There are guides who show you a city, and there are guides who introduce you to a living, breathing character you will never quite forget.

Jerusalem, in the hands of Tzachi Samiya, is very much the latter.

Our delegation’s first morning in the city began, as such things often do, with coffee, security checks, and the slightly jaded expectation that we were in for “another political briefing and walk through the Old City.” What we received instead was a lesson in how love, knowledge and storytelling can turn stone and history into something almost painfully alive.

Tzachi is, on paper, an unusual combination: lobbyist and tour guide – “your expert guide to the corridors of Israel’s Parliament and the alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City,” as one description neatly has it.

In practice, that dual vocation is precisely what makes his voice so compelling. He moves effortlessly between the Knesset and the Cardo, between coalition maths and Second Temple archaeology, between present-day policy and three thousand years of longing.

Even his name feels strangely apt. Tzachi – crisp, bright, staccato on the tongue – suits a man who has a positive gift for clarity. Samiya carries, to my ear at least, an echo of elevation – appropriate for someone who spends his days walking the high places of the city and lifting other people’s understanding. He does what the best namesakes do: he makes the name mean more by the way he lives it.

From the moment we set off, he refused the easy clichés. Jerusalem, for him, is neither a postcard nor a battlefield of slogans. It is a palimpsest – layers of faith, empire, poetry and blood written one atop the other, never quite erasing what came before. He points, not just at the famous skyline – the golden Dome of the Rock, the grey domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the pale stones of the Western Wall – but at the human choreography beneath it: ultra-Orthodox men hurrying to prayer, Christian pilgrims clutching rosaries, Muslim families headed to the Haram, Armenian shopkeepers, secular Israelis walking their dogs, all flowing through the same narrow streets.

With Tzachi, Jerusalem is always two cities at once: the one already under your feet, and the one that exists in the text and memory of the Jewish people. He will show you a stretch of exposed stones and, with a few carefully chosen sentences, transform it into the City of David; he will stand you before a view of the Temple Mount and quietly remind you that here, on this hill, two Temples once stood – the First, raised in Solomon’s day and destroyed by the Babylonians; the Second, rebuilt by the returning exiles and later expanded by Herod, only to be burned and torn down by Rome in 70 CE. From that destruction, he explains, came not only ruins but a revolution: Judaism without a Temple, carried in texts, rituals and a daily turning of the body and the heart towards Jerusalem.

Ask any Jew, he says, what direction they face when they pray. Ask why a wedding is concluded with the breaking of a glass and the words “If I forget you, O Jerusalem.” Ask why, at the end of every Passover, every Yom Kippur, the same line is spoken: “Next year in Jerusalem.” The answer is not sentimentality; it is structure. Jerusalem is not a backdrop in Judaism. It is the axis around which the tradition turns.

And yet, for all that, he never allows the city to be reduced to a single narrative. As we walked along the ancient stones, he spoke with obvious warmth about the many faiths that move within the walls. He showed us where Crusader knights carved crosses into pillars, where Ottoman inscriptions still speak in calligraphic Arabic, where Armenian artisans fire their distinctive tiles. He described the Armenian genocide and its refugees, the Christian denominations that share – and sometimes squabble over – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Muslim custodianship of the Haram al-Sharif, the status quo that has somehow held despite wars and intifadas.

In lesser hands, this could descend into a bland catalogue of “diversity”. In Tzachi’s, it becomes something richer and more honest: an acknowledgement that Jerusalem is holy not only to Jews, but that for Jews it is home in a way that is simply different in kind. Other faiths cherish it; Judaism is built around it. That distinction, delivered without apology and without aggression, is part of what makes his guiding so rare. He refuses to lie to please fashionable sensibilities, but he equally refuses to hate.

His background as a lobbyist – a man who knows the “corridors of Israel’s parliament” as intimately as the tunnels beneath the Old City – adds yet another layer. He can stand in front of the Knesset and explain how coalition politics actually works, how laws affecting Jerusalem’s future are made and unmade, how debates over security, heritage and sovereignty play out in real time. Then, twenty minutes later, he will have you in the Jewish Quarter, tracing with your fingers the cracks between stones laid by hands that never heard the words “Left” and “Right”, but knew all about exile and return.

