Rawan Osman has come a long way from Lebanon, where she grew up hating Jews, to arriving in Jerusalem to speak at an event Friends of Zion Museum on Sunday night.
“I always believed I would witness peace in the Middle East in my lifetime,” Rawan Osman told The Press Service of Israel. “We need to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We have a golden opportunity that we must not waste,” referring to the defeats of Hamas and Hezbollah and the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria.
“We hated the Israelis, we hated the Jews,” the Lebanese-Syrian national recalled of her childhood.
Only after she left Syria at the beginning of the civil war and arrived in Europe did she have the opportunity to meet Jews directly. As her acquaintance with Jewish people and Judaism deepened, she began to understand how mistaken and harmful the beliefs she had been raised with were.