WEBVTT

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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)