This article is the second in a two-part series on the Muslim delegation’s visit to Israel. The first installment, by reporter Maayan Hoffman, is “‘Null and Void’: Muslim Leaders Visit Israel After Mamdani Refusal [1].”
A Muslim delegation brought to Israel by Sharaka—the organization that has quietly built people-to-people bridges between Israelis and Arab and Muslim communities since the 2020 Abraham Accords—spent a day listening to Jewish grief, visiting sites of memory, and arguing that interfaith solidarity cannot be reduced to social media slogans. The visitors stood out not only for arriving in the wake of October 7, but because they are faith leaders who have pursued this work for decades, often at personal cost.
Their message, delivered in meetings with educators and survivors, was deliberately counter-current: build ties in person, reject zero-sum narratives, and carry those lessons home. “There are so many people that actually stand with us,” said Alyssa Annis of Sharaka, who described the visit as a rare source of hope since October 7.
This trip here is called ‘Unbreakable Bond’ between the state of New York and the Holy Land
Adding a pointed political motivation, Sheikh Musa Drammeh, founder of the Muslim Media Corporation and the Muslim–Israel Dialogue in New York, said the trip took shape after a Democratic candidates’ debate in which Zohran Mamdani vowed not to visit Israel if elected, even as others said their first stop would be the Holy Land. To Drammeh, Mamdani’s hostility to Israel crosses into antisemitism, and letting such a stance pass unchallenged risked normalizing it. “This trip here is called ‘Unbreakable Bond’ between the state of New York and the Holy Land,” he said, explaining that he and his wife organized the visit to model public solidarity rather than silence.
One vivid example was Imam Nuriddin Shakir Mustafaa of Dallas, Texas. He is married to a Christian woman—an arrangement he sees not as an exception but as the embodiment of what he teaches. Interfaith, he explained, is something he and his wife have practiced since the early 1990s, long before it became a post-9/11 buzzword.
“We are taught in the Quran that we should not do that, and we are one humanity,” he told The Media Line, adding that in 1993, he and his wife began interfaith work at Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, where different faiths met to learn from one another in a local mosque. He said participants discovered shared values across synagogues, churches, and mosques and began to push back against polarization and exclusivism. “In 1995, people started to see it. … The Jews bring the Torah, the Christians bring the Bible, the Muslims bring the Quran, and they teach about the effect Moses had on their community. People said, ‘Wow, I never saw it that way.’”
For Mustafaa, coming to Israel now was not about relativizing Jewish trauma but about learning from it and treating it as a warning. “Don’t take away from the Jews’ atrocity, and coming from here, we could use the Jews’ template and promote it, letting people know and don’t forget it because it could happen again,” he added.
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A similar language of universalism came from Shireena Drammeh, an educator and community builder who has spent more than two decades shaping young Muslim minds at the Islamic Leadership School in the Bronx—a school she helped develop in the shadow of 9/11 to give Muslim American children a solid, confident, nonradical identity. Her message in Israel matched the one she gives in New York classrooms.
We are Muslims and therefore we must stand for peace and all of humankind
“We’re not here to take sides; we are not about sides at all. We are Muslims and therefore we must stand for peace and all of humankind,” she told The Media Line, explaining that her school emphasizes dignity, coexistence, and civic responsibility. “Because if you kill one person in Islam, it is as if you kill all mankind.”
Polarization, Drammeh argued, is not just toxic—it is lazy. She pushed for an awakening of hearts as much as minds. “We have to open minds, hearts, and ears, and we need to wake up,” she added.
On the Israeli side, the presence of Muslim leaders after October 7 was unexpected—and welcomed. Alyssa Annis, Holocaust education program manager at Sharaka, said this visit gave her something rare these days: hope.
“I wake up every day as a religious practicing Jewish person and I say, ‘Modeh ani,’ thank God that I found my job, because specifically since October 7, this gave me hope,” she noted. She said the delegation came to learn about Jewish history, the Holocaust, and October 7, and that Sharaka’s role is to bring such groups to Israel so they can return home ready to lead efforts against hatred, antisemitism, and extremism in their own communities.
There are so many people that actually stand with us
Her broader point was that Israelis often hear only the loudest anti-normalization voices from the Arab and Muslim worlds. The loudest, she said, are not necessarily the most numerous. “There are so many people that actually stand with us, allies of Jewish people and of the state of Israel,” Annis said, adding that each week she sees more moderate voices from the Middle East embracing interfaith dialogue, Jewish–Muslim cooperation, and Holocaust education as tools against extremism. She urged Israelis to remember those partnerships exist, arguing that awareness itself can strengthen public faith in bridge-building.
Sheikh Musa Drammeh has been public about supporting Israel both online and offline, and he acknowledged that this stance has not always been welcomed in all Muslim spaces. Even so, he said he and his wife chose to “turn the negative into a positive” and organize this trip to make visible the Muslims who refuse antisemitism.
“We are created to serve different purposes. At this juncture in our lives, we believe that the purpose we were created is to do this: to leave New York, travel all the way to come to the Holy Land, to assure them that no matter what happened, New York stands with you. New York is in solidarity with you,” he told The Media Line, saying the visit was designed to show personal support as much as political courage.
He tied the trip to a concrete moment in US politics, when a New York politician said he would not visit Israel. For Sheikh Musa, leaving that unchallenged risked normalizing a worrying precedent. He explained that during a Democratic Party debate, candidates were asked about their first foreign trip; most said the Holy Land, while one candidate said he would not go. Drammeh said that stance, combined with the candidate’s well-known anti-Israel positions, risked setting a new standard for public officials. In response, he told his wife they should model the opposite. They organized what he called an “unbreakable bond” visit between New York and Israel to signal that refusing to go should not become acceptable.
The program was conducted with the assistance of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
The final stop brought the delegation to the most painful layer of Israel’s current story: October 7. There, the narrative of “Muslims versus Jews” broke down further with testimony from Nova survivor Niv Reuveni about how he and his friends were saved by a Bedouin Muslim who risked his life to hide them and negotiate with the attackers.
“When I was here, everything started at 6:30, and I was running with my friends outside, and we ran like 8 kilometers east in the fields,” he told The Media Line, describing how they found a nearby farm and a worker who sheltered them. He said a Bedouin Muslim confronted the attackers when they arrived and tried to convince them no Jews were hiding there. “After that, they left, and we got out of the farm, and people rescued us.” Reuveni said he came to share the story with Muslim audiences because “not everything you see in social media is the truth,” and he wanted them to hear directly from both him and the man who protected them.
That Bedouin, Yusuf Ziadna of Rahat, told the delegation his version in the simplest terms—people were being hunted, and he could not leave them outside. “I did what it was necessary to do,” he told The Media Line. He said people ran to his farm and begged for help, so he hid them at home, promised to stay with them to the end, and even went out alone to speak with the attackers and mediate, despite the risk to his life.