“What should I do with this pain?”: Israelis, Palestinians try to move forward

With the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel approaching, the death toll in Gaza climbing to more than 41,500, and Israel inflicting ever more extreme violence on the West Bank and now on Lebanon as well, something very different happened recently in a poky classroom at Columbia University. Two young men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both of whom had lost people they deeply loved to the conflict, came to speak not about fear and anger, revenge or oppression, but about reconciliation, friendship and peace.

One of them was Arab Aramin, a 30-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem whose little sister, Abir, had been shot and killed in front of her school by an Israeli soldier. She was 10 years old.

The other was Yonatan Zeigen, a 36-year-old Israeli who grew up on the Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza border, where his mother, the renowned peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

Both men are fathers, both thin and lightly bearded, and both are members of the Parents Circle, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization of 750 bereaved people working together to end the cycle of revenge that has so scarred their lives. They and other members of the group were touring New York and the Boston area to introduce the Parents Circle and its philosophy to Americans.

Moving from anger to empathy

I went to hear the men speak when they were at Columbia and was surprised to find them tucked away in one of the most remote corners of the university, in perhaps the smallest classroom I’ve seen in all my decades teaching there. It seemed chillingly symbolic that a group carrying a message of reconciliation in this time of extreme violence and conflict should be relegated to such a hidden and shabby spot.

The visitors began by asking us, the audience of about 20 people, to introduce ourselves. Among us were several Israelis, a few Palestinians, a Jewish law student from Iran and other students and teachers from a variety of departments around the university, including political science, Middle East studies and, in my case, the Graduate School of Journalism. One man startled us by saying he was a Palestinian who lived in Ireland and had once fought with and killed people for the Irish Republican Army but is now devoted to promoting peace. Like the rest of us, he had come to hear how the speakers had moved from grief and anger to promoting reconciliation and empathy.

“Peace became irrelevant”

After the introductions, Zeigen and Aramin, each squashed into one of the old wooden desk chairs cluttering the room, opened by telling their own stories with striking honesty, for it is impossible to talk about reconciliation in a land mired in conflict without also bringing up heartbreak, history and hate. Zeigen, who wears his hair shorn tight to his head, emphasizing his finely boned face and huge brown eyes, began by describing his mother. “She was a feminist, a peace activist — she devoted her life to that,” he said, his voice instantly sad. “I grew up knowing lots of Palestinians because of her work. She would take us into Gaza to meet her friends. But I knew my Israeli peers did not experience this because of the divisions between our peoples.”

Once he was grown, Zeigen became an activist himself, soon moving to Haifa to study law, thinking that would be the best way to help forge peace. But after he married and became a father, while no progress was being made between Israelis and Palestinians, he began to give up. “Peace became irrelevant and I fell into a political coma,” he told us.

He switched from law to social work and had two more children. “I tried to hold onto the fantasy that I could live a normal life.” He did not wake from that political coma until Oct. 7, when his wife told him what was happening. He called his mother at the kibbutz while it was under attack.

“We decided to say goodbye”

“We talked through the morning about how the once celebrated Israeli Army was not coming, a dual experience of knowing something was happening but being unable to understand it, to grasp the scope.” Then he heard shots and screaming through the telephone. “They are in the house,” his mother told him.

“I asked her, what should we do? Keep talking or say goodbye? We decided to say goodbye.” He paused, then told the audience, “I was lucky.” He gestured to two other members of the Parents Circle sitting nearby, Layla Alshekh, a Palestinian, and Robi Damelin, an Israeli, both mothers who lost children to the conflict. “Most of us do not get to say goodbye.”

Zeigen’s own mother was killed in the safe room of her house that day, but he was unable to find out her fate for a long time because the house had been burned down. At one point, she was considered a hostage, then her bones were found and identified and he knew for sure.

“I sat down and said, ‘What now? What should I do with this pain and helplessness? What should all of us do?’ I realized my illusion of safety was gone. That we all need to shape an alternative reality where no one should pay this price. Otherwise, it will happen again and again.”

“We are not weak people who kill”

Aramin, who also wears his hair cut short and has huge brown eyes, spoke next, telling the rapt audience that he was only 13 when his sister died. She had just bought some candy and was standing outside her school when an Israeli border guard shot her with a rubber bullet and killed her.

“She was everything to me, my second mother, even though she was younger, because I was just a stupid, naughty boy,” he said with a sad but wry smile. “I kept going into her room to find her before I remembered she was not there. All I could think about was taking revenge. But I had no gun, so I lied to my parents, stopped going to school and went to the checkpoint instead to throw stones at Israeli soldiers.”

Luckily for him, a friend of his father saw what he was doing and reported him to his parents. His father sat him down and told him it was time to have a talk.

Aramin’s father, Bassam Aramin, had himself been arrested for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers when he was 16, and served seven years in an Israeli jail for his actions. But whenever Aramin asked his father how he had been treated in prison, Bassam refused to answer. A founder of Combatants for Peace, which describes itself as “an organization of former Israeli and Palestinian combatants leading a non-violent struggle against the occupation,” and a member of the Parents Circle himself, Bassam only wanted to talk about peace.

“Abir’s murder could have led me down the easy path of hatred and vengeance,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay, “but for me there was no return from dialogue and non-violence. After all, it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but one hundred former Israeli soldiers who built a garden in her name at the school where she was murdered.”

