I escaped Hezbollah — and found the truth about Israel.

I came from inside the machine that produces hatred of Israel, and I am telling anyone who will listen: The machine is a lie.

Author Rawan Osman speaks at an event in Germany. (photo: author provided)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, a third-generation Holocaust survivor.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a fertile valley in eastern Lebanon and its most important farming region, located about 30 kilometers east of Beirut.

Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime — a wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: There, across the border, is the source of your suffering.

Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on.

I believed it. I repeated it. For years.

Then I moved to France, and I met Jews — not the abstraction, not the enemy, but real people, neighbors, and colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over by reading, asking, and dismantling, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth.

What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration.

Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not.

I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door.

Instead, I am defending what Israel is, what it represents, and what it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people.

Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it.

That difference is not incidental. It is the point.

The so-called “Palestinian cause,” as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination.

Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Organization of the Islamic Conference summit held in Tehran, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export.

Look at Durban, the infamous 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa — the moment when the geopolitical strategy conceived by Iran was successfully mainstreamed on the world stage, to shift the international framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a territorial dispute to a human rights struggle against a racist regime.

Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it tries to resolve. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open.

The Palestinian cause, as it functions globally today, is a tool of an anti-Western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them.

When Western “progressives” march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value.

I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation.

It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts — the insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other, to argue, to question, to hold power accountable, including your own.

I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission to the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition: that G-d does not want your silence.

That wrestling with truth is itself a form of worship.

And then there is the resilience — not the resilience of stubbornness, but the resilience of a people who have survived every civilization that tried to destroy them and responded not with conquest but with contribution, law, literature, medicine, and the insistence, generation after generation, that life is worth protecting and that the world can be made more just.

Israel is the political expression of that tradition: an improbable state, a people who returned to their ancestral land after two thousand years of exile and built, in decades, what their neighbors have not managed in centuries. Not because they are superior, but because they were shaped by a tradition that takes civilization seriously.

That is what is under attack. Not a government. Not a policy. A civilization.

I am Syrian-Lebanese. I was born in Damascus. I was raised on Hezbollah’s version of history. My family has paid a price for my choices. I live under threat.

I am telling you this not for sympathy, but because who is speaking matters.

I am not a Westerner who discovered Israel on a Birthright trip. I am not someone who stumbled into this position from comfort. I came from inside the machine that produces hatred of Israel, and I am telling you: The machine is a lie. I have seen both sides from the inside, and there is no honest comparison.

Israel is not our enemy. It never was. Our enemy is the ideology that needed us to believe otherwise because as long as we were pointed at Israel, we were not looking at what was being done to us.

I support Israel because I believe in civilization. Because I believe in the dignity of every human being, including my own. Because I found, in Judaism and in the state it produced, something worth defending — not despite my background, but because of everything my background taught me to recognize.

The truth, when you finally reach it, does not feel like a revelation. It feels like something you should have known all along.

---