It may seem idealistic, but the campaign Israel Loves Iran claims that peace in the Middle East is just a friend request away.
Ronny Edry, an Israeli citizen and founder of the campaign, started Israel Loves Iran by posting a picture of himself and his daughter with the message “Iranians, we will never bomb your country. We (heart) you.”
He soon received hundreds of submissions from both Israel and Iran. People who would have otherwise never met connected and began to talk.
A central premise of the Israel Loves Iran campaign is that merely becoming friends with people from other countries – seeing their statuses, knowing their birthdays – shows people they are not all that different. And with this discovery may come an increased willingness to make peace.
UCLA students with particular interests or opinions about the Middle East often get their information from traditional media outlets they seek out and actively read.
We tend to learn about the Middle East by watching Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu display a crude drawing of a bomb to the United Nations or former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to wipe Israel off the map. We primarily hear about violent altercations and contentious policy, and rarely about the daily lives of common people.
But through social media, we have access to a much more powerful and much more wide-reaching pool of information.
Polarized students should use social networking sites to start conversations with friends of different political and cultural backgrounds. As long as these conversations remain constructive, they can bring together students who are passionate about the same topics, even though they fall on different sides.
As it stands, campus conversation features signs and slogans more prominently than faces and people. But on social media, profile pictures and personal information are prominently displayed.
We all have that Facebook friend who posts incessantly about the latest Middle East headline. Many students have seen, or even participated in, the angry and often hateful online arguments that ensue from these kinds of posts.
Although we do not have the same physical borders of the Middle East at UCLA, political boundaries can be just as divisive.
Emulating the “Israel Loves Iran” model by using social media for constructive conversation would connect students who otherwise might not speak to each other about politically charged topics.
Social media can be used not only to humanize the conversation, but also to direct it toward tangible solutions.
Yala Young Leaders is another movement that uses social media to shift the conversation from the one-liners of politicians to real interaction between people.
Housed in the Peres Center for Peace, the organization has over 400,000 followers on Facebook. It uses the forum to encourage young people from all over the Middle East to engage in productive dialogue and to develop a stronger sense of community.
The Peres Center also hosts Google+ Hangouts between Arab and Israeli high schoolers. The students have the opportunity to find their common interests and work together on different projects with people who they might never meet in person.
These different forums have bridged the very solid physical boundaries between people of different religious or ethnic groups in a highly politicized region. While Israelis and Iranians cannot travel to each others’ countries, they can now engage in conversation, and present a different image to the world to each other than what their newspapers reflect.
UCLA students can create those same kinds of connections by consistently and respectfully engaging with their online community and at the very least keeping those Facebook friends who disagree with them.
Ronny Edry is changing the conversation in one of the most contentious and divided regions in the world, simply by posting a picture online. UCLA, which is not riddled with contentious borders or at risk of war, can surely do the same.