“My father is my hero,” Aramin told us. “When I said I wanted to kill the soldiers who killed my sister, he told me, ‘We are not weak people who kill. We have strength in other ways.’ But I still needed revenge. So, he said, ‘I understand, but first you must make peace with yourself.’”

Bassam then took his young son with him to Germany, where he had been invited to give a talk. While there, he and Aramin also toured the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald.

“He wanted to take me out of my stress, but he also wanted me to learn about the narrative of the other side,” Aramin explained to me later.

“I started to cry like crazy for all the people who had died there,” he told us in that classroom. “But then I felt even more confused. I realized I knew nothing about my enemy. All I knew of them was that they had killed my sister, and that they were the soldiers who would storm into my house at five in the morning to harass my father because he had a Palestinian ID and my mother had an Israeli ID, so they were not supposed to be in the same bed.”

His mother was Palestinian, but because she had been born in East Jerusalem, she had a Jerusalem ID that looked Israeli. That was enough to subject them to persecution.

“So I taught myself Hebrew and I began to learn that if you want to kill yourself, keep hating your enemy. If you want to save yourself, then learn about your enemy. I began to lose hate and fear of the other side. But it took me seven years to make peace with myself and to understand that behind every Israeli is a human being.”

Both Aramin and Zeigen agreed that the first step toward ending the cycle of revenge is for Israelis and Palestinians to listen to each other’s stories, learn each other’s language and come to see one another as the humans we all are.

Listening from the heart

The Parents Circle conveys this message not only by holding talks like the one at Columbia, but through videos of bereaved people telling their stories, an online guide to conflict resolution, and an educational program aimed at both children and adults called Listening From the Heart. The goal is to move people away from thinking in binary terms of “us versus them,” “victim versus oppressor,” or “right versus wrong” to considering instead how to accept people’s differences while working toward peace.

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“Our organization does not advocate a political solution to the conflict,” explained Shiri Ourian, executive director of American Friends of the Parents Circle, who was touring with Aramin and Zeigen. “Our vision is for a reconciliation process to be alongside any political solutions.”

Zeigen elaborated further in a text: “Declaring in advance a solution (one or two states, federation, etc.) is not constructive if there is no ability to reach that solution in total agreement. The point of the Parents Circle is to train both peoples to accept or reach a solution from a place of equity, of acknowledging each other’s narrative, pain and reasoning, and to be able to build trust and a shared future.”

As one of the organization’s campaigns stated, “If you have lost a family member due to the conflict, and you are also tired of the never-ending cycle of loss of life, we would like to see you with us.”

Banned

At home in Israel, the Parents Circle has been sending bereaved Palestinians and Israelis to talk together in schools for some 20 years. It also runs youth programs and an Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day every spring, which the organization says is the largest such jointly organized peace event in Israel.

These actions have long been controversial in a land where so few Israelis and Palestinians ever get to know one another, but since Oct. 7, the Israeli government seems to see the Parents Circle as downright dangerous — so much so that the Israeli Education Ministry recently banned its speakers from entering schools at all. (Twice!)

The first ban took place in April 2023 which, according to the Jerusalem Post, the ministry excused by citing a new rule prohibiting any educational program that “slanders” the Israel Defense Forces or its soldiers. The Parents Circle sued, a judge reinstated its right to speak in schools and then the ministry barred them once again. The circle has been battling that decision in court ever since.

Yuval Rahamim, Israeli co-director of the Parents Circle Families Forum, lamented the ban in a blog post written last September: “A generation that grows up shielded from alternative viewpoints is ill-equipped to engage in meaningful dialogue, bridge gaps, and work towards peaceful solutions… In such a scenario, the cycle of animosity and mistrust continues unabated.”

Letting go of revenge

In their talk at Columbia, Zeigen and Aramin also emphasized that understanding and even friendship between their peoples is essential if lasting peace is ever to be achieved. This doesn’t necessarily mean forgiving those who kill, it only means letting go of the need for revenge. “I do not want my son to see his sister or brother die like I did,” as Aramin put it.

Both men were quick to add that the members of the organization hold a wide range of views about how to solve the conflict, but the view they all have in common is this: Nobody wants anyone else’s child, brother, sister, mother or father to die in the name of their own loved ones. As Rahamim wrote, “The tears shed by a bereaved Palestinian mother are no different from those of a grieving Israeli mother.”

Once Zeigen and Aramin had finished telling their stories, they took questions from the audience and, naturally enough, given that we were at Columbia, the subject of campus protests came up. Neither man seemed much impressed.

“Instead of exporting solutions, you have imported the conflict,” Zeigen told us. That made a few of us blink.

“If you want to promote peace in Israel, give up the flags,” he continued, adding that he has nothing against the flags and their symbolism, but that in protests, they only serve to emphasize divisions. “Put the flags down and hold up peace signs instead.”

Aramin agreed. “The land doesn’t belong to Palestinians and it doesn’t belong to Jews,” he said. “God gave it to us all.”

If only more people would listen right now, with Gaza lying in rubble; Israeli bombs crushing southern Lebanon; war spreading ever more widely across the region; and tens of thousands of children, women and men maimed or killed.