'Why Would YOU Support Israel?' A Recovered Antisemite Explains
"The story we grew up with was incomplete. Israel's perspective did not exist. Everything we knew came through a single lens: Palestinian narratives and Arab media, often predisposed against Israel."
By Rawan Osman
Guest Commentary
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jewdicious is pleased to share this guest commentary from Rawan Osman, a Syrian-born, pro-Israeli activist. Rawan is a self-described Arab-Zionist who is in the process of converting to Judaism.
‘How can you possibly support Israel?’
Westerners who adopt the Palestinian cause — often out of distance, abstraction, or the comfort of moral posturing — struggle to understand those of us who come from the Arab world and have walked away from it. Some of us have gone even further: we stand with Israel.
To many, this is incomprehensible. In a worldview where Israel is cast as absolute evil and Palestinians as perfect victims, there is no room for nuance. So instead of questioning their assumptions, they reach for conspiracy: we must have been paid, threatened, manipulated. Why else would anyone with a conscience refuse to support the Palestinian cause?
I was one of those who made that transition. And I will try to explain why — not to convince everyone, but in the hope that some might find the humility to admit that what they think they know about this conflict is incomplete.
I come from a family shaped by war.
My mother is a daughter of the Lebanese Civil War. As a child, she witnessed horrors — inflicted not by Israel, but by Lebanese factions upon each other, often in the name of the Palestinian cause. Pan-Arabists, Arab nationalists, and Islamists rallied behind it. Militias formed, alliances fractured, and a country once known for its beauty and diversity was torn apart.
Not everyone agreed. There were Lebanese who refused to turn their country into a battleground for broader ideological projects. They wanted Lebanon to remain Lebanon — not a proxy, not a footnote in someone else’s war. They lost. After nearly two decades of bloodshed, Lebanon fell under Syrian control.
In the midst of that chaos, my Shiite Lebanese mother married my Sunni Syrian father. Their marriage embodied the very fractures tearing the region apart. The tensions between Syrians and Lebanese, between sects and identities, were not abstract — they lived in our home, in our daily lives, in the quiet and not-so-quiet conflicts between our Lebanese and Syrian families.
And yet, despite all this complexity, there was one simple explanation offered for everything:
Israel.
Israel was blamed for the wars, for the divisions, for the suffering. Had Israel not existed, we were told, none of this would have happened. The Palestinians would not have been displaced. They would not have gone to Jordan, then to Lebanon. Lebanon would not have been destabilized. Syria would not have intervened.
This was the story we grew up with — clear, emotional, and absolute.
But it was also incomplete.
The Israeli perspective did not exist in our world. Everything we knew about Israel came through a single lens: Palestinian narratives and Arab media, often predisposed against Israel. Even when Israeli sources were cited, they were carefully selected — typically the most critical or extreme voices, reinforcing an already established conclusion.
There was no curiosity, no engagement with the full picture.
But as we grew older, cracks began to appear. The story we had been told was too simple for a reality that was clearly not.
Questions emerged—questions that had never been encouraged:
Why did Jews come to this region in the first place?
Why here in particular?
Why did Jews leave the Arab world?
Why are all nations in the region considered legitimate, except Israel?
When did the Palestinians lose their state?
Why have repeated opportunities for compromise between Palestinians and Israelis failed?
These questions did not lead to easy answers — but they revealed something crucial: the narrative we inherited lacked context, depth, and accountability.
Meanwhile, we were living the consequences.
In Syria and Lebanon, regimes and militias claimed to champion the Palestinian cause — at our expense. They demanded sacrifice, loyalty, and silence. They spoke of dignity while denying it to their own people.
We watched Palestinians protest conditions in Israeli prisons — calling lawyers, speaking to the media, organizing hunger strikes. And we couldn’t help but compare.
In our countries, people disappeared for much less. In Syria, prisons were places you feared to even mention. A mistake, a suspicion, sometimes even a name similarity, could mean torture or death. In Lebanon, under Syrian dominance and later Hezbollah’s power, dissent came at a cost. Criticize the wrong actor, and you could be silenced.
We stood in humiliating lines at the border between Lebanon and Syria for hours just to visit our grandparents in Damascus. Soldiers could take what they wanted, insult or detain whom they wanted. There were no rights to invoke, no systems to appeal to.
My father once nearly lost everything for transporting basic goods for his friends and family — bananas, milk, Coke, medicine — items considered illicit simply because they came from the “evil West” during a ban. He paid heavily to avoid arrest and to retrieve his car. That was not unusual. Thousands of Lebanese experienced similar treatment at Syrian checkpoints throughout Lebanon from the 1990s until 2004, when Syrian forces finally withdrew.
No document could be issued without bribing bureaucrats. Without connections, the average person was constantly pushed around.
This was our reality.
And yet, we were told to focus on Israel.
We were told that our suffering was secondary, that the Palestinian cause came first. That we must endure — for them.
But over time, a quiet question grew louder:
Why are we asked to sacrifice endlessly for a cause that has brought us so much destruction?
Then I went to Israel.
And what I saw did not match what I had been taught.
I saw a functioning country. A democracy. A society with institutions, rights, and accountability. I saw Arabs living with freedoms and opportunities that people in Syria and Lebanon could only dream of.
This did not mean everything was perfect. But it shattered the image of Israel as a uniquely evil entity.
It also forced another realization:
The Palestinians who remain trapped in hardship are not only victims of Israel. They are also victims of their own leadership.
The Palestinian Authority is led by Mahmoud Abbas — but well beyond his mandate. Hamas, an Islamist organization that rules through violence and repression. These are not leaders committed to building a future. They are leaders who perpetuate conflict.
And their governance reflects it.
Blaming Israel is easy.
It absolves others of responsibility. It hides corruption, repression, and failure behind a convenient external enemy.
But once you begin to look honestly, the picture changes.
The Middle East is not a morality play of pure villains and pure victims. It is a complex, often tragic reality shaped by history, ideology, power, and choices — many of them made within our own societies.
So when you ask, “How can you possibly support Israel?” — understand this:
For some of us, it was not a betrayal of our roots.
It was the result of finally seeing the full picture.
RAWAN OSMAN is a writer and researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Her regular commentary can be accessed on X, Instagram, Linkedin and Facebook.
Thank you.
Such courage to call out the hypocrisy! Thank you, yasher koach! Curiosity has disappeared from society, false curiosity is now considered “journalism “