“I can’t say I walk into work knowing what is going to happen anymore.” Emma Siegel, a graduate of the Media and Communication Studies program and now an associate producer at i24News in Israel, describes the challenges of covering a war 

Walk me through a day in the life of a reporter working for a news publication at Tel Aviv. How is it different from the life of a journalist working in safe, western societies? 

Emma: I will give a little example of the differences that I can immediately see. I can’t really speak to how the newsrooms are different because I haven’t really worked in newsrooms in Canada or North America, but the news is very different. I would say about one week into this war, we were seeing some truly, truly horrific images, stuff I hope nobody else sees, and stuff that is unbelievable that it happened and it just traumatized us at work to see these things. And as we are doing this, I get a push notification from CBC and it said in huge red letters, ‘BREAKING NEWS’ and I am like ‘oh my god what is going on in Canada,” and it was something like ‘Ontario added 15,000 new jobs in October.’ It is just like the disconnect in me to see breaking news in Canada versus what is breaking news right in Israel, to me, was such a stark difference of what’s happening  here versus what would probably never happen in North America. I am not saying that it is not breaking news for Canada, for CBC to be publishing this, because it is, this is the breaking news that Canadians want to see and that CBC believes needs to be pushed for Canada. But it is just really interesting to see the difference in views of news and to see what is actually going on in Israel versus my home. It is just drastically different and it really made me feel very disconnected from Canada in that moment like, wow, the breaking news at home is like, I almost miss it because it is so much nicer compared to what I am looking at right now and what I am doing right now. 

If you had to go back to Canada or America and work in one of their newsrooms, what would be some of the challenges you would encounter there? 

Emma: I would say like something that is probably unique to my experience in Tel Aviv is the amount of languages I am exposed to everyday. So i24News, it broadcasts in English, Arabic and French and so these are all languages that I hear all the time and see on screen all the time because we broadcast in those languages. Then I am also working at Tel Aviv, which is in Israel, which the first language is Hebrew. So, I am hearing a ton of Hebrew throughout the day, too, and I think something that is quite unique to where I am is that there are five languages going on around me all day long. I don’t think necessarily that will happen in Canada or America, I am not entirely sure though, I guess it depends on the newsroom. Something else that I think will be very different, though I am not a 100 per cent sure, I heard a lot of people say newsrooms in Canada, the management is not always very helpful or very nice. I can’t see this being true or not, this is just what I heard from people working in newsrooms in Canada. And so, when I came to this newsroom, I was very, very weary of management. I was very scared that they wouldn’t help me or they would think I couldn’t do my job if I asked them questions. So, I was very quiet when I first got there. I didn’t want to bother anybody or poke any bears and I very quickly realized that is not the case here. Management is all about the success of their employees, they all want to make sure we are doing the best possible job. They are all very nice and we all work together as a team. I hope that is going to be the case too when I get back to North America. 

What makes reporting on warfare different from reporting in other news genres? 

Emma: I think the difference, probably specifically to this work as well, is the misinformation and the disinformation that we are seeing. Trying to figure out what is real, what is a false alarm, what has been completely made up. Trying to skim through and figure out what the real truth is, is an extremely difficult and rewarding task. So, I think that is what makes it different from a normal day at work. I also think the intensity is very different. On a normal day we have an hour to build our rundown like get ready for the broadcast and we will do an around the world. This is what is happening in Israel, this is what is happening in the Russian-Ukrainian war. But it is pretty leisure. The breaking news worldwide is for the most part, you know there is politics in America, it is stuff you walk into work already knowing. I can’t say I walk into work knowing what is going to happen anymore, you know it could be a totally normal day as in normal coverage, but the number of deaths in Israel has stabilized, the number of hostages has stabilized. We know there is stuff happening in the north border and the south border. Suddenly, the other day, Yemen also attacked Israel and that was breaking news that nobody saw coming. You really can’t predict what you are going to see and what you are going to hear and what is going to be real and what is going to be fake. A lot of the shift is just spent making sure that we are sending out accurate information and in a very, very fast deadline oriented as well. There was one time, about a month ago, so this all happened in Southern Israel and Gaza. I think the very, many reasons why everybody did not see this coming was because there was an expectation that the north was going to be the problem, not the south. So, in Northern Israel, it borders with Lebanon. Lebanon and Israel have officially been at war since 2006 or something like that. There is a lot of conflict brewing on that border, there was a lot of talk on when the next war will be so no one is really looking at the southern border. I think on day two, we got the first rockets coming from Lebanon into Israel and we had just walked out into the most grueling, three-hour broadcast I think I have ever been in. We are going back to our seats to just decompress before the next broadcast in twenty minutes or something like that. And then we get the rocket alert. Literally I am walking to my desk, and I just turn right back around and sprint to the control room. There is no time to think, there is no time to do anything. You can’t predict what is going to happen in these shifts and now it is more common that there is more conflict and skirmishes coming from the north border. But, on day two, we did not know that yet. Every day you don’t know what you are going to expect. 

