This one is really moving for me because it's the story of a girl that
has been raised in Iran to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning.
And now that she see the posters that we're sending,
she start, she said that she changed her mind.
And now she loves that blue, she loves that star, and
she loves that flag—talking about the Israeli flag—and she wished that we meet
and we come to visit one each other in just few day after I posted the first poster.
The day after, Iranians start to respond with their own posters.
They have graphic designers.
What?
This is crazy!
So you can see they're still shy— they don't want to show their faces,
but they want to spread the message. They want to respond.
They want to say the same thing, so,
and now it's communication. It's a two-way story.
It's Israeli and Iranian sending the same message one to each other.
This never happened before, and this is two people supposed to be enemy.
We're on the verge of war and suddenly,
people on Facebook starting to say, I like this guy. I love those guys.
And it become really big at some point.
And then it become news.
Because when you seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news,
and suddenly, there is something that was happening that was good news.
So, the guys on the news, they say, okay, let's talk about this.
And it just came.
And it, it was so much.
I remember one day, Michal, she was talking with the journalist,
and she was asking him, "Who's going to see the show?"
And he say, "Everybody."
So, she said, "Everybody in the— in Palestine? In where? Israel?
Who is everybody?"
"Everybody." She say, "Syria?" "Syria."
"Lebanon?" "Lebanon."
At some point, you just say 40 million people
are going to see you today. It's everybody.
The Chinese. And we were just at the beginning of the story.
Something crazy also happened every time a country start talking about it,
like Germany, America, wherever, a page on Facebook pop up with
the same logo, with the same stories.
So, at the beginning, we had Iran loves Israel, which is an Irani sitting
in Tehran, say, "Okay, Israel loves Iran? I give you Iran Loves Israel."
You have Palestine Loves Israel.
You have Lebanon that just few days ago, and these all lists of pages on Facebook
dedicated to the same message, to people sending their love one to each other.
The moment I really understand that something was happening, a friend of mine
tell me, "Google the word Israel." And that, those were the first images
on those day that pop ups from Google when you were typing "Israel" or "Iran."
We really changed how people sees the Middle East,
because you're not in the Middle East—you're somewhere over there.
And then you want to see the Middle East,
so you go on Google, and you say "Israel," and they give you the bad stuff.
And for few day, you got those images.
Today, the Israel Loves Iran page is this number: 80,000.
And 2 million people last week went on the page
and shared, like, I don't know, comment one of the photos.
So, for five months now, that's what we're doing:
me, Michal, few of my friends that just making images.
We showing a new reality by just making images,
because that's how the world perceives us.
They see images of us, and they see bad images.
So, we're working on making good images.
End of story. Look at this one.
This is the Iran Love Israel page. This is not the Israel Love Iran.
This is not my page.
This is a guy in Tehran on the Day of Remembrance of the Israeli
fallen soldier putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page.
This is a—this is the enemy!
What?
And it's going both way.
It's like we're showing respect one to each other. And we're understanding.
And you show compassion, and you become friends.
And at some point you become friend on Facebook and you become friend in life.
You can go and travel and meet people.
And I was in Munich a few weeks ago. I went there to open an exposition about Iran,
and I meet there with people from the page that told me,
"Okay, you going to be in Europe— I'm coming." I'm coming from France,
from Holland, and from Germany, of course.
And from Israel people came.
And we just met there for the first time in real life.
I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time.
And we just shake hands and have a coffee and a nice discussion,
and we talk about food and basketball, and that was the end of it.
Remember that image from the beginning? At some point
we meet in real life, and we become friends.
So, you may ask yourself, "Who is this dude?"
My name is Ronny Edry, and I'm 41. I'm an Israeli.
I'm father of two. I'm a husband, and
I'm a graphic designer— I'm teaching graphic design.
And I'm not that naive, because lot of the time I've been asked,
many time I've been asked, yeah but,
this is really naive sending flowers over—
I mean, I'm, I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers
for three years, and I know how it looks from the ground.
I know how it can look really bad. So, to me,
this is the courageous thing to do, to try to reach the other side
before it's too late, because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late,
and sometimes, war is inevitable.
Sometimes, but maybe doing an effort, we can avoid it.
Maybe as people, because especially in Israel, we're in a democracy.
We have the freedom of speech,
and maybe that little thing can change something.
And really, we can be our own ambassadors.
We can just send a message and hope for the best.
So, I want to ask Michal, my wife, to come with me on the stage
just to make with you one image,
because it's all about images,
and maybe that image will help us change something.
Just to raise that—exactly.
And I'm just going to take a picture of it.
And I'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of
"Israeli for Peace" or something.
