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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The Israeli-Palestinian conflict of 2023 seemed clear in Harvard Yard earlier this week. At one point on the Green, people in Kaffiyehs looked at a mock complex of bombed schools and hospitals and said peace requires that Israeli military actions in Gaza be described as “genocide.” At a second location, students silently held posters depicting Israeli hostages.
As with Harvard as a whole and America as a whole, both sides kept their distance.
But in a fourth-floor classroom down the street, a Palestinian-Israeli woman and her Jewish-Israeli colleague — on the final day of a U.S. tour that has drawn thousands — had a message that may seem strange today: Israeli Jews and Palestinians must it urgently be his partner.
“Radical empathy is key,” said Sally Abed, 32, shortly before she and Alon-Lee Green, 35, her lecture partner, spoke to Harvard faculty members at the Center for Government and International Studies on Wednesday. “We have to stop talking about ‘pro-Israel’ and ‘pro-Palestine’ – we have to be pro-people. We need a new story. We deserve a new story.”
The couple’s performances last week in D.C., New York City and Massachusetts drew three to four times more people than their trips in previous years to promote their group Standing Together, Israel’s largest Arab-Jewish grassroots initiative. Three thousand people took part in a virtual lecture on Sunday. Five hundred people filled a New York synagogue. Hundreds attended a library lecture in Brookline, Massachusetts. They often received standing ovations.
When Abed and Green visited the United States for support, they felt like they had traveled through the looking glass. Some people treated them almost like therapists, saying they felt lost and asking for hope. The couple also has have been shaken – and put off – by what they say is a country “obsessed” with statements, litmus tests and ultimatums, and by what Green calls a “very theorized discussion about who is fairer.”
And that seemed particularly true at American universities, including Harvard, where Israel’s military action in Gaza has triggered a cascade of statements and counter-statements, with disgruntled donors and alumni withdrawing their support and bitter confrontations among protesters. In an email to the school community this month, Harvard President Claudine Gay compared today’s campus climate to the Vietnam War era.
Abed and Green attended a virtual forum in DC on Sunday hosted by the New Israel Fund, which supports progressive civil society groups in Israel and is one of the sponsors of Standing Together. “It was crazy for us to get off the plane and understand that we left one war zone and entered a whole new war zone that is being waged here in such a terribly unconstructive way,” Green said during the event. “You’re playing such a zero-sum game. The discussion you are having here can be very destructive for us.”
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Their day on the Harvard and MIT campuses reflected the extremely tense climate. The three conversations were not widely publicized and were reserved for a Washington Post reporter. Several faculty members who were present and asked to discuss it declined, citing “sensitive” times. Students interviewed said they were afraid of being cited and feared they or their families could face violence or retaliation at work or school. After an interview with two students who were dating, both asked that they not be referred to as “friends” so that their respective perceptions of the conflict would be crystal clear.
Some compared the setting and collective presence of the peace activists to water for thirsty people in a desert. Others said her emphasis on solidarity rather than blame and her lack of specificity – “our job is not to draw maps” – were deeply flawed. Some expressed a little of both.
Among the visitors to the art installation in Gaza was Rameen Javadian, a Harvard student. He initially rejected the concept of mutual solidarity – without conditions.
“Any attempt to avoid calling this a genocide is a failure. “Any discussion, no matter how peaceful, cannot begin without calling this genocide,” he said. “Atrocities have been taking place in Gaza for decades and nothing has been done to stop them. This didn’t start six weeks ago.”
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Meredith Zielonka, a junior majoring in government and Middle Eastern studies, attended the first event activists two lectures at Harvard and said they were both inspiring. She was drawn to their view that it was the leaders on both sides – rather than the masses – who were fueling the idea that war and division were the only options.
“I left the room extremely impressed,” Zielonka said. “The only thing missing was action. It is easy to say, “No one benefits from the occupation, neither Israelis nor Palestinians,” and that the pragmatic solution is to end the occupation. It’s easy to say but extremely difficult to implement,” she said.
“You need the consent of the Israeli and Palestinian people and leadership,” she said, “and currently those elements are missing.” Alon-Lee and Sally are the salespeople. I hope they can sell it to as many people as possible.”
The tension and fear surrounding the issue led Shira Hoffer, a junior, to set up an anonymous text message hotline for questions about Israel and the Palestinian territories. As a mediator in small claims court, Hoffer has engaged more than 30 volunteers from around the world to answer questions from diverse perspectives and from common, cited sources of information. Since launching two weeks ago, they have answered 150 questions.
“There’s a lot of posturing,” Hoffer said. “People don’t want their friends to think less of them.”
Noam Weiss, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, attended the pair’s second lecture at the Kennedy School of Government. She seemed almost emotional as she spoke about Abed and Green’s message that Jews and Palestinians must see each other as partners creating a shared vision. She said she had a bad conscience that people who came from a real war zone were setting an example of this – and not the students here.
