Hen Mazzig, a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, joined Arutz Sheva - Israel National News to speak about his experience battling misinformation about Israel.
“It's extremely frustrating. I've done hundreds of interviews since October 7th and I've been on so many TV channels and news stations, and I go to the same point of explaining the basic history to people who seem to either forget it or lie about it.”
“Thinking that you know the history of Jews in this area, and then starting in 1948, saying that Jews have no connection to Israel, is the most ridiculous thing you can think of. People are saying that we are colonizers, that we came from a different land to take over this land. I keep asking 'Where did Jews come from?' If we are colonizers, we must have come from somewhere else. Going over the same line of arguments over and over again is a bit exhausting, but it gives me hope, because I see that a lot of people are reacting to it. A lot of Jewish people around the world feel like their voice is being taken from them, so it's my small part of helping them by saying what I know to be the truth.”
“Millions of other people that are seeing this conflict, not only the conflict in Gaza but also the other front with the anti-Israel protesters, are tired of it. They don't want this war to come into their front door, and they are on our side. I think that silent majority is much larger than we can imagine, and what we saw on the campuses in the United States is happening throughout the world - it's it's happening all over the world. I've seen it for the last ten years. They are using the same talking points to convince the the younger generation that standing against the only Jewish state in the world is actually the just thing to do.”
The problem, he notes, is far more than ten years old: “We're living in a time that we still have Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers, it started with hate speech, calls to boycott Jewish businesses, to dehumanize Jews. I think that's the levels of hate that we're seeing, and it should frighten us, because it got to the worst genocide of of the Jewish people in history.”
“Every person that has good conscience knows which side is right. It doesn't take being a rocket scientist to understand which side is the right side and which side is wrong.”
Mazzig addressed accusations of excessive collateral damage in Gaza, saying: “We should protect both Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Israel is not against Palestinian civilians, it's against Hamas, and my fight in the media is not against the people that stand for humanity, it is for peace. Unfortunately, no one is out there chanting for peace, only hate. As long as this is what leads them, they're never going to win.”
Hen rejects the calls not to engage the protesters: “Throughout history, the Jewish people have faced a lot of challenges. The best way to fight antisemitism is for Jews to be proud. As many people have been saying recently, I promise to love being Jewish ten times more than anyone hates me for it. I think that's the best way to respond to antisemitism, by being proudly Jewish. We are one people, we are one community, we need to support one another, and I'm hoping that the rest of the world will see it and join us. Jewish people have to be the ones leading this fight, and I know that more and more people will join us. We were always few against many, and we are again, but I'm confident that we'll get through this and be even stronger than we were before.”