Did you know?

Did You Know?

There were once thriving Jewish communities all across the Middle East and North Africa!

Did you know— for centuries, Jewish families danced beneath the same stars in cities like Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Sana’a? They spoke Arabic with sweet familiarity, sang our lullabies in courtyards fragrant with cardamom, shared olives and laughter under embroidered tents, and built lives side by side with us.

In Baghdad, they filled a third of the city— doctors, poets, merchants, musicians. In Egypt, they helped birth cinema and banks, stringing stories across the Nile like lights for a wedding. In Morocco, they were the whisperers to kings, the keepers of wisdom at royal courts.

They were not strangers. They were part of us.

But then the pages turned too fast. Politics screamed louder than tambourines. And silence fell like dust over their names.

I didn’t grow up knowing any of this.

I was born into a devout Shia home in Saudi Arabia, where I was taught—without question—that Jews were the enemy. It was in my textbooks, my television, my tongue.

But history has a way of knocking at the soul. And when I left home, when I dared to read beyond what I was given, and finally walked the streets of Israel for myself— I didn’t just find facts. I found faces. Not myths, but neighbors. Not monsters, but brothers and sisters with aching hearts, just like mine.

I saw what they lost. I remembered what we shared. And I began to weep for the songs we no longer sing together.

Reconciliation, I’ve learned, doesn’t begin with a peace treaty. It begins with truth. With memory. With honoring the full story—of Arabs and Jews. Of pain and beauty. Of exile and return.

Today, I speak from both worlds— as an Arab woman who carries the echoes of my ancestors, and as a lover of the Jewish people, who found in them not enemies, but long-lost family.

The work of healing is just beginning. But maybe, just maybe… it starts with a question whispered in love:

Did you know?

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