These are the Arab and Israeli activists you do not hear about in the headlines, which, I think we can agree, are rather bleak at this time. This is the story of how peacemakers are working towards a better future for the Holy Land. They know firsthand that conflict and injustice in this region are all too real, but they believe that so too, is the possibility of peace.
The awning outside the small coffee shop is a sapped sort of red, and the grimy plastic windows let the morning sunshine through. It is January of 2023, and a cool morning in Jerusalem’s HaNevi'im Terminal bus station. Coaches brandishing Arabic and Hebrew fonts line the tarmac, vegetable and fruit sellers compete with falafel vendors for the attention of a few passers-by. A little down the hills sits the majestic Damascus Gate, the northern entrance to the old town’s Muslim quarter. The city is calm and sleepy, unaware that this region will come to be synonymous with war and tragedy in only nine months’ time.
Our sips of bitter coffee are interrupted.
“Hey, yes! Welcome! Where are you from?”
My mother and I turn to see an elderly man sat on the next table. A pair of twinkling eyes and a mischievous grin are framed by a bright red Jordanian Keffiyeh scarf. He offers to buy us more Arabic cardamom coffee and Knafeh pastry. We start chatting. This small man with a big heart is Ibrahim Abu El Hawa, a Palestinian Arab and Muslim leader born in Jerusalem. He lives on the Mount of Olives, an Arab neighbourhood in the East of the city, in a house overlooking the infamous concrete barrier which separates Israel and the West Bank. He describes himself as a ‘Peacemaker’. I am intrigued.
“I have met Donald Trump,” he says, among other seemingly random factual outbursts. Ibrahim is 81 years old, he has no official Israeli citizenship, but has visited dozens of countries. He has spoken not only to Donald Trump, but, as a quick scour on the web revealed, to Ravi Shankar, Jimmy Carter and even to the Dalai Lama. He has made it his life’s mission to advocate for peace, primarily between Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land, but more generally between all peoples globally.
Ibrahim is a founding member of Jerusalem Peacemakers, a grassroots network of Jewish Rabbis, Christian priests and Muslim Imams working to foster peace by running inter-faith events such as community prayer gatherings throughout Israel and Palestine. Ibrahim has also travelled extensively on diplomatic trips on his simple yet profound crusade for peace. He likes to specify his twenty-eight visits to the USA and seventeen visits to the UK. But for Ibrahim, peace begins in the home.
He warmly invites us to his Peace House, located in East Jerusalem, a building in which he accommodates visitors of every colour and creed, at no charge. No visit to the Peace House is complete without a warm, homemade meal. Every false stereotype of the misogynistic Arab male is blown to smithereens when the humble Haj -an Arabic term of endearment applied to those such as Ibrahim who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca- stumbles out of the kitchen with warm pittas and hot soup he has prepared from scratch. The next day, he invites us to his personal home for another generous feast.
Food and hospitality, especially in the Middle East, are important building blocks to peace, mealtimes playing a fundamental part in wider Jewish and Arabic cultures.
Another peace initiative based in the region, The Abrahamic Reunion, run regular communal meals during Ramadan, known as Iftars, which members of all religions are invited to. Founded in 2005, this inter-faith organisation promotes, “love, peace, communication, cooperation and dialogue among the people of the Holy Land.”
The Abrahamic Reunion’s Israeli director, Sheikh Abd al-Salam Manasra, talks about the community Iftar meals they host. “We welcome 200, 300 people sometimes, we’ve been doing that for more than 15 years. It’s in different locations, in one Ramadan we always have four or five Iftars, and all the people are coming from everywhere in Israel and Palestine.”
“If there’s one thing that connects people, it’s food,” agrees Daniella Foux, Donor Relations Manager at A New Way, an educational organisation working towards a shared society for Jews and Arabs in Israel. Daniella explains that one of the highlights of the Communities in Partnership education programmes they run, is the parents’ evening, during which Arab and Jewish families meet over a shared meal. Invisible barriers are effectively crossed through the simple ritual of sharing a meal together.
Phil Saunders, co-founder of the organisation Path to Hope and Peace, confirms that shared interests and mutual need for resources, including food, are key to building long-lasting coexistence. Whether it be ultra-Orthodox Jewish or Palestinian Muslim families, neither have great means to live by, and both need to feed their often very large families. Phil elaborates on the role basic necessities have to play in connecting communities in the region he resides in, which straddles the West Bank and Israel: “They (Orthodox Jewish families) need to be able to buy everything as cheaply as possible, and where’s the best place to buy things cheaply? A Palestinian town. And there’s one just on the other side of the main road, so great, it’s started”.
