
An Israeli Leftist Gets Mugged by Reality
These Palestinian filmmakers didn’t need any excuse to crush an artist. All they needed to know was that Lapid was Israeli. Never mind that he supports boycotting the country they hate.
David Suissa is Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of Tribe Media/91ý Journal, where he has been writing a weekly column on the 91ý world since 2006. In 2015, he was awarded first prize for "Editorial Excellence" by the American 91ý Press Association. Prior to Tribe Media, David was founder and CEO of Suissa Miller Advertising, a marketing firm named “Agency of the Year” by USA Today. He sold his company in 2006 to devote himself full time to his first passion: Israel and the 91ý world. David was born in Casablanca, Morocco, grew up in Montreal, and now lives in Los Angeles with his five children.

These Palestinian filmmakers didn’t need any excuse to crush an artist. All they needed to know was that Lapid was Israeli. Never mind that he supports boycotting the country they hate.

Only humans can create things from scratch. Machines are brilliant at taking that “scratch” and running with it, but if there’s no human content in its digital brain, a machine is useless in front of a blank page.

I’ve been a sports nut my whole life, so it was no big deal to be up in the middle of the night to follow a major sporting event.

Maybe hiding the fear was my own personal missile. Maybe it was my own defiant message to the Jew-hating murderers in Tehran.

For about an hour or two, you’re asked to absorb centuries upon centuries of kings, armies, religions and empires taking turns trying to control the center of the world.

Maybe it’s because our 250th birthday is right around the corner. Or maybe it’s a statement of defiance, a way of telling Jew-haters I’m giving them the very opposite of what they want.

Israelis seem to have a special affinity for that electric energy of the here and now. Maybe that is how the country has made it this far— millions and millions of “What do we do now?”

I was no longer on my laptop writing about Israel-hatred. I was on a street corner confronting that hatred. If I could write in my columns about the need for a winning attitude, this was now my chance to show it.

It’s not easy to think about love during times of crisis. When the battles facing us are so hard, we don’t look for emotions that appear soft. When we’re surrounded by hate, we don’t run to something like love.

Emphasizing Israel’s value to America must become a community-wide effort. From the ADL to the AJC to the Federation system to Hillel and every pro-Israel activist group in the country, the collective priority must be to strengthen the U.S.—Israeli relationship.