On the morning of 7 October, as news emerged of the Hamas attack on Israeli communities near the Gaza border, Naama Barak Wolfman joined thousands of others frantically texting their friends and family. “Checking you’re alright,” she wrote to her colleague, Vivian Silver, a Canadian who spent decades working to foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The text was never read. Silver was one of several peace activists killed that day, though news of her murder took nearly a month to reach Silver’s friends and family. Many believed the Women Wage Peace leader had been taken hostage, even picturing her negotiating with her captors.
“We couldn’t find the right words to express the pain, the hurt, and the terror. People on both sides were afraid,” Wolfman recalls. “You shut down, you close the windows. In Israel, that’s what everyone literally did for the first few months.”
Over the past seven months, Israeli and Palestinian peace and reconciliation groups have been grappling with how to move forward while dealing with personal grief, government restrictions, internal divisions and the fact that members’ efforts may have been set back decades.
“What happened on 7 October really destroyed the peace movement as a movement,” says Jørgen Jensehaugen, a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. “It’s individuals now, and not a movement.”
Mohammed Abu-Nimer, a professor in peace and conflict resolution at the American University in Washington DC, says periods of intense violence tend to reveal weaknesses in the peace movement. Historically, Israeli peace groups “do not withstand the cruelty or the escalation of the conflict”, he says.
Organisations such as Women Wage Peace, with 44,000 members, including Arabs and Orthodox Jews, and its Palestinian sister organisation, Women of the Sun, acknowledge that peacebuilding is facing its greatest challenge yet, but they will not give up.
“Not everyone has come back to the table but it has to happen,” says Wolfman. “Our ability to maintain a dialogue with different parts of Israeli society is crucial right now. We have to widen our base, we have to have a bigger camp. You have to be a little more flexible.”
Peacebuilding efforts have not been helped by tighter restrictions on movement in the West Bank. Robi Damelin of the Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF), a peace group made up of bereaved families, recalls a painful online meeting between Israeli and Palestinian members two days after the 7 October attacks. To even meet online took “a tremendous amount of trust”, she says.
Some of the best-known reconciliation efforts before 7 October included an annual summer camp run by PCFF, in which 25 Palestinian and 25 Israeli children were brought together “to alleviate fear of the other”, says Damelin, one of the group’s leaders.
Describing what her grandson called the “best week of his life”, Damelin says last year’s camp was “the first time he met Palestinian kids of his age, that he could sing karaoke with and cook with, cry with and swim with”.
After 7 October, many of the former bunkmates traded hateful messages to one another. Now, the PCFF has started to reunite the children again online, with hopes of running the camp abroad this summer.
Aziz Abu Sarah, a prominent Palestinian peace activist, says the rising death toll in Gaza and the draconian restrictions on the West Bank make the language of peace difficult for some Palestinians.
“When I think of all these kids in Gaza and the West Bank, I totally relate to what is going on in their minds,” says Abu Sarah.
In 1989, Abu Sarah’s brother, Tayseer, who had been accused of throwing stones at Israeli cars, died from internal injuries after a year in Israeli detention.
“It’s a duty almost to be angry, it’s a duty to hate. When you’re 10 years old, you don’t rationalise those kinds of things,” he said. “You feel like you don’t have any choice.”
Abu Sarah began advocating for peace after meeting Israelis, initially through Hebrew classes, in the 1990s. He mourns that these opportunities are now almost nonexistent.
“If you live in Gaza today, most likely you have never had a normal one-on-one interaction with an Israeli Jew,” he says.
Maoz Inon, an Israeli peace activist, argues that though peace may seem an impossibility, history offers hope. After the Yom Kippur war in 1973, peace also seemed a distant concept to many. Within four years, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, had visited Jerusalem, and within six years, Israel’s first peace agreement with an Arab state had become reality.
Although academics are wary of drawing parallels, as regional leadership and geopolitics look so different today, Inon believes peace is still possible. “By the year 2030 or before, there will be peace between the river and the sea,” he says.
His enthusiasm for this “dream” is hard to reconcile with the knowledge that his parents, Bilha and Yakovi Inon, were killed on 7 October. “People tell me I am naive, and I tell them of course I am naive, but I am naive with a plan,” he says, smiling.
Inon is leading a new, informal peace coalition. Among his new Palestinian friends is Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who has lost 30 relatives in the conflict. Captioning a photo of the pair on social media, Alkhatib writes: “If a Gazan who lost dozens of family members and an Israeli who lost both of his parents to this tragic war can work through their pain to overcome divisions, others can and must follow suit.”
Each week, there are steps taken by those determined not to let the dream of peace die. Members of Rabbis for Human Rights have been demonstrating near Gaza, demanding a ceasefire and the return of the hostages. Combatants for Peace – an organisation of former fighters from both sides – offers a meeting space to members and new joiners.
Every Saturday, Standing Together, the largest Arab-Jewish movement in Israel, joins organisations such as Women Wage Peace and thousands of others in Tel Aviv to call for peace.
Standing Together has received “unprecedented” support from abroad, says one of its leaders, Sally Abed. The group offers advice on navigating nuances and terminology to new international chapters – Friends of Standing Together – in Britain, the US and Europe. The organisation’s solidarity banners were seen at universities in the US, including at UCLA.
External pressures might give the region’s peace movement the lifeline it needs, says Jensehaugen. “If you are a peace protester in Israel, it’s very hard to pressure the Netanyahu government, but if you can create alliances with demonstrators in the US, who can pressure the leaders in the US to apply pressure on Israel – that’s a viable option,” he says.
There is also a growing interest in reconciliation work in countries such as the US. The PCFF, in collaboration with Georgetown University in Washington, is developing an online learning tool that will allow organisations to mediate rifts in the workforce, using filmed meetings of dialogue between people on both sides and practical guidance on mediation.
“Consider how absurd it is that [we] have to go to Washington to talk to … the Jewish workers and Muslim workers who won’t talk to each other because of the war,” says Damelin.
Damelin’s son, David, was killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2002. She told the soldiers who delivered the news: “You can’t kill anybody in the name of my child.”
She felt the same way on 7 October. “When I see the pictures of all mothers … it’s the same because we all share the same pain,” she says. “There’s no difference between me and a mother in Gaza. And the tears are exactly the same colour, I promise you.”
