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. 

“There were no Jews living in the Jewish quarters in Damascus and in Beirut,” she explained. “But in Strasbourg, I literally lived among Jews.” 

On her first day, she wandered into a small grocery store stocked with the same ingredients and spices she would find at home. She didn’t connect the dots between her home cultures and Jewish cuisine. She didn’t even know what a kosher store was. 

Then four religious Jewish men walked in. She recognised the sound of Hebrew from Israeli cartoon broadcasts that had occasionally come through on the family television as a child, and as Osman described, she had her first panic attack, right there and then. 

“I left my shopping, but also my bag with my passport and my wallet. And I ran out of the store, crossed the street without looking left and right, went up to the third floor where my bedroom was in that house, and I locked the door,” she recalled. 

When she composed herself enough to return, she was already preparing herself to hide her identity, quickly buy her items and get out of the store as quickly as possible. Yet, she was met with kindness. 

The storekeeper smiled, asked where she was from. He helped her with her shopping bags. He chatted calmly to her. 

“He knew what happened earlier, and he knew that I knew, that he knew,” Osman recalled laughing along with the audience. “He was helping me calm down. He helped me save face, and by doing so, without intending to, on that afternoon, he converted me from an enemy to an ally. 

“If you are not going to contribute to a solution, if you’re going to become part of the problem, please, we implore you, stay out of our issues.”

For weeks afterwards, Osman sat on her wide windowsill and spied on her Jewish neighbours. They seemed normal. Their children were well behaved. The elderly were looked after. The women dressed modestly, which she had only ever associated with Islam. She kept seeing them walk in large groups to what she assumed was a museum.

“My friend told me, ‘bless your heart, that’s the synagogue.’ I didn’t know what a synagogue was. I was that naive.”

Osman began researching, starting with former Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. She found an old video in which he declared Hezbollah wanted Lebanon to become an extension of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She felt duped.

That journey from anger to conviction drove her to activism. Since 2018, she has worked with American and Israeli organisations building bridges between Israel and its neighbours. She supported the Abraham Accords. Since October 7, she has visited Israel 26 times. Going public though came at a cost. On October 8, her entire family and most of her friends blocked her without a word. They never even asked her why she was speaking out. 

But Osman, a single mother now based in Germany, channels that loss into action. On a recent speaking tour in Johannesburg, she asked her hosts to arrange a meeting with a Gazan woman from among the 300 families who had recently been flown to South Africa. A 27-year-old mother of a five-year-old boy agreed to meet her.

The woman described paying US$1400 per person to leave Gaza. She spoke of starvation, but when gently pressed, acknowledged her family had been able to buy food, at prices of 40 shekels per egg, from traders reselling humanitarian aid. 

Osman is equally direct about Western activism. Her blood boils, she said, watching feminists march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge behind a portrait of Ayatollah Khamenei. She described an Iranian activist in Berlin, shot in the eye by the IRGC, being bullied on the street by German students who told her “they should have shot you in both eyes”.

“If you are not going to contribute to a solution, if you’re going to become part of the problem, please, we implore you, stay out of our issues.”

“Sometimes my Israeli friends say, ‘Don’t say this about yourself. You’re better than that.’ No, I’m not. We have to call a spade a spade if we’re going to cure this disease.”

But, she said, she appreciates the fact that the media is sharing some of the staged footage and imagery, because it inadvertently outs their bias. 

She pointed to the infamous New York Times image shared by millions around the world of the emaciated child allegedly starving in Gaza. As is well known now, the child actually had a genetic disorder. Osman said even looking at the photo that included the child’s mother proved the lie. 

“We are mothers, and we know, we would die of starvation before our kids sleep hungry,” she said, saying people are starting to understand the manipulation. “That is not to say people aren’t suffering in Gaza. They are. But stop lying, stop promoting lies, and point the finger in the right direction.” 

Finishing the Q&A with NCJWA national president Lynda Ben-Menashe, Osman was emphatic in her support for the Jewish community – of which she will soon be part, currently undergoing the conversion process.

“The Palestinians can be a lot of things, but weak, incapable, incapacitated, they are not. And they showed us what they’re capable of on October 7. And it is my decision to go with all my strength and energy against that agenda, that camp. I will not live in a world as a mother, as a woman, where this is permitted.” 

Rawan Osman will also be in conversation with Kathryn Eisman on Thursday night, presented by AIJAC, The Central Synagogue, ZCNSW, WIZO Victoria, ZDVO and Shalva. Book tickets.