"Wait a second," Matan Peretz interrupts the interview as soon as it begins, "Yaara from TikTok Israel is calling. She probably wants to apologize," he says, explaining that he is in an interview with Israel Hayom. With his 263,<> followers on social media, which has already been criticized for unbalanced behavior to Israel's detriment, it only makes sense that he would receive such calls.
Have problems with TikTok?
"Relative to being accused of controlling the media, it's really not reflected in reality. Write me the worst things you could wish for someone in the comments. But if I post about a terrorist who was killed and write 'very good' - then it turns out that I violated the Community Guidelines, and I can't go live on Instagram for the next month, and my posts get less exposure. It's not fair."
@matanperetz
Is that too much to ask? #israel🇮🇱 #palestina🇪🇭 #hamasisis #amisraelchai #unrwa #un #jurnalist
♬ original sound - Matan Peretz
For Peretz, a 35-year-old stand-up comedian, social media is the main living space. He broke into the field late, but in normal times he stars on stage as a sought-after stand-up comedian. Since the outbreak of the war, with the help of his excellent English, Peretz has succeeded in becoming a significant element in Israeli public diplomacy. Just two weeks ago he was released from reserve duty, during which he had served in Judea and Samaria almost since the beginning of the war. Between patrols, he uploaded videos to TikTok and Instagram, in uniform and in fluent English, explaining to all our haters how wrong they were, with receipts.
"I started with explanatory videos already in the previous operation," he recalls. "I uploaded some in Hebrew, and people from abroad told me they wanted to know more about what was going on, so I uploaded it in English as well. When the war started, I was abroad. My return flight was scheduled for 7 October. Here Friday night, in Israel Saturday morning. We received alerts and realized there was no flight.
Sounds stressful. Were you able to stay in touch with the family?
"Yes. All were fine. I was stuck abroad for a week, turning the world upside down to get back to my unit. I was in a nightmare of helplessness. The first video I uploaded was in English, from the hotel. I talked about what's happening in Israel, about the fact that people don't even understand what's going on, release statements and confuse the mind. I rested on Saturday, a week later, and on Sunday I was already in reserve. Only after I arrived in Israel, with all the sirens, when I went up to the post in Hebron, did I manage to breathe. From there, I started uploading videos regularly.
"A lot of people from English-speaking countries told me that I'm lucky to do hasbara, because they don't understand the Israelis' English. There are guys here who do excellent advocacy, with good English, but apparently they are not exposed to them. Or maybe they wanted someone who wasn't connected to some official body to pass on his experiences as a reserve soldier. I myself didn't understand the full value of it at first."
Is it even possible to deal with anti-Semitism and false information on the networks?
"I quickly realized that my opinion doesn't matter, only the facts matter, and the word of a soldier in the field carries more weight than talking in the air. You are constantly attacked by genocide, genocide, and you understand that you have to bring data, history. Jews living in other countries hear left and right that Israel is committing genocide, and I have been told that my videos have helped them feel better about themselves. Someone said to me, 'Thank you for giving me the peace of mind to know that I'm on the right side of history.'"
What do you think of Israeli hasbara?
"Which is a disgrace. The very fact that pro-Palestinians assume that we are being paid to upload propaganda videos shows how much the Ministry of Information, with a budget of millions, is failing and embarrassing. I've also heard about pricing $1,000 per post and 10 cents per comment. A week after the war began, Distal Atabrian resigns from her position. And I ask: What have you done so far? You have to be extra in wartime, but don't act only then. The world receives 24/7 pictures of dead babies in Gaza. We're in two months of war, and we're saying: 'But it's not like that.' In which world will we win in this arena?
"I'm also able to slap some of the young TikTokers for the content they upload. This stupidity bothers me, this lack of awareness and the desperate desire to get likes' at a time when the State of Israel is going through trauma. It's a war, it's not just another trend on TikTok."
But it's not just the young TikTokers that are hard for him, but also the demonstrations of the families of the abductees. As a soldier who returned home for the weekend, he arrived at the hostage square and found that it wasn't doing him any good. "My personal feeling was that I gave 60-something days, and we're losing because people are crying and falling apart and want to give them back now. It's clear that everyone wants to bring them back in the moment, but when you convey closeness and helplessness, it's not good.
"Friends from my unit are on Arab Telegram, and they tell me that every demonstration like this makes us look weak. If we had conveyed resilience and unity, this would not have happened, but we are divided, and this is what ends our war. If for me, who served in Judea and Samaria, this demonstration did badly, I don't envy the soldier who left Gaza and found himself there. It's just punctuating the soldiers' wheels."
Dahlash without a kippah from the age of 27
Peretz took off his kippah at the age of 27. He grew up in a traditional home, with a secular father ("a Moroccan mourner of yesteryear, with Kiddush and Shabbat"), a repentant mother, and six brothers and sisters. The boys questioned, the girls remained religious. The exit process in his question was slow: first television on Shabbat, then telephone, and then, as mentioned, the dome. "I realized it was less for me," he explains, half apologetically. "I don't connect to practice, I don't like going to synagogue, God forgive me. It's very hard for me to keep Shabbat, when I find myself locked at home on my free day without a phone or TV."
