Ovadia, now 25, was born and raised in Al-Ma’moura, a high-scale neighborhood in Alexandria, Egypt, under the name Maysa Abdallah. She lived there until the age of 15. Her wealthy family had a successful fashion factory, and for many years she lived comfortably. She didn’t even know she was Jewish until 2005.

“Our parents didn’t allow us to pray in a mosque or a church or visit friends’ houses, and we never understood why,” Ovadia says, with traces of a foreign accent slipping into her speech, dimples visible on her smiling face, and her eyes alight. “There were strange things at home that I didn’t understand, like a meal on the Sabbath that my grandparents and parents insisted we eat together.

“My grandmother, who was very religious, also lit candles every Sabbath, but we, the kids, didn’t know why. Grandmother would also tell us stories from the Bible, but they didn’t interest us. I remember that I really loved the taste of the apple in honey, but I had no idea that it was connected to Rosh Hashanah.

“Our parents preferred not to tell us that we were Jews so that we wouldn’t talk about it outside our house, so that we wouldn’t be hurt. There were kids who suspected us and laughed at us. I was told that I looked Jewish, and when I answered them that I wasn’t, they asked why my mother didn’t wear a veil. I didn’t know how to answer, so I told them that we were secular.”

Until 6th grade, she studied in a Muslim Brotherhood school and after that she transferred to a Coptic Christian school. “I didn’t like the Muslim school. I suffered there. I didn’t want to wear a veil, and they forced me to. Every day we had to memorize entire chapters of the Quran by heart. Whoever didn’t study or didn’t speak nicely got beaten – serious beatings, not friendly pats. One time, I dared to stick my tongue out at one of the other students during a lesson, and the teacher hit my hand with a rod until my hand broke. I was taught to hate Jews, that they were creatures with horns, a long nose and a tail, and to hate Israel, the cruelest country in the world.”

After the second Intifada broke out in 2000, solidarity with the Palestinian people and hatred of Israel were on the rise at the Muslim school that Ovadia attended. “On the wall in the classroom, there were two pictures. One was Muhammad Al-Dura, the child that, they explained to us, the Israelis had murdered. There was one picture taken just before he had died, and a second picture taken when he was already dead, on a stretcher. That’s what was in front of the children’s eyes – a child’s corpse. My parents realized that there was no point in keeping us in that school, so we transferred to the Coptic school. That was much easier to handle. They also beat you there, but only for really serious things.”

In 2005, the family was forced to leave Egypt after masked men broke into their home, proclaimed that Jews were unwelcome in Egypt and that it would be best that the children not go to school anymore. “Five bearded men, with weapons and clubs, broke into the house,” Ovadia recalls. “At first, they broke the glass of the electronic gate at the entrance, and then they came inside yelling ‘Ald Al-Yahud,’ ‘the Jewish family,’ and just started to destroy the entire house. They demanded to know where the men were, but none of the men – my father, uncle, and grandfather – were home.

“The attackers pushed my mother and she fell. We screamed. My brother and cousin were on the roof. The attackers went up there, trampled them and shot next to their heads to scare them. We heard the shots downstairs. It was horrifying. They left the house eventually, the police came, and we took Mom to the hospital.”

Three days after the incident, the grandfather gathered his seven grandchildren and told them that they were Jews and that soon they would go to Israel and live in Jerusalem. “I couldn’t understand where this had come from. To Israel? Why would I want to go to a country with people who had big noses and a tail? It was a total shock. The children reacted badly and were angry, but we left in the end.”

“At the beginning, I pretended it was a trip. Ulpan was pretty good for me, but afterwards my cousin Dina and I transferred to the Amaliya High School [in Jerusalem], and it wasn’t easy. We fought with the other girls all the time. Mostly I did. They called me Pharaoh. We had heavy Arabic accents, so they made fun of us. I was very insulted and I would hit the other girls. It took the teachers a long time to teach me not to hit. I couldn’t stand the way the other girls talked and mostly disrespected the teachers. Maybe everything they taught me from a young age about the Jews affected me. The girls seemed ugly and cruel to me.”

“You’ll laugh, but the first time I went to Mea Shearim, there was some Haredi guy [religious Jew] – you know, with the whole outfit – that pressed himself against a wall in order to not come near me. I turned around to check that he didn’t have a tail. Today, when I see what Palestinian children are taught, when I see seven year olds saying on air that Jews are apes and pigs, and the hostess of the program applauds them, I understand them. Once, I also thought like they did.”

Her connection with Palestinian Media Watch started in high school. “I took the Arabic matriculation, and one of the employees at the [PMW] institute taught a class there once and asked every student to read part of a text. When he heard me reading, he told the teacher that I sounded like an Arab, and asked about me. The teacher told him my story, and he suggested that Dina and I come to work at PMW during summer vacation. I was 17, and ecstatic that I had a job. It was a joy. After high school I started working here full time.”

Her acclimatization at the [PMW] institute wasn’t easy. “I would argue a lot with the other employees. Because I didn’t have Israeli friends, and because I didn’t watch Israeli television, I was convinced that Israel was hurting the Palestinians for no reason. I hid the fact that I would cry about Palestinian suffering from the director of the institute, Itamar Marcus, but I would say to the other employees: ‘The Palestinians lived here, and you came with weapons, kicked them out with force and took their homes.’ One of the employees would argue with me all the time, and I would answer him half-seriously, ‘Well, be quiet, you occupier.’ The employees would laugh and say that you can take Meira out of Egypt, you can’t take Egypt out of Meira.

