Miss Iraq 2017, Sarah Idan at a lunchoen in her honour in Athol, Johannesburg 23 March 2022. She represented Iraq in the 2017 Miss Universe pageant but after posing with fellow participant Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman and posting the picture on instagram. She recieved massive backlash and was unable to return home to Iraq. Picture: Neil McCartney
When former Miss Iraq Sarah Idan heard of Miss South Africa Lalela Mswane’s plight last December, she immediately demanded to get to Israel to be with her at the Miss Universe pageant.
For Mswane, taking part in the Miss Universe competition came at a cost, with calls to boycott the pageant because it was being held in Israel and death threats when she ignored those calls.
Even the department of sports, arts, culture and recreation withdrew its support for Miss South Africa after it failed to convince the organisation not to compete in the pageant.
“I was having flashbacks,” Idan told guests at a lunch hosted by the SA Jewish Board of Deputies in Johannesburg this week. “I was really angry at what she was experiencing.”
Idan courted immediate controversy at the Miss Universe competition in 2017, when she posted a selfie of herself and Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman. The furore was such that her family, who had fled Iraq once before to become refugees in Syria, had to flee Iraq a second time in fear of their lives.
Ultimately, Idan, the first person to represent Iraq at Miss Universe in 45 years, would have her Iraqi citizenship revoked.
“The Miss Iraq organisers pressured me to take my post down, but the more they pushed, the more I didn’t want to. They wrote a statement for me to put out instead, but it didn’t stop the death threats or the conspiracy theories that I was a member of the CIA or Mossad [the Israeli secret service].
“All the comments had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with religion…”
Idan visited Cape Town and Johannesburg this week talking about her experiences; first as a young girl living under the repression of the Saddam Hussein regime, then as a refugee in Syria and finally as human rights activist for a lasting peace in the Middle East.
She began the Johannesburg leg of her trip with a visit to Sharpeville on Human Rights Day before going to Cape Town, where she also visited the University of Cape Town.
On campus, she came across the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions protests, held at this time every year to push for international isolation of Israel, politically and economically.
“I saw a student there and I asked her if she knew what she was protesting about. She told me she had many Palestinian friends and they lived like black South Africans did under apartheid.
“I told her I was an Arab myself and that I’d been to Israel. Apartheid, I said, was imposed by one set of people on another in the same country. The Palestinians are self-governing, they’re not ruled by the Israelis.
“[In Israel], I came across Muslims and Christians living side by side with Jews. They were citizens. I was amazed. Israel looked and felt like any other Arab country, except in those countries, Jews would not be welcome, they would not be allowed to worship.
“I witnessed a democracy in Israel that was unlike anything else in the Middle East.
“The banner on the wall said ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free’. I asked her if she knew what it meant?”
The student, Idan said, believed the call was for a free Palestine coexisting with Israel. Nothing could have been further from the truth, she said.
“I told her this slogan was created by the [Palestine Liberation Organisation] and Hamas, two organisations determined to create a world where there is no room for Israel… when you have that kind of sign, you’re closing the conversation.” Idan returns home to Los Angeles on Saturday.
– news@citizen.co.za
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