How did Mom get it?
"I explained to her that it was less for me and she accepted it, and said that as long as I am happy and do what is good for me, it is okay, because what good will it do for me to be religious and sad. It wasn't easy, but how much can you pretend?"
After his discharge from the Kfir Brigade, he worked as a tour security guard, and also secured Taglit-Birthright expeditions. "It helped me a lot with English," he says, "I always loved the language very much, and my mother was an English teacher, but as an Israeli I felt embarrassed to speak English." He worked in carts, sales, earned a degree in communications at Sapir College and sought his professional direction in life.
In 2018, he came to watch an open stage event for stand-up comedians in a pub in Ashdod, and when he sat in the audience and heard them, he didn't laugh. "I told myself that if these guys call themselves stand-up comics, I'm one too. I went on stage and performed a piece on the spot, and since then it's been a never-ending love story, I've found my calling in life. After the first stand-up, I realized that all the other things I did in life were one big waste of time, and that stand-up was the thing I would do until my last day."
Can we make a living from this?
"If you're good? Undoubtedly. During the war, everything stopped, so right now I'm doing social media campaigns, because I have a lot of followers. But I want followers to come to my shows, not to say I'm an influencer. If you tell me to shut down Instagram and TikTok tomorrow, but all my shows will be sold out, I'll shut them down tomorrow. But in the meantime, campaigning on social media is great money, and the fact that I started at the age of 31 makes me appreciate it more. I'm not a 17-year-old influencer who gets NIS 30,5 for a campaign and doesn't understand how the real world works. When you work countless minimum wage jobs and break your back, and suddenly you get 000,<> shekels for a movie review, the only thing you think is, 'Where has this world been all my life?'"
Concert. "Talking about everything, except sex", photo: Uri Hai Alfie
Peretz draws his main inspiration from his father, and his roof "Daddy Jokes" is also one of the sellers. "Here," he says, "the waiter I asked for coffee from immediately said to me, 'Ha, Daddy joke!' Anything that comes out of my dad's mouth is punch, and he doesn't mean it at all.
"I also draw inspiration from Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, people I admire. That Dave Chappelle go looking for his friends, a damned Palestine supporter I've admired for years and who has lost direction. Kanye West too. It was quite a heartbreak, but they can jump at me. The first time I saw an Eddie Murphy performance, he walked into the theater—and thousands of people went crazy that he went on stage, before he even spoke. I asked myself, 'What is this thing?' It's a kind of superpower, standing on a stage with a microphone, a stool and a bottle of water and captivating thousands of people – especially in our generation, where people don't focus on anything."
Do you also have inspiration from comedians in Israel?
"Sure - Daniel Chen, Assaf Yitzhaki, Noam Ungar. People who, beyond being my friends, I draw inspiration from the comedy that comes from them effortlessly. Shahar Hasson may not be my style, but he's talented whether you like him or not. My dream is that they will say 'Matan Peretz' and the first association will be comedy and stand-up, and not TikTok or the vlog project with Saar Kalizo that we did on YouTube, and which I was already broken to talk about."
So we won't talk.
"The best thing that happened to me when I started doing stand-up was trying to figure out who I looked like."
For Idan Amidi?
"Yes, but in stand-up comedy I realized I wasn't like anyone. I understood that I was doing something good, that people accepted Matan Peretz at the concert, and not one celebrity or another."
What attracts you in this field?
"Make people happy. Real laughter cannot be faked, it is an uncontrollable reflex. The truth of this fascinates me time and time again. That's a mission to me. I've been making music for 15 years, singing and playing guitar. As a singer, you can stand on stage and no one will listen to you, and it's over and everyone applauds. In stand-up, the reaction is immediate. Funny? Laughing."
What do you touch on your performances?
"Everything but sex. It's embarrassing to me, it's something intimate to me. I think this is something that should be between you and your partner. That's the lowest common denominator, everyone will laugh at it. When you're in a stand-up comedy marathon with ten other people, and you have five minutes, and you have to be funny without talking about sex, you have to be a thousand times more witty to be listened to. I have religious people, service girls, high-tech people in the audience. People say they enjoy coming to my shows because they know they won't have any qualms. They can come with their spouse or parents, and nothing will embarrass them and make them cringe in their chairs."
What about love, dating?
"I talk about everything in concerts. Relationships, men and women, black humor, politics."
And in your life - what about love, dating?
