Brian Heater talks to How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less author Sarah Glidden for Heeb magazine:
You certainly risk coming off as a bit too one-sided, given the generally filtered nature of information on the subject that we receive in the State—but then there’s a certain degree of bias one has to anticipate on a Birthright trip. Did the trip make it more or less difficult to get at both sides of the issue?
Well, I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to get balanced portions of both sides of the issue. Part of me wanted to see just how one-sided the tour would be and I was ready to report on it in the comic, but I was surprised at how left-wing our guide was. It kind of caught me off guard, actually. We talked a lot about the Palestinian situation, the separation wall and what historical events brought the Zionists and Arabs to that point. In the end, however, we were on a tour of Israel and not a tour of the conflict, so of course it wasn’t balanced, but I didn’t feel like I was being brainwashed at all. I really want to go back and get the Palestinian side of the issue, although I could never come close to what Joe Sacco did with Palestine.
