Talk hosts visit Israel
Podjockey.com to present documentaries chronicling
latest America’s Voices in Israel mission

By Michael Harrison
TALKERSMAGAZINE
Publisher

NEW YORK – We just returned from Israel and my head is spinning with exhilaration and information. For the third time in two years, TALKERS magazine teamed up with America’s Voices in Israel to organize a talk radio tour of the dynamic Middle Eastern democracy for an intensive fact-finding mission. Each of these journeys has been an invaluable growth experience with this latest adventure pinning the meter in terms of sheer, intense productivity.

America’s Voices in Israel, founded and chaired by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, accurately defines itself as a program that provides broadcasters, commentators, journalists and media personalities with firsthand experience of Israel – the society, the culture and the geography – to generate informed public discourse about the country and the region. Since its formation in 2002, America’s Voices in Israel has arranged for more than 50 broadcasters to visit Israel and receive “front row” exposure to its sites, scenes and experts. These trips have received rave reviews across the board by their participants for professionalism, accuracy, objectivity, philosophical and theological diversity and thoroughness.

As publisher of TALKERS magazine and a member of the board of advisors of America’s Voices in Israel, I am proud of the partnership between our two organizations and very pleased with the creative synergy that has been generated by these joint projects. It is my observation that the mainstream media does not provide the American public with the depth, details and analysis necessary to serve the needs of a healthy democracy adequately… so we do whatever we can to provide practitioners within our segment of the media with opportunities to gain firsthand knowledge about complex issues. (TALKERS magazine has been involved in sending broadcasters to such news-active places as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Taiwan and the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast.) This latest trip, which took place between March 3 and 9, gathered a treasure trove of content chronicled for a series of audio, video and graphics documentaries that are presented on the official TALKERS magazine podcasting site, PodJockey.com.

Joining me on this adventure were my son and colleague, attorney Matthew B. Harrison, senior partner in the talent management firm Harrison Strategies as well as operations director of PodJockey and ace producer Bernadette Duncan of United Stations’ Launch Radio Networks, who directed my personal satellite tour of her affiliates live from the radio studios of the Jerusalem Post. Talk host participants on this mission included Lars Larson of KXL, Portland and Westwood One; Lionel of the WOR Radio Network; and Liz Dolan of the Satellite Sisters, ABC Radio Networks. Larson and Dolan also broadcast their shows live from the Jerusalem Post. America’s Voices in Israel director Fern Oppenheim again led the trip, outdoing her past work (if such a thing is possible) in terms of bringing the group face-to-face with a non-stop parade of fascinating personalities and eye-opening information.

In addition to giving those on the trip who had never before been to Israel (Lionel, Liz and Matthew) the opportunity to visit some of the Holy Land’s iconic attractions such as the Western Wall, City of David, Old City of Jerusalem, Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock and Caesarea in addition to walking tours of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa – the component that made this trip significantly memorable was the agenda that included in-depth encounters with leaders from government, academia, the arts, science, medicine, industry, the military, the media and popular culture. We sure learned a lot more than we knew coming in about the complex issues of the Middle East.

Highlights of the trip

• We met with leaders of the national government including Vice Prime Minister/ Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni and former Prime Minister/current Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

• Israel Project Director and journalist Calev Ben-Davis escorted us via helicopter to the town of Sderot, which has been the target of an ongoing assault of Qassam rocket attacks by Hamas terrorists on the increasingly tense border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. We visited the police station where the retrieved remnants of the exploded rockets are being stored and walked through an area hit by rockets both the day before and the day after our visit.

• Captain Noa Meir, head of the IDF North American Desk, personally accompanied us to the security fence erected on the border between Israel and the West Bank as a deterrent to suicide bombers. We visited a major highway checkpoint and stood less than 100 feet out of range of sniper fire.

• We toured the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and conferred with Professor Joel Sussman from the Department of Structural Biology about groundbreaking work being done at the facility to combat Alzheimer’s disease and autism.

• We had dinner with former Ambassador Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who advised us about his hard-line perspective on Middle East tensions.

• Jonathan Medved, one of Israel’s leading serial entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, apprised us about the burgeoning Israeli high tech industry as well as other areas of stunning business growth and innovation. Mr. Medved also hosted a festive Purim holiday party at his home which we attended, affording us an amazing opportunity to soak up local color and cultural flavor.

• We had dinner with Mark Regev, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the Israeli counterpart to the late Tony Snow), and discussed his take on Israel’s role in Middle East politics.

Planet of the Apes hd

• Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, delivered a presentation detailing what the Palestinians are saying about Israel in their media which included shocking “public service” messages designed to encourage children to become suicide bombers.

