Peace between Israelis and Palestinians is possible say those dedicated to the cause — here's how
Activists say education, investment in peacebuilding helped in other conflicts, but visionary leaders are key
Oct. 7 was a turning point in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza claiming lives, on each side, on a ferociously unprecedented scale.
The immense pain, trauma, anger and loss will undoubtedly be felt for generations to come, and the possibility of peace between the two sides may seem more distant than ever. But there are scores of people dedicated to building peace between Israelis and Palestinians on a person-to-person level — and they're not ready to give up.
"We inherited this conflict from our parents. Do we want to have our children inherit this conflict or do we want them to inherit peace," asked Palestinian peace activist Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, who is based in Jerusalem. The 77-year-old founded a movement called Wasatia that is aimed at empowering potential leadership in Palestinian society.
For any peace process to succeed, those involved say there need to be shifts in the respective societies in order to reconcile and understand each other's past suffering and to move forward with recognition of the mutual right to a peaceful existence. Any resolution will also require visionary political leaders on both sides willing to negotiate in good faith.
But the voices of those involved with grassroots peace initiatives often get drowned out by inflammatory political rhetoric and dehumanizing language, says John Lyndon, the executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a coalition of over 170 Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding organizations.
"We should really reflect on why we weren't paying attention to peacebuilding stories before, because they were just as real then and now," he said.
Waging peace to end war
Israel-based Women Wage Peace is one example of efforts by everyday citizens organizing to bring a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The group was formed in the aftermath of Israel's 2014 war with Hamas.
It grew out of the belief that women could make a difference if they were more involved in the prevention and resolution of conflicts. That's something founding member Arielle Ginegar said is meant to be ensured under UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which states that women and girls should have a role in peace and security.
She said the organization has brought together women from across the spectrum in Israel and also aims to build bonds with Palestinian women through a partner organization in the occupied West Bank called Women of the Sun.
The groups held a joint event in Jerusalem on Oct. 4, just days before the violent attack in Israel, to promote what's known as the Mother's Call — a statement of unity for a peaceful and secure future for their children — and "demanding to end the cycle of bloodshed."
Israel says Hamas and other armed factions from Gaza killed 1,200 Israelis and took about 240 people hostage in the surprise attack on Oct. 7. The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza estimates Israel's military assault on the territory has killed more than 14,000 people so far.
Ginegar admits maintaining optimism during this time is difficult. Some of her fellow peacemakers were killed that day, including her friend Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli humanitarian who was also a founding member of Women Wage Peace.
Ginegar spoke with CBC News from her home in Herzliya near Tel Aviv, on Nov. 13, shortly before learning of Silver's death. She had held out hope for five weeks that the 74-year-old was alive and being held hostage in Gaza.
"The only optimistic thing is that after the [1973 Yom Kippur war] we managed to make peace with Egypt," she said. "Maybe it's not the best peace there is … [but] there is a relationship."
Moderation to undermine extremism
Dajani said many wounds need to be healed after this war, but there will come a time when people need to look beyond the horrors of Oct. 7 and the violence inflicted on Gaza and the occupied West Bank, which has seen a surge of Israeli settler attacks and Israeli military raids.
Building peace will require reconciliation, he explained, but also rethinking education.
"We need to have a peace curriculum … Our present curriculum in Israel and in Palestine teaches hate of the other. It does not teach living with the other," said Dajani, who once taught a Holocaust studies program at Jerusalem's Al-Quds University and led a group of Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp, in 2014.
Public criticism and misinformation about the educational trip, fuelled in part by Holocaust denial in Palestinian society, led to him being forced to resign.
To undermine extremism, Dajani believes Israelis and Palestinians need to try to understand each other's histories and suffering and see each other's humanity.
He says that though extremists on either side are in the minority, they're very vocal and violent, and that means ordinary people can be afraid of expressing themselves.
Dajani says it was extremists that "derailed" the best attempt at securing Arab-Israeli peace — the 1993 Oslo Accord signed by late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The trio would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, but Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist the next year and Hamas violently opposed the peace process. After a chain of other events, the peace process ultimately fell apart by the early 2000s.
A Good Friday for Israelis and Palestinians
Though the Oslo Accord didn't succeed, Lyndon says one peace agreement that has persevered and could serve as somewhat of a model for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the1998 Good Friday Agreement that officially brought an end to nearly three decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, a period known as "The Troubles."
"People in the 1990s, if you ask them, assumed that the Israel-Palestine conflict was easier to resolve," he said in an interview from Paris. "That was the accepted wisdom."
Lyndon, who is from Ireland, said part of what made the Good Friday Agreement successful in maintaining peace for the past quarter century was the international investment in civil society peacebuilding.
For more than a decade before the deal was signed, he explained, foreign governments contributed to the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) to bolster peace efforts by supporting community-led programs working to build trust and facilitate reconciliation, as well as to improve economic advancement and quality of life in disadvantaged areas affected by the violent conflict.
According to ALLMEP's calculations, donor nations contributed $2.4 billion US — equivalent to $44 per person, per year in Northern Ireland — to such initiatives between the fund's establishment in 1986 and 2016.
Work supported by the IFI is ongoing, including one project where former prisoners involved in the conflict engage with marginalized youth who may be vulnerable to recruitment into violent activities.
"We've never tried anything like [the fund] in Israel-Palestine and the populations have moved further and further apart," Lyndon said.
ALLMEP estimates foreign funding for Israeli and Palestinian civil society peacebuilding works out to just $1.50 US, per person, per year.
Political path to peace
No matter how many ideological bridges are built on a person-to-person basis, the road to peace will ultimately be up to negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian political leaders.
"Civil society doesn't exercise power," said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. "[It's] necessary. It's valuable. But it's not sufficient to do what needs to be done."
He points to the example of South Africa, saying apartheid came to an end not because of civil society groups, but due to a combination of external pressure and the emergence of leaders like Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk "who had some measure of vision" to bring about the end of the country's systemic racial oppression.
It's likely both Israelis and Palestinians will go through a period of "political reckoning" after this war, and "presumably" a change in leadership, said Miller, a former U.S. State Department adviser who has participated in U.S.-brokered negotiations.
"The question is whether leaders on both sides will find a way, should they emerge, to reshape these traumatized communities and redirect energy in another direction."
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