Three young Israeli storytellers who have been visiting South Africa over the past week mess up negative stereotypes about their country before they even say a word.
Maryam Younnes, a Christian Lebanese-Israeli activist, Foaad Ahmad, a Muslim Arab-Israeli public diplomacy advocate, and Havtam Layo a Jewish-Ethiopian content creator are in SA to share their positive, lived experience of their country with young people who have been told that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.
They are representatives of Israel-Is, an organisation that uses storytelling to advocate globally for Israel and which is partnering with South African Friends of Israel (SAFI) in facilitating dialogue between the diverse Israeli trio and young people at churches, campuses and schools in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
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Yifat van Leeuwen director of global programmes at Israel-Is told Gateway News the delegation members were chosen because of their different backgrounds and “according to the messages that we wanted to emphasise and that we thought would resonate with the South African communities that we were meeting”.
When I spoke to the Israel-Is team they were in Johannesburg after a visit to Cape Town where they had engaged with church groups, Christian university students and learners at a few Jewish schools. They were disappointed that a planned meeting at the University of Cape Town, where they had hoped to engage with pro-Palestinian students, was cancelled by the hosts because of security concerns.
Foaad said unfortunately such campus-meeting cancellations are something that they — and other Israeli speakers — encounter a lot in places such as Europe and the US where pro-Palestinian voices have a lot of influence on university managements.
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“It is very sad. We want there to be an opportunity for them to listen to us and for us to listen to them. We want to have a dialogue to share about the reality of life in Israel,” he said.
“As an Arab Muslim from Israel, I have a lot to share because most people only know about a Jewish population in the State of Israel. They know about Arabs in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem but they don’t know there is another group of Arabs who make up 21% of the population of Israel.,” he said.
“We live together side-by-side with the Jewish community. We are up of 2 million Arab citizens in Israel.(15:00) We are a very diverse nation. There are Jews, Christians, Muslims, Bedouin, Caucasians — a lot of minority groups and people didn’t know about them. And all of these groups are involved in every sector in the state. You can see us in the Knesset –the Parliament of Israel, in the government, in education, in health. That is what we want to share about. All of these people who say that Israel is an apartheid State are repeating a lot of fake news/ I just invite them to come to Israel and just see the reality with their own eyes.”
Maryam said she hoped that SAFI and other organisations would continue to work on creating dialogue opportunities between Palestinian supporters, the Muslim community and delegations from Israel. “I think that hearing from Havtam is something that could create change, especially with the younger generation. Even if we don’t change perspectives, at least through dialogue we could counter some of the misinformation that South Africans hear, like on apartheid in Israel. We could shed a lot of light on those subjects,” she said.
Havtam said she often surprised people because she was Jewish and black. “Many people don’t know the history of my community. We are not converts. We have been preserving Judaism for thousands of years and we have been suffering from antisemitism for thousands of years in Ethiopia.
“Our journey to Israel was very difficult. We lost a lot of lives. We even lost the ability to read and write as a result of very antisemitic rulers in Ethiopia. So, when when you see and you hear voices online saying that Israel is white and Israel is a colonial state, they very comfortably forget that more than 50% of Jews are brown and black. They say, no, all of them are from Europe and they’re deleting and ignoring our history.”
Maryam said that despite the negative narrative about Israel from influential media and government sources she was very hopeful that voices like theirs are reaching more people — especially through social media. “I think we are already seeing that change on the ground. The narrative in the Middle East has changed in the last couple of years because people are sick of wars. People really want to prosper, to have solutions and peace agreements.
“The new generation who watch social media see a different narrative than what people used to see growing up watching TV. And more and more moderate voices, more and more courageous people who watch our videos are taking courage from them and standing up and creating a better narrative for the Middle East.”
Social Media:
Foaad Ahmad
https://www.facebook.com/foaad.ahmad
https://www.instagram.com/foaadahmad
https://www.tiktok.com/@foaad_ahmad
https://x.com/foaad__ahmad
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