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My First Encounter with Jews Changed My Life

(Times of Israel) Rawan Osman - In 2011, I moved from Damascus to Strasbourg, France. I found accommodation in the Jewish quarter. I had never seen a Jew in real life, although the Jews were always in the center of my existence; they were in the school history books, in Egyptian films as spies, in reports about the Palestinians, in the news as the aggressor. They were the antagonists with whom we are never to speak. As I grew older and Hizbullah stronger, the term "Jew" became, in my world, synonymous with "enemy," or even "monster." Yet those Jews I watched from my window in Strasbourg seemed nice. Meeting Israelis left me under the impression: they are just like us, normal people. And just like us, they too would love to live in peace with us. Our reality in the Middle East does indeed include war-mongering monsters, and they are those who vowed to rid the region of Jews. Israel did not kill half a million Syrians. The Syrian regime did, with the help of the Iranian regime and Hizbullah. Even Palestinian life doesn't matter; the Syrian regime imposed a siege on the Yarmouk Camp for many years after 2011, causing more than 200 Palestinians to die of starvation. Many of those who survived the siege were eating grass. The people of the Middle East realized in the past years that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a pretext for the Axis of Resistance to gain power. It is time for them to learn that what they know about Israel and the Jews is wrong, and that peace can reign and replace the senseless suffering. The writer is a Syrian-Lebanese peace activist, studying Jewish and Islamic Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany.
2023-10-05 00:00:00
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