Rawan Osman
@RawaneOsmane · Pro-Israel advocacy & explainers
Rawan Osman is a Syrian-born German activist, writer, and research fellow focused on Arab-Israeli reconciliation.
This morning, everyone in Germany had a taste of what it‘s like to live in Israel. https://t.co/dV7sFKPn2m
Proud Jews don't preface a speech with "as a proud Jew." Pride is a lifestyle, not a slogan. Real pride comes from understanding. Without it, pride is just the trait of a fool. The UK's "proud Jewish" Foreign Secretary announced sanctions on settlements in the West Bank. He wants that land handed to a Palestinian state. Settlers call it Judea and Samaria. They didn't move there to spite Arabs or provoke violence, but because they know their story and live it. Here's some of what he wants Israel to give away: Cave of the Patriarchs. Tel Hebron. Susya. Herodium. Rachel's Tomb. Shiloh. Bethel. Nebi Samuel. Joseph's Tomb. Ancient Shechem. Mount Ebal. Sebastia. Ancient Jericho. The Hasmonean palaces. Qumran. Condemning violent settlers who clash with Arabs is one thing, but calling every settlement illegal is another. The Foreign Secretary did the latter, but certainly NOT as a proud Jew. P.S. In the photo, I'm with Daniel Kapp in Vienna, a political strategist who fought tirelessly for the hostages. He wears his IDF cap openly and unapologetically, because for him it's a badge of honor. Without an army, we know exactly what happens to the Jews. #israel @DanielKapp
Hamas named the attack on the 7th of October “Alaqsa Flood”. What is the story of Alaqsa? https://t.co/fOeNyJKCkn
This is how I spent my day in Vienna yesterday. Some people rolled their eyes, some gave me a thumbs up. I wish I'd been in the UK instead. Britain already gave 78% of the British Mandate of Palestine to the Hashemite family of Hijaz, making them royalty in the Levant despite not being indigenous to the region. The same Britain now lectures Israelis, who built their country against all odds, on sharing the remaining 22% with Palestinians who have refused to share it, repeatedly. Now that Hamas has failed to deliver its promises of liberation, the international community steps in to deliver what Hamas couldn't. The UK's "proud Jewish" foreign secretary said he had to act before it was too late to save the two-state solution. The two-state solution died on October 7. Anyone who still doesn't get that, in Israel or anywhere else, is delusional. Since the day Jews started building their state, the world hasn't stopped pushing them. It's time to stop infantilizing the Palestinians. Time to hold them accountable. Time to push them to get real and understand: enough is enough. #AmIsraelChai 🇮🇱🤍 #uk #Israel #vienna #kerenhayesod
Is the AfD's landslide victory on Sunday a surprise? Hardly. On September 6th, the AfD won 39 of 83 seats in Saxony-Anhalt, falling just three seats short of an absolute majority. The CDU, which governed the state for over two decades, collapsed to 15. The AfD is a far-right party boycotted by nearly every mainstream politician. On Monday, Chancellor Merz insisted he will never work with it. Meanwhile Italy's La Repubblica accused AfD voters of betraying the vow "never again." Of course, alarmed liberal voices have nothing to say about the extremism of the radical left that got us here. The arrogance of stubborn politicians is mindblowing. I emigrated from the Middle East in 2011, escaping the stigma I faced as a divorced woman, to raise my son with western values. When refugees walked out of Syria, their primary destination was Germany. Angela Merkel, like other European leaders ashamed of watching Assad slaughter his own people for years, welcomed them with open arms. She did not know what she was inviting into the continent. How could she? Who would have advised her otherwise, in woke Berlin? I predicted this. In 2015, the Washington Institute published my piece warning of an inevitable rise of the far-right, leading to a clash between Left and Right. Nobody in Germany appreciated my "melodramatic tone." Here we are. For more than ten years, people like me have looked for a strong center with a sensible plan. It never came. So the frustrated silent majority is voicing its discontent at the ballot box. And the moderates still don't get it. This win is the beginning of a trend that will repeat globally. What triggered it isn't Germany reverting to its Nazi past. It's decades of an emboldened Left claiming the higher moral ground, stretching the language of equal rights until it equated criminal and good, sane and mad, citizen and alien, prioritizing abstract ideals over reality. The marriage between Islamism and the radical left was the last straw. Holocaust survivors are understandably concerned about the German far-right. Here's the plot twist nobody saw coming: the "Free Palestine" movement might as well be where the world draws its line. Graphic: Deutsche Welle #DW #deutschland
