Yoseph Haddad: Taking pride in being Arab Israeli

Love him or hate him, people listen to Yoseph Haddad. And to say that this approach has been effective is an understatement. In Israel, he’s a virtual rock star.

By HANNAH BROWN NOVEMBER 16, 2024 21:23

Yoseph Haddad at a London demonstration calling for support for Israel and the return of the hostages. (photo credit: Elliot Jacobs)

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.

Yoseph Haddad is seen embedded with IDF troops in Beit Lahia, Gaza, in December 2023. (credit: FLASH90)

He is a regular guest on some of Israel’s top-rated television shows, including popular news programs on Channel 12 and Channel 13, where he sometimes breaks into Arabic (which he then translates into Hebrew) to make his points.

He posts many times a day on social media, including TikTok, X, Instagram, and YouTube, and he has a combined following of close to two million on these platforms. He has established a nonprofit foundation, Together Vouch for Each Other, which encourages Arab Israelis to connect to and feel part of Israeli society, volunteer for the IDF or National Service, and help solve problems in Arab society in Israel.

He often speaks abroad. He is currently on a speaking tour of the US, where his appearances have drawn both admirers and groups of protesters. For example, in Chicago protesters tried to stop people from attending his talk last week and gave out flyers saying he was “wanted for normalizing occupation, apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.”

But love him or hate him, people listen to him. And to say that this approach has been effective is an understatement. In Israel, he’s a virtual rock star.

Magnet for grateful Israelis

I’ve interviewed many celebrities, often in public settings such as cafés, but never have I seen anyone attract the kind of adulation that Haddad received from other customers and passersby as we spoke.

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He’s a recognizable figure, in his usual outfit of a white shirt, suit jacket with a yellow ribbon pin to support the hostages, and sporting a short black beard and mustache. His brash style in his TV appearances has earned him the ultimate Israeli media street cred – an imitation on the popular TV comedy show Eretz Nehederet.

When he thanked the counterman at the café, the man said, “Thank you, bro!”

People who saw him through the café window gave him a thumbs up and made heart signs with their hands. Others waved. One woman came over and said in English, “I love you” and quickly amended it to say, “My boyfriend and I love you.”

Haddad basked in this outpouring of admiration, and how could he not? On both sides of the political spectrum, his very existence and that big mouth he mentioned are an affront to many people’s worldview, and he gets a lot of hate: from Arabs here who don’t identify with Israel, from extremist right-wing Jews who don’t think Arabs should be part of the country, and from anti-Israel activists abroad.

He has been attacked physically, including in an incident when he and his family were assaulted as they attempted to board a flight in Dubai, and his mother was injured. 

Needless to say, he receives death threats, as does his fiancée, American-born Israeli journalist Emily Schrader. She is from a Jewish-Christian background but identifies as Jewish and engages in similar advocacy work for Israel. At a speech at University College London this year, Haddad needed six security guards to protect him from an angry mob. In Israel, Haddad, an IDF combat veteran, carries a gun.

Arab Israeli, loud and proud

While you might think this high-energy social media fixture would order a strong coffee, he went for a large carrot juice and some pastries.

“I’ve already had so much coffee today,” he explained in fluent but lightly accented English, sitting down at a Tel Aviv hipster café that blared 1980s pop music as we spoke, while six-foot-tall trans women with teased hair came and went. Haddad seemed to feel totally at home, as he likely would anywhere he got to speak his mind.

He emphasized that while he has earned certain celebrity by giving a point of view that until recently was rarely heard, his mission isn’t all about him.

“It’s been a long journey, and there’s still a lot of work to do,” he said. He and his colleagues at his foundation “have finally managed to arrive at a place where the Arab Israeli voice has a stage. You can see that more Arab Israelis are saying, ‘Hey, we’re proud to be Arabs, we’re also proud to be Israelis. This is our country, and we want to be here.’

“It’s a voice that existed before, but the problem is that the extremists will do absolutely everything to keep that voice quiet and control it. Once it’s unleashed, there is no way back. And that’s why today, the extremists are scared of my way. Scared! Excuse my French, but they’re sh***ing themselves.”