There is, running through all of this, an unmistakable love for Israel – not the brittle, defensive love of propaganda, but the kind that has looked unflinchingly at the country’s flaws and still chosen to stand, to guide, to explain. He is generous with his criticism where he feels it is justified; he is equally generous in defending the city and the state against libels, lazy analogies, and the grotesque misdescription of Jerusalem as a place of “apartheid”. On our tour, he did not flinch from difficult subjects: 1948, 1967, neighbourhoods contested and lives uprooted. But he insisted, correctly, that complexity is not a crime and that history does not arrange itself neatly for the comfort of activists’ placards.

What struck me most, perhaps, was the way he read people as effortlessly as he read stones. The same “unique ability to read human interactions” that makes his virtual tours so engaging was on display with us in person. He knew when to let silence speak at the Western Wall, when to lighten the mood with a wry joke in the Muslim Quarter, when to pause a political explanation because someone had quite visibly just realised, for the first time, what it meant for Jews to return to a city they had prayed for over two millennia in absentia.

It is no small thing, in a world as shrill as ours, to teach without hectoring, to persuade without bullying, to love a place without turning it into an idol. Tzachi manages it. His tours – including the virtual ones he offers to people who may never set foot in Israel – make good on the promise on his website: an opportunity “to learn and engage with a truly special place,” to bring “the rich heritage of Jerusalem to life for people all over the world.”

For those of us on this delegation, that first walk with him through Jerusalem set the tone for everything that followed: Sderot and Haifa, Nova and Nir Oz, Tel Aviv and the Knesset. He had reminded us, at the very beginning, what all of this is ultimately about: a small, stubborn people and their impossibly old, impossibly young capital; a city where prophecy, politics and daily life jostle each other on every corner; a place where the past refuses to stay neatly in museums because it is still recited in prayers and lived in the present.

Jerusalem will outlast us all. Empires have discovered that to their cost. But the way we see her – as battlefield or as home, as abstract slogan or as the intricate, fragile reality we walked through with Tzachi – is not fixed. It is shaped by voices like his, by people who know how to take you by the hand and say: “Look. Listen. Feel. This is what it means when we say Yerushalayim.”

If you have the chance, take his tour – in person or online. Let him show you the corridors of power and the stones of the City of David, the many faiths that brush past each other in the Old City, and the thread that ties it all back, always, to the Jewish heart that has beat for Jerusalem since before there were domes on that hill.

In a world determined to flatten Israel into caricature, a few hours in Jerusalem with Tzachi Samiya is a small act of resistance – and a quiet, unforgettable gift.

Haifa is one of those rare places where a city feels like a conversation.

Stand on the slopes of Mount Carmel and look down: the sea stretching out in front of you, the port to your left, the German Colony unfurling at your feet – and rising above it all, in perfect symmetry, the Bahá’í Gardens, nineteen terraces of manicured green and pale stone, cascading down the mountain like a suspended hymn.

Drive a short while up the same mountain and the picture changes again: stone houses, narrow lanes, the smell of coffee and spices, the sound of Arabic mingled with Hebrew. You’ve reached the Druze villages of Daliyat al-Karmel and Isfiya – communities that have been part of this landscape for centuries and part of the State of Israel since its birth.

Between these two – the Bahá’í and the Druze – you glimpse something essential about Israel, and about Haifa in particular: a stubborn, unfashionable commitment to coexistence in a region that has not made it easy.

The Bahá’í: Terraces of Quiet Universality

The Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa and nearby ‘Akko is the spiritual and administrative heart of a religion that preaches the oneness of humanity, the equality of men and women, and the harmony of science and faith. It is not here by accident. Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, was exiled by the Ottomans to this corner of the world; his followers later built their holiest sites here as a testament not only to his life, but to the idea that out of persecution one might still choose universality instead of revenge.

The Shrine of the Báb, with its golden dome and surrounding gardens, sits at the centre of the Haifa terraces – nineteen levels of paths, lawns and flower beds, meticulously tended by volunteers from across the globe who come on special visas simply to care for this place. It is, remarkably, a sanctuary that belongs to everyone and no one: the Bahá’í keep out of local politics; they do not proselytise in Israel; they simply maintain their holy places and quietly welcome visitors of every background who walk through the gates.

