Lucy Aharish is the first Arab Muslim television presenter on mainstream Israeli t.v. Here’s a video, highly touted on the Free Press site, in which Bari Weiss interviews Aharish for an hour: “This Muslim Israeli woman is the hope of the Middle East“.
I’m not sure what the title means by “hope of the Middle East,” unless it buttresses Aharish’s claim that Muslims who commit or even approve of terrorism are not “real Muslims”, and thus there is hope for peace and comity between Israelis and “real” Muslims in Palestine.
A bit about Aharish from Wikipedia:
As of 2018, Aharish serves as a news anchor for Reshet 13. She was previously a morning anchor on a current-affairs show for its predecessor Channel 2, a presenter of the Evening Edition for i24NEWS, a news presenter and reporter for Channel 10, a co-host for Radio 99, a late-night co-host for Channel 1, as well as a co-host for Kan 11.
The interview has its ups and downs, but I think it’s worth watching for two reasons. First, it shows how even Israeli Arabs are subject to racism (Aharish tells several stories, including her failure to get paid for a speaking engagement simply because of her religion and ethnicity). But she also claims that Israel is not an “apartheid” state, citing those Israeli Arab Muslims who have risen to high places (both of her sisters have good jobs, and of course Israeli Arabs do occupy high places, including the Knesset and the Supreme Court). So apparently Aharish believes that although there’s residual racism in Israel, it doesn’t affect Israeli Muslims’ opportunities or life prospects. (I’m not quite sure how, if there’s racism, it can NOT play out in differential treatment!) But it’s certainly true that Israel is a ton less racist than Palestine or other Arab countries—places where Jews often can’t even live, much less rise to decent positions.
At many points Aharish is moved to tears, especially when saying things like, “Hamas murdered in the sense of compassion in me, the humanity in me.” She argues that after the October 7 attacks she had lost empathy for the Palestinians, but now is realizing that “Israel cannot afford to lose its humanity” and emphasizes the need to make the next generation of inhabitants of Gaza and West Bank become neighbors to the extent that they could forge a peace with Israel.
As I said, I find the most dubious claim to be Aharish’s insistence that terrorists, as well as those Arab Muslims in Palestine and other Arab countries who sympathize with terrorists, are not genuine Muslims. She argues that this extremism “is not Islam. This is not being a Muslim. This is being a monster.” But the polls taken in Palestine and other Arab countries show the contrary: a huge proportion of inhabitants, if not most of them, approved of the October 7 massacre and don’t want Israel to exist. And, of course, Sam Harris has argued that this form of extremism is really inherent in Islam. All you have to do is to read the Qur’an to see its emphasis on killing apostates, infidels and Jews. To be sure, the Bible is pretty genocidal, too, but the difference is that Christianity has now largely been stripped of its homicidal dicta while Islam has not.
It is, I think, a debatable matter of whether most Muslims fall into Aharish’s definition of “extremists.” Sometimes it sounds as if she’s making a virtue of necessity.
But, as I said, this is worth listening to. For a shorter take on her views, also showing her emotionality (a good thing, one rarely seen in an anchorperson), see this CNN video.
Here’s the intro to the interview at the Free Press.
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And the video:
Thank you, will watch.
To the best of my knowledge, a Jewish and an Arab Muslim person can still not legally marry in Israel, one of the rare countries in the world beside Afghanistan and the like where family law is ruled theocratically. If you marry outside of Israel — it’s frequently done in Cyprus — , the marriage will be recognized by Israeli courts (international law demands that).
Her Hebrew Wikipedia page says they kept the relationship secret for 4 years for fear of backlash from both Arabs and Jews. Also, their son, who they put down as “of no religion”, will himself not be able to marry a Jewish woman in Israel because according to Halakha, he is not a Jew.
I listened to this yesterday: VERY powerful.
Me too. Agree.
Encouraging, yes, but how many Jewish presenters are there on the television channels of Muslim countries?
As Professor Ceiling Cat reminded us, polls of Arab populations reveal them to be overwhelmingly supportive of Hamas and other terrorist groups. Their silence on the atrocities committed on Oct 7 – under the principle that silence betokens assent – of itself speaks volumes.
Until that situation changes, it would be naive and foolhardy – to say the least – to expect anything other than further deceit from Hamas and their Iranian backers. The only realistic option left is to support the IDF in its operations to eradicate Hamas.
I watched this today. It’s long, but I didn’t want it to end. Lucy Aharish is brave and she’s a fighter. Her attitude toward Israel is just like that of my Israeli relatives, whose great-grandparents fled pogrom-torn Czarist Russia for what was then called Palestine. They are tough and they will fight for their country. It a fight for their very survival.
I couldn’t resist tearing up when Aharish told us that her son’s name is Adam. It gave me hope.
Depending on how you define “presenter”, she is not unique. Suleiman Maswadeh is a reporter for Kan 11 TV, and segments featuring him are regularly aired on the channel.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/middleeast/palestinian-reporter-israeli-tv-mime-intl/index.html