our job or career, but because it’s our responsibility as proud Israelis. We’ve been given the privilege to serve our country and people in the best way we know how.
The author is the Editorial Director of HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post A Note From Israel: When the Media Battlefield and the Home Front Collide first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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World News Standing with Zionism Is Standing with Liberty and Justice
Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern-day Zionism, leans over the balcony of the Hotel Les Trois Rois (Three King’s Hotel/Hotel drei Könige) in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – Understanding a two-sided conflict requires nuance. In almost all disputes, both sides have merit to their arguments; simultaneously, flaws can also be found in their position.
There are rare conflicts that require no nuance to understand them. These conflicts pit good against evil. One side is so obviously moral and the other so vile that even trying to understand the vile side doesn’t help a person understand the topic of dispute, but rather, runs the risk of demonstrating empathy for a position so objectionable that it deserves no space in a moral society. One doesn’t need to (and shouldn’t) study Nazi thought to understand why antisemitism and murder are wrong. The same is true of racism and rape. There aren’t many conflicts that are so obvious, but when they occur, it’s important to relate to them properly and not treat them as normal conversation.
Zionism is a modern political movement based on a 4,000-year-old ideology that maintains there is an intrinsic connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. The modern political Zionist movement started in the middle of the 1800s and advocated for the rights of the Jewish people to self-determination in their historic homeland, the Land of Israel. Its founder is generally recognized as Theodor Herzl, but hundreds of Zionists came before him. The Zionist movement experienced success in its mission with the establishment of the modern-day State of Israel in 1948. Since its founding, the nation has remained loyal to its purpose of ensuring the Jewish people determine their destiny on their land.
Zionism was the modern age’s greatest liberation movement. For 2,000 years, almost every country the Jews settled in eventually turned on them, persecuted them and expelled them. The Jew was known as a wanderer—always a stranger in a strange land. The Jewish nightmare reached its lowest point when Nazi Germany, aided by antisemites throughout Eastern and Western Europe, murdered 6 million men, women and children. This evil was so singularly unique that it was given its own name: the Holocaust. Many opposed to Zionism or who had yet to understand its merits understood the need for Jewish self-determination and a Jewish state after witnessing the evils perpetrated against the Jews when they didn’t have their own nation to defend them and provide refuge to their persecuted. Zionism stands as an outline for every liberation movement that came after it.
On the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah on Oct. 7, the Jewish people, Israelis and the international community were given a harsh reminder of the violent plots antisemites plan for the Jews. Palestinians by the thousands stormed across the Gaza-Israel border and committed acts equally as heinous as the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews of Europe and North Africa. The barbarians who killed, kidnapped, raped, burned, beheaded and tortured innocent Jews that day targeted civilians. The atrocities weren’t acts of resistance but evil savagery. The acts that day were premeditated and committed out of antisemitism.
In the year since, antisemites around the world have felt emboldened to express their Jew-hatred in ways not seen since Nazi rallies. These rallies aren’t about a free Palestine, justice or human rights. In the past few decades, Palestinians were massacred by the tens of thousands in Syria, uprooted from their homes in Egypt and discriminated against in Lebanon. Not one rally was held anywhere in the world for these genuine atrocities committed against Palestinians in Arab countries. It was antisemitism that awakened the masses to scream vile hate-filled slogans like “Kill the Jews” in cities spanning from San Francisco to London to Sydney. The people at these rallies looked at a conflict that pitted the freedom movement of Zionism against the hate of antisemitism and chose to rally for evil. For shame.
The conflict that has sprung up since the Simchat Torah massacre pits the Jewish state against terrorists who wish for the demise of the one nation that protects the Jewish people. It doesn’t aim to win freedom or rights for the Palestinian people but to reverse global progress that achieved liberation for the Jewish people. The side of the conflict that waves flags of terrorist organizations intends to put the Jewish people back at risk of the extermination they faced throughout the Crusades, during pogroms and the Holocaust.
This two-sided conflict isn’t a normal conflict that requires nuance to understand it. This conflict pits good vs. evil. Israel’s enemies and their supporters use emotion instead of facts, demonization instead of history and victimhood instead of responsibility to trick society into confusing weakness for virtue and strength for misconduct, leading the public to support evil instead of standing up for a liberal and democratic state.
