The best way to see through the lies about Israel that spread widely is to see the Jewish state in person, according to Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel.
“The more people who can come to Israel—they will go home with an understanding of what Israel’s really about,” the U.S. envoy told JNS at the opening dinner of the 35th International Mayors Conference at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. “Not the nonsense that the Tucker Carlsons of the world lie and tell, but the truth.”
“They will be able to see it for themselves,” Huckabee said.
The event gathers 20 mayors and municipal leaders, from 18 countries on five continents, in the Jewish state from Nov. 8 until Nov. 12. The American Jewish Congress, Israeli Foreign Ministry and American Council for World Jewry sponsored the gathering.
Daniel Rosen, president of the congress, told JNS that Eric Adams attended last year as New York City mayor, but Zohran Mamdani, now Big Apple mayor, wasn’t contacted.
“We did not invite Mayor Mamdani on this,” Rosen told JNS. “We don’t only invite mayors that we think would agree. We bring mayors that we think are interested in learning about what Israel has to offer, and really building bridges.”
The mayors spent Sunday night at the historic hotel before going south on Monday to visit the site of the Nova festival massacre on Oct. 7.
They appeared in high spirits as they mingled over drinks on Sunday night, before sitting for a three-course dinner, during which Huckabee delivered the keynote speech and Rosen and several others addressed the group.
The dinner fell on the eve of the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” when a Nazi pogrom occurred on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938.
Huckabee told JNS that the gathering, whose theme this year is “empowering” tomorrow’s cities with technology and artificial intelligence, would afford participants a chance to form their own impressions of the Jewish state.
“They go home, they’ll tell people what they saw,” the envoy said. “What they will see is a very vibrant, resilient nation who, despite being under threat every single day, is continuing to outperform the expectations that anyone should have.”
“The United States is such a proud partner of Israel, and we’re grateful for the relationship that we’ve had, starting with Harry Truman first acknowledging, really, the existence and the right of Israel to return to its homeland 11 minutes after independence was declared in 1948,” he told JNS.
“We just want to preserve and protect that partnership,” he said.
Samuel Dusengiyumva, mayor of Kigali, Rwanda, was 13 when he survived the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, during which his parents and four siblings were murdered.
Rwanda is “bouncing back with a lot of things—good things happening,” he told JNS during the cocktail hour. He addressed fellow attendees during the dinner.
“I’m part of that history, and I’m very proud to be leading a city that is considered as the cleanest city of Africa and one of the fastest-growing cities in the region,” he told JNS. “It’s amazing to be here, to see what the Israeli country has been able to achieve in the last few years and to be inspired.”
Rwanda continues to face an “existential threat from the neighbors,” he said.
“Hatred, antisemitism, is a serious problem, even today,” he told JNS. “That’s why we have to join our efforts to fight it, and to promote humanity, and promote living very good values for human beings.”
Dusengiyumva was looking forward to “blessings” during the four-day trip, which was slated to include visits to Sderot, Tel Aviv and several Israeli technology companies and startups.
“I love it here,” he told JNS. “People are friendly. Everyone we meet, they talk to you. Yesterday, I had a chance to visit the Old City. I saw a lot of things I read in the Bible. It’s amazing.”
Rosen, of the American Jewish Congress, told JNS that three participants in past mayoral delegations are now presidents of their countries: Lai Ching-te (Taiwan), Nayib Bukele (El Salvador) and Nasry Asfura (Honduras)
“We believe that mayors are the ones who actually need to figure out how to make sure the wheels turn, how to make their citizens’ lives better,” Rosen said.
The mayors face many of the same challenges, he thinks.
“Some are more focused on agriculture. Some are more focused on urban, but many of the startups that they see and leaders in innovation that they see here bring solutions that a lot of these mayors need to bring to improve the lives of their citizens,” he told JNS.
Four mayors of U.S. cities are participating: Andy Thomson (Boca Raton, Fla.), Lori Bagwell (Carson City, Nev.), Stephen Jones (Columbus, Miss.) and Mark Schwartz (Teaneck, N.J.), and five come from Europe: Almudena Negro Konrad (Torrelodones, Spain), Jaroslav Zámečník (Liberec, Czech Republic), Florian Kaida (Krumbach, Germany), Përparim Rama (Prishtina, Kosovo) and Toni Konjanovski (Bitola, North Macedonia), according to organizers.
Dusengiyumva, of Kigali, Rwanda, was joined by Richard Kubana, director general of the Rwandan local government ministry.
Zuberi Kidumo, mayor of Moshi, Tanzania, and Edmund Emmanuel Rutaraka, head of the council of Tanzania’s Hai District, attended, as did Anwel Sadat Ahmed (mayor of Oforikrom, Ghana), Mutula Kilonzo Junior (governor of Makueni County, Kenya), Fenoherintsoa Ralambomanana (mayor of Antananarivo, Madagascar) and Peter Alex Banda (mayor of Lilongwe, Malawi).
