Inspired by a colleague in New York, a Tel Aviv photographer has created what is rapidly becoming an immensely popular webpage dedicated to showing the human face of Tel Aviv to Facebook users worldwide, including citizens of Israel’s most ardent geopolitical foes.

“I get a lot of responses from people in Tehran, in Pakistan and in Jordan and Egypt, who always thought of Israel as something like Mars,” Erez Kaganovitz told the Ma’ariv newspaper earlier this week about his “Humans of Tel Aviv” project.

“Suddenly they see human beings and there’s a huge discrepancy from what they see on Al Jazeera or Al-Arabiya,” he says. “Many people from the West also say the photos are surprising. Some think of Israel as a benighted and conservative place, and these pictures show a different side they hadn’t known.”

Kaganovitz began the initiative five years ago, he says, after he encountered skewed perceptions of Israel during travels abroad. A waiter in India asked him to leave his restaurant after learning that he was Israeli, and European tourists spoke of Israel as a society engulfed in perpetual war.

The project was inspired by “Humans of New York,” a blog by photographer Brandon Stanton that has accumulated hundreds of thousands of devoted readers and spawned dozens of spinoffs including Humans of Beirut to Humans of Isfahan (Iran).

“I’m not trying to brainwash people or even to educate,” Kaganovitz says. “I’m just showing us as we are.”