There is something almost disarming in that modesty. In an age when every square metre of this region is said to be “contested”, here is a world religion whose holiest site in Haifa has been allowed – and helped – to flourish, framed by a thoroughly modern, thoroughly mixed city. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, atheists, tourists and locals wander the same terraces, peer over the same railings, pose for the same photographs. No one is asked for a creed at the entrance.

For a country so lazily described as “segregated”, it is an awkward fact: a universalist faith chose to anchor its world centre in Israel and found the space to do so in Haifa.

The Druze: Loyalty, Tradition and Open Doors

Travel further up the Carmel and symmetry gives way to bustle. Daliyat al-Karmel, Israel’s largest Druze town, and neighbouring Isfiya are home to a community at once fiercely particular and remarkably open.

The Druze faith is a tightly held, esoteric tradition that branched from Isma‘ili Islam in the 11th century. It does not seek converts; its religious texts are studied only by an initiated few. And yet Druze society in Israel is known above all for its hospitality – strong coffee, generous tables, and an easy willingness to welcome strangers into the rhythms of village life.

Walk the streets of Daliyat al-Karmel and you find a living tapestry of that identity: older men in traditional black garments and white caps; women in white veils; teenagers in jeans and hoodies; market stalls piled high with spices, olives and fresh produce from the surrounding hills. The story the community tells about itself is unusual for this region: it has, quite consciously, bound its fate to the Jewish state – taking up compulsory military service, sending sons to the IDF, serving in the police and border units, while maintaining its own religion, language and customs.

Here, pluralism is not a slogan on a poster; it is a contract lived day to day. Druze citizens sit in the Knesset, command military units, run municipalities, teach in universities and hospitals, and return on weekends to villages where the hilweh (house of worship) and the family guest room remain the beating heart of community life.

Haifa: A Reproach to the “Apartheid” Lie

Put these strands together – the Bahá’í terraces, the Druze villages, the mixed Jewish-Arab neighbourhoods of Haifa itself – and the city begins to look less like a “case study” and more like a quiet rebuke to the fashionable accusation of “apartheid”.

Apartheid, in its real historical meaning, was a system of enforced racial separation: separate benches, separate buses, separate laws, bans on mixed neighbourhoods, bars on minority participation in the army, government, universities and courts.

Haifa, by contrast, operates on an entirely different script. Jews and Arabs share buses, pavements, classrooms, hospital wards and lecture halls. Arab doctors operate on Jewish patients and vice versa in the city’s major hospitals. The university on the hill teaches in Hebrew and Arabic; its staff and student body are Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze. Mixed teams of Jewish and Arab firefighters, paramedics and engineers keep the city functioning. Municipal politics are fought with all the usual pettiness – and with candidates and councillors from every community.

On one slope of Mount Carmel, a global faith anchors its world centre, tends its gardens, and opens its gates to anyone who wishes to visit. On another, a local minority preserves a centuries-old secret tradition while sending its children to the same universities and army bases as their Jewish neighbours. Between them lies a port city where Arabic and Hebrew ring out over the same cafés and markets, where synagogues, mosques, churches and the Bahá’í shrine all share the same skyline.

None of this erases conflict, discrimination, or grievance. No honest person would claim that life in Haifa – or anywhere else in Israel – is a utopia of perfect equality. But it does complicate, in the most concrete way, the crude picture painted by the word “apartheid”. A state that allows, and in many ways encourages, Bahá’í guardianship of a world centre, Druze integration into its armed forces and institutions, and mixed cities that actually function, is not operating a regime of racial separation. It is wrestling, imperfectly and noisily, with the far more difficult task of making shared space work.

To speak honestly about Haifa, one must account not only for its sorrows and its struggles, but also for its astonishing capacity to hold difference – to make room for a Bahá’í world centre and Druze strongholds on the same mountain, under the same flag; to allow a golden dome, a minaret, a church spire and a synagogue roof to share the same horizon without one demanding the erasure of the others.

