Friday, August 30th, 2024

A Canadian friend of mine owns a successful landscaping company. This week, he told me that he’s currently understaffed and looking to hire a horticultural technician and “anyone with a green thumb”. I suggested posting on the Jewish Toronto social media sites because there are a lot of Israelis who recently arrived here and are looking for work. They post regularly on these sites, and many are open to doing pretty much anything just to feed their families.

“Why are they leaving Israel?” asked my friend, who is not Jewish. I was shocked by the question. “Seriously?” I replied. “They are tired of living with rockets shot at their neighbourhoods all day long. Tired of the trauma, of the tension, of the fear for their lives.” Now it was his turn to be shocked. He asked me what I was talking about. Rockets being shot into Israel? Into residential neighbourhoods? Whaaat?! He had never heard of such a thing. He had no idea.

I launched into a brief (well, ok, maybe not so brief) History-of-Israel-and-Gaza. I started with 1948.
-Israel was granted statehood
-The Palestinians were offered their own state as well (and turned it down),
-All of Israel’s surrounding Arab countries decided to wage war to wipe Israel off the map.
My friend had no idea about this. Oh, and I made sure to include the part about the surrounding Arab countries telling the local Palestinian Arabs who lived in Israel to leave and stay away until the new State of Israel was defeated and no longer existed. (That, by the way, is how so many Palestinians ended up outside of Israel.) My friend had no idea.

Unfortunately for them, Israel was not defeated, and now there were “Palestinian refugees” in the world, people who were not absorbed into the Arab countries to which they fled. Even worse, those surrounding Arab countries treated the Palestinian refugees like second class citizens, at best. In Syria more than 4,000 Palestinian refugees would be slaughtered, and more than 850,000 would be displaced. Lebanese militias would kill 2,500 Palestinians in refugee camps and displace another 30,000. In Lebanon, too, Palestinians were banned from working as doctors, lawyers or from owning land. My friend had no idea about that either.

There was so much more. Israel’s government forcing Israelis to leave Gaza in exchange for the promise of peace (for which we still wait). Hamas elected, rockets and terror showered on Israel’s southern cities, the October 7th Massacre, hostages, and rockets being shot into Israel daily, hourly, which was how the conversation with my friend had started. He had no idea about any of this.

I recognize that I am a broken record. You’ve all heard this from me before. But you know what I just realized? If my wonderful Canadian friend knows absolutely nothing about what’s happening in Israel, other than the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza, we have to all be broken records. We have to keep repeating ourselves. Not just to each other, but to our good Canadian friends. Get the story straight before the cement hardens on the anti-Semitic narrative. If you don’t know a lot of history, share what you do know. And take time to learn – and share! – a bit more. Our knowledge is the best ammunition in today’s propaganda war. Our friends should never say, “I had no idea.”

Am Yisrael Chai!