How do you interview people? Was it any different than learning how to interview people at Guelph-Humber? 

Emma: My job does not deal with interviewing people because I am not one of the correspondents in the field. But I will say that when I talk to the people who come on to air because if they are on Zoom or Skype, then I am the one that sets them up. It has been more difficult lately just because of the nature of why they are coming on air basically. We are interviewing survivors of the music festival in the desert where 260 teenagers and young adults were murdered in the field basically. We are talking to parents whose kids are kidnapped or grandparents who found out their grandkids were killed that day. When I speak to them, it is not the same way I would speak to somebody when I was interviewing at Guelph-Humber. I was wandering around the school, I was interviewing like the vice-president of IGNITE or I was talking to profs from different departments, and it was a fun experience, it was interesting, it was new, and it was really exciting. I can’t say those are the feelings I feel anymore when I talk to the guests. I feel that I have to be a lot more delicate. I warned them of what kind of images we are going to be putting on screen when their segment is coming on to let them know in advance and tell them if they want to turn off the cameras, so they don’t see the screen, that is okay. A lot of the time, we are interviewing Israelis, and their first language is not English, it is Hebrew. Before they go on to their segment, they are telling me they are scared to go on. They don’t know English well and it is my job to be telling them it is okay. Tell your story. Take it as slow as you want. Don’t worry about the English. It is going to be okay. Just say what you want to say and let the world know what you want them to know. So, it is just very different in terms of the emotions around the tone and the way I am talking to people. 

How do you verify information from an expert or an ordinary interviewee? 

Emma: So it really depends on who I am talking to. I would say that if information comes from our defense correspondents. They get information from sources directly in the military, on the field in Gaza. We have a news group chat so if they post information in that group chat, you know it is rock solid information that we can be reporting on. It can be a little dicier when talking to your average citizens because you have to question, where did you get this information from? If they say the IDF attacked this target in Gaza and it did XYZ damage, how did they know that? Are they previous officers that still have connections inside the military? Did they hear this from a neighbor and the neighbor made it up? We don’t know so you have to be a lot more skeptical. When we have security guests in the studio, we know as well with our defense correspondents that they have sources. They know what they are talking about, and they wouldn’t say information if they were not 100 per cent sure of it. But if you are doing newsgathering in the field and someone who is not a military source is telling us something, we have to verify it through different channels before we can use the information. I would say that for my job specifically, I am not necessarily newsgathering in the field so much. I am not talking to locals, but I am seeing massive amounts of information on Twitter and part of my job is sorting through that and figuring out what is real and what is not. A lot of it is seeing where the original videos are coming from. Is this person actually in Gaza? Are they in Israel? Do they understand what is going on? Is this like a war junkie profile that you are actually seeing? I saw it at the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, I see it now with the Israeli-Hamas war of people just reposting anything they can get their hands on that has an explosion in it and it is not real. A lot of the time, it is CGI or some other special effect. It is just a matter of sifting through, trying to figure out the profile, trying to figure out if the images even look like Israel or Gaza, to make an informed decision on whether we can use the content or not. 

As a reporter covering war, how do you balance the polarized opinions of both experts and ordinary civilians in your work? 

Emma: I will say it can be a bit difficult to have balanced coverage right now for anybody in Israel because it is nearly impossible to get a source from Gaza talking to Israeli media. It is nearly impossible getting sources from Arab nations talking to Israeli media because there is a lot of animosity. This has made it a lot worse, and it can be difficult. For example, there is talk of Israel needing to have a ceasefire. The UN is backing it, the Arab nations are pushing for it, the U.S is not pushing for it and Israel is saying we are not going to do it. So, all of our security guests are also against the ceasefire, and we are discussing today the need to have somebody from abroad pushing the other side. That there should be a ceasefire. Why do they want this? Do they think that it will stop Hamas? Will they actually give back the hostages if there is a ceasefire? Because this is a side that we are lacking right now, in all of Israel I would say. The coverage is a little bit one sided, I am not just talking about I24News, but I do just mean in general. So, I do think that is something that needs to be worked on all around. 