• We conferred with Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu-Tameh, West Bank and Gaza correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. Mr. Abu-Tameh is a bold Muslim who covers Palestinian affairs in the Israeli press as he sees them. He is a high-profile reporter, often critical of his own people’s government, who gave us valuable insights into the complicated relationship between the Israeli and Palestinian populations, including a detailed history.

• A lunch conference was prepared and presented exclusively for our group by Israel’s leading experts on counter-terrorism led by Dr. Boaz Ganor, dean of Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

• We schmoozed with Ivri Lider and Idan Raichel, Israel’s leading pop musicians at Gilly’s Restaurant on the beach in Tel Aviv.

• We were presented a personal overview of the recent Hezbollah bombing of Haifa by the city’s extremely popular Mayor Yona Yahav, who explained the impact of the second Lebanon War on Israel’s third largest city.

• We toured Kibbutz Nachsholim and met with Ira Ben Giat, a well-known local artist and mother of a young soldier slain in the recent Lebanon War. While there, we also spoke with one of Israel’s leading archeologists, Kurt Ravé, who shared the area’s history and showed us an area along the Mediterranean that has been a remarkable source of historical treasures. The stunning connection between ancient history and immediate world events is one of many factors that makes Israel so compelling. Lionel tells TALKERSmagazine, “Israel is the epicenter of history, I mean history. Our guide made the comment that any site or artifact younger than 500 years old is almost negligible. 500 years! It is a people who willingly live with the real and palpable specter of imminent war at a moment’s notice. Israel is a testament as to how a people disparate in religion, culture, history and language somehow coalesce and coexist in a seemingly unfathomable harmony.”

• One of the most touching stops on the trip was our visit to the widely acclaimed Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem where we not only got to see the practicing of world class medicine up close and personal, but also witnessed the amazing unity that exists just below the headlines between the Israeli and Palestinian – Jewish and Arab – people. Greeted at the door by Hadassah National president June Walker, we arrived during a major human interest news story that illustrates this premise. The following account explaining it appeared in an Israeli newsletter published by Hadassah Director of Communications Barbara Sofer:

PALESTINIAN POLICE OFFICER LOVES HADASSAH

When the lights went out in Gaza City, one of his teenaged daughters lit a few candles in the room she shared with her younger siblings. Tragically, they all fell asleep and the candles set fire to the sleeping mat beneath them. “We couldn’t get all the children out fast enough,” said their dad, a Palestinian policeman. His daughter, with 80 percent second and third degree burns, died in Shifa Hospital in Gaza. One of the nurses in Gaza had trained in an Israeli hospital and recommended that Baha, 4, be transferred to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. He had only 30 percent burns, but they were so deep that they would not be able to fight off the infection in Gaza. The nurse phoned Dr. Ido Yatziv, head of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit who judged that Hadassah could indeed help the boy. Baha was taken by ambulance to the Erez checkpoint in a Palestinian ambulance. An Israeli ambulance took him the rest of the way. His mother, pregnant and hospitalized for shock, couldn’t accompany him, so his father and his aunt are staying at Hadassah Hospital with him. “He’s getting the best treatment possible,” his father said. “Dr. Ido is a great man. And when Baha feels better, I invite you all to visit us at home to thank you in Gaza. Thank you, Hadassah.”

We visited the bedside of little Baha in intensive care and I had the opportunity to interview his Palestinian aunt with the help of a translator. It was a magic moment that, no doubt, will be one of the many high points of our forthcoming pod-docs on Podjockey.com. We also spoke with Dr. Yatziv and our extensive tour of this extraordinary hospital was capped by a meeting with one of the world’s most respected trauma surgeons, Dr. Avi Rivkind.

At the conclusion of the journey Lars Larson sums up his reaction, “Visiting the city that sits at the heart of the world’s three major religions and at the center of the ideological storm that is the Middle East lets a talker like me soak up the kind of perspective you can’t get any other way. Spending time in the region with fellow talkers like Liz Dolan, Lionel (falafel-phobic) and TALKERS magazine publisher Michael Harrison made it even more valuable. Seeing the terrorist fence/wall that holds back the suicide bombers, standing a couple of miles outside the Gaza Strip where many of the attacks originate, and holding an exploded Qassam rocket makes the terrorism we all spend time talking about real. Hearing the personal stories of residents of Jerusalem, a Palestinian journalist, and an Israeli Defense Forces Captain is the kind of experience everyone who talks about the middle East should experience.”

Time and space do not permit even scratching the surface here in presenting the facts and feelings gathered and evoked by this wonderful talk radio mission to Israel. Thank goodness for modern communications technology and the advent of Internet podcasting! In the coming days we are going to sort it all out and present the world with a series of “pod-docs” – audio and video recordings – chronicling our experience in depth and detail, supplemented by photos and text on the exciting website. We invite you to join us there.