In that sense, Haifa is less a city and more a suggestion: that even here, especially here, coexistence is not a slogan for foreign consumption but a daily practice – fragile, flawed, but undeniably real.

Yesterday our delegation stepped out of the physical borderlands and into a very different front line – the digital one.

We met Kamal Penhasi in Haifa, the IDF’s Farsi-language spokesperson, a man whose life story is itself a bridge between Iran and Israel. Born and raised in Tehran, he spent his childhood in a mixed neighbourhood – two Jewish families, one Christian, and the rest Muslim – where life was, as he put it, “normal, peaceful, without hatred or antisemitism,” until 1979 changed everything. After the revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic, his family eventually made it to Israel, trading fear and uncertainty for a new, complicated freedom. 

Sitting with him today, you sense both worlds living in him at once – the Israeli officer and the Persian son. He speaks of Iran with affection and clarity, never confusing the people with the regime. That distinction is the foundation of his work.

Kamal now leads the IDF’s Farsi outreach, a team of young Israelis who spend their days crafting messages, videos and graphics aimed not at Western audiences but at ordinary Iranians scrolling their phones late at night, behind VPNs and firewalls. Their task is deceptively simple: tell the truth about Israel, the war, and the region – in a language and tone that cuts through decades of regime propaganda.

The scale of what they are doing is staggering. Before the current war, the IDF’s Farsi Instagram account had just over 300,000 followers. In a matter of months, it has exploded to around 900,000, the overwhelming majority inside Iran despite censorship and surveillance. 

He described how his team works: monitoring Iranian state media, tracking disinformation, responding quickly with verified information, short explainers, and sometimes humour – all in colloquial, idiomatic Farsi that signals respect rather than condescension. They are acutely aware that every post may be a risk for the person reading it inside Iran.

We were struck by the deeply human side of this work. Kamal and his team are not just pushing messages out; they are receiving them. Hundreds of Iranians write in – some in anger, many in curiosity, others in whispered solidarity. Some claim to be serving in the IRGC and other security organs, disillusioned and looking for a way out. 

“You feel the weight of those messages,” he said. “They remind you that behind the slogans, there are real people trying to breathe.”

For our delegation – many of us Iranian by birth or heritage – meeting Kamal in uniform, speaking flawless Farsi in the heart of Israel, was emotionally charged. He embodies a possibility that both the regime in Tehran and many Western commentators prefer to deny: that Israel and the Iranian people are not natural enemies, and that there is a quiet but growing conversation across the digital divide that could shape the future.

What stayed with us most was the moral clarity of what Kamal and his team are doing. In an age of information war, their work is an act of resistance against dehumanisation – of Israelis and of Iranians. They insist on speaking to Iranians as adults capable of understanding complexity, not as a hostile mass. They refuse the lazy binary that says one must choose between caring about Iran’s freedom and recognising Israel’s right to defend itself.

As our day ended, one member of the delegation summed it up quietly:

“On one side of the border, rockets. On the other, words. Today we met the people using words as a shield for both Israelis and Iranians.”

The trauma of this war is real and raw, but so is the determination to lay foundations for a different future. Kamal and his Farsi team are, in their own way, already speaking to that future – one post, one reply, one courageous follower at a time.

We Believe in Israel (WBII) notes the recent resignations of senior BBC leadership, including the Director-General and the Head of News, following severe failings in editorial judgment and trust. However, resignations alone are not reform. Unless the BBC guarantees a clear, measurable change in direction, these departures are little more than symbolic gestures while the underlying culture remains undisturbed.

For more than a year, the BBC has repeatedly failed to meet its own standards of accuracy, impartiality, and public responsibility. A broadcaster funded by the British public must not become an amplifier of propaganda or a sanitiser of terrorism. Yet since the atrocities of 7 October 2023, that is precisely what has happened.

The BBC’s persistent refusal to describe Hamas as a terrorist organisation—despite its proscription under UK law—has created a dangerous moral distortion. Words matter. When a group that burned families alive, raped women, executed children, and kidnapped civilians is softened into “militants,” this is not neutrality. It is a linguistic evasion that emboldens extremism and erases victims.