What equipment do you carry with you when interviewing people in dangerous areas? 

Emma: The correspondents and cameramen have a camera, they have a mic, they have what we call a live news kit so that they can be sending back the feed to us from wherever they are. But at times like this, they are also all wearing bullet-proof vests and helmets as well. They are also reporting right beside shelters so if there are rockets, they can just jump off into a shelter basically. It is really really important. So, for example, in Tel Aviv, I get a siren alert on my phone or if I can hear the sirens outside, I have one minute and fifteen seconds to get to a shelter. On the southern border, they have 15 seconds. On the northern border, they have no time at all. And so, it is extremely important that they are wearing their vests, that they are wearing their helmets, and they are right next to a shelter. Very often these days, when they are on air or right before they are on air, there are sirens and they do have to dive in straight to a shelter. 

What are some safety protocols you are taught at your job when you are navigating your way through a war-zone area? 

Emma: I am not sure if the correspondents were given specific instructions, because I am not a correspondent and I did not get those instructions. But I will say that there are some things in place. For example, wearing the vests, wearing the helmet, keeping ears out for the sirens, making sure you are up to date on your phone with what is going on. In the north, we can’t say what their location is, we can say Northern Israel or the Israel-Lebanon border, but we cannot give the community that they are in because it is all closed military zones now. We can’t really give information about our correspondents or where the military might be. 

Describe some of the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of your profession? 

Emma: I would say the good is how informed I feel. Before, when I took on this internship, I had two tests that I had to do: one was a written test. Can I write a script? The other one was a knowledge test. Do I understand the Middle East? And they said, be as truthful as possible. We just want to see your knowledge; we are not going to judge this one. We are judging the scriptwriting one to see if we can take you or not. So I was brutally honest on the Middle East test, and I knew almost nothing. Like a pitiful amount of information. I could not even tell them who the opposition leader of the government was and it was Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been put in power for 15 years or more. So, I wasn’t strong in that department. Now I feel very educated on the Middle East, politics in Israel, Arab nations, their relations with Israel, their relations with each other. Who has ties, who doesn’t have ties. I understand the military a lot more than I did before and I think these are all things I can really carry into future jobs. I hope that when I come back to Canada, I will be able to work on a Middle East feat so I can use this information that I have learned. I just feel like I have so much more knowledge than I did two years ago and I am really lucky to have all that information. I would say for the bad and ugly, let’s start off with the bad and I will give a general example. It can be really rewarding to have such break-neck deadlines, but really upsetting when you can’t hit them. Sometimes the deadlines can be between 15 to 30 seconds. We get new visuals in, and it has to be in the rundown. The anchor is talking about the story before this number where I need to get this visual in and I am trying to get into the computer as fast as I can, trying to get it under our editing system as fast as I can, putting it onto the rundown for them to use. And sometimes when I get it, it is great, it is wonderful. Sometimes when I don’t get it, it can be really frustrating, especially because a lot of the time, it comes down to tech issues or things that are out of your control, and it can be really annoying. But the ugly I would say very specific to this war is the stuff that we are all seeing and hearing, especially in the first few days. In this context, we have to blur them ourselves to make sure that it is not too graphic for air, which means that I have already seen the original, extremely graphic images. When I blur them, sometimes you have to go frame by frame to fix them. And if it’s a minute long and you are going frame by frame and if it is extremely graphic, then it could be very disturbing and pretty traumatic depending on what it is you are looking at. I would say in the first few days that was the ugly. That and listening to the personal stories of the people that lost their loved ones on October 7th. Very hard to listen to. Very necessary, but very hard. 

Reporting in a war-zone area is incredibly erratic and life-threatening. Walk me through some of the challenges of reporting on a military conflict as it happens in front of you? 

Emma: I think the difference is the proximity to the war. For example, when we are on air, if there are rocket alerts coming into Tel Aviv, we stay on air. That means everybody else runs to the shelter. We don’t and the anchor will stay in the studio, reporting on incoming rockets coming into Tel Aviv.

