Finding peace for Israelis and Palestinians among people – not policies

The day after this cooking class, I watched a group of Israeli and Palestinian women discuss a visit to a former Palestinian village destroyed during the war of 1948. What surprised me was how each could check their gut reactions and give up on being the victim. These people were craving the interaction with each other, starved for this singular opportunity to meet those from the other side of the wall. They listened intently and considered carefully, disagreeing with members of their own side as often as they found common ground with the other.

The interaction allowed participants to see that good people, earnest and benevolent in their intentions, can find themselves on both sides of the same conflict. For one side to see for the first time how hard the other is trying for peace, how they can feel sympathy for the pain their side has caused the other – it’s remarkable to witness.

If my own experience here has taught me anything, it is the ability of personal stories shared between ordinary people to produce a powerful shift in attitudes. The more these personal stories and shared respect can be translated into politics, the more likely peace is to come to this conflict.

The grassroots approach is challenging and circuitous, and peace is slow to come. Dialogue groups are fighting fire with water, but every Palestinian home that gets demolished, every missile that comes over from Gaza, is like a shot of gasoline. As an American, I believe in the power of the popular will, and that every person who can come to see the other side for all their humanity helps build a coalition for peace.

Secretary of State John Kerry or the Arab League may plead and prod a peace deal into place, but nothing can last, nothing can improve the lives of the people who actually live these policies, unless ordinary people can prove to one another that every Israeli is not a settler and every Palestinian does not begrudge Israel its right to exist.

Organizations like the Parent’s Circle are making small headway, but the scale is just not big enough. How many Israelis and Palestinians will grow up without ever interacting with a member of the other side before we acknowledge how ideologically poisoning it is to have never met one’s foe? The physical wall that exists between these two peoples is certainly limiting, but the psychological wall it creates may be even more difficult to surmount. And yet, it is the wall that ordinary citizens have the best chance of breaking down.

The road forward will never be easy, but the dialogue groups such as those I’ve witnessed this summer, and the process of reconciliation they cultivate, point a way forward.

Kelly Payne is studying global affairs and political science as a rising senior at Yale University. She is spending two months in Tel Aviv, Israel, interning at the Parent’s Circle Families Forum.

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