Israeli influencers started a hashtag campaign on social media against The New York Times that portrayed Israelis in an article as "angry" and "displeased."
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Influencers are posting pictures with the hashtag "SadSadIsrael," coined byGilead Ini, a senior research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, to mock the article posted by the American daily.
The piece, Whose Promised Land? A Journey Into a Divided Israel, calls Israel a "divided" nation, and mentions "incompatible factions" and grievances of people living in the country, World Is One News reported.
Many were provoked by the descriptive terms and subsequently flooded Twitter with joyful-looking pictures under ironic captions about their "sad" and "miserable" lives.
When the #SadSadIsrael campaign makes it into @WIONews in #India! Proud to be part of this campaign, showing @PatrickKingsley & @nytimes the real side of Israelis - Happy, resilient, optimistic! As opposed to how we were portrayed in NYT!https://t.co/l7Ane2D0bl
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 3, 2021
Twitter users also pointed out that Israel was ranked the 12th happiest country in the world by the World Happiness Report, a study conducted by economists.
CAMERA, a Middle East reporting agency, refers to the NYT article as an effort to "curate, conceal, and contrive the faraway land for its American readers."
The publication goes further to refer to the piece as a "comical caricature of the paper's own biases."
Israelis criticized the New York-based publication's negative outlook, lambasting its presumptions.
International human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky suggested that "some folks ... only see the negative in Israel."
"They come here with set preconceptions and refuse to take off their blinkers."
"...open your eyes, talk to people, get out of your comfort zone," he added.
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Also highlighted in the article is the claim that many Arab-Israelis are increasingly asserting their Palestinian identity, according to WION.
This comes off the back of successful Palestinian social media campaigns concerning the recent tensions between Palestinians and Israelis.
Attention from around the world was drawn to Israel and its relationship with Palestinians amid violent and complex events in the region throughout the past year.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
