Mick Hartley

This is a welcome spot of good news for the coming year. Jonathan Sacerdoti at the Jewish Chronicle meets the Arab Zionists: a new wave of pro-Israel influencers.

“The Golan Heights is the only area in Syria that hasn’t been destroyed and had its people killed.”

With these words, a Syrian blogger began a video begging the Israeli government to “occupy” the entire country of Syria to save more lives.

In another video, an Arab academic dressed in a long white kandura is moved to tears by visiting Yad Vashem, promising: “Today, together, Muslims Jews and Christians, we promise you, it will never happen again.”

The huge growth of social media has in recent years allowed the world to see a different Middle East — one where individuals have been able to directly communicate their honest views on Jews and Israel to the world.

But in 2020, something changed again. The signing of the Abraham Accords in September that year was a watershed moment: it allowed many Arabs to speak out openly about Israel without fear of a backlash — while opening the door to positive experiences of Israel, whether via the news or trips to the Jewish state.

Now, in a growing trend, pioneering Arab Zionists and pro-Israel influencers — who once would have been labelled traitors — are promoting Israel to their hundreds and thousands of followers.

Loay Al-Shareef, 39, is an Abu Dhabi-based social-media influencer and a self-declared Zionist. He has 180,000 followers on Twitter, and more than 80,000 on Instagram, thanks largely to his regular posts about languages and etymology.

Originally from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, he studied software engineering in America, and in 2010 spent some time living with a Jewish family in Paris, learning French. “That was the real life-changing point for me with the Jewish people, because I got to know the Jews more closely,” he said.

Thus began his mission to investigate biblical history, archaeology and the history of the Near East and Mesopotamia, all of which led him to believe in the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

“It’s very righteous for the Jews to have their ancestral homeland in the land of Israel,” he said.

He peppers his conversation with frequent references to Jewish scripture, saying he came to the conclusion that “Jews are not colonialists or conquerors in the land of Israel, because if we would believe that then we would believe that David, Solomon, Isaiah and Yirmiyahu and the prophets were actually colonisers, and that would kill the Islamic faith.”

That's a line I hadn't heard before.

Dan Feferman, a founding member of the UAE-Israel Business Council, said: “For most of their lives, people from the Gulf have been taught that Israelis are the bad guys, the occupiers. But they meet us abroad and we seem like normal, nice people. They hear about the tech, the Nobel prizes, the academia, and something doesn’t make sense. Now they have government support to do so, they’re interested in getting to know Israelis themselves.”

Positive feeling towards Israel among Arab countries is not necessarily new, but open expression of those feelings is becoming more commonplace.

Middle East commentator Tom Gross has witnessed this first hand. He said: “For years I’ve been attending clandestine and not so clandestine meetings with Israelis, Europeans and people from almost every Arab country.

“The goodwill has always been there. I’ve witnessed far more hostility towards Israel among leftists in London and Paris and by some European-born Muslims, than people I have got to know who actually live in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq.”

For now, pro-Israel Arab voices are still notable for their rarity. But where innovators venture, others often follow. Even with a change in leadership in America and Israel since the Accords were signed, relations have remained firm.

Consequently, a new wave of warmth towards Israel is sweeping across the internet from the Middle East like a pro-Zionist Gulf Stream.