He explains that simple needs for sustenance override any political divide. “People have to find ways to survive, and all the principles and ideology go out the window at that point. When I got to meet them (local Palestinians), one of the first things they said to me is ‘Look, one state, two states, ten states, we don’t care as long as we can put food on the table for our families and just live in dignity in our town’”.
Phil refers to the communities living in the Palestinian town of Husan, the Israeli city of Tzur Hadassah and the Jewish-Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit, which thanks to collective efforts by Phil, his Palestinian partner Ziad Sabateen and their communities, have become models for Israeli-Palestinian friendship. Pioneering projects has involved social programmes, strengthening trade relations, promoting sustainable tourism, enabling dialogue between community and religious leaders and fostering personal interactions.
Ibrahim’s lounge television flickers live images of Mecca in the background, as we indulge on salad and pitta bread warmed on a portable infrared heater placed on the coffee table. The room is strewn with fluffy carpets on which sit several leather sofas. We eat with our hosts, Ibrahim’s wife, sister and sister-in-law. Their English is sparse, my Arabic even sparser, but Ibrahim’s sister, a gentle woman with kind blue eyes, more than bridges any language gap, holding my hands and kissing my forehead profusely as she repeats the phrase “Alhamdullilah, alhamdullilah”. Ibrahim later introduces us to his grandchildren, one of whom also hopes to become a peacemaker like his grandfather.
I realise that peace is passed on; it is cultivated at a young age. It is learnt and it is taught, whether like this through family bonds and an inherited calling, or through formal education.
Sheikh Abd al-Salam Manasra explains, “In the Quran it says he (Allah) created us to meet each other. This is the point, to meet each other. I can learn so much from you, and you can learn so much from me.”
Manasra’s desire for mutual learning and understanding shines through The Abrahamic Reunion’s youth education programmes: “We are creating four to five events monthly in Israel and Palestine. With the youth we are dealing with more sensitive things. For example, we visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, and then we visit Ein Karem, an occupied village near Jerusalem, so we are talking about more political stories and how we can face these challenges together.”
For A New Way, Daniella says that peace and coexistence begin with learning and dialogue: “Before we talk about peace, we need to show these kids that they can talk to each other.” Cross-cultural programmes, and a pedagogical approach equips young Arabs and Israelis with “skills that allow them to see the ‘other’”.
Working in partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Education, A New Way runs a variety of courses in around 70 schools, targeting young Arabs and Jews who would otherwise not have the opportunities to interact. Hundreds of children have taken part in courses such as the Joint Citizenship Program and the Communities in Partnership Program, learning through multi-cultural, group collaboration, that coexistence is possible. Daniella says that since the Hamas attacks on the 7th of October, A New Way’s work is “even more difficult, even more necessary”, and “a unifying force that comes to break barriers.”
Ibrahim waves sadly at the austere, concrete wall visible from his balcony. Some of his relatives live on the other side, in the West Bank. Others live in Gaza. He has not seen them for years. It is getting late; Ibrahim offers to drive us to our hostel. We exchange many, many “Alhamdulillah’s”. I hug Ibrahim for the hundredth time. “Thank you, thank you my friend”.
He replies: “No, we are not friends, we are family.”
‘Alhamdullilah’ translates to ‘praise be to Allah’. Many peacemakers explain that rather than being what drives them apart, faith is the motivation behind loving their neighbours.
In the words of Sheikh Abd al-Salam Manasra, “There are a lots of things we (Jews, Christians and Muslims) have in common, why are why focusing on our differences? In the period of the Prophet Muhammad, they had the Christians, the Jews in the Medina, even in Mecca, they called them the people of the book, and the prophet said ‘if you hurt one of these people of the book, it is like hurting me directly’”.
Similarly, the Israeli organisation Rabbis for Human Rights work to promote “social and economic justice” and “activities in the fields of education and interreligious dialogue” in Israel and Palestine. Their statement makes it explicit that their peace and justice activism is “rooted in Jewish tradition, in the spirit of the Rabbinical teaching that all persons are created in God’s image.”
