‘I grew up hating Israel, Jews’: Former antisemite-turned-Zionist takes on world’s oldest hatred in new doc

After reexamining her beliefs, Osman dedicated herself to soft diplomacy, educating the Arab world about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

By Debbie Weiss, The Algemeiner

In a world grappling with a resurgence of antisemitism, a new documentary seeks to confront the issue head-on, positing an unsettling take on the motivations behind the world’s oldest hatred through the insights of Rawan Osman, a Syrian-Lebanese antisemite-turned-Zionist.

“Tragic Awakening: A New Look at the Oldest Hatred,” directed by Canadian-Israeli filmmaker Raphael Shore, interweaves historical analysis with contemporary events through the voices of clerics, historians, sociologists, and cultural commentators, including the late British Chief Rabbi Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, author Yossi Klein Halevi, Israel’s antisemitism envoy Michal Cotler-Wunsh, and journalists Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray.

It argues that antisemitism stems not from a perception of Jewish inferiority, but rather from resentment of Jewish excellence and moral leadership.

Osman — who founded “Arabs Ask,” a forum designed to challenge preconceived notions about Judaism and Israel among Arabs, and who describes herself as an Arab Zionist — narrates the movie.

Born in Damascus, Syria, she was raised in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and later lived in Saudi Arabia and Qatar before eventually settling in Germany.

Her first encounter with a Jewish person was when she moved to Strasbourg, France in her twenties. In her words, the encounter prompted her “first and last panic attack.”

But a long process of exploration, including studying Modern Hebrew and Jewish history at a German university, led her to challenge the antisemitic beliefs she had absorbed growing up in the Middle East and ultimately change her perspective.

“Life is strange. I grew up hating Israel and the Jews, just like many Lebanese and Syrians,” Osman told The Algemeiner.

“Living in Europe, especially the decade I spent in Germany, made me one of the most vocal supporters of the Jewish state. Who would have thought?”

After reexamining her beliefs, Osman dedicated herself to soft diplomacy, educating the Arab world about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

However, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel last Oct. 7, she adopted a more direct and assertive approach, despite the personal risks tied to openly supporting Israel.

Reflecting on a conversation with her son, she recalled him asking, “Why are you doing this to me?” to which she responded, “I am doing this for you.”

Osman, who has expressed a desire to convert to Judaism and move to Jerusalem, teamed up with Shore and Rabbi Shalom Schwartz, the film’s executive producer and founder of Aseret, an organization dedicated to promoting the universal values of the Ten Commandments.

“I found myself on a quest to try and understand antisemitism. The Jews are blamed for all ills of the world. Why? Antisemitism requires a different type of explanation,” Osman says in the film.

Shore, who released the film alongside his new book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew?, argued that while religious, social, and political reasons may trigger antisemitism, they fail to explain its deeper motives, leaving efforts to combat it ineffective.

“Today, more than ever before since the Nazis were defeated, we are forced to discover ways of finding greater tolerance in our world. We are completely delusional if we think that hatred of the Jews will end with the Jews. We are always the canary in the coal mine — a harbinger of what is to come for the entire civilized world,” Shore told The Algemeiner.

“If we are ever to effectively combat antisemitism, we need to better understand its roots with moral and spiritual courage, which demands unwavering pride in our common Jewish identities,” he continued.

“Combating antisemitism requires pushing back at our enemies with clarity, unity, and an appreciation that our traditions and history are what have allowed us to overcome our enemies.”

Osman says at one point in the movie: “Hitler didn’t want to kill the Jews because they were bad; he wanted to kill them because they were good.”

Shore explains that for Hitler, the Jews represented “a spiritual and moral threat” because the ethical foundations of Western civilization — at their core, Jewish ideas — are the antithesis of his Darwinian outlook.

“Hitler believed that there was one great conflict that drives human history, and that was the idea of survival of the fittest,” Shore said. “Hitler believed that if the ideas of humanitarianism, love, equality, democracy were to succeed, that would be the end of humanity.”

After a screening of the movie in Tel Aviv last week, Osman shared her thoughts on the downfall of Iran’s regional axis of proxies, culminating with the recent fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Osman said that the reaction of some Israelis’ apprehension at Assad’s demise “literally broke my heart,” she said.

“I invited my Israeli friends to reach out to the Syrians and congratulate them” on the fall of Assad, who was the “monster of the century,” she said.

“Some of them misunderstood — they thought I’m endorsing Islamists,” she said, referencing the rebels led by a former member of ISIS and al Qaeda, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani.

Still, she noted, these groups achieved what the world, including the US and Israel, could not, emphasizing that the removal of Assad had to come from within Syria, as an external force taking him down would have turned him into a martyr.

Though Osman approached the recent changes with caution regarding their impact on Israel’s relations with its neighbors, she remained hopeful.

“While I watch myself together with Rav Shalom Shwartz and Rav Shore on the big screen, I feel that peace between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria might come in my lifetime after all,” she told The Algemeiner.