Nicky Blackburn, 51, from Guildford, UK, to Nirit, 1993.
By GLORIA DEUTSCH"There are so many incredible things going on here in Israel and our goal is to show people a side of life here that they might not be aware of,’ Blackburn says of the stories on ISRAEL21c(photo credit: Courtesy)
With the current anti-Israel atmosphere that pervades the world, any organization that battles the hostility is to be welcomed with open arms, and none more so than ISRAEL21c.Established in 2001, its aim is to make sure that content is published that emphasizes the positive side of Israel, to counter the almost universal negativity of the picture the rest of the world presents.The organization was established by Israeli Zvi Alon and American Eric Ben Hamo, and today the president is Amy Friedkin, a past chairwoman of AIPAC.The editor and Israel director is British immigrant Nicky Blackburn. She is not Jewish and came to Israel in the early 1990s.She met her Israeli Jewish husband, Meir Arad, soon after she began a trip across India in 1990.“I’d studied journalism at Cardiff University and worked for the Surrey Advertiser in Guildford, but decided to take a year off to travel,” she says. “He was the first Israeli I ever met. We traveled together for nine months. He came to England to do a law degree and we were married in Cyprus.”Today, they live in Nirit, a tiny rustic community in the Sharon region, and have three sons, the oldest of whom is just about to start his military service in the Navy commandos.“When we first came we lived in Tel Aviv, but friends told us about this beautiful place – Nirit – and as soon as we saw it we fell in love and decided to move there,” she says.“When we first moved there it was a dangerous place to live – there was no wall and it was right on the edge, the last village before the West Bank. There were many infiltrations from the surrounding Arab areas.”She never converted. When she first came to Israel she wanted to, and her husband and his Moroccan-born family wanted it even more so.“I started the process, but it just wasn’t right for me,” she says. “I’m not a religious person and I would have had to be Orthodox.”While the three boys all had a brit and a bar mitzva, they are not Jews according to Orthodox law.“But they are 100 percent Israeli,” she says. “We talk about it a lot and I know they will make their own decision about converting in the future, possibly when they go into the army.”She feels a real sense of mission about her job at ISRAEL21c.“It’s about fairness,” she says. “I saw what was going on in the British press; it is so incredibly biased that I was shocked. It’s such a one-sided view of Israel and so unlike what I witnessed around me.”She began freelancing for ISRAEL21c at the start of the second intifada and took over as editor in 2008. It seemed an ideal opportunity to try to amend some of the false images of the country abroad.“We write about innovation, creativity, culture, health. There are so many incredible things going on here in Israel and our goal is to show people a side of life here that they might not be aware of.”She feels that being non-Jewish is an advantage in her work.“I don’t look at things from a Jewish perspective,” she says, “and this gives me an advantage in running an organization like this.”As to whether the one-sided anti-Israel attitude of the British press stems from anti-Semitism, she says she has no answer to that, but she sincerely hopes not.The good news is that the readership of ISRAEL21c is growing all the time; in the last two years alone it has increased by 90 percent.“So many publications pick up our stories,” she says. Articles from the site have been translated into Chinese and views have been recorded in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world.There is also a Spanish-language site that is especially popular with the Spanish- speaking community around the world, and an ambassador program in which they work with students in the US through social media.All the material is available free and the organization only asks for credit.Once a month they put out an educational newsletter for use in schools.One of the most successful events in recent times was the mounting of an online exhibition on 18 ways Israel is changing the world, which was put on to coincide with this year’s Independence Day.“We had an amazing response to this,” says Blackburn enthusiastically.“Thousands downloaded it and it was put up in schools and community centers.”In case you are wondering, those 18 achievements include a camera that lets rescue workers see through walls, a technique of surgery without scalpels, and revolutionary wheels that enable wheelchairs to go down stairs. And there are many more stunning examples of Israeli brilliance and innovation that ISRAEL21c makes sure the world knows about.
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