Rawan Osman: I Hated Israel. Now It's My Home

Oct 13

Rawan Osman was raised to hate Israel. Now she calls it home, and she dreams of living there as a Jew.

Rawan Osman is a Syrian-born German activist and writer confronting antisemitism in the Arab world.

She grew up between Damascus and the Beqaa Valley, believing the Jew was her enemy. Then she crossed the one line no one from her world is allowed to cross, knowing she could never go back. Today she speaks for Israel to audiences around the world.

The cost was steeper than she expected, and it came from the people closest to her.

At the Kotel, she found herself furious with God. What a rabbi saw in that anger changed how she understood it, and why she keeps walking toward Judaism while her conversion moves through Israel's careful security review.

This is not the story of how she stopped hating Israel. It is the story of what comes after, when you have chosen a people and are still on the road to becoming one of them.

And at the end, Avi Jorisch asks her a question she calls painful.

Statecraft with Avi Jorisch is a production of IEF. Conversations with the people shaping the destiny of Israel and the Jewish people.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

02:15 Looking across the border

04:45 The feisty girl and the nun

06:09 The God she was given

10:03 Not Jewish yet

12:03 Blocked after October 8

16:41 A wine bar in Damascus

20:49 Strasbourg and a collapsing worldview

23:14 Her grandmother's words