It is one thing to hear about the event happening half an hour after it happens and type up an article and post it on a Canadian news site. But it is very different to be reporting on it in live

We stay in the control room, making sure that the show can still run basically. We will hear explosions over our head of the missile defense system, stopping the rockets from coming in. Or we will hear the explosion if the rocket falls into Tel Aviv. It has happened a few times now. It is one thing to hear about the event happening half an hour after it happens and type up an article and post it on a Canadian news site. But it is very different to be reporting on it in live time being on air, hearing explosions, knowing that one of them stands too close to one of the missile defense systems stopping it. Not knowing where it is yet, starting to see the report coming in of a smoky building, a building on fire, 20 minutes away, 10 minutes away from us. It could have been our building; it could have been any building. 

How important is it to remain emotionally composed in your profession? Can you give some examples?

Emma: It is very important, and it is very difficult. There are these two beautiful singers from the Israeli Opera who did their audition on a song that translates to “bring them home”. They made a video about it singing in opera with videos of all the babies and children that were held hostage in Gaza. It was a very emotionally-moving and beautiful piece. We brought them into the studio to talk to the anchor about it on the show. I cut a 30 second clip of this and I said to the senior producer that it is really a shame that we can’t show the 2-1/2 minutes because it is really, really good. But it is really unconventional to show that much of something on air. so, we showed 30 seconds, and it was really emotional.

we pull ourselves together because we have a 1-1/2 hour show to put on and we can’t sit here and cry. We always have other things we have to do instead. So, I think the takeaway there is that it is ok to be human, it is ok to have emotions, but we still need to put them in check because the show must go on and we have work to do. 

The anchor that was on air, he was like a usual robot, no emotions. But you can tell he was already choked up in his seat and he was having difficulty giving questions to these two guests just because of how emotional that video had made him. He still did a really good job, and it was still a really well-done segment, but he was having a hard time getting his words out. Then we decided, because it was so moving, to play the 2-1/2 minutes clip at the end of the segment. He was crying in his chair. He was on screen because we were showing the video. I was sobbing in the control room and the senior producer was sobbing in the control room. At the end of the two minutes, we pull ourselves together because we have a 1-1/2 hour show to put on and we can’t sit here and cry. We always have other things we have to do instead. So, I think the takeaway there is that it is ok to be human, it is ok to have emotions, but we still need to put them in check because the show must go on and we have work to do. 

What is the necessary criteria you have to fulfill to report in a warzone area that is different from any journalism sector? 

Emma: I think it’s what I have said before, which is the necessity to verify information. The misinformation and disinformation campaigns have made things very, very difficult to decipher what is real and what is not. So, it is one thing if in a sports story you say that Blue Jays traded somebody because you heard this information from a source. But then they don’t end up trading that person. It is not good to make mistakes, but it is not the end of the world I would say. For example, a rocket hit a hospital in Gaza and within five or 10 minutes I think Hamas blamed Israel. Israel said we don’t think it was us and we are looking into it. The Palestinian health ministry, which is run by Hamas right now, said hundreds were killed in this Israeli airstrike. They held a press conference outside of the hospital with the bodies of children they said were killed during the strike seen in the frame. Within 20 minutes this is the headline that BBC, New York Times, and CBC were all going with. ‘Hundreds were killed in an alleged Israeli airstrike’. It caused insane rioting across the Arab countries. They were going to the Israeli embassy trying to light it on fire, there was clashes. In Jordan they wanted to walk to the Israeli border to try to force their way in and I don’t know what they would do next if they did get in. As we saw on October 7th, with the south border with Gaza when they did get in, we saw what happened. So, disinformation circulated everywhere, and Israel said it wasn’t us, we were not operating in that area. The blast radius would be much higher if it was an Israeli strike. The surrounding buildings would have been leveled as well and clearly; they haven’t been. Al Jazeera had a live feed at that time, and it showed what looked like a rocket falling from Gaza failing and going back into Gaza. Channel 12, which is kind of like the BBC of Israel, they also have a live feed and it showed the same thing. So, what was deciphered in the end was the U.S said it was a failed rocket from inside Gaza that went up and went back down, hit the parking lot of the hospital, killed maybe 10-50. Which is a lot of people and really horrible, but it is not the hundreds of people that the Palestinian health ministry said. It did not hit the hospital, it hit the parking lot. So there was a lot of disinformation that night that caused a lot of damage. 

What would you recommend to journalism at Guelph-Humber who want to report in war-zone areas? 

