Israel: the real stories behind the slogans

I’ve just returned after spending the month of the chagim in Israel with my family, a rare opportunity for me and my sister, our mother and all our children to be together.

It was my fourth visit since October 7, 2023. Another chance to breathe in the air of the real and multi-layered Israel, instead of choking on the vile one-dimensional fabrications of the country we wade through in the post-truth world of social and mainstream media.

The diverse people living in Israel and their individual human stories rarely feature in that falsified world. Here are just a few:

On our first morning a man greeted me with “Bonjour, Madame”. I was flattered to be mistaken for one of Israel’s many stylish French immigrants. Since the 2006 antisemitic kidnapping, torture, and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi, 10% of France’s Jews have moved to Israel, many to Ra’anana, where we were staying.

22-year-old Omer Shem-Tov is one of them. On October 7 he was abducted, then held for 505 days, 450 of them alone in a tunnel. Omer lives ten minutes away from Ra’anana, in Herzliya. We swam at Herzliya Beach with a group of Arab boys, then a few days later at the Dead Sea with three generations of a Christian Arab family; many fully-covered Muslim women; a Druze family; and the usual assortment of secular, orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews. Here, in the ‘apartheid’ state.