Learning some simple facts about the very misunderstood country of Israel

Noa Tishby grew up in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and became a child actor. After she got out of the mandatory Israeli military, she moved to Los Angeles and found herself having more success as a producer. 

She started realizing that very few people in the U.S. had any idea about the history of Israel. They would ask her severely misinformed questions like “how do your parents feel about you being modern and not wearing any head gear (also known as the Muslim hijab).” She eventually realized she was spending lots of time telling stories about her homeland and what Israel was and is all about.

Some basic facts:

• Israel is a very “freaking modern” country. It is not, say, Afghanistan.
• There is huge difference between a kibbutz and a settlement.
• It’s the only country in the Middle East that “has been an uninterrupted democracy since its founding in 1948, after the United Nations granted the Jews a state after the horrors of the Holocaust. The Arabs were also granted a state at the time, but they chose to refuse it and start a war.”
• Israel is not a colonialist state. It’s a refugee state that was decolonized from British rule. Sounds a lot like another country we’ve all heard about.
• It’s not really an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s more like Israeli-Arab, which makes Israel a serious underdog, with its population of 9 million compared to the 21 Arab nations surrounding it with 423 million people.

Tishby's new book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, is a fascinating read at a time when we all need to be reminded that we should all be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and anti-Hamas, a terrorist organization that has the sole aim of wiping out Israel and uses international aid funding to build attack tunnels instead of schools and hospitals. Further, it uses that funding to build these tunnels under schools and hospitals, as a way to use innocent and usually vulnerable Palestinians in Gaza, where Hamas is based, as human shields for themselves.

There have been a lot of slogans thrown around social media and at protests recently that contain a lot of half truths at best. I like Tishby’s slogan best. “Free Gaza from Hamas” says it most humanely.

She also reminds us of the many beautiful things about the very existence of a Jewish state, which is maybe a little like if Washington D.C., a tiny liberal enclave, were dropped into the deepest rural reddest parts of the U.S. South. Here are just a few examples:

• There is a “built-in liberalism in Judaism and Zionism”
• Debate and dissent are a key component of a “highly Jew-y culture”
• “The Jewish holidays are connected to the moon.” That's pretty cool
• It’s a place you can be super secular and still carry a Bible in your bag because being a little weird is cool
• But to leave God and religion out of it for a second, Jewish people - despite what a lot of people not relying on archeological or written records often claim - are indigenous to the land of Israel not just since 1948 but rather for about 2,500 years, even back before the time that one dude was wandering around there in his hippy hair and sandals and spreading messages about peace and humbleness. That’s all very different than the state of Palestine, which, oh yeah, has never been a state. Not that it shouldn’t be a state, but just that is has yet to ever be - in case you hear folks in their antisemitism using a lot of talking points about indigenousness and how Israel needs to “give that land back.”

And, by the way, my above D.C./Deep South analogy isn’t entirely accurate. Israel is in fact about the size of New Jersey. But hopefully my sloppy comparison makes a point. It takes about six hours to drive the whole way north to south and about an hour to get west to east. So it’s small and you could say it’s a “rough neighborhood” with the likes of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran surrounding it. 

One of the truly odd things about Israel is why such a place - with almost no natural resources and a very limited supply of fresh water - is the origin of Judaism and Christianity as well as the home of the third-most holy place for Islam.

These are some of the details from the very start of Tishby's book, so as you can see, it's very interesting and she is a great and funny storyteller. I'm excited to keep reading it.