Noam Shuster-Eliassi is what some people might call a ‘unicorn’.
She’s an anti-Zionist, Jewish-Iranian Israeli who speaks fluent Arabic and grew up in a tiny village in Israel called the ‘Oasis of Peace’, where Jews and Palestinians choose to live together. And while she started a career in diplomacy with a stint at the United Nations trying to bring peace to the region, the issue of coexistence became such a joke that she literally changed her career… to comedy.
Noam is the star of the new documentary ‘Coexistence, My Ass!’, which won the Special Jury Award at Sundance film festival last year. The film explores her political evolution from growing up as an Israeli poster-child of the “coexistence movement” to becoming a standup comedian determined to dismantle apartheid within Israel.
Now, she joins Mehdi on the latest episode of ‘We’re Not Kidding’.
“Literally you can count the number of people who share your views on one hand in the state of Israel right now,” Mehdi tells Noam.
“Seriously. And it’s funny, but it’s also really, really sad,” she says. “The coexistence community in Israel has failed miserably.”
For several years, Noam had been a regular fixture on Israeli television mocking Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government. But after October 7, almost everything in Israel changed — even in comedy. “In the past two years, I’ve seen comedians that actively made genocide jokes,” Noam says. “They have actively been part of the propaganda machine.”
The two also discuss the contradiction of liberal Israelis who are critical of Netanyahu’s anti-democratic government yet don’t extend the same consideration to Palestinians living under apartheid, as well as the barrage of hasbara that Israeli society was exposed to after October 7. “There are normal lies when you grow up in the Israeli narrative,” Noam says. “But that opportunity of October 7th was an opportunity for the Israeli narrative to just drown us in fake news.” ….more
