Rawan Osman: from enemy to ally

Rawan Osman describes herself as a “recovered antisemite”. It is right there in her social media bios, and it is the first thing she wants you to know.

“Sometimes my Israeli friends say, ‘Don’t say this about yourself. You’re better than that.’ No, I’m not,” Osman told a packed room at the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia national conference. “We have to call a spade a spade if we’re going to cure this disease.”

Osman grew up half-Syrian, half-Lebanese, in a world where Jews were absent but hatred of them was everywhere. At her French Catholic school in Lebanon, students gathered every year around Easter to watch a graphic film about the crucifixion. The general understanding was clear. The Jews killed Jesus. In history class, the story of Palestine was covered in three pages, starring a villain called Theodor Herzl. On television, Hezbollah fighters who kidnapped Israeli soldiers were heroes.

“If you were in my shoes, you would hate them too,” she said. “Whether religious or not, whether on the right or the left, everyone told a consistent story about the Jews, the Zionists and the Israelis. We didn’t make a distinction between the three.”

Everything changed in her mid-20s when she moved to Strasbourg to study and found herself living in one of Europe’s most prominent Jewish neighbourhoods. She didn’t realise there would be Jews living there.