"I'm not looking, but I'm not deceiving. There was a long time when I didn't want that, because it's not the time and place and I preferred to focus on my career, but now I'm open to it. I dated a girl for a short time before I flew to Mexico, and we decided that when I came back we would leave properly. That Saturday, she went to a party in Reim. She calls me on video from there, and I see people running hysterically behind her, begging her to go home, and she doesn't want to. "They said that when the sirens ran out we would continue the party." Then the video disconnected in the middle, and I got a series of messages saying, 'There are terrorists here, they're shooting at us.' I didn't sleep until the next evening, when they told me she was okay, but the relationship itself faded."
"Immunity is slowly developing"
So that relationship didn't work, but there's no cause for concern. The many requests Peretz receives from fans manage to warm his heart. "I'm approached a lot, and it's cute and charming, and I appreciate anyone who loves me enough to send a message. I don't think salvation will come from there, but again, I don't rule out.
"There's nothing like meeting someone face-to-face. A girl who admires me on screen doesn't know me. She admires Matan the stand-up comedian, not Matan Peretz who has days when he's depressed, and days he doesn't feel like talking to anyone, and he has his fears and worries. I really am who you see on stage, but it's a prize for an hour and a quarter, it's not who I am all hours of the day. I've been on dates where girls were upset that I wasn't making them laugh. I'm not working now, my soul."
That's when a passerby stops by and says to Peretz in a heavy French accent: "When I was in Paris I used to look at you, you're a star, you're charming!" He lights up abruptly, laughing, his eyes lit up: "It's fun to hear, thank you very much!" and you have to admit it's captivating.
"Where have we been?" he asks, and I thread another question, because he's in a good mood and it seems like a good opportunity:
What about female fans who don't want a long-term relationship?
"We'll avoid it," he replies immediately. "You never know what will happen. I can go with a girl and say, 'Look, I have female fans I'm going home with,' and a week later someone will claim that I did something to her against her will. I'd rather go back to an apartment in Holon, sit with my partner, smoke and go to sleep. I perform for a religious audience, such a mini-scandal can ruin me. I don't want anyone to google me and jump that I've been accused of something. I don't do stand-up comedy for the fans."
Are you usually recognized on the street?
"Sure. Everywhere I am, I am stopped. 16-year-old boys on electric bikes, as well as 60-year-old men. I still don't know how to contain it. In the reserves, they couldn't put me on Shag Gan at the entrance to Kiryat Arba, because there were traffic jams because people got out of the car and wanted us to take a picture."
Weren't you afraid of losing your privacy?
"No, because I took that into account. I started out at the age of 30, and I realized that there will be good and bad things. That's part of the deal. There are a lot of bad reviews, but over time you develop immunity to it and are less offended. You understand that these are people to feel sorry for. I don't answer bad comments, because all they want is attitude. When they write to you, 'Go commit suicide,' and you don't reply, they end up deleting the comment or stopping responding. But 80-90 percent of the responses are positive and gratifying, and that's what I'm focusing on."
Alone vs. TikTok Global
Despite the good connections he has with TikTok Israel, Peretz also understands that in most cases they have no way to help him. At first, he fought with them over losing exposure, account violations and silencing, but when it all comes from TikTok, he says, what can our small Israeli branch do?
What kind of reactions do you get following the videos?
"I had an hour-and-a-half conversation with a girl from South Lebanon who asked me what was going on here. She said they are not on Hezbollah's side, but Israel is doing bad things and she wants to understand why. I explained to her that this is not what is happening on the ground, and the conversation ended with 'Congratulations to you and your family.' There was an Indian woman who approached me and said she identified with Hamas, because they stole the land and they were called terrorists too. I asked her if Native Americans had murdered American babies, because I don't remember that happening."
In war, as in war, you don't do stand-up. For two months everything went silent, and then the audience asked him to return. "It felt weird and detached, and I didn't want to go back to performing. I uploaded a stand-up comedy video the other day – and it exploded, and there wasn't a single response of 'it's out of place.' Everyone thanked me, wanted to laugh a little. Because how depressed can you be? You need escapism. I opened a show on January 4, and the day after I posted it, I got a call from the theater to tell me it was sold out."
Do you think it was the advocacy videos that succeeded that brought this audience?
"Absolutely, yes. Following these videos you know me, even Michael Rapaport shared some of them and started following me. I was excited at insane levels. We met when he was in Israel. I sat with him for two hours in the hotel lobby, we talked about every possible topic, we laughed, he was very interested in everything that was going on here. In two months, I gained 50,1 followers on Instagram, and before that the pace was 000,<> followers in four months. But it will probably go down after the war, when they realize I'm a comedian, and not just another national explainer."
With Michael Rapaport. Unexpected support, photo: Dor Yattach
TikTok Israel said in response: "We take very seriously our responsibility to keep our community of users safe, and work tirelessly to combat content that violates our Community Standards. Content that promotes fake news, misinformation, antisemitism and hate speech has no place on TikTok.
"Since the outbreak of the war, we have removed millions of content and accounts that violated our policies. The content that users are exposed to on TikTok is created by users, and as we've emphasized in the past, TikTok doesn't promote content from one side over the other."
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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