This week marks 54 years since the Munich Olympics massacre. On September 5, 1972, Palestinian militants from Black September stormed the Olympic Village, killed two Israeli athletes on the spot, and took nine more hostage. By the next day, all nine were dead, along with five of the attackers and a police officer, after a rescue attempt collapsed into a gun battle on the tarmac. Growing up in Lebanon, I remember watching “21 Hours at Munich” on TV, more than once. Adults around me praised Palestinian courage and heroism. Not once did anyone stop to say that the men targeted were talented athletes who had trained their whole lives to be there. Killing them was wrong, unjustified, cruel, barbaric. No one paused to think what that taught the kids in the room. Since I moved to Europe in 2011, and serendipity took me to a Jewish quarter in a French city, I’ve been trying to understand what made our culture — across societies in the Arab and Muslim world — glorify violence and romanticize death. What makes any culture choose hatred and aggression over rationality and kindness, when the latter is what actually builds stability, harmony, collaboration, progress, prosperity, and innovation? I understand the history that got us here. I still don’t understand the logic. What is the point of expanding your territory and dominating others, when your own citizens are the ones fleeing, leaving the house of Islam for the house of war? If I’ve learned one thing after years of pondering, this must be it: hatred is self-destructive. P.S. Photo taken at the site, on the 50th anniversary of the attack.
Can Arabs be antisemites? There was no political movement called "antisemitism" until a German agitator coined the term in 1879, specifically so he wouldn't have to use the plain German word for Jew-hatred, "Judenhass." Wilhelm Marr, founder of the "Antisemiten-Liga" (League of Antisemites), coined "Antisemitismus" to replace "Judenhass." He didn't want his hatred of Jews to sound religious (the old "Christ-killer" accusation). He wanted it to sound scientific. So he borrowed "Semitic," a term from 18th-century linguistics classifying a language family (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic), and repackaged it as a "race" Jews supposedly belonged to. He'd already used "Semitismus" in an earlier pamphlet to mean "Jewry" and the imagined "Jewish spirit," a fictional Jewish world-conspiracy he invented, not a real, neutral concept he was reacting against. From the moment "Antisemitismus" entered the political vocabulary, it meant one thing: hatred of Jews as Jews. It was never about Arabs, and never about "Semitic peoples" broadly. That's also why the term should never be hyphenated as "anti-Semitism." The hyphen implies a real, opposing "Semitism" that antisemites are reacting against, as if hostility toward Jews were symmetrical with some broader Semitic identity. There is no such symmetry. Scholars, Yad Vashem, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum all write it as one word, "antisemitism," precisely to make clear it names a specific hatred, not a linguistic category. So when people claim Arabs can't be antisemitic because "Arabs are Semites too," they aren't making a linguistic point. They're revealing they don't know the term's history. Being a Semitic-language speaker was never the criterion. Hating Jews as Jews is. Now, in case anyone thinks I'm oblivious to the Nazi connection to antisemitism in the Arab world today, I'm not. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, did not start hating Jews because Nazi propaganda influenced him. His political agenda intersected with theirs. That's why he collaborated, helped recruit Muslims in the Balkans for the Waffen-SS, and used Nazi infrastructure to fight Jews in the Arab world while they targeted Jews in Europe. With his guidance, Radio Berlin incited against the Jews of Iraq in Arabic, feeding directly into the Farhud of June 1941, when Baghdad's Muslim majority turned on its Jewish neighbors and killed hundreds. But long before he ever met Hitler, the Mufti had already turned a political dispute with Zionists over competing nationalist claims into a holy war between Muslims and Jews, using the Temple Mount as his instrument. And long after the Mufti and Hitler were gone, I myself bought a copy of Mein Kampf in Arabic in Damascus for less than a dollar. Nazi propaganda still circulates