Roughly 400 teenagers from across North America gathered at Nefesh B’Nefesh headquarters this week as part of The Anne Samson Jerusalem Journey (TJJ), a joint program of JSU, NCSY, OU Israel, RootOne, the Maidenbaum Family Foundation and Nefesh B’Nefesh. Representing the Atlantic Seaboard, Canada, New York and Southern regions, they joined “Voices of Israel,” a panel discussion moderated by Rabbi Uri Pilichowski that placed three very different Israelis side by side: a Bedouin former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Ethiopian-born CEO of a cultural touring company and an American-born tour guide and broadcaster who made Aliyah more than three decades ago.
Also on hand were members of the RootOne team, including David Bryfman, Ph.D., CEO of The Jewish Education Project and interim executive director of RootOne.
Rabbi Jacob Bernstein opened the session by tying the evening to the shared mission of NCSY, JSU, TJJ and RootOne: helping teens find their own voice. RootOne’s role, he said, extends well beyond funding a trip to Israel. The organization is invested in ensuring participants get the most out of the experience before, during and after the journey home.
The Panelists
Mohammed Kaabiya is a strategic consultant and Middle East affairs expert who served as an advisor and campaign manager for Prime Minister Netanyahu and as advisor to Israel’s minister of internal security on Arab affairs and regional crime reduction. A graduate of an elite IDF unit and an active Air Force reservist, Kaabiya lectures internationally and speaks Hebrew, Arabic and English fluently.
Naftali Aklum is CEO of Yerus, an educational touring and workshop company built around the history and culture of Ethiopian Israelis. Born in Ethiopia in 1979 and brought to Israel as an infant the following year, Aklum grew up in Be’er Sheva, served in the IDF as a firefighter and studied politics, government and Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He volunteers with at-risk youth in Be’er Sheva and mentors Ethiopian-Israeli academics entering the workforce.
Eve Harow is a licensed Israeli tour guide, host of the podcast “Rejuvenation” and a longtime public speaker on Israel. She made Aliyah from California in 1988 after earning a master’s in psychology from Pepperdine, later adding a second master’s, with honors, in Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology from Bar-Ilan University. She serves as director of tourism and education for the One Israel Fund, sits on the board of CAMERA’s Israeli affiliate Presspectiva and is a former Efrat councilwoman who raised seven children there with her husband, a physician.
‘Everyone Has to Stand for His Home’
Asked how each of them stands up for Israel, Kaabiya pointed to his own roots in a Bedouin village in northern Israel and his path through the Air Force and Middle East studies at the University of Haifa. His answer was direct: Israel is home and defending home is a universal obligation. He noted that his own tribe has lost three members in Israel’s wars. He said this was a marker of the Bedouin community’s commitment to the country.
Aklum framed his advocacy around visibility. Since Oct. 7, he has pushed back publicly against claims from Black Lives Matter-aligned and South African groups that Israel is an apartheid state, arguing that most people simply don’t know Israel’s Jewish population includes Black Jews. “I was born in Africa, but I left Africa,” he told the students, describing Ethiopian Jews as historically unique-a people who left the continent not into slavery but toward home. “Jews are Jews,” he said. “They don’t have one color but lots of colors.”
Harow described a slower path to confidence: realizing that speaking up for the Jewish people was something she was meant to do, then educating herself so she could educate others. She spoke of Israel as a large, sometimes dysfunctional family bound by a shared sense of purpose and urged the students to understand their own place in Jewish history. “The best time to be a Jew is now,” she said, reminding them that earlier generations of Jews would have traded places with them in an instant for the chance to stand in Jerusalem.
Since Oct. 7
Each panelist offered a personal memory from the aftermath of the Hamas attack. Harow recalled searching her house for a tambourine the moment she learned her family and friends were safe, thinking of Miriam at the Red Sea, even as she acknowledged attending too many funerals since. Her son currently serves in IDF reserve duty in the Golan.
For Aklum, the defining image of the past months has been unity. Jews and Arabs alike showed up for one another in a way he says he had not seen in 46 years in Israel. “Before Oct. 7 we were so separate,” he said. “When we are together there is no force on earth that can beat us.”
Kaabiya spoke about the month his younger brother, a paratrooper, went silent after Oct. 7. When Israelis of every background mobilized together, he said, it crystallized exactly what and who they were fighting for. “Hamas didn’t discriminate,” he said. “They killed everyone. That clarified for me what we’re fighting for and against who.”
Correcting the Narrative
Pressed on what they’d tell people who only know Israel through media coverage, Aklum pointed to Israel’s standing as the sole democracy in the Middle East, contrasting it with the treatment of Black citizens elsewhere in the region. He was candid about Israel’s imperfections, including discrimination and police brutality he has personally witnessed, but argued greater awareness of Ethiopian Israelis will only strengthen the country. He noted the range of backgrounds represented in the Knesset itself. Jews of every background serve alongside Muslim, Christian, Bedouin and Druze members.
Kaabiya echoed the point from his own experience advising Israeli leadership as a Bedouin minority. He argued Israel outperforms even many Western democracies on minority inclusion, citing the scale of the Syrian civil war-more than 500,000 deaths between 2012 and 2015-as a point of comparison regional critics rarely raise.
Harow’s answer centered on instinct: in Israel, she said, people run toward gunshots rather than away from them. She framed the value placed on saving lives as an old Jewish inheritance, carried through centuries of displacement because it lived in ideas rather than possessions. “We didn’t get independence in 1948,” she said. “We reclaimed it.”
A Message to Bring Home
Asked what a teenager returning to the United States in a few weeks can actually do, Aklum urged pride and consideration of Aliyah, specifically to the Negev, invoking both Ben-Gurion’s belief that Israel’s security depended on the region and a line from the Talmud in Bava Batra. He challenged the group to see Jewish history as one shared story rather than a set of separate, localized narratives.
Kaabiya’s ask was simpler: never hide being Jewish or being pro-Israel. Recalling visits to Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, he described Jewish students too afraid to identify themselves publicly. He said this silence let false narratives about Israel go unchallenged.
Harow closed with a charge to carry Israeli boldness home. “Be brave,” she said. “Whether you wear a kippah on campus, a Star of David or a hamsa. People are trying to kill our spirit, our pride in who we are and what we accomplish in the world. Do not cower.”