On 17 October 2023, the BBC broadcast unverified claims that Israel had bombed the al-Ahli hospital. This was false. The explosion was caused by a failed Islamic Jihad rocket. The correction came only after days of riots, attacks on Jewish communities, and diplomatic crises around the world. The original claim travelled instantly; the truth limped behind it. The damage was done, and remains unrepaired.

Equally alarming, BBC Arabic journalists were found sharing pro-Hamas propaganda and antisemitic content online. Despite suspensions, there has been no full transparency about who remains on air. The British public has a right to know who is shaping the news they are required by law to fund.

The human rights catastrophe of 7 October - the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust - has been routinely minimised or framed through “context”, as if atrocity requires justification. Israeli hostages and survivors have been treated as marginal details, rather than central to the moral reality of this war.

WBII therefore makes the following call:

• Resignations must be matched by a documented, demonstrable change of editorial policy.
• The BBC must publicly correct its refusal to label Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
• A full report into the al-Ahli misreporting must be published, with accountability for those responsible.
• Findings on the BBC Arabic scandal must be released, along with clarity regarding staff still employed or on air.
• Coverage of Israeli victims and hostages must be handled with the same empathy and rigour afforded to others.

Britain needs a national broadcaster that stands for truth, not evasive semantics and selective outrage. Accountability is not optional. Without concrete guarantees of a new direction, the departure of senior figures is cosmetic, not corrective.

Jewish communities in Britain, Israeli victims of terror, and the wider public deserve journalism grounded in fact - not distortion.

International sport has always been built on a simple premise: respect. Respect for your opponent, respect for the game, and respect for the principle that on the court or the field, politics is set aside in favour of fair play. Yet in Cologne last week, that principle was shattered.

At the Wheelchair Basketball Nations Cup, the British team turned their backs as Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, was played. For the Israeli players—athletes who train, sweat, and sacrifice just like any others—the moment that should have marked dignity and pride was instead turned into a humiliation. For what crime? Representing their country.

It was not just rude. It was cruel. These are athletes who know hardship, who know what it means to struggle against the odds. Many of Israel’s wheelchair athletes are veterans, wounded in service, men and women who rebuilt their lives through sport. To deny them the most basic courtesy of respect—simply standing for their anthem—was to deny their humanity.

This is not protest. It is prejudice.

The International Wheelchair Basketball Federation now finds itself at a crossroads. If such behaviour is excused, it sets a precedent: that some nations’ athletes can be treated as pariahs, subjected to ritualised humiliation under the guise of “political protest.” That is not solidarity. That is discrimination, dressed up as moral conviction.

And it reveals a deeper hypocrisy. Time and again, Israel is singled out for ostracism in arenas that are meant to be neutral. Athletes from countries with far worse human rights records—dictatorships, theocracies, regimes that suppress women and execute dissidents—are welcomed without protest. Their anthems are played, their flags raised, and no one dares turn their backs. Yet when it is Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East, respect is suddenly optional.

For Jewish athletes, this is not just an insult. It is a continuation of an old pattern: exclusion, shaming, the denial of equal standing. Once it was at universities, then in professions, and now even on the basketball court.

The Paralympics movement, of all communities, should know better. It was founded on the principle that sport can heal, that dignity can be restored through competition. To allow Israel’s athletes to be treated as outcasts undermines that very mission.

There must be consequences. Apologies are not enough. The British team’s behaviour was a violation of the spirit of sport, and of the principle of inclusion they themselves embody. If international sport cannot enforce neutrality and respect, then it becomes just another battlefield—another place where hatred, not talent, decides the rules.

Israel’s athletes deserve better. And so does sport itself.

We Believe in Israel (WBII) is proud to report that—working in coordination with our partners, The Shield of David, the Forum for Foreign Relations, and Stop The Hate UK—our joint advocacy has brought us to the threshold of a significant national security decision: the likely proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act.

After months of research, public education, and direct engagement with policymakers, we believe a critical shift has taken place—a moment in which democratic governments are prepared, finally, to name this threat for what it is.

In the moral fog that has settled over many of Europe’s democracies, clarity is rare. But now, at last, a line appears to have been drawn.