freely across large parts of the Arab world. But Jew-hatred did not begin when Nazi Germany popularized it. The Nazis, defeated in Europe, passed the baton to the Arab world. Running alongside that borrowed hatred is an older, separate strain, dating back to the Prophet's own conflicts with the Jewish tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. When protesters chant "Khaybar" on Western streets, they aren't echoing Goebbels. They're echoing something that predates him by 1,300 years. That's the whole picture: a modern, coined, specifically anti-Jewish term; a 20th-century Nazi-Arab alliance that gave it new institutional reach; and an older religious strain that has nothing to do with either. All three are real. None of them make Arabs exempt from being antisemites. 📍#Perth
A lady named Stephanie Benshimol confronted Mamdani in Borough Park. He’d just been welcomed at Eichler’s before Rosh Hashanah for a photo-op dressed up as goodwill. She called it out like a queen. She called out the Jews posing beside him too, telling him not all Jews have the memory of a goldfish. Some Hasidic Jews turned on her instead for “disrupting” the mayor, for being rude. Not for the antisemitism she was calling out, but for the disruption. Let’s be precise about terms. Antisemitism is Jew-hatred. Antizionism is Jew-hatred that extends to anyone — Jewish or not — who supports Jewish sovereignty in the one Jewish country on Earth. It excludes Jews who oppose that sovereignty themselves. Those are the “good Jews,” as far as the antizionist narrative is concerned. So were the smiling selfie-takers at Eichler’s self-hating? Not necessarily. Some may genuinely support Israel and still choose appeasement, smile for the camera, keep the peace, avoid confrontation with power. It’s not new. Last year, New York Jews shook al-Julani’s hand in Damascus, donated to him, reassured him they had nothing to do with Israel. Appeasement has a long, humiliating history. People are free to choose their survival strategy. But since October 7th, when the cost of this “cause” became measured in tens of thousands of lives and a wave of global antisemitism, appeasing the people who carry that agenda stops looking like strategy and starts looking like betrayal. Stephanie said the thing almost no one wants to say out loud: this is wrong. Welcoming Mamdani is wrong. Voting for him is wrong. Shaking al-Julani’s hand is wrong. It doesn’t matter how many people march for Palestine, including New York’s own mayor, the cause, as it stands, defends everything that shouldn’t be defended. Anyone whose position aligns with Hamas is not and cannot be a friend of the Jewish people. #Mamdani
I've been in Australia for three weeks now, and I have to say: this is by far my favorite country. Do I love it more than Israel? No. But Israel isn't just a country to me. It's a miracle, and it's home. Australians are incredibly friendly, laid-back, and polite. No wonder Sarah Sassoon is one of my dearest friends. I always thought she was made from different dough. Turns out, she got that charm from growing up here. It's not just the people. The landscape is also worlds away from what I'm used to in Europe and around the Mediterranean. And even though I've been working the whole time, this has been the closest thing to a holiday I've had in years. Here, the Star of David around my neck isn't a statement. It's practically invisible, to the point where I forgot, for a moment, that I'm an activist and that we're at war. Which begs the question: how on earth did antisemitism reach this part of the world, and claim fifteen lives at Bondi Beach? Here, especially in quiet, remote Perth, time slowed down and let me actually breathe. I got to see my son for three weeks, the first time since October 7, and we caught up on all the quarrels and conversations we'd missed. There is nothing more precious to us than our children. Except grandchildren, I'm told. And to them, we owe a better world. With that energy, I recharged in Aussieland and I'm ready for a busy September: Vienna, Zurich, Chicago, Denver, and of course Jerusalem for the Chagim. Before some cleverclogs asks who's financing my "luxury trips": I'm a public speaker invited by organizations to share my story and my thoughts. I mostly speak at fundraisers for Israel, making the case for G-d and Zionism, my humble contribution to this war between good and evil. On a personal note: I've added "Australian connection" to the profile of the Israeli Zionist man I'm going to marry. Here, just like in Israel, men still behave like men. Like gentlemen (mustache included) which is unfortunately a rare currency these days.