Emma: I would say do it. Go out of your comfort zone, do something that you have never done before. If you want to work in war zones, you should work in war zones.

Don’t do it for the glory of being a war reporter. Do it because you want to find the truth, you want to find knowledge and you want to be able to report and tell the world about what’s really going on in these places.

We just got a new freelance correspondent that looked a bit my age. He was on the northern border of Israel. He has been to Syria; he was in Ukraine for a while. If this is the path you want to follow, then follow it. But be safe while you are doing it. Don’t do it for the glory of being a war reporter. Do it because you want to find the truth, you want to find knowledge and you want to be able to report and tell the world about what’s really going on in these places. Do it safely. Don’t think that you are invincible. You can go out into an actual war without proper equipment, without proper preparation. don’t be surprised if your emotions get the best of you because they will. That is OK. It is OK to not be OK in situations like that and to get the help that you might need and to keep going. 

So, how did you get here?  

Emma: I graduated in 2020 and I came to Israel almost two years ago now for an internship program where I interned at I24News in their content department. I got a job offer while I interned there, so I stayed on as the associate producer and since I have been promoted to a producer. So, my job is basically all the behind the scenes that you see in a news show. So, headline writing, script writing, cutting videos, finding videos online. A lot of the time, especially in breaking news like this, is figuring out which ones are real, which ones we can use and cutting those for the show. And also I have a job inside the control room so during when the show is actually going on, I help set up the correspondents and the guests that are in the field or on Zoom or on Skype, connect them to the sound board work, with the sound man to get the sound checked and ready for the show. I am the right hand of the senior producer so basically anything they need help within the control room is where I will step in. If there is breaking news, something just happened, and we need a new headline to convey this… I will write it for them, I will find something online we can use as visuals and pull it up on the computer. So many hats in the job I guess you can say. 

What gravitated you to work at Tel Aviv as soon as you graduated from Guelph-Humber’s Media and Communications program? 

Emma: So, it was not like a linear I didn’t think I was going to graduate and go off in the Middle East and start reporting from there. I didn’t have that idea in my head at all at that point when I graduated. So, in 2020, I graduated in the middle of or the start of the pandemic and I had huge graduation travel trips lined up that I had been planning on and saving for almost a decade and, suddenly that was all dashed and none of it could happen obviously and that it is OK, it happens. Instead, I just jumped into the workforce, but when I say jumped, it actually took almost a year to get a job because it was such a turbulent time, especially in journalism. They were cutting off freelancers and it became much more competitive in an already competitive field so it was extremely difficult to get a job. I ended up finding a job for a magazine and started as the contributing editor and then I came back as the managing editor. It was a very wonderful job. It was a work-from-home with a lovely team. It reminded me a lot of the role that I took on in Emerge and it was really fun to use the skills I used in Emerge in this new role. 

(Emerge is a multi-platform project produced by University of Guelph-Humber’s media studies students. It combines magazine articles, a photography exhibition and media strategy) 

I was there for about a year and at this point, borders were starting to open. We were getting vaccinated. The threat of COVID was not quite like this intense fear that it once was, it wasn’t as unknown anymore. I started to get this like nagging travel bug again, but I had already joined the workforce, so I didn’t really want to put work and career on hold to travel anymore. I didn’t feel that that was very smart for my future. I didn’t want this gap on my resume. I did not want to forget skills I had learned so I wanted to try to figure out a way I could like travel but also still be working at the same time. So, I started looking at different internship programs around the world, seeing what aligned with what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted journalism. I thought it would be cool to do an interesting place. The reason I settled on Tel Aviv is because there are these things called masa programs and they basically discount programs to bring young Jews to Israel and I used that to my advantage. That was the only reason I chose Tel Aviv is because it was the cheapest option available and I originally interviewed for a newspaper here because I told the advisor that was setting us up, I said that I would like to work in a left-wing establishment and I want newsroom experience, because I didn’t have it yet. So, they let me interview at the most left-wing newspaper in all of Israel and that place didn’t really have it together. I asked what the interns do, they could not really give me an answer and there were a lot of red flags in the interview. They ended up ghosting me and another one of my future friends that I met on the program. So, then I interviewed at I24News and I was really hesitant because I did not want to work at TV broadcast at all. It was something that in university the profs would say to us, ‘What field in journalism do you want to work in?’ and I would always say, ‘I don’t’ know, but I do know that I do not want to work in TV broadcast’. So, I was very hesitant about it but I figured it is an internship, what do I have to lose? I interviewed. I did a couple of tests. They liked me. I got the job and that is how I ended up in the Middle East. 

