I have a confession to make. But before I make that confession, and especially if you are somebody who knows me, I want you to promise to read the whole story before making any judgments. I post the story here in its entirety but also on many other social media.

Here we go:

“I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people”! and emphasis here is on the past tense. Yes, I was anti-Semitic, even though I am a Semite, as this term broadly refers to the peoples who speak Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, among others.

I want to tell you my story of redemption with four goals in mind:

1. I acknowledge that prejudice, and especially hateful prejudice, is a vile philosophy that should be eradicated from our society. And by that, I specifically mean “irrational hate towards an entire class of people because of their affiliation to that class”.
2. Religious zeal, nationalism, and ideologies are abstract concepts that we adopted to unite us on purposeful missions, which is a good thing. But let’s not have these abstract constructs supersede our humanity. Humans are real— you can touch another human, but you can’t touch Zionism or Jihad. Furthermore, we all share 99.9% of our DNA, so don’t let the 0.1% of genes that flipped divide us, instead focus on the 99.9% that binds us.
3. There is hope. Modern history has shown us, more often than not, that peace always prevails. This is the way.
4. I paint a dream for how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can possibly be resolved once the irrational fear is subdued.

If you agree with me and support the message of peace and hope that I convey here, then I sincerely invite you to share my story with as many people as you can.

For you to appreciate my redemption, you need to hear my story, where I came from, and how I came to be. I was born in 1970 in Egypt, on a house bed via a midwife, in a district called Shobra in Cairo. Note that at the time, Israel was occupying the Sinai peninsula, so the two countries were locked in a state of war.

My parents took me to the UK shortly after I was born. I spent 5 years there while my father was getting his PhD in Accounting from Southampton University. In 1975, we moved back to Egypt, where I lived until 1995, and that’s when I came to the US. Now I am 50 years old: 5 years in the UK, 20 years in Egypt, and 25 years in the US. Today I am a very proud Egyptian-American with a little bit of British flair. I am also a proud Muslim with a touch of healthy agnosticism. I firmly believe that human minds can hold multiple states at the same time; there is no need to be binary about it.

Ever since I was young, and soon after I became intellectually conscious, the only narrative I heard from everybody around me was that the Jewish people are here to kill all of us, Arabs, and build their greater state of Israel that would span the land from the Euphrates River (in Iraq) to the Nile River (in Egypt). That was the story I was told, regardless of whether it is true or not— it was the main narrative most of us were told as we grew up. How can we not hate the other when we fear that they are here to kill all of us? In addition to that fear, there was widespread anger over the many Palestinians slaughtered in the Nakba of 1948, and the many Egyptians killed during Israel's occupation of Sinai from 1967 to 1973. I am not excusing myself, but for a child who was just forming his notion of the world around him, the narrative becomes the truth, and the fear, coupled with anger, leads to hate.

That narrative is still being told today, though many are starting to see through it. And, to be fair, I hear from many of my Israeli friends born around the same time that they had a similar counter-narrative: Those Arabs want to kill all of us so that the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea becomes theirs; they want to drown us all in the sea.

We were both taught to fear the other, and adding some really horrendous wars of rage in the mix, hatred became entrenched deep in our hearts and minds from a very young age. In retrospect, I blame our governments and elderly for doing that to us, for letting their prejudiced ideologies shape us in that manner, but they didn’t know any better either, and they did lose a lot of loved ones in those wars, regardless of intention.

I moved to the US in 1995 to get my PhD at Stanford University while I still held deep resentment towards the Jewish people. I was irrationally prejudiced. But here in the US, I started to see the humanity of the other side. I started to see the truth. And I emerged from the Matrix of hate that my mind was submerged in for so many years.

My first research advisor at Stanford was of Arab origin and didn’t treat me in a fair way. To my aid, came Héctor García-Molina, a Mexican-American professor at Stanford, who was probably an atheist or agnostic. Back home, I was also nurtured to be prejudiced against kafirs, which is anybody who disbelieved that Allah is the one and only true God, so that would include atheists and agnostics. Héctor became the first person to lend their privilege to me, and he helped me out during a rather tough time. For those who don’t know, Héctor was the research advisor for Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. As far as I am concerned, Héctor was not a “kafir”, on the contrary, he was an angel by all meanings of that word— a true human. He was one of the first reasons why the vile virus of prejudice started to be conquered in my heart. Héctor passed away in Nov 2019 at the age of 65, and we all miss him dearly.

Then came my second research advisor, Nick McKeown, who was very instrumental in helping me mature. Nick especially focused on training me to listen, pause and reflect, before I speak or respond— something I still struggle with to this day. He was also very instrumental in shaping my public speaking skills, especially on how to connect with an audience. Nick, like Héctor, continued to cure me of prejudice against the other. He was very instrumental in my life in so many ways, including connecting me with Frank Marshall who became the angel investor for my first startup (VivaSmart) that was later acquired by Yahoo. Nick, and Frank, if you are reading or listening, thanks for all that you did for me.

After Nick came Mendel Rosenblum, my research advisor for my PhD thesis (the vMatrix, look it up). Clearly from his last name, he is Jewish, and that made me very cautious when working with him. I wasn’t sure if he was religious, but as I got to know him, I felt that he was atheist or at least agnostic. For those who don’t know, Mendel is the co-founder of VMware, one of the most impactful information technology companies of our ge...