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.”
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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.
View this Algemeiner Report from January 6th