16th war update from our associates on the ground

The Abrahamic Reunion

The Abrahamic Reunion recognizes that creating understanding and empathy between diverse faith communities is fundamental to developing multicultural acceptance, constructive cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Working in the Holy Land for over 18 years, the Abrahamic Reunion uses education, interfaith dialogue, group processes and large-scale events to bring together diverse faith communities as well as secular groups to replace fear and trauma with understanding and trust. 

Tree Of Life Speaking Tour – February 15th to 20th
The Abrahamic Reunion’s Director Sheikh Ghassan Manasra from Nazareth is on a speaking tour around the UK over the next few days, where he will be discussing his experiences as an internationally renowned peacemaker.  His talks are given in partnership with Spirit of Peace

You can meet him in Crawley, Sevenoaks, Stroud and Golders Green:

• Thursday 15th February, CRAWLEY, 7pm, Crawley Museum (public event)
• Sunday 18th February, SEVENOAKS, 3pm Peace Tea, Sevenoaks Unitarian Meeting House (booking required)
• Monday 19th February, STROUD, 7pm, St Bride’s Hall (booking via Eventbrite)
• Tuesday 20th February, GOLDERS GREEN, 7pm, Golders Green Unitarian Meeting House (public event)

There are full details of each event, including address and location information, on this page.  For further information or if you have any queries, please contact Heather-Jane Ozane, either by email on info@spiritofpeace.co.uk or by calling 07711 960644.

The Abrahamic Reunion is in our directory  has their own website and joined TalkMatters for a webinar in November 2021.  There are details of how you can donate to help support their work on this page of their website.  

The Interfaith Encounter Association (IEA)

The IEA runs dozens of  ongoing community groups of interfaith encounters – from the Upper Galilee to Eilat, including many groups that bring together on a regular basis Israelis and West Bank Palestinians. Thus building a true grassroots movement which constitutes the human infrastructure for peace in the Holy Land.

Letter from Director Yehuda Stolov on the IEA and the war.

As many of you have wondered, we are now briefly explaining our activity since October 7^th.  When the war began we sent out several emails referring to it. In all of them we included our commitment to continue building a better future, a future of hope and cooperation, despite any hardships the present introduces. Facing the great shock and sorrow it seemed especially challenging at the current time.

We dived into immense efforts to sustain our activity. IEA’s dedicated office team communicated with all the groups’ coordinators, to check how they were doing and to encourage them to resume activity.

These efforts were successful and to date 25 groups have already met, some more than once and we were even able to launch a new group on 26th October. Several additional groups are working to schedule their next encounter.
In addition, we organized an online series of events on our current activity, under the title Interfaith Talks, which attracted many hundreds of views.

Consequently, we decided to return to the sequential sending of the activity updates. We hope they will continue to bring inspiration and hope!

Yours, Yehuda

The Interfaith Encounter Association is in our directory  has their own website and joined TalkMatters for a webinar in   October 2020 There are details of how you can donate to help support their work on this page of their website.

Sipur-Hikaya hosts Palestinian Peace Activist Hamze Awawde

The Sipur-Hikaya  (Hebrew and Arabic for ‘Story’)  initiative teaches the two sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on the book ‘Side by Side – Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine’’. The dual narrative approach is studied in pre-military preparatory courses, schools and universities.  The goal begins with the understanding that to begin the process of reconciliation it is necessary to recognise the other and a condition for recognising the other is to know the other.

Hamze Awawde spoke at a Sipur-Hikaya Zoom meeting last week.  We bring you a recording of that inspiring interview 

Hamze was born in Dura, near Hebron. While studying at Bir Zeit University, he began working for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. In recent years he was the Palestinian coordinator of Hands of Peace and with the Israeli coordinator, organized Israeli-Palestinian-American youth groups for youth camps in the United States.

Click the screenshot above to watch the recording.

Since the 7th October Hamze has intensified his activity in presenting the Palestinian side’s activism for peace, in a large number of meetings in Europe, in Zoom meetings, and in joint interviews with Israeli activists for the International television networks.

Sipura-Hikaya is in our directory  has their own website.  There are details of how you can donate to help support their work on this page of their website.  The recording of Hamze’s Zoom meeting is here.

Roots

Roots is a Palestinian Israeli Initiative in the Gush Etzion-Bethlehem-Hebron area. Roots works to nurture understanding, non-violence and personal transformation between Palestinians and Israelis in order to advance the two peoples towards a new social and political reality founded upon dignity, trust, and mutual recognition and respect for both peoples’ particular historic belonging to the entire land.

Roots Intervention against Violence

In the past three months, Roots’ Israeli leadership has sought, where possible, to actively oppose acts of violence against Palestinians, and the imposition of restrictions on their movement, in the areas where our network is active. We’ve worked with local army officers to find ways to ease the restrictions on those Palestinian communities most affected by road closures, reported on abuses of authority by security and military personnel, and approached Israeli local leadership to set clear red lines against vigilante groups taking advantage of the heightened tensions.

The images below were taken during a meeting with Palestinian shepherds who lost access to grazing lands due to expanded security perimeters. We forged a connection that we hope will develop into the future.  While the work seems endless against the backdrop of the continued war and tensions, these small acts of solidarity have their own potency. They help us to reach out to new communities in times of great need, and exemplify Roots’ commitment to each other’s basic rights at a time when fear and us-or-them thinking have become
so prevalent.

