There are moments in diplomacy when the prepared agenda gives way to something the room did not expect. That is what happened at an evening gathering in Bat Hefer, where hosts brought together Jews and Arabs under the banner of Building a Shared Future to welcome a visiting delegation from Somaliland — and ended up hearing a family history that no briefing paper had mentioned.

The account comes from Tom Wegner, who shared it in a post on X describing the evening. Among the delegates was Diane Dirie, Special Advisor to the Somaliland Mission to Israel, who had travelled with the Abrahamic Movement’s delegation. Partway through the conversation, Dirie began speaking not as an official representative but as a woman piecing together her own inheritance.

A family rediscovered

Dirie told the gathering that her mother was half Spanish and half Jewish — a lineage she had not always had the chance to explore. She lost her father young, and for years the fuller shape of her family history remained out of reach. Over time, and through her own searching, she found the relatives that connected her to that heritage.

“My mother was half Spanish, half Jewish. I found my family.”

That search did not stay confined to Europe. Dirie also described her first trip to Somaliland, where she recalled a memory of Jewish communities that once lived there — a detail that, in Wegner’s telling, quietly reframed the evening. A delegation convened for diplomacy had, without anyone planning it, become a room where a personal and a communal history met.

A third return to Jerusalem

Dirie is now in Jerusalem for the third time. For her, she said, the city has become a place she keeps returning to — not simply as a stop on an official itinerary, but as somewhere she has come to love visiting.

“I love coming to Jerusalem.”

For Wegner, who hosted the evening, the moment carried a meaning beyond the visit itself. He wrote that he did not see it as just another official engagement, but as a living reminder that the Abrahamic connection is not something that begins with formal declarations. It is, he said, already written into families, into memory, and into the people who arrive.

Tom Wegner

@tomweg on X

There are moments when you sit with a Somaliland delegation — and only mid-conversation you realize you’ve heard something you didn’t expect. She came to Israel with the Abrahamic Movement’s delegation. Then she spoke about her mother, about a family she found, about a first trip to Somaliland, and a memory of Jews who once lived there. And now she is in Jerusalem. For the third time. Watch. Share if you think this story deserves to be heard.

View original post on X ↗ Watch the video ↗

Source: Tom Wegner (@tomweg), posted on X. Embedded here for reference — quotes as originally shared.

One evening, three points on a map

Strip away the diplomatic framing and what remains is a simple shape: a woman’s family history running from Spain, through a rediscovered heritage in Somaliland, to a city she now returns to for the third time. The diagram below traces that shape as Dirie described it.

None of this required a treaty or a summit. It required a delegation, a hosted evening, and a willingness to let the conversation go somewhere the program did not schedule. That, more than any statement, is what made Bat Hefer feel like more than another stop on a diplomatic tour.