Israel’s 9-year-old ‘Spokeskid’ explains the war through a child’s eyes

Israel’s newest international spokesperson has a different way of explaining the Israeli-Arab conflict.

“I try to make people understand how life here looks to a child,” said Ben Carasso, 9, the new “spokeskid of Israel” gaining traction on social media.

“Most kids don’t understand politics, but they can understand the feeling of celebrating your birthday without your friends because of the war, or having to run to your safe room during a rocket attack. That’s what I try to share with them,” Carasso told The Times of Israel.

Carasso, a fourth-grader living with his parents in Tel Aviv, decided that he wanted to represent Israel shortly after the war began, when Hamas terrorists in Gaza attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 captive to Gaza.

He accompanied his mother, a media consultant who also lectures about the Holocaust, on a speaking trip to Europe, and after one lecture, found himself on center stage.

“I did a little talk about what it was like being a child in Israel after October 7, and people were listening to me and asking me questions,” he said. “That’s how I got started.”

With the help of his parents, Carasso started making videos about what was happening in his life and posting them on YouTube and Instagram. His youthful honesty and enthusiasm were infectious, and he started gaining the attention of kids — and adults — around the globe.

Last December, after the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania refused in a congressional hearing to say that calls for genocide of Jewish people violate campus rules on harassment, Carasso went viral for his honest perspective as a child.

“In school, if someone is thinking to bully or boycott a kid, you send them immediately to the principal’s office to punish them,” he said in a video. “That’s what the presidents of the universities need to do.”

In a Hanukkah video made the same week, Carasso shared a wish that instead of receiving a holiday present, he hoped for a miracle that Israel’s hostages would come home. “But my parents told me that that it’s not about a miracle, it’s about the world putting pressure on Hamas to release the hostages.”

Several months ago, Israel advocate and former government spokesperson Eylon Levy spotted Carasso and took him under his wing, adding him to his Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office initiative. Carasso has also collaborated with other influencers and recently did a speaking tour in London, where he spoke at five schools and met with more than 1,000 Jewish and non-Jewish kids.

He also met with Israel’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom Tzipi Hotovely, and spoke at two vigils for the hostages during the five-day tour, his mother, Avital, noted.

“Most of the kids in the schools in London didn’t know much about what is really happening here,” Carasso said. “I spoke with them about what I see and how I feel from my own experiences, and they said they learned a lot.”

Even in his young age, Carasso has been exposed to some of the grown-up costs of the war. A good friend’s father was murdered at the Nova Music Festival where some 360 partygoers were murdered by Hamas, while another friend is related to Romi Gonen, who is still held hostage in Gaza. Still another friend was forced to leave his home in Kiryat Shmona with his family due to rockets launched by Hezbollah.

“It is not normal that children of Israel should have to grow up like that,” Carasso said. “When my mother gives her lectures on the Holocaust, she always ends by saying ‘Never Again.’ But we see that it is happening again right now,” he noted.

While Carasso speaks mainly to English-speaking audiences, it is not his parents’ native language. After Ben decided at age three that he wanted to learn to speak English, they began speaking both languages in the house to help him learn, Avital said.

In his spare time, Carasso practices gymnastics and piano, which he integrates into his presentation. Occasionally, he poses doing the splits in talks and videos, and in London, students rallied around him when he played Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikva,” on the piano.

But his comments on events in real-time are often what hit hardest.

In his most recent video, shot at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday morning after a ballistic missile from Yemen sent residents of central Israel to their bomb shelters, a sleepy Carasso asked in childish innocence what the point of all the terror is in the first place.

“Can someone just explain why,” he pleaded, with tears in his eyes. “That’s all I’m asking. Why?”