Standing with Israel is not an easy thing to do

In my previous post I wrote about how badly the Swedish media reports about anything that has to do with Israel.
Israel is always the bad guy and all the great things that come out of your country hardly gets any attention at all.

I don’t know why this is and I don’t know when it started, but I do know that years ago it was nothing like it is today, because these days Israel has become a profanity.
The media is generally very left-wing and for some reason they have decided to collectively bash Israel.
The situation in Gaza gives them more fuel and of course they never pay any attention whatsoever to all the trucks – loaded with food and whatnot –  entering the Gaza strip from Israel, or all the Gazans coming to Israeli hospitals. They have decided that Gaza is a huge outdoor prison and the Israelis (not the IDF, but actually the Israelis) are treating the Gazans like caged animals. (For the fun of it, of course!)

Meanwhile another Ship To Gaza provocation is on its way from Sweden, something that on Swedish television has been called a “folkfest” (festival). (Really!) In an effort to show people that we are not all part of this “folkfest”, a few friends and I decided to organize a little Pro-Israel rally last week when the ship was passing Stockholm on its way from northern Sweden all the way to the Gaza strip. (Pictures here and here.)
We didn’t get much attention, apart from a few youngsters screaming something about “Palestine”, but deep down inside I believe that more and more Swedes are starting to see the whole Israel/Palestine situation in another way. Much to blogs, Twitter and the Internet in general.

Photo credit: Annika Hernroth.

To blog and to tweet positively (trust me – there are a lot of very popular anti-Israel blogs out there) about the Jewish state means you’ll get attacked from every angle imaginable. You’ll even lose a few friends along the way, but thankfully you’ll make many, many new ones. (For example at the rally that I just mentioned.)
I usually don’t debate with people online, because the ones willing to debate are the ones who have already decided that Israel is hell on earth, but every once in a while I try to talk to someone, and very quickly I realize that these people really do not know much about Israel or the Palestinians. They’ve been reading the headlines for years and they’ve accepted all the propaganda that they have been fed.

They yell about apartheid and racism and they actually do believe that there once was a state called Palestine, and then the evil Jews came from nowhere and slaughtered some Palestinians and kicked out the rest.
Naturally they know nothing about how the Arab states surrounding Israel are treating the Palestinians.

So, as you may understand I have a lot of work ahead of me…

This post wasn’t supposed to sound like this (I had something happier planned) but yesterday’s horrible terror attack in Bulgaria made me quickly write down these words.
Today I feel more determined than ever to continue doing what I’m doing – standing with Israel.

By they way: I just posted a (wonderful) letter on LettersFromIsrael.com, from an “Israeli grandma”. Check it out here.