Dr. Edy Cohen: Israel’s Most Important and Least Known Social Media Influencer

Meet Israel’s unofficial Arabic language spokesperson. The government, it seems, has left the room.

Dr. Edy Cohen has more than 550,000 followers on Twitter and I’m pretty sure that you’ve never heard of him.

Beirut-born, Cohen left Lebanon at age 18. He has since made Israel his home and lives with his family in a quiet town south of Tel Aviv. In his “down-time” from teaching and consulting, he’s a one-man, tireless presence on Arabic-language Twitter, engaging almost exclusively with residents of Arab countries in the middle east.

In recent months, since the launch of Twitter Spaces – a real-time, online forum where people engage in moderated discussions on any topics they choose – Cohen has amped up his presence and profile.

“Three or four years ago,” he says, “[Arabs] would not speak with me like they do today. I started interacting with them five years ago. Now, they know me. I am familiar. I interact on Twitter. I’m on Arabic television often. I’m active on Facebook.”

As with any culture, middle eastern Arabs have their behavioral codes and habits. Foremost, Cohen explains, they tend to develop relationships and trust, slowly. “And me,” he says “because I’m a native son of Lebanon, from the Jewish community in Beirut, and my mother tongue is Arabic, I’m kind of one of them. More or less. Other than religion. I understand them. I understand the mentality. I know their history. I’m familiar with their religion, the Koran, their holidays.”

“I’m like an Arab but I’m a Jew. I grew up in Beirut and lived there until age 19. Frequently – every week – people say to me: ‘We love you. Come. Enter Paradise. Embrace the light of Islam.’ Many of them like me – not all - but many. I’m the only Israeli Jew with so many followers in the Arab world!”

I have been in contact with Cohen since pre-COVID days but our initial face-to-face meeting was delayed by about three years. He is as ebullient and passionate in person as he sounds on the phone, on Twitter Spaces, in writing; sharp, focused and mincing no words. He’s also warm, ironic and has a non-threatening way of discussing very thorny topics. Which is why he's become a social media superstar.

Cohen is frustrated by the lack of an online Israeli presence in the Arabic speaking world and has internalized a responsibility to correct so much “fake news” about Israel that saturates the media in the middle east.

I interviewed Cohen online – in Hebrew – shortly after the conflict in early April at the Al Aqsa mosque during the Ramadan holiday. The situation in Jerusalem was extremely delicate.

Young Muslim men had hoarded rocks, sticks and other crude weapons and barricaded themselves inside the mosque. Each side played its part in this well-rehearsed fiasco. The Muslims believed that a group of Jews intended to sacrifice a goat on the Temple Mount, in keeping with Second Temple era rituals. Animal sacrifice on the al Aqsa compound is forbidden by Israeli law, but that fact did nothing to quell the tensions. Anticipating a barrage of rocks being thrown at any Jewish visitors to the holy site, Israeli police entered the mosque in early April.  The visuals beamed around the world were horrifying.  

Predictably, the Arab world went ballistic. The UN Security Council convened an emergency session. Western media and diplomats were ever-ready to thrash Israel.

And there was Edy Cohen, holding court on Twitter Spaces on the days following, speaking to more than 9,000 people directly over two nights.

Extraordinary does not begin to capture his courage and brilliance. I listened in for a while one evening to the discussion, not understanding a word, of course. But so much is revealed by tone of voice as well as how the discussion flows. There were no raised voices, nothing rude. It was a controlled, respectful exchange. Sure, there’s plenty of disagreement, anger and emotion. But they speak.

I was dying to know what they were all saying, so I gave Edy a call and said: Let’s talk.

“It was so frustrating not understanding a word of Arabic. What was the discussion like? What were you all saying?”, I asked him.

It was lively, to be sure, and a touch heated at times, but Cohen says that there are so many participants who really want to understand the situation more accurately and they know that state-controlled national media in Arab countries will never provide anything close to a balanced perspective. So, he works to provide facts and verifiable information.

“I sent them proof of the 1994 Peace Agreement between Jordan and Israel governing conduct and access to the Al Aqsa compound, and more. I showed them – Article 9 of the Agreement– where it is clearly written that Israelis and Jordanians are permitted to access the holy sites on the Temple Mount.” (In fact, the precise wording of Article 9 is that “Each Party will provide freedom of access to places of religious and historical significance.”

This Agreement was a watershed recognition by an Arab leader that the al Aqsa compound – regarded as the third holiest site in Islam – is also important to Jews. In fact, the mosque is built directly atop the remains of the Roman-era Second Temple and the site is the holiest in Judaism. The Western Wall, where many Jews pray, is what remains of one edge of the Second Temple compound.

When he explained this fact to his listeners, Cohen says:

“They were in shock. They didn’t know that there’s an agreement between Israel and the Jordanians; that all Israelis – not just Israeli settlers – are permitted to go to the Temple Mount. I don’t wear a kippah. I told them I was there three months ago.”

Cohen did not tiptoe around the violence on the Temple Mount. But he did offer a perspective explaining the violence that did not whitewash the Israeli police but was certainly more credible and factual than the reports on Arab television demonizing Israel and Jews.

“I opened their eyes. I explained to them why the police entered the mosque, because there were really difficult pictures from that day. It is difficult to see people being beaten. But I explained to them that these are a small group of Palestinians from Hamas who come to create problems. They (many Arabs) simply don’t know anything about Israel.”

When he became more active on Twitter five years ago Cohen was not exactly embraced. But over time he says that a psychological barrier has been broken down and a significant constituency in the Arab community has been drawn to him and his message.

