If you have been living in Israel for the past 6 months you have probably heard about the organization “My Truth”. If you didn’t, then you should get familiar with it. “My Truth” is a non-political organization that is fighting against the falsified information about IDF soldiers that is being spread around Israel and around the world. In fact, the organization started out as an independent initiative on Facebook. The one who began it all and one of the founders of the organization is Avihai Shorshan. I had my chat with Shorshan at 1am, after he returned home from another exhausting day at the never-ending battle for the good name of the IDF.
Shorshan (31) is married to Yaeli (A nurse in Hadassah) and a father to Rotem (4.5) and Ella (2), lives in Kfar Adumim. Couple of years ago he opened the mobile coffee house “The Fincan” (demitasse) which is also an information spot for tourists and is located on the main road between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. He did his military service in the Orev Golani company, participated in the second Lebanon War and in military operations in Gaza, and Judea and Samaria.
So how did it start?
“It all started in May the year before, when reports of various organizations that criticized IDF’s conducting during operation “Protective Edge” came out. Organizations like “Amnesty”, “B’Tselem”, and “Breaking the Silence” participated as well. One morning I saw an interview with Yuli Novak, the Executive Director of “Breaking the Silence” during a morning show on channel 10, and when I heard her I became furious. My mandatory service commander, Major Tzafrir Bar Or RIP, was killed during operation “Protective Edge” and I felt like she was ridiculing whose who fought, were injured and killed.
I was very upset, and like the average Israeli I logged into Facebook and wrote a post that began with the word “I’m breaking the silence too” and for the first time ever I revealed some of the experiences and stories I went through as a soldier. The stories present a different army, and army that thinks and educates its soldiers, a very different army form the one described in the “Breaking the Silence” report. I finished the post with a request from readers to tell their stories from their military service, because I knew that they are going to be different.”
“However, I did not expect what happened the next day, I really didn’t,” continues Shorshan. “I woke up and discovered that my post was shared by thousands of people I didn’t even know, and many other male and female soldiers sharing their stories under the hashtag #mytruth. My inbox was flooded with messages from Israelis that lived abroad that begged to translate the stories to other languages so they could share them as well. The snowball kept rolling and rolling, and a few days later there weren’t one media source in both Israel and the world that didn’t write about the phenomenon. And who are we? Just three reserves with a whatsup group chat”.
How did the Facebook hashtags become an official organization?
“Two weeks later we got a message from someone that presented himself and an employee in the embassy of Brussels. He asked us to come and testify in front of the European Convention on Human Rights. At first we thought it was a prank, since we couldn’t believe that our stories echoed through. After a few days Matan Katzman, one of our linchpins, went to testify in Brussels.
Then we discovered that representatives of “Breaking the Silence” came to testify as well. The next couple of days all of the media groups in Israel were interested in us and our testimonies and in fact were discussing the twisted world press coverage of operation “Protective Edge”. When we returned from Brussels we realized we had to establish an official organization, that we couldn’t miss this opportunity”.
Discourse about moral dilemmas
So who leads this organization?
“Working together with me there are Matan Katzman who I met though Facebook, and Itamar Atzmoni who is my friend from the army. A few days later we added Dror Dagan, who was injured during an encounter with terrorists in Bethlehem in 2004, and Lital Shemesh, a journalist and a graduate of the “StandWithUs” organization. Shahar Liran joined us in September as a Executive Director and later four additional members joined the organization. Together, each one in his own area of expertise, we move the organization forward.
What do you do on daily basis?
“We are mostly busy with education and public diplomacy, and trying to introduce as many people as we can to the moral dilemmas soldiers face in the complicated reality of military service. Male and female combat solders are forced to face difficult situations and we want to improve their ability of facing those situations.
We want to create a whole new generation of soldiers that are aware of the challenges they are going to face and will know how to handle them. A generation that will be able to distinguish between constructive self criticism that is an important tool in improving the system and criticism with only one aim - defiance. To achieve those goals we lecture to high school seniors from all over the country, meet with pre-army mechina students, and young members of youth organizations. The people we meet are very diverse and what we do is amazing educational work.
