When she was 18, Dalia Ziada says, she was like any other college student in her home country of Egypt. When the Second Intifada erupted in 2000, she joined anti-Israel protests on her university campus.
At the demonstrations, Ziada said, she saw protesters burning the Egyptian flag. Among them were members of the Islamist political movement Muslim Brotherhood, Ziada recalled, and she experienced an intense transformation.
“It was literally the moment I poked out of this ideological box I was stuck into my whole life,” Ziada told an audience Tuesday night at the Russian-speaking Jewish Community of SF Bay Area’s Menorah Center SF. “I started to ask questions.”
Ziada’s wakeup call, which led her to question everything about the Arab-Israeli conflict, started her toward a career promoting human rights, democracy, liberalism and women’s rights, and later into politics, foreign affairs and counterterrorism.
Nowadays, Ziada identifies herself as a “Muslim Arab Zionist from Egypt.”
After university, Ziada earned a master’s degree in international relations from Tufts University in Massachusetts. She currently works in the U.S. as the Washington, D.C., coordinator for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, a think tank and research institute “committed to fighting antisemitism on the battlefield of ideas.”
Ziada, 44, spoke in San Francisco about her tumultuous journey to the United States, her work on American college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023, and how she believes the current war in Iran will shape the region. The talk was sponsored by the Northern California chapter of StandWithUs, a group that supports Israel and combats antisemitism, and other local Jewish groups.
Before Oct. 7, 2023, Ziada was thriving in Cairo, where she directed the Center for Middle Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean Studies. She had established herself as a promoter of Muslim-Jewish dialogue. But that work was disrupted when she publicly condemned the Hamas massacre two days after it occurred. Ziada described Hamas’ actions as “terrorism” in a post on X, calling attention to the rapes of women and the targeting of children and the elderly.
“Whoever supports Hamas or justifies their acts of terrorism is a partner in their crime against the people of Israel,” Ziada wrote.
She immediately faced retaliation.
The response reached a fever pitch when local fundamentalists targeted her family’s home in search of Ziada after declaring that “her blood should be shed,” she recalled.
On Nov. 2, 2023, she fled Egypt for her safety and hasn’t returned. “I left everything literally in five hours,” she said, adding that she left her “whole life behind.”
“Everything I ever owned I just lost. It was a very, very tough experience.”
Ziada escaped to the United States.
Her work in the nonprofit sector led her to collaborate with Hillel International. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she spoke at nearly 60 universities throughout the country as an educator in Hillel’s Teach-In Tour.
As Ziada traveled from one American campus to another, she witnessed students join anti-Israel demonstrations. She said she was transported back to her own college experience. This time around, though, she became a target of protesters who attempted to disrupt her events.
In February 2025, members of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Maryland organized a campaign urging administrators to cancel an event with Ziada. When that effort failed, over two dozen protesters demonstrated outside the event, the school’s student newspaper reported.
In previous media appearances, Ziada has voiced her thoughts on encountering protesters who hate Israel and back Hamas. Her role, as she sees it, is not to evangelize for Israel, or invalidate concerns about Palestinian rights. Rather, it’s to condemn violent extremism in all its forms.
“I don’t want them to fall in love with Israel. I just want them to be taken away from supporting Hamas,” Ziada told Israeli American podcaster and former Columbia University professor Shai Davidai in an interview last fall.
Since the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began in late February, Ziada’s mission has expanded to raising awareness of what she sees as the ultimate purpose of the current war: to dismantle the region’s largest sponsor of terrorism — Iran — and to build inroads for peace agreements with Israel.
She pointed to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen as examples of Iran-sponsored proxies that demonstrate the regime’s role as a “terrorist organization with political legitimacy.”
“This regime always treated neighboring countries as a backyard, as a disposable arena,” she said.
Near the end of the talk, moderator Shachar-Lee Yaakobovitz, who organizes StandWithUs collaborations with universities across California and the Pacific Northwest, asked how Ziada expects the current war to affect the prospects of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Morocco signed in 2020 and 2021.
Ziada remains optimistic about the future for Middle East peace, despite the intensity of the war with Iran. She sees the emergence of other peace advocates like her, such as Mohammed Saud in Saudi Arabia and Loay Alshareef in the United Arab Emirates, as a good sign for future diplomacy.
“This is a very good indication that after the Iran war settles, more and more Arab countries would want to be friendly to Israel,” she said. “That’s why I think there is a very good chance for peace coming, after this war.”