Palestine Action—an organisation that has styled itself as a direct-action movement—has, in fact, repeatedly crossed the boundaries of legality, morality, and civic decency. Its latest act—storming RAF Brize Norton and attacking military aircraft with paint and crowbars—was not protest. It was not conscience. It was sabotage: an attack on Britain’s sovereignty, its defence infrastructure, and its foundational alliances.

If the government now moves to proscribe Palestine Action, it will be a decision rooted in principle, not politics. It will recognise that this group does not speak for human rights. It speaks for ideology in the service of destruction.

To proscribe is to speak clearly. It is to say: this is no longer protected dissent—this is extremism.

At WBII, we have long maintained that Palestine Action is not a humanitarian movement. It is fuelled by hostility—towards Jews, towards Israel, and towards the liberal democratic order that underpins both. Its activists have threatened workers, glorified Hamas, vandalised public and private property, and adopted the language of liberation to justify acts of calculated aggression.

We have provided Parliament and civil society with detailed briefings. Our policy papers have documented the group’s use of terrorist symbology, its dangerous flirtation with incitement, and its alignment with hostile foreign narratives.

If the proscription comes, it will be because the facts have become unavoidable.

But the truth is this: Palestine Action is not the whole threat. It is only the visible tip of something darker.

Behind the slogans and paint lies the guiding hand of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—the ideological engine of the Iranian regime. The IRGC funds, trains, and directs global networks of radicalisation. It sustains Hamas and Hezbollah. It engineers cyber warfare. And it extends its influence not just across the Middle East, but into European capitals—including our own.

As outlined in our research, the IRGC has:

• Targeted UK parliamentarians with cyberattacks and intimidation;
• Harassed Iranian dissidents living in exile in Britain;
• Amplified anti-Israel messaging through proxy groups;
• And mirrored its rhetoric in movements such as Palestine Action.

This is no coincidence. It is orchestration.

Palestine Action is the mask. The IRGC is the face.

Should the UK government now take the necessary step of proscribing Palestine Action, it must also begin a broader reckoning—one that culminates in the full proscription of the IRGC as a terrorist entity, in line with the United States, Canada, and others.

This must include its:

• Name and symbols;
• Front organisations;
• Funding arms;
• And ideological networks operating in London, Manchester, Birmingham and beyond.

To stop at Palestine Action would be to address the saboteur while ignoring the architect.

This moment—if confirmed—will mark a victory. Not for any one organisation, but for the rule of law, for the integrity of protest, and for the protection of our democratic society from ideologically driven violence.

We are proud of the role WBII and its partners have played in reaching this inflection point. We will remain at the forefront of efforts to ensure that Britain confronts extremism not with slogans, but with action.

The line is being drawn. Let it hold.

From We Believe in Israel and our partners across the free world, this is a message not of politics, but of principle—not of division, but of destiny.

To the Iranian people: you were never meant to live in chains.

Yours is a nation that once lit the world with the brilliance of its culture, its intellect, and its soul. From Cyrus the Great to the poetry of Hafez, your heritage is one of dignity and wisdom. Yet for too long, a regime of cruelty has sought to replace your greatness with violence, your voice with fear, and your dreams with death.

We say this clearly and without apology: the Islamic Republic does not represent you. It holds you hostage—using religion as a weapon, cloaking tyranny in robes of righteousness, and sending your children to fight in wars you never chose.

You are not alone in this struggle.

We see you—women who remove the veil in defiance of darkness. Students who chant for liberty in the streets. Families who mourn in silence, yet carry hope like a hidden flame. We in Israel, and across the world, honour your courage. And we call on you now—not in pity, but in partnership: rise together, stand as one, and claim the freedom that is already yours in spirit.

Do not be fooled by the propaganda that calls Israel your enemy. That lie is designed to divide us while the same hands steal your future. We are not your enemy—we are fellow human beings who know what it is to fight for survival, for democracy, and for peace.

Let this be the generation that says: Enough. No more terror in our name. No more martyrdom for men in bunkers. No more silence while our sisters bleed.

This is your moment.

Rally together. Rekindle the spirit of resistance. Refuse to bow. You have the right to choose your leaders, to speak your truth, to live in a country where your life is not a pawn in someone else’s war.

Freedom is not given. It is claimed.
And it is waiting for you.