Israel and Iran: A love story?

437,007 views ・ 2012-12-21

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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On March 14, this year,
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I posted this poster on Facebook.
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This is an image of me and my daughter
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holding the Israeli flag.
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I will try to explain to you about the context of why
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and when I posted.
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A few days ago, I was sitting waiting
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on the line at the grocery store,
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and the owner and one of the clients
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were talking to each other,
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and the owner was explaining to the client
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that we're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel.
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And the client was saying, no, it's 10,000 a day.
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(Laughter)
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("10,000 missiles") This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel.
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We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now,
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and we have people, you know, afraid.
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It's like every year it's the last minute
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that we can do something about the war with Iran.
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It's like, if we don't act now, it's too late forever,
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for 10 years now.
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So at some point it became, you know, to me,
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I'm a graphic designer, so I made posters about it
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and I posted the one I just showed you before.
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Most of the time, I make posters, I post them on Facebook,
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my friends like it, don't like it,
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most of the time don't like it, don't share it,
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don't nothing,
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and it's another day.
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So I went to sleep, and that was it for me.
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And later on in the night, I woke up
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because I'm always waking up in the night,
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and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots,
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you know, on Facebook, which I've never seen before.
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(Laughter)
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And I was like, "What's going on?"
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So I come to the computer and I start looking on,
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and suddenly I see many people talking to me,
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most of them I don't know,
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and a few of them from Iran,
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which is -- What?
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Because you have to understand,
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in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran.
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We don't know people from Iran.
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It's like, on Facebook, you have friends only from --
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it's like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook.
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And now people from Iran are talking to me.
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So I start answering this girl, and she's telling me
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she saw the poster and she asked her family to come,
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because they don't have a computer, she asked her family
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to come to see the poster, and they're all sitting in the living room crying.
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So I'm like, whoa.
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I ask my wife to come, and I tell her, you have to see that.
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People are crying, and she came, she read the text,
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and she started to cry.
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And everybody's crying now. (Laughter)
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So I don't know what to do, so my first reflex,
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as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody
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what I'd just seen, and people started to see them
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and to share them, and that's how it started.
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The day after, when really it became a lot of talking,
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I said to myself, and my wife said to me,
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I also want a poster,
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so this is her. (Laughter)
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Because it's working, put me in a poster now.
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But more seriously, I was like, okay, these ones work,
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but it's not just about me, it's about people from Israel
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who want to say something.
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So I'm going to shoot all the people I know, if they want,
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and I'm going to put them in a poster and I'm going to share them.
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So I went to my neighbors and friends and students
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and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster.
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And that's how it started. And that's how, really,
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it's unleashed, because suddenly people
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from Facebook, friends and others,
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just understand that they can be part of it.
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It's not just one dude making one poster,
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it's -- we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures
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and ask me, "Make me a poster. Post it.
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Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too."
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It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense.
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I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends
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to come, graphic designers most of them,
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to make posters with me, because I didn't have the time.
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It was a huge amount of pictures.
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So for a few days, that's how my living room was.
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And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images,
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but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran.
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And we took these messages and we made posters out of it,
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because I know people: They don't read, they see images.
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If it's an image, they may read it.
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So here are a few of them.
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("You are my first Israelian friend. I wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians, anyway nice to see you!")
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("I love that blue. I love that star. I love that flag.") This one is really moving for me because it's the story
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of a girl who has been raised in Iran
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to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning,
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and now that she sees the posters that we're sending,
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she starts -- she said that she changed her mind,
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and now she loves that blue, she loves that star,
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and she loves that flag, talking about the Israeli flag,
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and she wished that we'd meet and come to visit one another,
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and just a few days after I posted the first poster.
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The day after,
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Iranians started to respond with their own posters.
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They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter)
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Crazy, crazy.
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So you can see they are still shy, they don't want to show their faces,
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but they want to spread the message.
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They want to respond. They want to say the same thing.
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So. And now it's communication.
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It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians
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sending the same message, one to each other.
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("My Israeli Friends. I don't hate you. I don't want War.")
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This never happened before, and this is two people
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supposed to be enemies, we're on the verge of a war,
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and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say,
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"I like this guy. I love those guys."
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And it became really big at some point.
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And then it became news.
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Because when you're seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news.
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And suddenly, there is something that was happening
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that was good news. So the guys on the news,
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they say, "Okay, let's talk about this."
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And they just came, and it was so much,
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I remember one day, Michal,
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she was talking with the journalist, and she was asking him,
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"Who's gonna see the show?"And he said, "Everybody."