Haddad is one of a growing group of pro-Israel Arabs on social media. These include Nuseir Yassin, better known as blogger Nas Daily, who has a following in the tens of millions. After Oct. 7, he started calling himself an “Israeli Palestinian” rather than a “Palestinian Israeli” as he had previously. He posts messages of tolerance on various platforms, but much of his focus is on subjects not related to Israel, such as travel, hi-tech, and cryptocurrency.

Other Arab Israeli influencers who do focus on the Middle East include Israeli Muslim Fulbright scholar Tamer Masudin and Mohammad Kabiya, a Bedouin who served in the IDF, doing search and rescue missions with the Air Force. Marwan Jaber is a young Israeli Druze with a growing following on Instagram. Mosab Hassan Yousef, aka the Green Prince, is the son of one of Hamas’s founders in the West Bank; he spied for the Shin Bet and posts regularly on X and Instagram.

Brigitte Gabriel is a Lebanese Christian activist and author now living in the US whose negative view of Israel changed after her mother received medical treatment in an Israeli hospital. Moroccan-born Chama Mechtaly, whose Instagram profile describes her as “half-Jewish, half-Muslim, 100% Zionist,” posts regularly on Instagram under the handle @MillenialMoor. New social media accounts are added to this list all the time.

People often threaten and try to discredit Haddad, but, he said, “The more they hit me, hit us, the more we want to continue.”

Pre- and post-Oct. 7

Haddad said Oct. 7 did not change his message or his work at all.

“I’m saying today exactly what I was saying before Oct. 7… I gave warnings. There are lots of interviews where I said Hamas is going to make us pay.” He mentioned an interview he gave on Channel 13 in April 2023.

“I said: ‘If we do not allow the IDF to speak to our enemies in the language they understand, which is force… to speak the language of the Middle East to terrorists and their supporters, if we don’t do it, we’re going to pay a heavy price. And the longer we wait, the heavier the price gets.’ I got criticized. Then suddenly, on Oct. 7, I am actually the logical voice.”

So, post-Oct. 7, did he feel like a prophet? “No, I’m not. It’s just that when you’re familiar with your enemy and you read the signs on the surface, you cannot go wrong about it.” People didn’t listen to him, he said, either because of their political agenda “or because you’re just blind and you can’t see it.”

As the 1980s anti-war anthem “99 Red Balloons” blared in the café, he said he started every day by catching up on what has happened “in the four or five hours I was asleep.” While he also reads the Hebrew and English press, he follows Arab media with special care, watching Al Jazeera and “27 Arab news channels and websites,” including sites from Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and all over the world.

Then he reads as many messages as he can, out of the sometimes hundreds he receives each day, many of them alerting him to news stories. “And, of course, I look at social media.”

Seeing the full Arab Israeli picture

While Haddad can be over the top – he danced and ate kanafeh and baklava in a video to celebrate the assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar – he brings a sophistication to his messaging that can be obscured by his sometimes outrageous persona.

The morning of our interview, he had appeared on Niv Raskin’s Channel 12 morning show and presented three different videos of important Lebanese figures – a politician, an academic, and a journalist – all of whom were calling for an end to the war –

“These are important voices to listen to. And it’s important to explain why we’re finally hearing this. It’s not because they hate Hezbollah or because now suddenly they love Israel. No, we’re hearing this because Israel is striking Hezbollah.” If these people had been interviewed before Oct. 7, they would have expressed very different opinions, he said.

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?”

At the same time, he does not deny there is discrimination against Arabs. “If these European protesters who are screaming about apartheid and have never set foot here were really concerned about Palestinians, they would be talking about real problems that exist here, problems for Arabs in Israel. There is racism and discrimination, and problems in the West Bank and in Gaza.”

But if they looked at the full picture, he said, “they would see that it’s not what they thought. They would see that terrorism is coming from Gaza… They would see how the Palestinian Authority is abusing the millions and millions of dollars they’re sent, in order for them to fill their pockets… All the big names in the Palestinian Authority live in the biggest villas and drive the best cars; there is all this corruption. I’m not saying this; it’s the Palestinians who are saying this.”