My morning read in Sydney. Danielle, Eddie Jaku’s granddaughter, gifted me his book a few days ago. How many more Holocaust stories can I read? As many as I can. Every story adds a detail, a color, a city, a face, a name, a secret, an achievement, a sacrifice, a lie, a prayer, a lesson, a tear, a loss, an inspiration, a bond, a trick. Through these stories, we understand what happened to the world. How monstrosity took over reason. How politics alter reality. How leaders can manipulate the masses to execute their agenda, and how easily they can scapegoat a minority to cover for their own failures. In the thirties, Hitler promised to redeem Germany’s glory after its humiliating loss in the First World War. He wanted to obliterate Judeo-Christian values and reinstate the natural order: the survival of the fittest. The fittest and the finest, those at the top of the food chain, were the superior Aryans. His race theory deemed the Jews unworthy. The Jews, who were among the most skilled experts and brightest minds, were disposable in his eyes. Yet among the Arabs, who weren’t remotely as sophisticated intellectually and culturally by his own racial logic, he partnered with Haj Amin al-Husseini and admired Islam. Not Muslims, not the Arabs, but Islam as an ideology. Albert Speer reports in Inside the Third Reich that Hitler said: “Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.” Indeed, it was the ruthless, merciless, expansionist history that impressed the Nazi leader. When discussing the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) and what would have happened had the Arabs defeated the Franks in 732, Hitler reportedly said the Mohammedan religion would have been more compatible with Europe than Christianity. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” he said. After Germany was defeated in the West, it’s no wonder many senior Nazis found refuge in the Arab world, especially Cairo and Damascus, advising militaries and helping develop the notorious intelligence apparatuses that suppressed local populations and plotted against Israel, continuing what Hitler started. Since 1979, the Axis of Resistance, led by the Islamic Republic of Iran, has taken over that mission. October 7 was the first act of a second final solution against the Jews, and against everyone who stands with them. Especially the Americans, who for the last seven decades have been unapologetic about their strong ties with Israel, and the Western democracies still willing to defend Judeo-Christian civilization against the theocratic, Marxist, communist, and Islamist forces working, separately and in unholy alliance, to dismantle it.
Sababa Sydney offers decent shawarma and falafel, a taste of home for anyone from the Middle East. And if you identify with the watermelon, here’s your acknowledgment: it was Palestine, once. Until the Hashemites turned most of it into Jordan, and the Jews turned the rest into Israel. There’s a sliver left where time stands still, where people live in limbo vowing to undo history. It didn’t work with Jordan. Maybe it’s time to admit defeat, contain the damage, and let individuals build lives instead of chasing an illusion. I’ve yet to hear a single Arab Palestinian leader who cares more about the people than the cause.
Dear Palestinians, for the sake of your own children, stop lying. #gaza #israel https://t.co/ucKdmDoGWs
Free Iran 🤍❤️ #makeirangreatagain #irgcterrorists https://t.co/LzRuJf66eE
At the site of the Bondi Massacre in Sydney, I met some amazing people including an Egyptian Copt who was brainwashed into supporting the Palestinians cause at uni in California. Today, he has the Bibas’ names tattooed on his arm. https://t.co/UveTtHPpG5
I fight the Palestinian cause. It has brought nothing but pain to everyone in the Middle East. Enough is enough. Time to abort this project. https://t.co/rugguwvVPA
I posted a picture of a hummus brand named after Jerusalem, spotted at a supermarket in Sydney. As usual, the comments filled up with people accusing the Jews of "stealing" hummus from the Palestinians. So here's a question for those who hate me because I stand with the Jews: Are you saying the Jews stole their diet from the locals, or their recipes from the Arabs? Either way, before you comment on my posts and broadcast your ignorance, do this first: look up Sahih al-Bukhari 5686. Then come back and explain to me why those sick men were advised by the Prophet Muhammad to drink camel milk and camel urine. Hint: the Arabian Peninsula was mostly desert. Hummus literally means "chickpeas" in Arabic. Did the Jews learn to eat chickpeas from the Arabs? Google says: Chickpeas are among the oldest domesticated foods in human history, first cultivated around 10,000–11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent — especially present-day southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. They were part of the first agricultural revolution, alongside wheat, barley, and lentils. From there they spread across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and eventually to India, where they became a staple. The Greeks and Romans ate them too — the Latin *cicer* gave rise to several European names for the chickpea. In Arabic, chickpea is *ḥummuṣ* (حمص); the dish we call hummus is more precisely *ḥummuṣ bi-taḥīna* — chickpeas with tahini. So long before Islam existed (and Islam is 1,400 years old) my ancestors in the so-called Middle East were already eating chickpeas. In the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, and Mesopotamia — where the alphabet and the wheel were literally invented — agriculture provided this staple food for millennia. Hummus is not Palestinian. There are modern Palestinian recipes. Lebanese. Turkish. Israeli. Iraqi. Syrian. And within each of these countries, geography adds even more variation, from Mount Lebanon to Aleppo, Izmir to Akko, Mosul to Baghdad to Adana. What's called "Israeli" today is a basket of flavors gathered from around the world, including the Mediterranean tradition. And need I remind you that over 850,000 Jews were uprooted from Arab countries? You don't get to forbid them from eating the food of their own ancestors too. Before making silly comments, go look up Jewish history in what is now Iraq or Syria. Jewish communities lived in our region long before the Arabs ever conquered it.