Her exposure to the Palestinian television broadcasts during her work at PMW didn’t contribute to forming her identity as an Israeli. “Every time I watched In a Hero’s House, a program on official PA TV in which a different prisoner’s house is visited and the terrorist’s mother is interviewed – I would cry. I cried together with the Palestinian mothers about their suffering, and I didn’t understand that they put these people into prison because they committed terror attacks. I thought that the Israelis were persecuting them for no reason. They don’t explain on the program what happened before the arrest. It’s like now, when PA TV portrays the 13-year-old boy who carried out the Pisgat Ze’ev stabbing attack, as a victim. They don’t show that he stabbed someone, only that he was shot. That’s how they present most cases, as if some Arab who didn’t do anything was attacked in the street and shot for no reason.

“At some point, the other employees started to convince me to watch Israeli news. One of the employees would call me at 8 o’clock and remind me to watch the news in Hebrew. Today, I don’t need a reminder anymore. In time, I also made Israeli friends, and four years ago I started to see things differently and support Israel.”

Today, Ovadia tries to pass on her support for Israel to her Facebook friends in Egypt, Morocco and Yemen. “Unfortunately, even when I try to explain nicely, it doesn’t help. I tried to explain to them that their media is showing them an incomplete picture, that a 13-year-old boy wasn’t shot for no reason – he stabbed another boy his age and seriously injured him. When I ask them why they don’t say that it’s terror, they usually respond with curses: ‘Shut up, smelly Jew,’ ‘you monkey,’ ‘you pig,’ ‘don’t speak Arabic, you’re contaminating our language.’ People are very fixed in their ideas. They say: ‘It’s not terror, we’ll keep stabbing you until you leave our land.’

“Even when I explained as nicely and politely as possible, no one agreed with me. I understand them. I used to be exactly where they are, but they had nobody to show them the other side, and that’s what they’ve been told since a very young age.”

“Education from a young age has a tremendous effect and Meira’s story demonstrates this,” says Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch’s director. “What lies behind children who take a knife and go out to stab is many years of hate education. These aren’t bad kids. They’ve just been convinced that that’s what God wants: That the Jew is so vile and despicable, that he needs to be murdered. The average Palestinian child isn’t responsible. He’s a victim of an education system and a media that’s teaching him to hate.

“The hate stems from two major streams of thought: A Palestinian nationalistic one that seeks to liberate what they call “occupied Palestine,” which includes Haifa and Tel Aviv; and an Islamic religious one, which in my opinion is the more central one because it leaves a lasting impression. The religion-based hatred presents Jews as the murderers of Allah’s prophets, the representatives of the Devil, and apes and pigs. At the national level, Israel has no right to exist, and on the religious level, individual Jews have no right to live because God commands that they be killed. The Martyr (Shahid) fights against “the occupation,” but also gets a unique elevated religious status because he’s considered to be fulfilling God’s will. Until the world understands how serious the incitement in the Palestinian media and education system is, it won’t stop, and we’ll all pay the bloody price.”

Marcus (62), a resident of the Etzion Bloc, made aliyah (i.e., moved to Israel) from New York in 1974, but hasn’t managed to get rid of his American manners. Even when he’s making a strong point, he speaks quietly and sensitively. He founded Palestinian Media Watch in 1996 with donations from Jews and evangelical Christians in America, Canada and Australia. The donors continue to fund the institute today. He previously served as an advisor to the Minister of Religion Shimon Shitreet of Labor, “and because I was close to the Labor people, people who were against the Oslo Accords gave me videos of Arafat inciting to prove to me that the Accords were a bad idea. I gave the videos to MKs from Labor, and then a group formed that eventually became the “Third Way” party, that spoke out against Oslo. Peres also got these incitement videos, and he said, ‘I don’t care what Arafat says, I care about what he does.’

“After the government fell, I decided to raise money and check if researching the Palestinian media was worth the effort. I raised some money and hired two employees, and that’s how we started. We very quickly understood that there were two Arafats: the one who spoke about peace in English, and the one who encouraged terror in Arabic.”

“We also publicize positive developments. In the report [PA Education – A Recipe for Hate and Terror] we put out about the Palestinian education system, there’s an entire chapter dedicated to positive statements. When there’s a positive message on television, we publish it. And of course, there is value in exposing the negative material. We present it in European parliaments and in different forums in the United States and Canada, and we have great success there. The Europeans are horrified by what they see; afterwards they try to say that it has nothing to do with them, so we explain to them how much money their country gives to the PA. We show them that the hate education is funded by their money.

“We’ve succeeded in initiating important legislation in the United States that makes it more difficult to fund terror. Dutch, British and German parliaments had important debates and made important decisions after they were presented with our materials: The Europeans demanded that Abbas shut down the PA Ministry for Prisoners’ Affairs, which transferred 15 million dollars every month to prisoners’ families. That’s a huge sum. But Abbas, typically, knows how to lie: He founded the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, subordinate to the PLO, that transfers the money from the PA to the prisoners. We have proof of this.

“The monthly salary that a Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli jail receives can reach up to 12,000 shekels, while a PA civil servant’s salary is 3,000 shekels. What message does this send to the youth? They see these prisoners released, they buy fancy cars, they build villas, so why not be a terrorist?

“I believe that putting economic pressure on the PA, enough that would cause an economic crisis, would cause the Palestinian people to change its leadership and choose a different path. There are many moderate Palestinians. I have several friends like that.”