Good Neighbors

July 11, 2007 - 2:00 PM by Stephanie

Goodon Miss Yael – busy blogger, cat defender extraordinaire, professor, kibbutz starter-upper and now, press personality. All this within a mere 2 years of moving to Israel. You. Go. Girl.

This Haaretz.com article centers around Yael’s role in co-founding The Good Neighbour’s Blog earlier this year. The blog is a communal effort aimed at fostering dialogue among bloggers in the Middle East.

The article also explores Yael’s take on how last year’s 2nd Lebanon War “aroused a renewed interest in the media’s blog sector among the Israeli public.”

In creating dialogue among writers in different parts of the world, Yael also discovered a thing or two about the world of personal perception.

“I was shocked by the prejudice and mistaken assumptions characterizing each group’s perception of the other,” Kaynan says. “Many people have no idea that there are Israeli Arabs. A teacher from the Netherlands claimed that Israel does not permit Israeli Arabs to vote. She believed that they lack any rights.

After she visited the site, she changed her study plan. One thing I learned from the experience is that we cannot categorize anyone. We all harbor stereotypes regarding religious, secular, Arab and Israeli members of the population…”

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