Palestinian-American activist Reema Jallaq visits Tripoli, Lebanon with self-loathing American Jewish Flotilla “star” Jacob Berger and posts big news: he’s safe there! I can’t imagine anyone falling for this nonsense. Who knew Jews would be safe if they distance themselves from the only Jewish state on the planet, denounce Jewish sovereignty, ridicule their own people, and cheer their enemies? Kapos beat you to that survival mechanism — conscious or subconscious. @jacobbergeractor #lebanon
NO to the two-state solution. That ship has sailed. Not every group that can throw a dramatic tantrum earns the right to govern itself. The Kurds deserve statehood far more than the Palestinians ever have, and they've never tried to drag an entire region into the abyss to get it. If your national cause is built on fallacies, you don't get rewarded with a state just because the extremists among you might scorch the earth otherwise. No statehood alongside Israel. "Abort mission" is where the Palestinian cause has landed itself. I've watched the making of the alternative "Palestinian" for two years now, and it's time to say this. I see Jews cheering Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, celebrating him as a radical pragmatist. He criticizes Hamas, and for that he gets credit. He also criticizes the Israeli government — which pleases so many — and states clearly in his bio that he is "pro-Palestine & anti-Hamas/violence, pro-peace/coexistence." Let's unpack it. Pro-Palestine? Which Palestine? Unless he means Jordan, he's promoting the same cause the "freedom fighters" are, just taking a different path to reach it. Anti-Hamas? That's the bare minimum, after what they did to their own people in Gaza. Anti-violence? Israel won every war. Violence was never the winning strategy especially not in the eyes of a radical pragmatist. Pro-peace? What does this peace look like? Concessions? An end to the war? Israel laying down its arms? Wishful thinking that the Palestinians won't strike again? Coexistence? With whom, between whom? Christian and Muslim Arabs, Druze, and Bedouins coexist with Jews, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi alike, inside Israel. Arab Palestinians have failed to coexist with everyone: Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. They failed in Jordan. Black September. They failed in Lebanon, dragging the country into a civil war that ended with their own expulsion to Tunisia in 1982. They failed in Kuwait, where 200,000 were expelled in 1991 after Arafat backed Saddam's invasion and another 200,000 who'd fled were never allowed back. The Oslo Accords failed to prove them fit to govern themselves. After all the pain they've inflicted across the Middle East for decades, it's time they take a step back and abort the mission. Someone promoting Palestinian nationhood will always play well on CNN. But why are any Jews supporting this? Why hand this illusion of coexistence another chance to strike again? Why help achieve what Hamas failed to? What Gazans desperately need isn’t the burden of building a state. It’s a break from striving for one. They need a fresh bed, a warm shower, and an intensive deradicalization program that teaches achievement through something other than “k*lling Jews.” Before anyone assures Israel that Gazans have abandoned violence(without evidence), let them first leave uninhabitable Gaza and earn the trust of one country that isn’t Israel. Israel is the archenemy in their own telling, so let’s find one of their supporters to take on that project first, instead of demanding Israeli trust as the opening move. #Israel #palestine #kurdistan