The similarity between ultra-Orthodox Israelis and Palestinian Muslims is important, according to Phil Saunders, who explains the Palestinians he met acted as a “bridge” between himself, a secular Jew, and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Beitar Illit. He explains that religion acts as a unifier rather than a divider between the Israeli-Palestinian communities of Husan and Beitar Illit. “They (Orthodox Jewish families) care about just living a religious life now. They don’t feel very connected to the state, as they’re not Zionists. And so, they’re not about politics, which means there is no sort of political divide that prevents the Palestinians from talking to them”.
Also noticeable is the fact the peacemakers I have encountered are often those who have experienced the pain of conflict or the abuse of power firsthand. The Arabs and Israelis working to bridge gaps are often those who we would expect to hate the ‘other’ side. Ibrahim Abu El Hawa himself has experienced discrimination as a Bedouin Arab, being denied Israeli citizenship despite having family roots in the area dating back over a thousand years. More recently, he has faced extortionate fines and eviction threats from the Israeli courts for extending his home without a building permit, which are extremely difficult to obtain for Palestinians in the first place.
Sheikh Abd al-Salam Manasra’s family were evicted from their ancestral home during the 1948 Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war.
“We lost land, we lost homes, we lost everything (during the Nakba). But I am now the third generation working for peace, because we believe in peace. What happened, happened, but now we have to create this relationship” Manasra explains.
Ziad Sabateen, Phil’s partner at Path to Hope and Peace, grew up in Husan and was profoundly moved by the destruction he witnessed, including the confiscation and expropriation of land to build Israeli settlements and the innocent civilians killed in the crossfire. Unsurprisingly, Husan became and remained for decades, a stronghold of anti-Israeli sentiment and violence. Ziad actively participated in the First Intifada in his youth and accused of involvement in violent riots, was arrested and jailed for five years by the Israeli army.
However, disillusioned by the futile violence he saw around him, decided to pursue the path to peace. In fact, he became a follower of Rabbi Menachem Froman (a dear friend to Ibrahim Abu El Hawa and Sheikh Manasra’s family), also known as “The Settler Rabbi for Peace”. Ziad, despite, or perhaps thanks to his exposure to injustice, has gone one to found many peace movements including Combatants for Peace, Land of Peace, and Path of Hope and Peace which he co-founded with Phil Saunders in 2014. Path to Hope and Peace, now considered a prototype for conflict transformation and model to be replicated across Israel and Palestine, has turned one of the most hostile and dangerous towns in the region into a symbol of inter-community friendship. In 2018, this was demonstrated when several Palestinian men from Husan who had been previously black-listed by the Israeli army for violent altercations receiving clean names and being granted permission to enter Israel sometimes for the first times in their lives. This unlikely collaboration of coexistent communities was awarded the Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East in 2021.
Peacemakers are no strangers to conflict. It is important to realise peace-making is not about sweeping injustice under the rug. People like Ziad and Ibrahim are about facing up to a violent and unjust reality, but choosing to fight for something better.
As soon as I heard of the fighting in Israel and Gaza in October, I contacted my dear friend on the Mount of Olives. He picked up the phone with his usual gentleness, he thanked God his family were safe, and told me about the atmosphere in Jerusalem. “Nowhere is safe, but thank God Alhamdullilah, Jew, Christian, Muslim, no one bothers me, God protects me…I still go to the Damascus gate every day but there are no tourists now, it is very sad.” We catch up over several calls, his latest voicemail to me ends with “God bless you. Write to me or call me, we love you, I love you.”
Peace is an ongoing and multi-faceted process, it’s a constant effort to humanise the ‘other’, and the need for it is felt more desperately in this region than ever. It is political, it is global but it’s also down to every individual, to ordinary people like Ibrahim, Daniella, Sheikh Abd al-Salam, Phil and Ziad, these peacemakers who seek connection with the ‘other’. Ibrahim put it plainly, as he remarked during one of our first meetings in January to some passing tourists who seemed rather afraid of his friendly greetings: “We won’t eat you!”
Useful links to the organisations mentioned above:
Jerusalem Peacemakers: https://www.facebook.com/jerusalempeacemakers/
Abrahamic Reunion: https://www.abrahamicreunion.org/
A New Way: https://www.anewway.org.il/en
Path of Hope and Peace: https://pohap.org/
Rabbis for Human Rights: https://www.rhr.org.il/eng
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