Return of Roots Lectures with Young Israelis

Khaled Abu Awwad speaks with young Israelis before enlistment
Over the past nine years, Roots has presented and opened conversations with over 30,000 young Israelis before their enlistment. We had planned this year to conduct an in-depth evaluation of these programs’ impact, beyond the anecdotal stories that we receive on a regular basis, but have had to postpone the study due to the war. We were surprised and inspired to get a request three weeks ago to organize a series of these talks, which are indeed coming back to life

Opening the Israeli-Palestinian conversation to a room full of Israeli youth will never be the same for this generation. We don’t know the stories of those who enter the room, or how their personal circles have been impacted by the war. Yet the sensitivity and principles of our presenters have enabled them to spark discussion and sincere reflection—and even a glimmer of hope among the students that there is more than just a zero-sum lens through which to view the conflict, and that there are partners on the Palestinian side also seeking a better life for both peoples.

Khaled Abu Awwad speaks with young Israelis before enlistment

In January, Roots hosted over 180 Jewish and Arab Israeli youth

A Safe Space to Question: Roots War-Time Programs
After convening several conversations between our core staff and activists and then holding discussions separately with Israeli and Palestinian circles of activists and participants, Roots has been able to plot our course of action in these trying times. In a new (and hopefully temporary format), we are hosting lectures and events (primarily on Zoom) in order to keep our network engaged, despite the emotional and physical challenges to holding joint meetings. Many participants in these conversations have responded with gratitude for providing them a safe space where they can speak with nuance and even express concern for what is happening to the other side, given the emotional impact of the ongoing fighting. It has been a place to support our network in maintaining our values and also to share fears and frustrations and to explore the questions on people’s hearts and minds. 

Here are some of the highlights:
Over 140 Israelis have attended a series of talks about the theological and political development of radical Islam, from the Quran all the way up to Hamas’ beliefs and interpretations, with our Palestinian co-director, Khaled Abu Awwad.  

A Palestinian social activist spoke to Israeli Roots participants about how the war is seen and felt by Palestinian society. He shared personal stories of the current reality under the Israeli military closures in Palestinian towns, explained Palestinian fears of further displacement, and offered a Palestinian perspective on hopes for moving forward diplomatically.

Both these conversations were received with great interest, and gratitude for the chance to hear voices of Palestinian leadership still devoted to a joint future.  

Likewise, Rabbi Elhanan Miller spoke in Arabic to Roots Palestinian network about Israeli society’s experience of the war. The talk was well-received and recorded for further use. 

Both these talks sought to address a problematic gap that raised concerns for our staff. As can be expected, the Palestinian and Israeli experiences of the war are very different and quite exclusive. After three months, we felt the time had come to build an understanding each community’s experiences and feelings, and to challenge the one-sidedness that is prevalent in both sides’ media. 

On Friday, January 19, Palestinian women and children from Roots programs gathered together with Roots program staff, Marwa Dabah and Soheir Abu Awwad. Mothers listened to a lecture from a Palestinian psychologist on the topic of “Childhood Education in the Shadow of War – Moderating Emotions and Stress.” At the same time, Roots alumni ran activities for the children, allowing them to release stress, play and enjoy themselves. The event continued with a shared activity for mothers with their children. The event was a great success, with even more attendees than expected. In the closing meeting, our alumni expressed the desire to organize more initiatives like this one to allow the children in the community to release stress and tensions, something Roots is happy to support.

Supporting Victims of the War Roots, with the support of your donations and a special thanks to grants from both the GO Campaign and S & P Global, has been able to give much-needed support to those suffering from the war. From within our local networks of peacebuilders who have faced tremendous financial challenges in these last 100 days, Palestinian and Israeli families have received monthly stipends. We have been able to provide medicines and subsidize medical procedures and tuitions, in addition to the most basic help of putting food on the table.

Eighteen Israeli families displaced from the northern border have received gift cards to help them purchase winter clothes and household needs as their stay in Gush Etzion is extended. We took children and youth from Israeli southern communities for excursions and a day of fun, giving their parents a respite and valuable time to take care of family needs. And in the coming weeks, thanks to a gift from S&P Global, we will send $25,000 in humanitarian aid to displaced Palestinian families in southern Gaza. All this has been made possible by your donations and support! Below is a short note we received in response to the distribution of gift cards.

“Good evening Roots, We are a family from the nortAlon Shvut. We want to thank you for the gift, and primarily to thank you for the caring and warm embrace. 

We were very excited to read about your joint work with neighboring Palestinians that hold a hope for a shared future in this land. After reading deeper into your writings and activites we felt a degree of consolation and a ray of light to know that there are those on the other side, people who both see our pain and share a desire for good and hope for peace. We wish you only success in your work and may we we all hear good news, peace and calm upon this land.”

Despite the adversity and pain, Roots is holding on to our values, our partnerships and our commitment to work for a better future. Thank you for standing with us. May we all continue to seek out the path of peace and stand strong against the winds of hate and despair.

Rabbi Hanan, Khaled, Ethel, Marwa, Shaul and the entire Roots team

Roots is in our directory, has their own website and joined TalkMatters and Muswell Hill Synagogue for a webinar in March 2021 There are details of how you can donate to help support their work on this page of their website.