They Worked Together as Peace Activists. Oct. 7 Changed Everything.
They Worked Together as Peace Activists. Oct. 7 Changed Everything.
Tamar Shamir and Mohamed Abu Jafar tried for years to bring Jews and Palestinians together. Now they wonder if they ever understood each other.
This is an excellent article. It follows an Israeli peace activist and a Palestinian peace activist who work together with a group that believes communication between Israelis and Palestinians is paramount to having a peaceful resolution.
What it does really well is highlight how the two of them talk past each other and don't realize it -- one of them makes an innocuous comment, and the other thinks it's something bad but doesn't speak up necessarily.
The article also provides really good perspective on how misinformation and fog of war are affecting the conflict. It highlights situations where Israelis are lied to and shown selective news, and where Palestinians are lied to and shown selective news.
Thought this was better suited as a comment -- it mentions an incident which completely exemplifies the misinformation issue. Paraphrasing:
Some Palestinians were told that Hamas destroyed/liberated a prison. They celebrated in the streets, and were totally unawares that Hamas had committed a terror attack against Israeli civilians. When footage of this got to Israel, there was no context provided. The world thought that this was an open celebration of the civilian killings.
There was a propaganda campaign where Hamas omitted unsavory details to Palestinians, and a propaganda campaign where Israel portrayed every Palestinian as Hamas supporters to Israelis.
This just in: government creates propaganda to have their citizens hate Muslims so that they can wholesale slaughter citizens to get to the 'terrorists that did this'
Now that we're done with the look back at September 12, 2001 news segment let's see what's going on in this article.
Oh no.
Thank you for posting this. It’s a fantastic article.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Her phone was also pinging with messages that brought her some solace — Palestinian friends expressing concern for her safety, including, in his own way, her co-worker, Mohamed Abu Jafar, with whom she ran the weeklong summer camp as well as the regular reunions that continued throughout the year.
That night, Shamir and Abu Jafar attended an emergency Zoom meeting called by the Parents Circle-Families Forum, the nonprofit that runs both the Young Ambassadors for Peace program and the summer camp.
A slogan for one of its campaigns was “It won’t stop until we talk.” The group had a regular staff meeting scheduled for the next morning, but leadership did not want to wait even that long to bring the Israeli and Palestinian colleagues together, to remind one another of their shared mission before strong feelings escalated.
In the months leading up to Hamas’s attack, the Israeli Army had escalated its raids to root out militants in Jenin’s sprawling refugee camp, bringing in drone-fired missiles and ground troops and causing civilian casualties.
In the words of a participant, it was one thing for “spoiled kids from Tel Aviv” to come talk about reconciliation while their counterparts were struggling under occupation; maybe now, after the attack, their Israeli friends would be even more motivated to fight together for peace.
The Palestinian and Israeli board members of the forum failed to agree on a single joint statement that they could circulate to the staff, but the group’s directors, Nadine Quomsieh and Yuval Rahamim, published the following message on the homepage: “We express our deepest and heartfelt condemnation of the ongoing violence in the region.” The language, in any other moment, might have sounded anodyne; at the time, it was nothing short of radical in Israel, where even many members of the left were “getting sober,” a term that came to mean waking up to the urgency of protecting Israel, of making a show of strength to its Arab neighbors.
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