Cliona Campbell, a 19 year old Irish student who volunteered to help in the IDF says that she returned home after two months in Israel to a hate campaign, organized by anti-Israel elements in Ireland who saw her story written up in a local newspaper.
Campbell said she decided to volunteer because she 'had watched the injustice during Operation Cast Lead, where after eight years of incessant rockets, Israel cried enough and was villainized for the deaths caused by terrorists'
A resident of Cork in Ireland, Campbell volunteered several months ago for a program coordinated by Sar-El, which sends volunteers to work on IDF bases or in nursing homes, helping out with routine activities such as maintenance, packing 'kitbags', working in the kitchen, gardening, etc. Participants also take tours of the country, and learn about Israeli and Jewish life.
Campbell, who is not Jewish, said she joined Sar-el because she was “captivated by the Jewish people - a nation which has endured hatred, persecution and genocide, and yet still retains an unyielding will to survive, unifying them in an unbreakable kinship.” In an article in the Cork Evening Echo which was reprinted on the Sar-el site, Campbell said she decided to volunteer for the IDF because she, “had watched the injustice during Operation Cast Lead, where after eight years of incessant rockets, Israel cried enough and was villainized for the deaths caused by terrorists who used their own people as human shields, hiding cowardly in densely populated civilian areas.”
During her two months in the IDF, Campbell said she made some wonderful friends, and came to a real appreciation of Israeli society. 'I gazed at the myriad of faces surrounding me.” she wrote. “Moroccans, Russians, Yemenites, Ethiopians- a cacophony of races and origins, all sporting the same khaki green uniform, all calling each other ‘achi’- ‘my brother'.”
But her sense of joy and wonder were not to last. Even before she returned home, Campbell told the website Irishcentral.com, she was receiving abusive e-mails, warning her to “keep her head down” after word spread about her article. “I came back after two months and wrote a piece on my experiences,” she told the site. “Now I am getting hate mail and being targeted. I went into a clothes shop where I live and the security guard came up to me, abusing me. My Facebook page link was posted online in a forum and I started getting emails telling me to keep my head down from now on. My friends started getting abusive emails soon after that too.” She has been called a “terrorist,” she said, and some of her harassers say, “they don't even see me as Irish anymore.”
Nevertheless, Campbell doesn't regret her experience. “I got on really well with the soldiers. They were all there for their own reasons and had their own stories as to why they were there. I have a huge interest in the Jewish people and always have had so I had no hesitation about going out there.”