Aurele Tobelem is a historian, policy researcher and cultural strategist specialising in the geopolitics of the modern Middle East. He is CEO of Yadunna, a CreativeTech platform connecting creative professionals, mentors and cultural enterprises across the MENA region and its diasporas.
For most of human history, the alternative to a border has not been universal fraternity but uncertainty, an uncomfortable knowledge that what belongs to you can be crossed, taken or erased. In parallel, human beings have always had an awkward relationship with borders. We resent being told where we cannot go, whom we cannot meet, what we cannot become, and which dreams must remain on our side of a line someone else has drawn.
Jews should understand both impulses particularly well. Our very history is one of borders crossed willingly and unwillingly, of communities preserved behind cultural boundaries even as empires appeared and disappeared around them. We have spent millennia negotiating the distance between homeland and diaspora, sacred and secular, East and West, belonging and un-belonging. My own ancestry attests to this condition. My most ancient roots are Levantine, but my ancestors were travelers, exiles, merchants and migrants, and the traces of their journeys remain in me. Iberian, French, North African, Balkan, Peninsular Arab and Mesopotamian influences all appear in my family history and gene pool. In a world devoid of borders, I would not be able to celebrate this diversity today.
And yet, when borders cease merely to protect communities and instead become sites of confinement, they can begin to deform the societies they enclose. In Wealth, Poverty and Politics (2015), the brilliant historian Thomas Sowell observes: “Isolation is a recurring factor in poverty and backwardness around the world, whether that is physical isolation or cultural isolation, for any number of particular reasons.”
Jewish history offers an uncomfortable illustration of this phenomenon. In medieval Europe, Jews were progressively marked off by restrictions on social contact before being confined to ghettos. In Morocco, mellahs likewise enclosed Jewish communities in ways that reinforced their separation from the surrounding society, even where that confinement also served a protective function against periods of insecurity and violence. While those walls did not necessarily make Jews backward, they made it easier for observers to imagine Jews as alien, insular or regressive, and then to use that imagined difference to justify further exclusion. Centuries later, the Nazis revived and extended this familiar architecture of segregation: the Warsaw Ghetto was established and sealed in 1940, dooming roughly 400,000 Jews to deportation and murder. The ghetto itself, with its sacrosanct borders, became a weapon of extermination.
Perhaps, then, the question is not whether borders should exist, but what we allow them to separate—and how much of our humanity we surrender in the process.
Much of what calls itself “dialogue” between peoples still begins with division. Participants in such dialogue still arrive as representatives of distinct categories. They can be Jewish or Arab, Israeli and Palestinian, Muslim and Christian, but they are invited to discuss precisely the things that separate them. The encounters may be worthwhile, but identity-based disagreement remains their defining feature. Hence, the weakness of much regional diplomacy is not that treaties are worthless; quite the contrary, initiatives such as the Abraham Accords are monumental achievements. The issue is that state-to-state diplomacy cannot by itself manufacture social relationships or break down barriers between people. One can have embassies, trade agreements and security cooperation even as populations remain almost totally estranged from one another. To achieve true peace, we cannot simply redraw borders. We must also shorten the economic, cultural and psychological distances between the people who live behind them.
One of the most reliable tools for this purpose is creativity. It’s a virtue I have come to think of as God’s indemnity to mankind—a welcome reprieve from what might otherwise be a life of monochromatic suffering. Creativity thrives on incoherence. Creators take things that might not naturally belong together and assemble them into something beautiful, provocative, or meaningful. Creative collaboration therefore offers a very different model of regional encounter. A Syrian musician and an Israeli producer do not need to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict. Their first encounter will instead begin with them asking what they are trying to create and what message they wish to send.
These were the questions I found myself asking in late July 2025, sitting in a lecture hall at Reichman University in Israel during a summer fellowship on counter-extremism and digital media. Outside, the heat was so oppressive that I could feel myself melting the moment I stepped into it; the classroom became a refuge in every sense, physical and intellectual, with its immersive presentations and blessed central air conditioning. One afternoon, we were asked to divide into teams and devise a project that could advance Jewish communities worldwide. Somewhere in the middle of that exercise, a thought occurred to me with almost embarrassing simplicity. Why must we limit ourselves to one community? What might regional integration look like if ordinary people were given greater agency to shape it for themselves?
And so, Yadunna was born: a platform where creatives from across the Middle East and North Africa, their diasporas, and anyone with a meaningful connection to the region can find one another, access new opportunities and mentorship, finally monetize the extraordinary work they produce, and collaborate on cross-border projects in which they can define the terms of their own creative output. We aim to build a world in which emerging creative talent from Morocco to Turkey is harnessed to restore agency to creators, expand their horizons, and showcase the limitless diversity of a region too often reduced to racialized caricatures of extremism, factionalism, and war.
It has taken a year, a great deal of grit, and plenty of advice (some excellent, some less so) but that platform now exists, with a planned launch later this year, and the team building it is itself a reflection of our core mission. As CEO, I am a Moroccan-Sephardi historian and cantor; our Creative Director, Dan Harris, is a remarkable American Judaica artist; our finance specialist, Gabe Hamburg, is a Canadian policy expert and writer; and our CTO, Angel Mohamed, is an Egyptian Muslim computer scientist with his own ventures in the music industry. We are, in different ways, all creative entrepreneurs building a new ecosystem for entrepreneurial creatives.
Yadunna does not ask its users to become borderless people. Cultural particularity is precisely what makes collaboration interesting. What should transcend borders is the creative impulse itself, and that principle sits at the heart of Yadunna. An Israeli singer, an Egyptian musician, an Emirati designer and a Moroccan videographer may differ profoundly in background, politics and experience, but they can still be united by a shared desire to create something worthwhile and build towards a better future. Over time, Yadunna will give disparate communities a greater stake in one another’s stability, prosperity and, ultimately, in the pursuit of conflict resolution.
At Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London, the main hall is decorated with reflections from the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. One, drawn from an address he delivered in that very synagogue, has always stayed with me: “We have conquered every distance except one—the distance between human beings.” For years I understood the sentiment. It is only through building Yadunna that I have come to understand why it matters so much.
I have no pretension that a social media platform can conquer that final distance. Politics will remain politics; borders will remain borders; wars will not disappear because a painter in Beirut has found a gallery owner in Tel Aviv. But perhaps the distance can be shortened. Perhaps enough people can discover that someone on the other side of a frontier is far more than a national or political symbol. That is a much smaller ambition than fighting for a borderless world. It may also be a more rewarding one.
An amazing piece, Aurèle. I related deeply to this.
It made me return to a question I’ve carried for a long time: are we going to keep allowing political borders to become psychological and cultural borders too?
Politics may draw the lines, but I don’t think it should have the final say over how we perceive, understand, or connect with one another. In many ways, I believe collective consciousness has to move first — and politics will eventually have to move with it.
That’s why your point about creativity resonates so much with me. Creativity gives us a space to meet before we agree, to collaborate before we resolve everything, and to see the human being before the political symbol.
Maybe we don’t need to erase borders. Maybe we need to stop allowing them to define the limits of our imagination.