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February 21, 2003
Supporting Israel locally
Recent CIC mission focuses on Mideast education.
KYLE BERGER REPORTER
When Alexis Pavlich and Larry Barzelai went on their Canada Israel
Committee (CIC) mission to Israel in January, it wasn't for the
usual purpose of visiting Israelis and offering support from the
Diaspora. This time, their five days in Israel were more about what
they were supposed to bring back to their Jewish community: advocacy.
Pavlich and Barzelai joined 18 other participants, representing
Jewish communities across Canada, on a CIC training mission to become
better advocates for the state of Israel. The mission itinerary
included lectures and meetings with members of Israel's foreign
ministry, the Israel Defence Forces, newspaper reporters and ambassadors.
The goal, Barzelai explained, was to educate the participants on
what was really going on in Israel and offer them techniques to
inform others back in Canada.
"There were lots of question-and-answer periods where we could
ask different questions as to what was happening," he said.
"There were also a lot of sessions about how to understand
some of the propaganda from the other side and how to deal with
it."
According to Pavlich, a lot of attention was focused on how to handle
debates or dialogue about the Middle East when Israel is being questioned.
"The problem that a lot of [Jewish] people face when they are
discussing Israel is that debate or dialogue is hijacked one way
and people keep throwing out key phrases or sound bites like, 'what
about the occupation,' and it puts you on the defensive," she
said. "[In Israel] they taught us how to flip that and work
with it and how to then address the issues at large because a lot
of people don't know what the issues are."
Barzelai suggested that one of the toughest battles for any advocate
of Israel is trying to change the perception in the media that he
said often makes Israel look bad. Along those same lines, he felt
that the Jewish media have to take more of a responsibility to illustrate
the severity of the situation in Israel, rather than treating it
like second-tier news.
He cited the Jewish Bulletin as an example, explaining that
he thinks the community would benefit from having news about Israel
on its front page more often because right now the average Vancouver
Jew isn't really aware of how serious the situation in Israel is.
Pavlich, who works for the University of British Columbia (UBC)
Hillel House as the director of Israel affairs, has already found
herself involved with another Israel advocacy program. She spent
a few days hosting two young Israelis who had been sent by the Israeli
Foreign Ministry to visit Canadian Universities and talk to students
about how the average Israeli feels right now.
Yuval Mellich, 24, said he hoped that his time in Canada helped
students realize that the Palestinian issue is not as simple as
other political issues.
"Many Canadians think in terms of black and white," he
said. "If you are a lefty then you are right and if you are
a righty then you are wrong. They don't understand that it is not
about these old terms."
Hadas Greenglass, 22, said that the only way pro-Israel advocates
can confront anyone successfully is by understanding the facts.
"When a Palestinian advocate comes and says, 'Well, what about
the [Palestinian] woman who wanted to cross the border because she
was pregnant but the ambulance was [held up] at the border between
Israel and the West Bank,' that is a point where a Jewish person
could come and say that the day before this event, exactly the same
ambulance tried to pass bombs into the middle of Tel-Aviv and into
our coffee shops," she said. "Time and time again these
ambulances have been caught with terrorists and bombs and this has
been one way of them sending these terrorists to bomb us."
Greenglass and Mellich spoke to students at UBC, Simon Fraser University,
Langara College and the TAG Hebrew high school.
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