At the age of seven, Rudy Rochman, 27, experienced his first antisemitic incident when, together with his mother and younger brother, he was waiting in London for a double-decker bus. Rudy's mother wore a shirt with the word "truth" in Hebrew, and the driver – who later turned out to be a neo-Nazi – asked her "Sorry, is that in Jewish?" She replied, "It's in Hebrew, the language of Jews." In response, the driver demanded she get off the bus. "I do not want Jews here, get out of here," he declared, and physically dragged her over to the steps of the bus, with little Rudy and his brother behind her.
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"It all happened really fast and slowly right in front of my eyes," Rochman recalled. He spoke with Israel Hayom via Zoom, half in Hebrew with a French accent and half in English with a fluent American accent, during the short time he managed to make for me – between giving a lecture to a group coming from the US to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a 1 a.m. conversation with the Jewish community in Montreal.
As he walks around with his phone in Tel Aviv on the way to his parents' house, people he does not know stop him at least three times and pat him on the shoulder or shout at him, "Rudy, great job!"
Q: You're famous.
"I do not know if I'm famous," he says modestly.
If you have no idea who he is, you probably don't spend much time on social media, where the total number of his followers has hit 300,000. Rochman's videos get tens of thousands of views on YouTube and hundreds of shares on Facebook. Most of them are discussions with pro-Palestinians and radical leftists, shot in Israel and around the world during demonstrations against Israel, in processions and on the streets.
If Israel's public diplomacy efforts have a name – it's Rudy Rochman, and he's not even clearly right-wing – he just wants to make peace here. In one of his videos, one of the demonstrators asks him who he is, and Rudy replies: "I'm an activist for the rights of Jews and Israel, living in Israel, and building relations between Palestinians and Israelis. Jews and Palestinians can live side by side."
During Operation Guardian of the Walls, where the country's public diplomacy seemed to fail colossally, Rochman came out against comedian and Daily Show host Trevor Noah, who declared that Israel needs to understand that it has more power and therefore must spare the other side, which suffers far more losses.
"Any missile fired at civilians in order to kill civilians is a war crime," Rochman wrote on Facebook in a post that went viral, to which he attached a video illustrating a small part of what Israel went through during the war. "If not for the Iron Dome, the casualties on the Israeli side would have been much higher than they are today," he wrote.
The narratives that work
From a young age, Rochman has tried to explain to those around him who he is and where he came from. He was born in France, moved to Israel at the age of three, then to Miami at the age of five, returned to Israel to enlist in the IDF, then moved back to Los Angeles, and two years ago made aliyah and settled in Jerusalem – even managing to have his family immigrate to Israel during the pandemic.
Now, among his various pursuits, which in addition to social media videos also include the "The Home" project – a movement that builds connections between Israelis and Palestinians through joint activities, he is also working on a docuseries he plans to sell, called "We Were Never Lost" that deals with the story of the disengagement of the ten tribes from the Jewish people.
Searching for roots is not unfamiliar to Rochman. "My mother is Moroccan and my father is an Ashkenazi from Poland and Germany, but he adopted my mother's culture and our house was Moroccan in every way. When I went to Jewish school I was told 'you go by your father, so you are Ashkenazi.' That put me in a situation where I did not know what to answer when I was asked who I was.
"In Morocco, we [Jews] were killed because we were not Moroccans, in Poland we were killed because we were not Poles, why do we identify with the last place we lived in? I am a Jew, because no matter where I grew up and where I was, I am part of the people of Israel. As a result of all the moving from place to place, I started to be good at explaining myself. "
Q: Where else did you explain yourself?
"In eighth grade, I would go to AIPAC meetings and there were speeches by members of Congress who spoke very superficially. One of them once said, 'A strong America is a strong Israel!', and everyone stood up and applauded, and he went on to say, 'A strong Israel is a strong America!' I asked myself, 'What exactly is he saying?' I felt like they were just talking to make people feel good, instead of doing something. I went out, and there were thousands of anti-Israel protesters, neo-Nazis and all kinds of Israel haters, and as an eighth-grade kid I went out and talked to them, and I saw that the way I was taught to answer didn't really work, and that I should learn how to answer them next time.
"I jumped at every opportunity I had to talk to anti-Israelis, and checked what narratives were working, listened to their speeches and learned to respond in the best possible way."
Q: And you continued as you grew up.
"Absolutely. During university in the United States, I founded a pro-Israel student movement, to give Jews tools to help them be strong and know what to answer so that the younger generation will understand that a lot of things being said about us are wrong. But later I stopped with that, because the movement became something I did not want it to be: mainstream propaganda without depth, with stories about Israel inventing Waze or the cherry tomato, and that we are the only democracy in the Middle East. That does not give us the right to exist.
"It's a 4,000-year-old story, that we created the state after thousands of years of oppression, that our nomadic people came to the Land of Israel, kicked the British and proved that a state can be formed.
"The movement became an average pro-Israel organization, doing things that supporters liked and less what needed to be done. Jews aren't pro-Israel, they are Israelis. I'm not pro-Rudy, I'm Rudy. There were times, if we were talking about the establishment of the state and the wars, the world would support us, but today people care about narratives and emotions that if they support them, they feel better. They are less interested in technology, but more in the belief that we have taken land from other people – and that needs to be fixed."
Rudy's story with social media began during a time when he studied at Columbia University and founded the student movement.
"We would go to anti-Israel events, and show them how they use the hardships of the Palestinians only when it fits their agenda," he says, "and we started filming videos to expose them. There are videos that show how at the beginning of the conversation they shout at me 'You are a racist!' And at the end I am told: 'I agree with you, my brother, now I understand what Zionism is'. It doesn't always happen in the first conversation, sometimes you have to plant the seed and move on."
Israeli & Palestinian bump into each other in Copenhagen, Denmark. After the shalom/salam, a long and passionate conversation breaks out.
Invest your energy in speaking to the person you share a Homeland with rather than trying to prove to the world why the other doesn't belong. pic.twitter.com/3luQUpKMZ8
— Rudy Rochman (@rudy_rochman) May 31, 2021
Q: What claims do you repeatedly hear from the other side?
"Antisemitism is finding the problem in society and projecting it on the Jews. On the left side of the map, people care about human rights and racism, but when they recognize what is bad in their society they project it on the Jewish state, instead of on their own people: racism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, land theft. There are Palestinians who suffer in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon, but they only care when it comes to Israel."
Q: What responses do you get from people?
"Every day I get at least 30 messages from Palestinians and Jews saying 'You changed my perspective.' There was someone at Columbia University who really disliked Israel, and after a few conversations, he told me that his grandparents were Jews from Georgia. He knew nothing about Judaism. I suggested he learn more about his roots. After a year, he made aliyah and enlisted in the Border Police."
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