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So she said, "Everybody in Palestine, in where? Israel?
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Who is everybody?""Everybody."
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They said, "Syria?" "Syria."
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"Lebanon?""Lebanon."
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At some point, he just said, "40 million people are going to see you today.
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It's everybody." The Chinese.
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And we were just at the beginning of the story.
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Something crazy also happened.
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Every time a country started talking about it,
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like Germany, America, wherever,
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a page on Facebook popped up with the same logo
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with the same stories, so at the beginning
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we had "Iran-Loves-Israel," which is an Iranian
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sitting in Tehran, saying, "Okay, Israel loves Iran?
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I give you Iran-Loves-Israel."
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You have Palestine-Loves-Israel.
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You have Lebanon that just -- a few days ago.
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And this whole list of pages on Facebook
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dedicated to the same message,
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to people sending their love, one to each other.
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The moment I really understood that something was happening,
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a friend of mine told me,
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"Google the word 'Israel.'"
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And those were the first images on those days
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that popped up from Google
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when you were typing, "Israel" or "Iran."
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We really changed how people see the Middle East.
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Because you're not in the Middle East.
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You're somewhere over there, and then you want to see the Middle East,
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so you go on Google and you say, "Israel,"
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and they give you the bad stuff.
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And for a few days you got those images.
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Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page
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is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week
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went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know,
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commented on one of the photos.
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So for five months now, that's what we are doing,
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me, Michal, a few of my friends, are just making images.
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We're showing a new reality
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by just making images
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because that's how the world perceives us.
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They see images of us, and they see bad images.
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So we're working on making good images. End of story.
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Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page.
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This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran. This is not my page.
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This is a guy in Tehran on the day of remembrance
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of the Israeli fallen soldier
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putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page.
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This is the enemy.
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What?
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("Our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in Bulgaria")
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And it's going both ways.
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It's like, we are showing respect, one to each other.
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And we're understanding. And you show compassion.
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And you become friends.
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And at some point, you become friends on Facebook,
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and you become friends in life.
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You can go and travel and meet people.
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And I was in Munich a few weeks ago.
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I went there to open an exposition about Iran
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and I met there with people from the page
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that told me, "Okay, you're going to be in Europe,
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I'm coming. I'm coming from France, from Holland,
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from Germany," of course, and from Israel people came,
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and we just met there for the first time in real life.
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I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies
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for the first time. And we just shake hands,
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and have a coffee and a nice discussion,
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and we talk about food and basketball.
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And that was the end of it.
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Remember that image from the beginning?
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At some point we met in real life, and we became friends.
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And it goes the other way around.
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Some girl that we met on Facebook
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never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran,
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lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis
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because of what she knows about us,
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decides after a few months of talking on the Internet
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with some Israelis to come to Israel,
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and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion
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and says, "Okay, not that big a deal."
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So a few weeks ago, the stress is getting higher,
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so we start this new campaign
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called "Not ready to die in your war."
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I mean, it's plus/minus the same message,
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but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it.
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And again, something amazing happened,
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something that we didn't have on the first wave of the campaign.
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Now people from Iran, the same ones who were shy
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at the first campaign and just sent, you know,
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their foot and half their faces,
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now they're sending their faces, and they're saying,
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"Okay, no problem, we're into it. We are with you."
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Just read where those guys are from.
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And for every guy from Israel,
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you've got someone from Iran.
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Just people sending their pictures.
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Crazy, yes?
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So --
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(Applause)
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So you may ask yourself, who is this dude?
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My name is Ronny Edry, and I'm 41, I'm an Israeli,
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I'm a father of two, I'm a husband,
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and I'm a graphic designer. I'm teaching graphic design.
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And I'm not that naive, because a lot of the time
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I've been asked, many times I've been asked, "Yeah, but,
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this is really naive, sending flowers over, I mean — "
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I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers for three years,
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and I know how it looks from the ground.
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I know how it can look really bad.
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So to me, this is the courageous thing to do,
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to try to reach the other side before it's too late,
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because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late.
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And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes,
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but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it.
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Maybe as people, because especially in Israel,
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we're in a democracy. We have the freedom of speech,
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and maybe that little thing can change something.
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And really, we can be our own ambassadors.
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We can just send a message and hope for the best.
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So I want to ask Michal, my wife, to come with me
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on the stage just to make with you one image,
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because it's all about images.
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And maybe that image will help us change something.
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Just raise that. Exactly.
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And I'm just going to take a picture of it,
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and I'm just going to post it on Facebook
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with kind of "Israelis for peace" or something.
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Oh my God.
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Don't cry.
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Thank you guys.
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(Applause)
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