In February 2024, the Jewish American actress Mayim Bialik endorsed a children’s book offering an Israeli perspective on life under rocket fire. The book was called Under the Rockets’ Glow, and featured a young Israeli girl named Shira learning from her father about why her nights were routinely disrupted by rockets fired towards Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah.
Unabashedly Zionist in nature, the book aimed to teach Israeli children about the Jewish people’s historic roots in Israel and to reassure them that Israel’s Iron Dome, which lights up the sky when it intercepts incoming rockets from Israel’s enemies, would ultimately keep them safe. “It will make me happy if it will bring value to Israeli children who are going through this, hear[ing] rocket sounds at night and the alarm and need to run to bomb shelter,” wrote author Roman Sandler.
It only takes a passing acquaintance with social media to appreciate that when Bialik decided to post her recommendation of this book online, it did not go down well. There was much that reasonable people might have contested about the book’s partisan history. The events surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 are outrageously elided with the line: “It wasn’t easy because some people tried to stop us, but we were brave and said, ‘We are going to make this our home again!’”
You don’t have to deny centuries of Jewish suffering, driven by 1900 years of exile from their land of origin, to suggest that this is a cheap kind of history to teach children.
Bialik’s critics, however, largely did not go down this route. Why choose reasonable critique in an online conversation about Israel, when hatred, ignorance and downright disinformation are abundantly available?
Instead, a series of Palestinian-aligned accounts began to spread a downright lie: that Sandler’s book was a jubilant celebration of Israeli rocket attacks on Gaza.
As one prominent Muslim American commentator said: “Under the rocket’s glow? The rockets that have killed over ten thousand children? If Hamas published a heartwarming children’s book called Under the Paraglider’s Shadow, they’d nuke Gaza.” She didn’t back down when repeatedly informed that the book referred to rockets targeting Israelis, not sent by them.
Hamas themselves do routinely publish materials encouraging children to commit acts of genocide and suicide bombings against Israelis, so there’s no imagined “if” about her alternative scenario. But why let facts get in the way of a tweet?
If you’re a Palestinian sympathiser on X, it is politically unacceptable to acknowledge that Israeli civilians have lived under constant rocket fire since 2001. In this mirror universe, instead of two militarised societies both living in a state of almost total war, the only people who fire military weapons can be Israelis and the only victims of bombardment can be Palestinians.
The truth is quite different. According to the evidence of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, nearly 17,500 rockets were launched at southern Israel from Gaza between 2001 and 2021 by a combination of Hamas and the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which provides most of the military hardware.
On the other side of the country, in the north, Israel borders Lebanon. This means that Israelis live under routine rocket fire from the Hezbollah paramilitary group (proxy: Iran, again). Rockets from Hezbollah have long been a fact of life, but since the launch of this round of hostilities by Hamas on October 7, 2023, the inhabitants of northern Israel have spent more time in their bomb shelters than ever. In the 12 months following October 7, Hezbollah fired 10,000 rockets into northern Israel, displacing 60,000 Israelis.
This is the reality of Israeli life: nightly sirens, bomb shelters, safe-rooms. Over in Gaza, the reality of Palestinian life is clearly worse, because with Israel’s aerial bombardment comes starvation, unchecked disease, and the constant threat of murder by Hamas for anyone who challenges their control of aid, their imposition of strict gender and religious norms, or their propaganda.
But as a British reader, you don’t need me to tell you this, because it’s already all over your Instagram feed and your WhatsApp groups.
Most of the widely-shared memes of Palestinian anguish are rooted in fact, because the inhabitants of Gaza are suffering profoundly. But they are souped up by casualty figures reported with blind faith from the lips of Hamas officials, or images generated by AI.
There is no absence of advocacy for Palestinian children in Western popular culture, whatever antisemitic myths about “Jewish control of the media” may circulate. What is lacking is an understanding of how Israeli parents feel about raising their children under constant rocket fire. That wilful ignorance gets us no closer to why the Israeli government does what it does – and why it has finally moved to take on Iran, the source and origin of almost every rocket aimed at the children of Israel.
square KATE MALTBY Israel has become impossible for me to defend
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In the first hours of Israel’s new phase of direct conflict with Iran, the controversy around Under The Rockets’ Glow reemerged on X. “You’re ‘Under The Rocket’s [sic] Glow’ for real now. How does it feel? F*** around and find out,” one Irish nationalist account tweeted at an Israeli mother who had posted about packing supplies to care for her children and baby in a bomb shelter.
Another anti-Zionist account mocked up an image of a sequel to the book, showing Iranian rockets falling onto Tel Aviv, and suggested the title Under the Rockets’ Glow Vol 2: Shira’s Journey to Understanding Consequences.
The trope was repeated across the web: a heady combination of sheer glee at the prospect of Israeli families experiencing a bomb threat, and a brazen pretence that this is not, in fact, a norm with which many Israeli families are wearily familiar.
None of this helps us understand Israel, and none of it helps us get any closer to the unlikely prospect of peace in the region. Israel’s government under Netanyahu has done appalling things. Regular readers will know that I wrote in April about the impossibility of defending Israel’s actions in Gaza. But even if we criticise Israel, we should and must understand it.
Israel has understood itself as under siege from Iranian assault for over three decades. That has made its people both hardy and angry. Few Netanyahu voters are likely to care about a bunch of Western leftists displaying their ignorance on social media. But when we saturate our population in ignorance, we make it harder for our government to respond with expertise to the latest true horrors in the Middle East.
We need to understand both Israelis and Palestinians as people who are sick and tired of trying to hide their children from bombs.
Hawks will argue that regime change in Iran is the only way of breaking the cycle of violence that its government so brazenly sponsors; those of us who remember Iraq know that regime change doesn’t come so easily from foreign weapons. Either way, those of us who live in Western European or American cities should take a moment to be grateful that we live under more peaceful skies – for now. (Eastern Europe, of course, has already lost that luxury.)
Ignorance, hate and propaganda: all thrive by mocking other people’s suffering. The worse our culture of disinformation becomes, the greater our own polarisation – and the sooner the conflict it engenders will come to our own door.
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