“I feel like her voice is very important these days,” Weiss said. “It feels like we [on campus] are polarized on much more fundamental issues than on specific policies or solutions.
“First we must fight for our common humanity, our desire for peace and a solution that includes both sides,” she said. “I understand that a lot of people don’t see it that way. Or they don’t believe that partnership is the most important thing at this stage because it is not their immediate need. I felt like this was my immediate need at this moment.”
Some on campus focused on the Palestinian cause said the couple’s coexistence work in Israel could be helpful, but that campus movements – and those around the world – that demand specific language and statements, as well as historical context, are essential because the goal is to address what they see as injustices against Palestinians since 1948.
Abed and Green are used to harsh criticism from all sides. Abed says she receives vile and racist feedback. They would both be called traitors, they said.
“I don’t argue,” Abed said as she walked across Harvard’s campus Wednesday. “I just repeat my vision over and over again. We believe that we are the patriotic camp of Israeli society.”
The two see their work together as extremely strategic.
“People aren’t being constructive and thinking, ‘How do we move the needle?’ And don’t ask important questions: ‘Who do we want to convince and how do we do it?'” Abed said. “Rather, they’re just waging this war of narrative, of theorized fantasies, whether it’s pro-Israel or Palestinian liberation, it’s very, very imaginative and theorized.” Abed, the first Palestinian woman in Haifa, Israel, one political “list” is running for office in January.
Their agenda is broadly progressive. Before Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, its coexistence work focused on bringing Palestinian and Jewish Israelis together to work on fundamental issues such as raising the minimum wage and creating affordable housing. This brings together groups that don’t normally overlap but have common interests, including ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians, as well as young high-tech workers, all struggling with the current economy.
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Since Oct. 7, they have focused on other coexistence efforts, including pop-up protest rallies, organizing Palestinian families to host people from the southern Gaza Strip displaced by the attacks, and a hotline for people complaining about political activism related to the attacks were released or punished after the attacks.
Their overall context of the conflict is that right-wing extremists in the Israeli government and Hamas — allied in some ways under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — are feeding a false narrative that most people reject: that the two sides cannot accept each other and live in peace.
But in interviews they say directly what they see: deep discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, as well as barbarism by Hamas and oppression in its rule over Gaza. They talk about the power imbalance between them as Jews and Palestinians. They talk about their complex identities.
Abed told some listeners how she encountered a large group of men chanting pro-Israel chants at the airport in Israel on the way to the United States. She called Green, who was traveling, and told him she was feeling unsafe – and particularly uncomfortable speaking to her mother in Arabic on her cell phone. When the couple landed in the United States, she told him, “You know, I’m not sure I feel confident speaking Hebrew,” a reference to stories she had read about Israelis and Jews living in were subjected to harassment and violence in the United States.
What the pair represents in Israel, say experts on the long-running conflict, is an attempt to pick up the crumbs of the Israeli left, which once stood for coexistence, peace advocates and progressive politics but began to crumble about 20 years ago.
John Lyndon, executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, a network of dozens of coexistence groups, said there had been no incentive to resolve the conflict. The international community spent an average of $1.50 per person annually on Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, compared to $44 per person in Northern Ireland in the 12 years before the Good Friday peace accords, Lyndon said.
He said there is a large population in Israel that does not want the extremes but sees no choice. Departed activists from previous decades have been returning since October 7, he said. “Not with a political analysis, but with a family analysis and saying, ‘I don’t want my children to inherit this.'”
Lyndon said he believes Standing Together can create conditions that other efforts cannot.
“This is the most over-explored area in the world. We have solutions. “The problem is local politics, there are political leaders who have an incentive to take risks,” Lyndon said. “This is the most urgent priority and ultimately what puts us on the map. But if you only focus on maps, the situation worsens underfoot.”
Gideon Rahat, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, rejected Standing Together’s role.
“The parties on the left are no longer relevant,” he said, predicting that the country would move even further to the right after October. 7. He noticed that too Israeli history shows that important advances in coexistence directly followed outbreaks of violence.
“In the short term, people are moving to the right,” Rahat said. “After that, they become more pragmatic.”
Abed and Green’s tour can seem like a parallel universe. As they met with lawmakers in D.C. on Tuesday, tens of thousands of people gathered less than a mile away to March for Israel. When Abed told hundreds of people at a synagogue in suburban Boston on Wednesday to “call peace the only solution, to use that word, to talk about peace – it’s not a crazy word,” about 150 anti-occupation protesters joined in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters with the D.C. Police Department. Six officers were treated for minor injuries and one protester was arrested and charged with assaulting an officer.
On her last day in the United States, Green was in Cambridge when he came across something he had heard about but not seen: the remains of a torn-down Israeli hostage poster on a light pole.
“Oh wow, that’s so sad,” he said. He knows, he said, that those who tear down the leaflets do so as a broader commentary on Israel, a country that he himself is heavily critical of.
“But it’s a person. Who does it serve?”