The reason that Haddad feels his critics don’t want to solve the real problems of Arabs here, he said, is “money, money, and money.” If the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other groups really tackled issues and helped Arabs, “tomorrow there is no organization and no budget… And if they really looked at Arabs in Israel, they would see that Arabs are an integral part of Israeli society.”

Integrated into Israel

Haddad certainly is. He volunteered for the IDF – Arab Israelis are not drafted but can volunteer – and he served in the elite Golani unit, sustaining a serious wound during the Second Lebanon War in 2006.

Haddad comes from a Christian Arab family, originally from Haifa, “the largest mixed city.” His grandfather chose not to flee during the War of Independence of 1948. “He was more determined to stay on his land than he was afraid of what he was hearing from extremist voices telling Arabs to flee.” The family still owns agricultural land and grows olives and cherries in Jish, aka Gush Halav.

His mother is a teacher, and his father is a priest (he explained to me that Greek Orthodox men with families can become priests) and a civilian pilot – “I call him the flying priest,” joked Haddad. He credits his parents for instilling in him tolerance for people of all faiths, as well as a feeling of belonging. “They taught me that this is our country, and we have to defend it.”

His parents moved the family to Nazareth, “the largest Arab city,” but he spent a great deal of his childhood in Haifa, where his extended family still lived, mostly in the Kiryat Eliezer neighborhood.

“We played football together, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Druze,” he said. “This is how we became friends. We became more than football friends. We would all go to each other’s houses for holidays.” He broke into the Passover song “Echad, Mi Yod’ea?” singing verses 11-13, which many Jews forget. “I’m not converting, but knowing the culture helps me to bridge gaps.”

Another way he feels that differences can be overcome is by learning each other’s language. “Every Arab in Israel must learn Hebrew, and every Jew in Israel must learn Arabic. This will help both communities to understand each other better,” he said.

“It will not cut anything from Israel being a Jewish state; in fact, it will only strengthen Israel’s being a Jewish state. If we want to live in the Middle East, we need to know who our friends are and speak to them in their own language, and we need to know our enemies and speak to them in their own language.”

He and two friends from high school volunteered for the IDF. “Some of my friends who didn’t enlist came to me years later and said, ‘If I had the maturity of today when I was 18, I would have joined the army just like you.’”

One place you won’t see Haddad is on Arab television stations in Israel. “Arab politicians won’t appear on these channels if they have me [on],” he said. He said the CEO of one of these stations told him they would like him to appear, but they don’t want to lose the cooperation of the politicians. “The politicians don’t want to legitimize my voice.”

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.

In June, Levy and Mehdi Hasan publicly debated journalist Douglas Murray and lawyer Natasha Hausdorff in a Canadian forum, the Munk Debates, on whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Hasan and Levy officially lost that debate, with Murray and Hausdorff gaining more support in the polling at the end. But 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.”

Aware of risk but unafraid

During our interview, Haddad didn’t touch his pastries, and toward the end of our talk he invited me to share them. “I’ve gained so many kilos; I have baklava every time one of those terror leaders is assassinated,” he said.

But all kidding aside, he knows that what he’s doing is risky. “Sure, I’m scared of violent extremists. I would be lying, and it would be dumb on my side if I said no. Of course, I’m scared. But it’s not something negative because when you’re scared, you’re more determined and you’re more careful. You watch your back, and you see what’s going on.”

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.

“We’re freeing the Middle East. People will see that we’re saving the entire world. We’re on the right side of history.”

While he had more to say, it was time for him to get going. As the 1980s song “Fame” played in the background, with its chorus, “Fame! I want to live forever/I want to learn how to fly,” we had an only-in-Israel moment, where Haddad asked if I was shomer negiya, a term for a kind of Orthodox observance where people do not shake hands with members of the opposite sex. Assured that I was not, he shook my hand warmly and headed out into the welcoming streets of south Tel Aviv. 