Israeli, Palestinian pro-peace groups cautious, but not cowed

Since his parents, Bilha and Yaakobi, and his best friend were killed in their homes by Hamas attackers who raided southern Israel on Oct. 7, Moaz Inon has not had a moment to grieve.

He is consumed with a mission, he says: to stop a war and send a message of peace. “Only hope can extinguish extremists and this cycle of bloodshed,” he insists. “It will not be by opening a new front or another invasion of Gaza.”

Mr. Inon, a longtime advocate for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, runs cross-cultural tourist trips to Arab towns such as Nazareth. For the time being, though, those trips are off.

In the shadow of a pending Israeli ground assault on the Gaza Strip, and amid the deepest polarization between Palestinians and Israelis for decades, these are difficult days for members of the peace camp.

“We are trying to navigate a closing space at the eye of the storm to de-escalate tensions,” says Sally Abed, a Palestinian Israeli director of Standing Together, a grassroots organization gathering Jews and Arabs. “At times it does feel bleak.”

“Both sides are crying out with intense pain, a consuming rage, and a rejection of the other side,” says Rami Elhanan, who lost his 14-year-old daughter to a Hamas bomb on a Jerusalem bus a quarter of a century ago.

“There aren’t many people who are capable of hearing in the middle of all this that we share a common humanity and all deserve peace,” he acknowledges.

Mr. Elhanan belongs to Parents Circle-Families Forum, an organization of parents and relatives of young people killed in the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says the two decades that he has spent promoting its message of peace saved him from a life of bitter hatred of Palestinians after his daughter’s death.

Parents Circle has suspended its activities, reflecting a wider pause in public events by other peace-building organizations. Sometimes that pause has been enforced by the Israeli authorities: Israeli police broke up a Standing Together rally in Jerusalem last week, imposing fines on participants.

Some peace activists are concentrating on at least keeping open channels of communication within their organizations, so as to maintain the solidarity and support they will want to call on when the time for broader outreach returns.

“From Day 1 [following the Hamas attack] we began to call our Israeli brothers and sisters to make sure they are safe and to say we support them,” says Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian member of Parents Circle who bonded with Mr. Elhanan (“my brother!”) after his 10-year-old daughter was shot and killed by an Israeli border guard in 2007.

With Palestinians under lockdown in the occupied West Bank, Zoom calls between peace activists have proliferated.

At the same time, some say that with emotions so raw, and intercommunal dialogue on hold, now is a time for each side to focus first on its own well-being.

“It’s not a matter of segmentation or a denial of the other’s pain, but this is a time to hear our own communities and keep the values we are based on alive as we address the pain,” says Antwan Saca, director of Palestinian programs at Seeds of Peace, a group that trains youth leaders in Israel and the Palestinian territories. “I see it as the emergency aid we can provide right now.”

“The shock of what occurred caught us just as we were getting our programs in full swing,” says Shaul Judelman, Israeli co-director of Roots, an organization that works through religious leaders of different faiths to influence young people.

“People have had to face things on each side that are very hard, to the point where making space for dialogue and hearing the other – I don’t know where it can come from,” Mr. Judelman says. “So yes, for right now we are stepping back.”

That has not meant inaction. “You deal with trauma by doing, so that’s where we are right now,” says Mr. Judelman, who has organized patrols to paint over “revenge” graffiti proliferating in his West Bank community, and collected supplies such as baby formula and food for Palestinian families.

He wonders, though, what more he and people like him could have done to forestall the current descent into unbridled violence. “Now we see that even with everything we did, we didn’t work hard enough for peace,” Mr. Judelman says.

But the peace and reconciliation community had been facing stiffer head winds well before the shock of Oct. 7. Far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had ramped up action against pro-peace groups – for example, banning Parents Circle from giving talks in high schools, something the group had done for 20 years.

Mr. Inon takes that kind of attitude as a challenge to be met. “When I hear the voices of apartheid and revenge, I understand that I have a mission,” he says. “I don’t have time to grieve [for my parents and friend] because if our cry can’t be heard, then the catastrophe will be much greater.”

“This kind of radical empathy is one of the most important voices in Israel right now,” says Ms. Abed. “Out of the loss, the pain, the grief they are calling for peace and a cease-fire.”

Her group, Standing Together, is working with relatives of those who died in the Oct. 7 massacre to “amplify their voices.” It is also helping both Arabs and Jewish evacuees, and organizing joint Jewish-Arab hospital visits to survivors of the attack.

In Haifa, a diverse city, Standing Together has mapped out and renovated public bomb shelters to be used by both Jewish and Arab Israelis should Hezbollah be drawn into the war and fire missiles from nearby Lebanon.

“If this war escalates, our role will be more important than ever,” says Ms. Abed. “We will never stop because the only path forward is accepting that we have a shared homeland, a shared fate, a shared pain, and a shared experience.”