Reading some of the other Israeli blogs, it looks as though there was a blog conference in the Holy Land this week.
While I am surprised I didn’t hear of it until after the fact, I am not arrogant enough to think I am somehow entitled to an invite. So you won’t be getting any whiny “why wasn’t I invited?” post from me. Not this time, anyway.
I did, though, read some of the accounts from conference participants, and was struck by a couple of them, for very different reasons.
First up is this post by some blogger called Garrett Graff. Looks like a nice enough chap, and he seems to have enjoyed his time over here. However, I was intrigued by this observation of his:
I’m in Tel Aviv this week for Israel’s first blogging conference. I was one of a half-dozen U.S. bloggers invited to come speak at the conference, since the U.S. blogosphere is a few years more advance than Israel’s right now.
I am curious as to how the US blogosphere is more advanced. Do bloggers like Garrett Graff write using a bigger vocabulary than those like me? Or is it the ability to set up an blog with an alliterative name? In any event, I find it ironic that his statement about the relatively advanced state of the US blogosphere would contain the grammatical error that it does.
The other blog post from the conference that got my attention was this one by Micah Sifry, which includes this passage.
I am also grumpy because so far I feel like we’ve been visiting a bubble, that we’ve had little to no contact with “real Israelis” but instead are being handled, with the greatest of finesse, by Professional Israelis, people who have made it their job, either by day or by avocation, to “represent” the country to outsiders and make sure we get a varnished view while claiming they are giving us a rounded picture. Out of politeness again, and a sense that, hey, after all, they invited me and paid my way, I bit my tongue when David Brin said that Israel21c had organized a post-Blogference touring itinerary that aimed to give us a balanced experience–seeing the border fence (with an IDF guide), visiting Sderot (a border town being regularly shelled from Gaza) and also meeting an Israel Arab economic development group. I should have said, and what about a meeting with a Palestinian, or one of the Israeli human rights groups? Are you so sure every option for peace has been tried? You say that the Palestinians rejected a two-state solution at Camp David, but what about the fact that after Oslo in 1993 Israel doubled the size of its settlement population and kept demolishing Palestinian houses (built without permits from the occupying authority) at a prodigious rate?
While Sifry’s post is ever-so-aggravating, the above passage should teach the PR professionals a valuable lesson: it is all well and good to invite bloggers to Israel and see firsthand the situation. But the results are not automatic, especially when said bloggers already have preconceived notions of the conflict and an embedded cynicism about Israel. I would suggest that the money spent on bringing such bloggers to Israel would be better spent improving the information flow to those bloggers who are genuinely interested in spreading the truth about Israel to the world at large.
