+
upworthy
More

He ditched a tour of Israel after spotting a very flawed map. The story went viral.

Elon Glickman knew something wasn't right while on his tour of Israel.

On July 18, Glickman and a handful of young Jewish Americans were participating in a guided heritage tour sponsored by an organization called Birthright Israel. As part of the tour, they were given maps — but those maps were alarming to Glickman: They had erased Palestine completely.

Glickman asked the guide why Gaza and the West Bank — both Palestinian territories — were missing from the map. The guide said the state of Israel believes those areas are part of Israel.


But that didn't sit right with Glickman.

"It’s not fair," Glickman said to the guide, as shown in a video of the encounter. "The people who live [in Palestine] can’t vote, they’re under military occupation, their water is being controlled by someone else, and they can’t get access to it. And their lives are like a living hell because they can’t even see their families in Jerusalem … the roads are constantly controlled, they have to go through all these checkpoints."

As Glickman and the others found out, Birthright Israel doesn't allow participants to visit Palestinian land or openly discuss their occupation. This refusal to acknowledge or expose the harsh realities of Palestinians living under occupation is a problem Glickman felt he had to give voice to: "It feels like the equivalent of going to the Jim Crow South during segregation and not talking about segregation."

After speaking out, he and seven others chose to walk off their tour and instead meet and learn from Palestinian families facing eviction.

There's no getting around it: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a polarizing issue.

While the Holy Land is significant to the three Abrahamic faiths (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism), thousands of years of violent conflict has raised the question of who is the rightful owner of the land. In 1967, Israel gained control and occupied Palestinian land. Since then, Israel has built more than 500,000 illegal settlements and forced 7 million Palestinians to flee their homes.

In order to strengthen the connection between the Jewish identity and Israel, Birthright Israel offers free trips to young Jewish people worldwide. But a sizable portion of Birthright Israel's funding comes from the Israeli government with substantial donations coming from private donors, like Sheldon Adelson, an American casino magnate and an influential right-wing financier.

But as young Jewish people are discovering, these Birthright tours aren't painting a complete picture. Essentially, they're erasing Palestinians altogether.

Glickman's group in July is not the only example of young Jewish people taking a stand on the occupation of Palestine.

On June 28, five Birthright participants walked off their trips to meet with Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation group of former IDF soldiers, and then they went to Hebron to meet with Palestinian families living under occupation. They live-streamed their encounters.

Birthright has refused to show us the truth about the occupation’s impact on Palestinians, instead asking us to visit a site operated by a far-right settlement organization. We’ve decided instead to go meet with the Sumarin family, a family that has lived in East Jerusalem under threat of eviction for years to learn from them and hear their story.

Posted by Hal Rose on Sunday, July 15, 2018

IfNotNow, an American Jewish progressive group, launched a campaign this summer called #NotJustAFreeTrip. The campaign encourages young Jewish Americans on their Birthright Israel tours to demand that the group educate participants on the occupation of Palestine. In addition to having participants walk off the tours, IfNotNow activists hand out educational materials about the occupation to people heading on Birthright Israel trips.

"Our generation will no longer allow ourselves to be manipulated by right-wing donors and the radical Israeli government who tell us a story about Israel and Judaism that legitimizes, justifies, or simply ignores the Occupation," the campaign website read. "We demand the truth."

But walking off trips and speaking out against occupation does come at a cost — quite literally.

Participants who protested have reported that they lost their deposits for the trip and had their flights back home canceled.

In response, IfNotNow has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help finance these costs. Some of the proceeds will also go to help Palestinian families in the West Bank and Jerusalem. At the time of this post, they'd raised over $15,000.

And while the money certainly helps, the most impactful thing these Jewish Americans have done is set a powerful example: We must stand against any forms injustice, even if we're its benefactors.

Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

True

Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo via Canva, @WhattheADHD/Twitter

The 'bionic reading' font is designed to help keep you focused and read faster.

Reading is a fundamental tool of learning for most people, which is why it's one of the first things kids learn in school and why nations set literacy goals.

But even those of us who are able to read fluently might sometimes struggle with the act of reading itself. Perhaps we don't read as quickly as we wish we could or maybe our minds wander as our eyes move across the words. Sometimes we get to the end of a paragraph and realize we didn't retain anything we just read.

People with focus or attention issues can struggle with reading, despite having no actual reading disabilities. It can be extremely frustrating to want to read something and have no issues with understanding the material, yet be unable to keep your mind engaged with the text long enough to get "into" what you're reading.

Keep ReadingShow less

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less

Only child asks her friends what it's like to grow up with siblings.

Ahhh, siblings. Sometimes they're your best friends and other times your living room turns into an MMA octagon over the remote control. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be an only child. (That's not to say you didn't dream about it when your sister stole your favorite shirt for the 30th time.)

But not everyone has siblings, so it can be equally as hard for someone who grew up as an only child to picture what it would be like to have them. Only children also likely had moments where they dreamt of having a little brother or sister, not realizing the literal torment siblings can inflict on each other.

TikTok creator Lonnie IIV recently posted a video of himself with two other friends seemingly out to lunch, when the girl in the group asked what it was like to grow up with siblings. In less than a minute she realized she lucked out being an only child because her two guy friends gave her a crash course in sibling behavior.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo: courtesy BioCarbon Engineering/WikiCommons

Technology is the single greatest contributor to climate change but it may also soon be used to offset the damage we've done to our planet since the Industrial Age began.

In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire "seed missiles" into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

Keep ReadingShow less
Health

Artists got fed up with these 'anti-homeless spikes.' So they made them a bit more ... comfy.

"Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable."

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy

Spikes line the concrete to prevent sleeping.


These are called "anti-homeless spikes." They're about as friendly as they sound.

As you may have guessed, they're intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they're pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

Keep ReadingShow less