Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Israeli and a One-Man Multitude

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Dec 15, 2024

Yoseph Haddad is an Arab Israeli and an articulate defender of his country. At the Oxford Union, he took on the anti-Israel toffs, with a display that made a deep impression on me. And perhaps it will do the same for you.

Here he is:

Yoseph Haddad is an Arab Israeli, a Christian, and an IDF veteran who served in the Golani Brigade and was wounded in the Second Lebanon War. He has become one of the most articulate supporters of his country at home and abroad, where he makes the case for Israel to different constituencies, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. More on the remarkable Yoseph Haddad can be found here: “Yoseph Haddad: Taking pride in being Arab Israeli,” by Hannah Brown, Jerusalem Post, November 16, 2024:

Yoseph Haddad says that he feels grateful to his grandfather for staying put in northern Israel during the War of Independence.

“I say, ‘Thank you, Grandpa.’ Because with a mouth like this, if I was in any Arab country, I’d probably be dead by now,” he said in a recent interview.

If you’re interested in Israel at all, especially this year, and if you’re on social media, you know Haddad.

The Arab Israeli who is one of Israel’s most vocal supporters, both at home and abroad, addresses three constituencies, each in their own language: Arab Israelis, Jewish Israelis, and English speakers around the world.

What he says varies, and he addresses many subjects, but the basic message is always the same: He is proud to be Arab and proud to be Israeli, and that there is no contradiction between these two identities; that Israel should fight hard against its enemies; and that Arab Israelis should support their country, and Israeli Jews should embrace Arab Israeli citizens….

While interpreting what is going on in Arab media and social media during the war is a significant part of what Haddad does now, he hasn’t lost sight of his core mission to make Arab Israelis comfortable with Israeli society and vice versa, and making sure people abroad understand the reality that 20% of Israelis are Arab. So it’s crucial to him to demolish the myth of “apartheid” in Israel.

He said that according to one of the largest human rights organizations, Amnesty International, “I am categorized as an Arab Palestinian who lives under an apartheid regime… So I ask myself, ‘Am I living under an apartheid regime?’” He looked around the café and said, “An Arab walks around Tel Aviv, and people are sending him these hearts.” He asked rhetorically, “How can you solve the apartheid problem when it doesn’t exist?”

He mentioned certain statistics about Arab Israelis, saying one-third of doctors in hospitals are Arab and 50% of pharmacists are; and he noted that an Arab judge, George Karra, sent Israeli president Moshe Katsav to prison for rape. “What kind of an apartheid state is that?”…

And he might have added that Arabs serve on the Supreme Court, sit in the Knesset, are treated in the same hospitals by the same medical personnel as Israeli Jews, work in the same offices and factories, play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras, start businesses together, from restaurants to high-tech start-ups, and then he could have noted in an epistrophe after each observation, “what kind of an apartheid state is that?”

He knows that many leftists in Israel and abroad are especially skeptical of his message, and there is one he would especially like to debate: Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy….Haddad has more he’d like to say to Levy, who he said has refused to debate him “because he’s scared. He knows that if I debated him, I would crush him with the truth and the facts.”…

Gideon Levy is a far-left journalist who writes for the far-left Haaretz, where he specializes in stories on how the Israelis mistreat the Palestinians and how peace can only be achieved once Israel stops being a nasty little Sparta and agrees to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines so that the state of “Palestine” can be created. Of course he doesn’t want to debate Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli Arab who would quickly show up Levy’s misrepresentation of Arab life in Israel.

While he certainly will make fun of his adversaries, he doesn’t underestimate them. “Our enemies are so good at what they do, at making their case against us, we have to be better.” He said he thought that by fighting Iran and its proxies, Israel is preventing World War III….

Yoseph Haddad is quite an Arab. And quite an Israeli. I thought you’d want to know.