On US tour, Israelis and Palestinians united by violence hold fast to hopes for peace
With conflict seeming more inexorable than ever, victims from both sides tell US audiences understanding and willpower can keep future generations from paying the price they’ve borne
Reporter at The Times of Israel
NEW YORK – Yonatan Zeigen and Arab Aramin sat side-by-side in a nondescript Manhattan hotel room, recounting the traumas that had brought them unexpectedly together.
Zeigen, an Israeli, said he was on the phone with his mother, a renowned peace activist, when Hamas terrorists closed in and they said goodbye for the last time. Aramin, a Palestinian, remembered the day an Israeli border police officer fired a rubber bullet that struck and killed his little sister.
Neither flinched as the other spoke. Instead they nodded their heads, listening.
The two were in the US as part of a speaking tour with the Parents Circle–Families Forum, or PCFF, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization bringing together some 750 bereaved families who have lost a close family member to the decades-long conflict.
During several days they and fellow PCFF members Layla Alsheikh and Robi Damelin visited venues around New York and Boston, including a suburban Massachusetts synagogue and a Brooklyn jazz club.
Before the Hamas attack of October 7 set the Middle East aflame and since then, the organization’s message has remained the same: To achieve peace, one must start with understanding.
“The most important thing right now is humanity. Peace can happen tomorrow. It’s a question of will for people to reach an agreement,” Zeigen said over video chat from the hotel room.
On October 7, 2023, Zeigen was on the phone with his mother Vivian Silver, a renowned peace activist who lived on Kibbutz Be’eri. Reports were coming in that something was “terribly wrong,” he said. Hamas terrorists had infiltrated the kibbutz.
When it became clear Silver would not escape, Zeigen and his mother “said words of love to each other,” he recalled. “And that was that.”
Silver was one of 101 civilians and 31 security personnel Hamas murdered on the kibbutz that day. Her killing shook Zeigen from what he described as a “political coma” and he soon became one of 20 new families to join PCFF since the terror attack and ensuing war in Gaza.
“There are two aspects to our loss. First, we are just people who lost loved ones, so it’s personal. But it’s not only personal because we also have to acknowledge the context in which they died,” Zeigen told The Times of Israel. “They didn’t die in a car accident; they were killed violently. Each one of us has paid a price for the conflict that no one else should have to pay.”
Aramin and his family have lived with that price since January 16, 2007, when an Israeli border police shot and killed his then 10-year-old, brown-haired sister Abir in front of her school.
“I was 13 when she was killed. She was my best friend. She was so smart. I was so angry and it took me seven years to understand that the color of his blood is the same color as my blood,” Arab said, gesturing to Zeigen.
“I did not know there were human beings on the other side. I did not think they died on the other side. I wanted to learn though. I feel we have a great responsibility on our shoulders to make peace, to get out of the black box we put ourselves in,” he said.
It was a process Aramin knew well. His father Bassam, who spent years in Israeli prison for terror offenses, was among the founders of Combatants for Peace, bringing together Israelis and Palestinians who previously only viewed each other through the lens of violent conflict.
Bassam Aramin’s friendship with Rami Elhanan, an Israeli whose daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing in 1999, was the inspiration for the 2020 novel “Apeirogon” by Irish-American writer Colum McCann.
On September 18, McCann was on hand as a moderator for “Bridging Divides – A Conversation with Parents Circle – Families Forum” at The Africa Center, a museum and cultural center in East Harlem.
“Each person here is using the force of their own grief as a weapon to possibly repair this broken world,” McCann told the audience, adding that each of the four were courageous for speaking so publicly about their experiences.
Although the nonprofit is lauded in peacebuilding circles, it’s not without controversy. In Israel the Education Ministry has barred it from holding events in schools, saying it disparages IDF soldiers and equates Israeli terror victims with that of Palestinians killed while rioting against Israeli forces or committing acts of violence against Israelis. On the Palestinian side, there are those who oppose the group because they say it equates oppressed Palestinians with Israeli soldiers.
An annual Joint Memorial Day ceremony organized by PCFF and Combatants for Peace regularly draws thousands of attendees, as well as hundreds of right-wing protesters.
For members of PCFF as well, being able to sit down in the same room, let alone side-by-side on a stage before nearly 100 strangers, is something none of them take for granted.
After Aramin’s sister was killed, he started skipping school and throwing rocks at checkpoints. His father found out and confronted him.
“He told me he didn’t want to lose me to jail or to being killed,” Aramin said.
So he joined PCFF and started telling his story and his sharing his hope for the future.
“A lot of what I am doing today is to save my son tomorrow,” he said. “What I am doing today is revenge for my sister; it is non-violent revenge.”
The idea of revenge in the form of storytelling resonated with Alsheikh, a Bethlehem resident who joined PCFF in 2016, over a decade after her infant child died due to Israeli security restrictions.
In 2000, Alsheikh spent five hellish hours attempting to get her 6-month-old son Qussay medical care. She knew he needed to go to the hospital, but Israeli soldiers prevented her from leaving her house, which was in a restricted zone.
“When we finally got there, the doctor told us it was too late. I couldn’t talk about his death for so long. I still imagine what he would look like, what he would study, what work he would do,” she said.
She felt despondence but not hatred.
“That wouldn’t bring back my son. I want peace, I want a better future for all of us,” she said.
In 2002, when Damelin was notified that a Palestinian sniper had killed her then 28-year-old son David at a checkpoint in the West Bank, her first reaction was not anger, but fear that the killing would beget more death.
“When they came to tell me I said ‘you can’t kill anyone in the name of my child,’” she recalled.
Sometime later, Damelin found herself sitting around a kitchen table in East Jerusalem “looking into the eyes of the Palestinian mothers and realizing we all shared the same pain,” she said.
Each of the four said that while repeating the story of a loved one’s violent death can be traumatic, there is also something healing that comes with the retelling.
“It’s an act of externalization when I tell a story over and over. We transform it from something raw to something of substance. It also allows me to hold my mother in a healing way, to make meaning out of her senseless and preventable death,” Zeigen said.
As the evening wound down, each of the four urged the audience to refrain from reducing the decades-long conflict to binary, simplistic terms. Since October 7, both Israel supporters and their Palestinian counterparts have shown a tendency to retreat to their own ideological corners, with confrontations on college campuses and city streets in the US and elsewhere becoming ever more fraught.
“We don’t want you to bring our conflict to your country,” Aramin told the crowd. “You have more than enough of your own.”
With the war in Gaza continuing, antisemitism surging around the world, and the risk of a wider war with Hezbollah, a peaceful future has never felt more in doubt, the four agreed.
Yet for those same reasons, they insisted, it’s never been more necessary to engage with each other, foster empathy and resist hopelessness.
“If I despaired,” Damelin said, “I’d be home knitting sweaters.”
