 Hi friends and subscribers, welcome back to my youtube channel, my name is Daniel Rosil, this channel focuses on life on the ground here in Jerusalem and in Israel. Like many people living in Israel and who support the Jewish state in this fight against terror, I've been feeling an instinctive draw lately to get involved in helping out whenever and however I can. Sometimes that has pulled me into what might be called the world of Hasbara or online advocacy for Israel. Although Hasbara has taken on a very distinct connotation that can be linked to state propaganda, in Hebrew the term simply means something like an explanation. Sympathetically it could be called people to people diplomacy, trying to get Israel's message out on social media to those who are sympathetic or potentially sympathetic to its cause. Critics however would accuse Hasbara of being nothing but classic state propaganda, sometimes it's actually funded by the state. Personally Hasbara is the subject about which I have very mixed feelings. Some of those are supportive of its activities and some are critical. I thought I'd set out both of those reasons in this video. But let's start out first with the positive. Like many Israelis and those who are sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish state, I think the communicating Israel's messages becomes quite an essential activity during wartime. Those of us who move to Israel from other countries likely have friends who are potentially interested in hearing our perspective on the conflict or how we're experiencing life on the ground during this period of particular turbulence. Others may simply have friends from overseas that they made one way or another. In this respect I believe that Hasbara can be a powerful tool. There's no real official way to get involved in the effort or qualifications that you need to get going. If you're supportive of Israel, putting your feelings out there on the internet in some form or another will probably have an effect even if it's only a small one. On the other hand I have lots of grievances about Hasbara or perhaps more accurately how Hasbara is often conducted. But my central complaint about Hasbara is really this one. Because those who conduct Hasbara get involved in a sort of online war of information about Israel, it becomes extremely easy for those involved in that activity to subscribe to a sort of group thing echo chamber mentality. Many people who are the most fervent practitioners of Hasbara don't actually live in Israel, or they visit Israel only for a short amount of time periodically. When you put these two facts together you end up with a sort of recipe for a kind of irrational superiority complex on the part of many Hasborists when it comes to Israel. If the reason they get out of bed with the morning is to combat online anti-Israel hatred then everything Israel does eventually sort of has to become a paragon of virtue. However someone living here I can tell you that this is really not the case. I've tried to use this YouTube channel to raise awareness about some of those socio-economic problems that many Hasbara practitioners would prefer don't exist or they don't know that they exist because they don't actually live here. That's because they represent failings on the part of the state and the fact that Israel is well what you might call an imperfect country like any other one. Facts such as the one that are cost of living here is out of control and the highest in the OECD, or that Israel has a long-standing poverty issue that remains largely unaddressed. Issues related to the quality of our digital connectivity in Israel, or the fact that Israel's capital city Jerusalem remains a comparatively neglected city that lags bandally behind Tel Aviv in terms of job creation and standard of living. The problem with Hasbara is that just like Palestine supporters who can't even bring themselves to denounce the burning of babies and the mass murder of civilians, it ends up polarizing and radicalizing its adherence and painting the terms of a very nuanced and complex political situation and conflict in purely black and white terms. In order to achieve that end, it tends to cherry-pick facts that support one narrative. It's one brings fringe opinions to the minority and wheels out supportive Arab-Israeli's a spokespeople which is really a kind of tokenism and it generally tramples upon the principles of intellectual honesty in order to frame the conflict in only one dimension that which supports Israel. Israel is currently facing a time of national crisis and so it's a moment when many people who live here and care about the country feel an instinctive need to step up and chime in. But as Irish filmmaker Nicky Larkin once captured in a documentary movie entitled 40 Shades of Gray, sometimes the truth in this conflict falls somewhere between the opposing dimensions of the two extremes created by the pro-Israel and the pro-Palestine echo chambers. And any one sided form of thinking about the conflict, whoever it comes from, is almost certain to miss out on the vital truth.