TikTok Live with more than 200 Gazans

[Gershon Baskin]

Last night I did a "Tiktok live" with more than 200 Gazans for 3 hours.  It ended at midnight. The whole first hour was completely in Arabic.  The next two hours, i was asked questions in Arabic, but I answered in English and Samer Sinijlawi translated to Arabic. I recognize that the participants were anxious to hear me and to ask their questions and I know that my speed in talking Arabic and my vocabulary in Arabic is must less than in English. Nonetheless, this is the first time that I have done a public talk in Arabic. I always say that I have too much respect for the Arabic language to do public speaking in Arabic.  I never studied Standard Classic Arabic known as literary Arabic and my Arabic is more or less street Arabic. Because I listen so often to Arabic language radio stations, and watch Arabic language television stations, i generally understand between 80-90% of what I hear, but speaking is a whole different story. In my talks with Hamas leaders over the years, depending who I am speaking with, it is generally a combination of Arabic, English and Hebrew. Regarding documents, I have always requested that the Hamas side prepare the documents in Arabic and then we would negotiate on the written texts because i did not want to have a situation of misunderstandings about the texts and I always wanted Hamas to take responsibility and ownership of the documents we were working on. After three hours of this kind of meeting with more than 200 Gazans, it was such a good experience that I hope to do it much more frequently and I hope that other Israelis friends who can speak Arabic will join me.  We Israelis and Palestinians have to engage in conversations much more now than ever if we really want to ensure that we will never return to war again.