So, you said that you have published articles on Emerge during your time at Guelph-Humber. So, what were some of the skills that you learned while working for Emerge? 

Emma: In my last job, almost all of my skills transferred over. I felt almost like it was an extension of the Emerge program because it was a magazine and we had to figure out our timelines together. We had to all work together. We all relied on each other to get the work done and it was very magazine-writing oriented. It is a little harder to say what the crossover is right now for my job because it is a very different medium. The way you write a script is not at all the way you would write a magazine article. And the deadlines are very different. With magazines, we had six weeks to get everything ready, sometimes my deadlines are 15 seconds and so it is a very intensive, very different atmosphere. But I will say that the one thing that really stuck from university that I found was something I learned during Emerge and is useful still now is the team-working aspect. During Emerge, everybody had a part, and we were all cogs in a machine and if one cog failed, the machine wouldn’t work anymore. We all had to learn how to work together, had to adjust to each other’s different skill sets in the way they did work, and it is the exact same now in TV broadcasts. We are all cogs in a very different, very complicated machine and if one fails, it all fails. I am more on the content side so if we don’t have visuals scripts and headlines ready, we are just going to look at an anchor on screen. If the anchor is not ready, they are just going to sit there, and the viewer is going to see someone staring at a screen back at them. If the control team is not ready, we have no body to switch the cameras, to switch the headlines, to switch the visuals and we can’t show any content and it just keeps going down the line. The way you learn teamwork in university, specifically at Guelph-Humber and specifically in Emerge, is the most transferable skill that I have found that I still use to this day. 

What did you do as a former journalism student at Guelph-Humber that prepared you for this kind of position? 

Emma: I think, especially in third year at Guelph-Humber, we all kind of felt a little thrown in the deep-end, at least my year did. Because for the first two years, you’re at the general media program and then in third year you specialize in something, and we chose journalism. It wasn’t something personally, at least, that I had any experience really with. I hadn’t worked for any publications; I did not have anything published and the profs were really amazing, and they really got us started right away. I remember in one class she kind of looked around and she’s like ‘ok you have 10 minutes, go find me a story somewhere in the university,’ and we were all like ‘OK, I guess’. We were all put on the spot, and we didn’t quite know what we’re doing yet, but it was this really great lesson of newsgathering quickly, figuring out how to gain sources in an accurate way while also still maintaining integrity and understanding what the story is. Even though we felt we were put on the spot, it was really good to be open to these very new and almost scary experiences. I think something that really prepared me for this job now is that we have, like I said, very limited time. Sometimes to gain information to make sure it is correct information, maintaining the integrity of what we are trying to do and it really does feel like, at least in the beginning when I started working at I24News, it really felt like I am in the deep end. I just got pushed in and I am trying to figure out if I am going to sink or if I am going to swim. I think that the skills they taught me at Guelph-Humber was the reason why I was able to swim and not sink. 

What was the sociopolitical climate like when you first worked at Tel-Aviv in contrast to what it is now? 

Emma: I would say that inside the newsroom, socio-politically, there hasn’t really been much change. We are all still on the same page in just trying to get the most accurate information out as quickly as possible. But yeah, you are right in terms of who we are interviewing on a local Israeli scale, it has changed. Before October 7, which is when all this started, the biggest thing on the forefront of everybody’s mind in Israel was the political situation in Israel. The coalition that is currently running the government, some say they are a dictatorship or on their way to a dictatorship. Some said that they are the future of Israel, they are here for the security of Israel and they are going to make it better and it has completely torn the nation apart. There was a protest every week across the country for, it was something like 30 weeks (about 7 months). There was lots of clashes, especially in the beginning, and it didn’t look like it was going to end any time soon. This event has, in a way, taken a nation that was torn apart and mended them back together by the trauma that everyone faced that day. So I think everybody is more on the same page now of where the priorities are. There is still a lot of animosity towards the government, but no one at the moment is saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to step down because this is not the time to be calling on the government to change itself. A lot of people want him and the whole coalition to step down when this is all over. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many others in the coalition have said we will answer to what happened when this is done, but this is not the time. It just seems that the nation is much more on the same page socio-politically than it has been basically since I arrived in Israel. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]