Activist describes journey from Hezbollah hate mill to Judaism

“When I began examining why I hated Jews and realised how deeply Hezbollah had shaped my perceptions, I became angry. I understood that we had been intensely indoctrinated and fed a steady stream of hatred that ultimately harms us all.” 

These are the words of Syrian-born German political activist and self-proclaimed reformed antisemite Rawan Osman on unlearning her hate-filled view of Jews after leaving Lebanon and Syria in her twenties. 

Osman is visiting South Africa to attend the Aish Hatorah annual gala dinner and to give a social media workshop on combating anti-Israel bias at The Base community. 

“This propaganda wasn’t created by Hezbollah alone. It’s part of a highly organised and dangerous alliance in the Middle East, led by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its network includes Hezbollah, the Assad regime, the Houthis in Yemen, and, of course, Hamas,” she said. 

“Hamas could never have carried out such a co-ordinated attack on 7 October without Iran’s training, funding, guidance, and logistical support. And to build fighters like that, you have to start young,” Osman said. “Recruitment happens indirectly by poisoning the education system and shaping children long before they realise what’s being done to them.” 

Osman was born in Damascus to a Syrian Sunni father and a Lebanese Muslim mother, and grew up in secular Lebanon after the civil war, attending a French Catholic school. 

“Growing up, the only thing everybody hated was the Jews, slash Zionists, slash Israelis,” she said, “We didn’t make a distinction between Jewish and Israeli.” 

Osman said Lebanon’s primary school curriculum teaches children a simplified history of the region, portraying Theodor Herzl as a villain and Zionism as a Western-backed plot to take Palestine. She said students internalise the idea that Palestine was always a country, but she later realised that Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and that countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait are also modern ethnostates formed after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. 

Osman was brought out of this daze of Israeli hatred when she moved to Strasbourg, France, in 2011 and met Jewish people for the first time while living in the Jewish quarter. 

The first time she ever met Jewish people, she was shopping in a store around the corner from her home and saw two visibly Jewish men walk in, and her body went into a panic. 

For weeks, she had to think about why her body reacted this way to sharing a space with a Jew, considered her enemy, for the first time. She then had to ask herself why she hated Jews with such passion, and why other Arabs like her hated Jews too. It was only then that she confronted the idea that everything she knew about Israel and the Jews came from the leader of Hezbollah. 

She started doing research and got extremely angry to realise that her “side” was the bad side and “tens of thousands lost their lives because of the Palestinian cause, all of which could have been avoided had the Arabs accepted sharing the land with Jews”, she said. 

Before moving to France, she hadn’t realised that Hezbollah openly stated its aim to turn Lebanon into an extension of the Islamic Republic of Iran, something she never supported. When she discovered this had been public knowledge for years, she felt increasingly alienated and left for Europe, believing that she wanted to raise her son with Western values. 

But even there, she found no escape. Waves of terrorism and the growing influence of Islamist ideology made her feel pursued, as if extremists wanted to “bring her back”. She even considered leaving Europe, but friends in places like New Zealand and Canada were reporting similar issues. After major attacks in France, she realised there was nowhere left to run, only the need to push back for the sake of future generations. 

“This is personal. My mother grew up in the Lebanese war, traumatised. And what led to the Lebanese war is the Palestinian cause. So my parents have war trauma. Their parents have war trauma. Everybody in Lebanon and Syria, I would think, in most of the Middle East, including in Israel, suffers from war trauma,” she said, “We carry this baggage with us, and sometimes we pass it on to the next generation. I just wanted it to stop. But also to expose the lies. Because I realised that we are intensively brainwashed.” 

This is why she decided to start Arabs Ask, a social media channel with about 200 000 Instagram followers in which Osman, as well as German academics, target head on misinformation about Israel spread by the Arab world. 

Osman is converting to Judaism, a process which she started a year and a half before the tragic events of 7 October 2023, as when studying Jewish Studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, she realised that she identified with being Jewish. 

“I knew in my heart that I’m Jewish. It was such a clear and overwhelming grace, and I knew that I wanted to convert and make aliya before I had ever visited Israel,” she said. 

After visiting Israel 16 times since 7 October 2023, the one thing she takes away from the country and its people is resilience. 

“Israel’s enemies undermine how resilient the Israelis are. Israelis bicker a lot, and their enemies mistook it for division,” she said, “They thought you could hit them where it hurts and finally get rid of the country, destroy it from within. They had no idea. They fight each other that badly, just imagine what they’re gonna do to you. So the country’s here to stay.” 

She says what pains her most is how convinced many are that Israelis are hateful and indifferent to killing, a belief she insists is completely false. Even her far‑right Israeli friends, despite their harsh political views, would never wish harm on Arabs or teach their children to hate or kill. They simply want to be left alone, not commit violence, she said. 

As a person who grew up around war trauma, Osman believes that peace can be achieved only when “the world stops infantilising the Palestinians. The world needs to understand that the Palestinians aren’t senile, handicapped, or stupid people. On 7 October, they showed all of us that they are capable of a lot. So, it’s time to tell them that actions have consequences, and this is the last time you ever opt for terrorism.”