All great justice movements fought for the liberty and rights of their people. These movements weren’t built around fighting against others. They advocated for their people’s rights and used violence to achieve their goals when they were left with no other choice. Zionism followed the American Revolution, among other movements, to earn its liberty. Israel’s enemies have consistently chosen to leave the negotiating table or never join it in the first place and use violence as their first option.
A year after the Simchat Torah massacre, the world has become a more confused place. People who stand for justice are standing on the wrong side of a conflict between the liberation movement of Zionism and violent antisemites who march with terrorist flags, following people being paid by terrorists to disrupt Western, liberal and free societies. There must be a moral reckoning directed by global leaders who don’t try to kowtow to both sides and appease the most evil actors in today’s world. The world must choose—and declare Zionism and Israel just and its opponents the enemies of liberty, democracy and justice.
The post World News Standing with Zionism Is Standing with Liberty and Justice first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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North Korean Soldiers Spotted in Russia, Fighting Against Ukraine
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Сosmodrome in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, Sept. 13, 2023. Photo: Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin via REUTERS
i24 News – Footage has emerged showing approximately 1,500 North Korean soldiers receiving uniforms and equipment at a training ground in eastern Russia, confirming reports that North Korea is preparing to play a more active role in the conflict in Ukraine.
This development underscores the growing military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, particularly in the face of increasing tensions with the West.
The video, which aired on CNN, depicts long lines of North Korean soldiers waiting to be outfitted for service. Upon their arrival in Russia, these soldiers were reportedly asked to complete questionnaires providing their measurements for uniforms, hats, and footwear.
This organized effort suggests a systematic approach to integrating North Korean troops into Russian military operations.
In another video shared on social media, a Russian speaker can be heard commenting on the presence of North Korean troops, stating, “We can’t film them… There are more, there are millions of them here. Here are the new reinforcements. This is just the beginning.” This statement raises concerns about the scale of North Korean military involvement in Russia and, potentially, in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has expressed alarm over the alliance between Russia and North Korea, warning during a NATO summit this week that “thousands” of North Korean troops are reportedly en route to Russia. This revelation could mark a significant escalation in the ongoing conflict, as North Korea has one of the largest standing armies in the world, boasting 1.2 million soldiers. However, many of these troops lack combat experience, raising questions about their immediate effectiveness in a frontline role.
The burgeoning relationship between North Korea and Russia has been solidified through recent high-level meetings, including President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the North Korean capital in June. During this visit, both countries pledged to provide mutual military assistance in the event of an attack, signaling a historic defense agreement forged out of shared interests and mutual ostracism from the West.
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Sinwar’s Wife Seen Holding $32,000 Hermès Bag
The wife of recently eliminated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar seen holding a $32,000 Hermes bag while fleeing through tunnel. Credit: IDF
JNS.org – The Israel Defense Forces released footage on Saturday showing the wife of recently deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar making her way through a tunnel carrying a $32,000 Hermès Birkin bag.
She is seen walking behind her husband and children the day before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, in which 1,200 were slaughtered and 251 taken hostage.
The footage was posted to X by Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, head of the Arab media division of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.
“While the people of Gaza do not have enough money for a tent or basic necessities, we see many examples of Yahya Sinwar and his wife’s special love for money,” Adraee posted in Arabic.
IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari on Saturday said of the footage: “For hours, they go up and down, stocking up on food, a television, and other products for a long stay. He [Sinwar] only cared for his personal survival.”
According to the post, Sinwar’s wife was carrying a Hermès Birkin 40 Black Togo Gold Hardware.
It has “tonal stitching, two straps with front toggle closure, clochette with lock and two keys and double rolled handles.
“The interior is lined in black chevre with one zip pocket with an Hermès engraved zipper pull and an open pocket on the opposite side,” according to website Madison Avenue Couture, which sells it for the $32,000 price tag the IDF noted.
The post Sinwar’s Wife Seen Holding $32,000 Hermès Bag first appeared on Algemeiner.com.