Marinos Lambrou (mayor of Akamas, Cyprus), Argishti Mekhakyan (mayor of Vagharshapat, Armenia) and Thinley Namgay (mayor of Samdrup Jongkhar, Bhutan) also attended.
Rama, mayor of the Kosovo capital, told JNS that “all the mayors share very similar issues.”
“We have to provide services for our people,” he said. “We have to ensure that people—they always have better lives, that we’re increasing their associated value and we find similar issues, and we share ideas, and we bring different mayors together.”
Rama, 50, was visiting Israel for the first time and told JNS that he was “loving it.”
“It’s just fascinating,” he said. “More than 4,000 years of history there on how different civilizations come together, where they meet, the agreements and disagreements and now everything comes into this very small part of the world.”
JNS asked Rama about attitudes toward Israel in Kosovo, which became the first Muslim-majority country to open an embassy in Jerusalem in 2021.
“We’ve gone through war ourselves, so everybody is very sensitive towards war,” Rama said, of the 1998-1999 Kosovo War, during which Serbian forces ethnically cleansed Kosovo’s Albanian population.
“We feel and we obviously pray for peace,” he told JNS. “We want people here to find resolution amongst each other, to find ways forward, to understand each other, for there to be, perhaps, not only tolerance—because tolerance is when you’re not agreeing but you’re tolerating—but understanding.”
In 2023, Kosovo’s parliament unanimously adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred, making it one of the few Muslim-majority territories to do so.
“Through these processes of building confidence in people, in different communities,” one can “bring people together and peace prevails,” Rama told JNS. “That’s what we pray for Israel and for all the communities here.”
Rama is not concerned about criticism from those who might see his visit to Israel as “political.”
“Everything is political,” he told JNS. “Every decision we make is political, but I think that we can’t, we shouldn’t hide from each other.”
“We should always be there where the conversation is happening,” he said. “We should always talk to one another, impact each other positively and build peace.”
“By knowing one another, we can see how alike we all are, and how we build peace together, how we are all searching for safer, better life for our children, for our family, for the future of our cities, for the future of our countries and for the future of our people,” he said.
Schwartz, the Teaneck mayor, told JNS that he was the only Jewish mayor in the delegation, and certainly the only Orthodox one.
“I actually asked myself, ‘Why am I here?’” said Schwartz, who wears a kippah and was one of only two mayors on the trip who had been to Israel before. “Most of the mayors here are mayors of large cities. There’s one mayor, I believe he said, who has 14 million people in his metro area.”
Teaneck has about 41,000 residents, he said, a significant number of whom are Orthodox Jews.
“I believe they felt it’d be good for me to blend in and promote Israel as well,” Schwartz told JNS. “You have almost a dozen African mayors, but you have no one here that actually knows Israel, knows the Judaism part of it.”
Schwartz, who was in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, told JNS that he avoided visiting the site of the Nova festival massacre.
“I try not to watch videos,” he said. “I am a 28-year firefighter, and an Ambulance Corps member, but I just couldn’t watch. I didn’t want to see all that.”
He was asked to recite Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, when the delegation visits the Nova site, he said.
“For me, that’ll be—I think—the highlight of the trip,” he told JNS. “Because I’ve pushed it off for so long.”
Schwartz compared the international delegation to the world-conquest board game Risk, which he grew up playing on Shabbat. He joked that he was surprised to learn, seeing there was a mayor from Madagascar, that it was a real country.
“It’s Risk on a Shabbos come to life,” he told JNS, laughing.
Nkuhi, of the northern Tanzania city near Mount Kilimanjaro, told JNS that people at the airport back home were concerned when they learned the group was traveling to Israel.
“They asked, ‘Where are you going?’ We tell them, ‘We’re going to Tel Aviv,’” he said.
Many in Tanzania are under the impression that Israel is a war zone, and some asked him, “‘Are you going to make it there? Are you not going to be bombed?’” he told JNS.
“But we tell them, ‘No. No. No. No,’” Nkuhi said. “We believe that what is said mostly in the media is not reflecting on the reality, which is presented on the ground.”
Many back home also think that “there are divisions here in terms of the ethnic, religious, or anything,” according to Nkuhi.
“But we are telling them, ‘We’ve been here,’” he told JNS. “What we’ve seen, like today in Jerusalem, is what we are communicating at home. Yes we have great communities here and they are representing diversity and coexistence.”
In Israel, “you have Jewish communities, you have Arab and Muslim communities, as well as Christians,” Nkuhi said. “They are all serving and living happily. They coexist.”
“We’ve had these questions, but we are telling them the realities on the ground,” he told JNS.
