Israel influencer shocked by UCT students captured by Hamas propaganda

The Israel hatred on the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus shocked a South African-born Israeli influencer who has used his five million TikTok followers to fight antisemitism.

Daniel Braun, who was born in Cape Town and has travelled the globe with his mission, said he was confronted by a crowd of 50 people at UCT yelling vicious remarks at him.

“This is one of the worst campuses I’ve been to in terms of students falling for this propaganda,” he said. “They think they’re so connected to it because of buzzwords like ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ because of what South Africa has been through, and it’s a shame that they’re falling for [pro-Hamas] propaganda.”

Braun was in Cape Town last week to attend the Zionist Connect Conference hosted by the South African Zionist Federation Cape Council on 16 March as well as to connect with the Jewish community, particularly students at UCT, on 18 March.

He said it was essential for young Jews to be empowered and stand up for what they believe.

“I’ve seen what’s going on in Cape Town, especially with the younger generation who are less involved and engaged. We need to be empowered. There’s a real lack of that here.”

He said that for some time he had felt the need to go back to his birthplace and speak to those he grew up with, telling them not to be afraid and to stand up for what they believe in.

When Braun started his TikTok account in 2019, he didn’t intend to become an activist. He started out making funny videos completely unrelated to Israel and Judaism. However, in 2021, that all changed when the Unity Intifada began, and after Israel went to war with Hamas. This was the first time that Braun had experienced war in Israel as he made aliya with his family in 2017.

“I saw so much anti-Israel propaganda online, so much antisemitism, and I understood that I had the power to do something with the platform I had,” he said.

“I literally opened my phone, and said to the camera, ‘I see all this nonsense going on online, all this anti-Israel propaganda, and all I have to say is, Am Yisrael Chai,’ and I raised my flag.”

Braun was then approached by the Israel foreign affairs ministry to assist it to form the first influencer team in Israel to combat antisemitism. They would travel around Israel showcasing different communities that lived there.

However, everything changed after Hamas invaded Israel on 7 October 2023, murdered 1 200 people, and took more than 250 hostages. He said he woke up that morning and went for a run in Ra’anana to the sound of sirens. He later saw footage of Hamas terrorists invading Israel on the back of pickup trucks, with people lying on the streets of Sderot with bullet holes in them. He was so distressed, he recognised immediately that “he had a job to do” with his platform.

“I’ll always remember one video I saw of a soldier being pulled out of a car in Gaza and being trampled on by Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians,” he said. “I was crying because that soldier could have been any one of my friends. From then on, I started making content every day about Israel, exposing antisemitism online.”

Braun would go onto Omegle – a moderated website where you are paired with strangers to discuss specific topics – and confront Neo-Nazis and pro-Hamas supporters, amassing millions of views. Similarly, he travelled to the kibbutzim in the south of Israel and documented the horrors that happened there on 7 October. “I filmed the blood that was on the floors and the walls and the bullet holes. I just exposed the truth to the world,” he said.

As well as making content in his personal capacity, Braun is also the creative director of Israeli non-profit organisation (NPO) Let’s Do Something.

The latter was created by four friends who felt hopeless after their friend, David Newman, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova festival. Let’s Do Something has since become a leading NPO in Israel.

Braun was brought into the organisation in December 2023 by chief executive Baruch Apisdorf. The organisation was heading to New York, and they wanted Braun to come with them.

For Let’s Do Something, Braun has been able to travel around the globe, making content that seeks to fight antisemitism and Israel hatred. In one video filmed in New York City, he walked around the subway tunnels holding up signs asking the public to imagine what it would be like to live there in the same way that the hostages have had to stay in Hamas tunnels in Gaza.

He has also confronted Israel haters at various university campuses around the world. In filming these videos, Braun has been kicked, hit, pushed, spat on, and verbally assaulted. While filming a video in Los Angeles recently in which they showed passersby footage from 7 October, one young woman said that she loved the footage – they were killing Israelis, and she liked it.

“On a lot of college campuses, people are uneducated when it comes to what they believe,” he said. The biggest problem is that they hear buzzwords like ‘genocide’ or ‘apartheid’ and throw them into what they are saying and chanting. But we’ve taken on the job of trying to convince these people and help them understand the truth.”