“There is so much fake news and these people have never seen an Israeli or a Jew and they imagine us as monsters. Really. Arabs from Syria or Saudi – it doesn’t matter. But now, with technology, twitter, social networks of friends, we’ve broken so many barriers. They suddenly speak with me and can see me.”

Cohen’s rendering is similar to what I experienced in my interactions with numerous Arab diplomats when I served as the Canadian Ambassador to Israel. These were the pre-Abraham Accord days, when there had been no public thaw between Israel and the Arab countries. The peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan were frosty, at best, and people-to-people ties virtually non-existent. In spite of the Egyptian and Jordanian leaderships’ putative support for normalization of relations with Israel, their state-controlled media continued to broadcast and print viciously antisemitic and anti-Israel content. Constantly.

In private conversations with my diplomatic colleagues at the time, I was surprised – and delighted – to hear a very different tone.

One diplomat in particular came from a rabidly anti-Israel family – his description, not mine - in which many had served militarily. Too many had lost their lives in conflict with Israel. He was mandated to develop people-to-people ties but lamented that it was impossible. To even be photographed with an Israeli official and then have it appear online or in his home country would have resulted in total ostracization from family, friends and professional colleagues, not to mention almost certain vilification in the mass media. His country’s top leadership said one thing publicly but continued to encourage the machinery fomenting popular hatred of Israel and Jews.

Several Arab diplomats told to me how stunned they were upon arrival in Israel. They truly had expected monsters. The reality they encountered was nothing like the propaganda myths which saturated media and professional culture in their home countries.

They were surprised by how much they loved Israel. It was democratic, cultured and genuinely free. Israelis were so friendly, even when they learned where they were from. In fact, that knowledge usually caused them to be even warmer. They craved acceptance from their Arab neighbors.

The diplomats also saw first-hand that Christians, Muslims, Circassians, Druse, Jews, Bedouin – everyone - flourished and enjoyed full legal rights. They went about their business – personal and professional – like regular guys. They were unprepared for this normalcy.

With the advent of the Abraham Accords era we have made some progress but certainly not with Jordan and Egypt. Interactions between those countries remain limited to security and political matters. There is very little economic and other co-operation. These always have been and remain “cold” peaces.

In his early days on social media, Cohen found himself responding to the same basic misunderstandings which saddled the Arab diplomats when they first arrived in Israel: explaining that Israel is not an apartheid state; that there are Muslim Members of Knesset and the judiciary. He responded to repeated – and serious - assertions that Israelis routinely harvest the internal organs of Palestinians.

Not everyone is keen to engage with Cohen and he is frequently attacked for lying, and worse. But he says there are many moderate and neutral Arabs, particularly in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, who want to know facts and truths. Slowly, he says, they are beginning to see and understand that there is a different story than the one they have been hearing in schools and state-controlled media for decades.

When discussing the al Aqsa issue, Cohen explained to listeners that the rebuilding of what will be the Third Temple can only come about with divine intervention. “They didn’t know that,” he recalls, “and their reaction was like – ‘Ah. So you’re not going to build on top of the al Aqsa plaza?!?’ You can’t imagine what a relief it was for them to hear this!”

“I try to educate and engage,” says Cohen, ”but this is something the government should be doing. Not just one man. This is hard and important work that Israel must do.”

“The Department of Foreign Affairs,” he points out, “has employees and graphics and a new media department and they have fewer online followers than me!”

Still, Lebanese nationals will not engage with him at all. Syrians, he says, are afraid to participate. And Jordanians and Palestinians? He says they tend to hurl insults and curses. Small numbers of Egyptians interact with him but very few.

Wherever they are from, the Arabs generally, according to Cohen, know nothing about the Holocaust. They say that the Jews are lying about the six million murdered and – based on nothing – assert that it was only a few thousand slaughtered in Europe.

Holocaust denial is considered to be a mainstream position in the Arab world. I mean, PA President Mahmoud Abbas – lauded as a “moderate” by many - wrote his PhD thesis at The Russian Institute of Oriental studies, which was later published as a book, in Russian, titled: The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. His core thesis was and remains that the organized Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine collaborated with the Nazis and that overall, the common allegations regarding Jewish mass murder and persecution in the Holocaust were largely untrue.

“I don’t know of anyone in the Arab world who researches Holocaust denial there,” notes Cohen. “I mean – maybe there is – but you need many skills to do so: Arabic language, culture, history, etc.” I would conjecture that for anyone to pursue such an academic focus in the Arab world would be the kiss of career death.

In the midst of this swirl of fake news and misinformation, the Israeli government currently has no capability to address these issues. At the moment, Benjamin Netanyahu’s PMO has no political staff to act as spokespersons with international media even in English, never mind Arabic. Cohen knew the Arabic language spokesperson who left the PMO a year or so ago and to his knowledge there is no one there or in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to feed the voracious appetite in the Arab world for correct information.

Arabs tend to consume Arabic-language news, according to Cohen. He does his bit but says: “I’m just a private individual. A drop in the sea. I self-finance my work and do this on my own time. But there is nothing state-sponsored or managed.”

Recently, there has been considerable online interest in the multiple domestic crises afflicting Israel, in particular the wobbly status of democracy.

“Are you democratic or not?” they ask me. “It confuses me! Why shouldn’t it confuse them?!?!”

Irony aside, there are many Arabs, he points out, that are delighted to watch Israel unravel from within. Hizballah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a speech made shortly before we spoke, stated: “Israel is in an unprecedented situation. We’ve never seen the Jews behave like this.”

“He was rubbing his hands with glee,” Cohen said.