And what about international public diplomacy? It is challenging work too.
“I agree. This is why we realized that we need to put a lot of effort in that area as well. If a congress member from around the world, a foreign journalist, or anyone interested in Israel would like to get information on IDF and the moral dilemmas our soldiers face, we want to be the first organization approached. We put the reality from the battle field on the table, and we are not an official source like the spokesman of the IDF, and this is our advantage. Unfortunately, the reality today is that when the foreign press and foreign parliament members want to get information on certain events regarding the IDF of a non-official source, they would approach organizations whose cause is the slander of IDF and the state of Israel. Our goal is to change this”.
Shorshan says that today the biggest project of the organization is the “Testimonies Project”. “Men and women, officers and simple soldiers that participate in this project, tell their experiences from their military service. Those testimonies are in first person, unedited and without any political agenda. At the same time we are working on a report that will summarize the testimonies and it will be spread to Israeli representatives around the world. It will be sent to Israeli envoys abroad, foreign embassies, diplomats, and pro-Israeli organizations all over the world”.
Those testimonies remind me of “Breaking the Silence”. What is the difference between your testimonies and theirs?
“I think they are not comparable at all. What they present are extreme cases, rare occurrences that are definitely not representative samples. They present those extreme cases as IDF’s educational strategy, as if this is how IDF teaches and educates the soldiers and commanders, and this the problem here. Look, no one says those things never happen, they do. There are some soldiers that have questionable values and they do things worthy of contempt. But they amount to a very very small percentage of the IDF. On the other hand our reports and testimonies present a much lager database, and have also refer to questions about how the army works, starting from the cabinet and the Minister of Defence, and ending with the material taught in commander courses.
Sounds like your work is very intense. How do you combine it with your personal life?
“It’s not simple, but the work is unpredictable. Sometimes I am very busy, and sometimes I manage to have some time free time. During my average week I manage my coffee house for a day or two and devote the rest of the week to “My Truth”. Whether its meetings, participating in conferences in the Knesset, writing, giving lectures and anything that needs to be done for an organization. I am also an Abseiling guide, so occasionally I have some work in that field. I try my best to find some free time to be with my family, and it is definitely challenging”.
Public diplomacy for the long run
Shorshan and the organization are currently working on fund-raiser via Headstart so they can turn the testimonies into a physical form. “The plan is to publish two books, one in Hebrew and one in English, which would be distributed in only a few hundreds of copies. Apart for that, all of the testimonies will be uploaded in video form to a special new website we created just for that. As for the money, this week we passed our 100% goal for the project, but the aim to get as high as we can before the deadline.
The work never ends: we need to translate the materials to more languages, print more copies of the book, and reach as many people as we can. All of those cost money, so any sum we would gain through the fund-raiser would be useful and necessary. The amazing thing about this fund-raiser is that unlike the delegitimisation focused organizations that get their funds from foreign sources, our project was fully funded by Israeli citizens and each shekel is valued”.
Did you witness the effect your work has abroad?
“Look, the damage that was and is done by the Israeli and the foreign delegitimisation focused organization didn’t begin yesterday. They have been doing their anti-Israeli work for over 20 years! The funds of the organizations that work against us are enormous. Their goal is ruining the name of Israel and damaging the country on the international level. And why am I telling you this? Because making significant change takes time. We will need the time they had at the least, if not more, because we are not walking through an unploughed field. Not only it had been ploughed, but seeds of hatred were planted and they have deep roots. With all that taken into account we can spot a few small changes. They happen slowly, but they still happen”.
What do you wish for “My Truth” in the upcoming year?
“This year, which is our first year, is the most significant one. I wish that we would keep the energy we had so far, keep our heads out of the water, and manage to fulfil the goals we set for ourselves. And I believe that we will”.