Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Ronny Edry

Israeli Graphic Designer, Owner of Pushpin Mehina, created online movement for peace in the Middle East

"So I come to the computer and I start looking on (after posting his initial poster to Facebook), and suddenly I see many people talking to me, most of them I don?t know, and a few of them from Iran, which is ? What? Because you have to understand, in Israel we don?t talk with people from Iran. We don?t know people from Iran. It?s like, on Facebook, you have friends only from ? it?s like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook. And now people from Iran are talking to me. So I start answering this girl, and she?s telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don?t have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they?re all sitting in the living room crying. So I?m like, whoa. I ask my wife to come, and I tell her, you have to see that. People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry. And everybody?s crying now. So I don?t know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I?d just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that?s how it started."

"The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters. They have graphic designers. What? Crazy, crazy. So you can see they are still shy, they don?t want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So. And now it?s communication. It?s a two-way story. It?s Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other."

"I don't think Israel will attack Iran and Iran won't attack Israel because it would mean mutually assured destruction. But if you talk too much about war it's really dangerous - at some point you're going to have to prove yourself, you're going to have to go there, so what we really need to do now is calm the situation down."

"This is the courageous thing to do: to try to reach the other side before it's too late."

"We've had this war coming with Iran for more than 10 years now, but to me it's a lot of bluff."

"So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster. And that?s how it started. And that?s how, really, it?s unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it. It?s not just one dude making one poster, it?s ? we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, ?Make me a poster. Post it. Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too.? It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense. I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn?t have the time. It was a huge amount of pictures. So for a few days, that?s how my living room was."