When Lior Finkel-Perl left her Romanian immigrant parents at age 13 and went to summer camp in the United States, she cried. A lot. (Editor's note: This paragraph was revised to correct the age at which Ms. Finkel-Perl attended camp.)
It wasn’t because she missed home. It was because she was coming to understand it better through her new Israeli, Palestinian, and Egyptian friends.
“I remember crying a lot because it slowly sunk in, the reality of my life and how little I knew about it ... the reality of their life and how little I knew about it,” she says, recalling her summer at Seeds of Peace in Maine. “After I came back from Seeds of Peace, many things rose to my awareness that were always there and I had never seen them…. I gained my political awareness, I gained my passion, I found my focus.”
Now in her early 30s, Ms. Finkel-Perl is a young leader in Israeli civil society, with five years in Israel’s parliament already under her belt. She hopes one day to become minister of education, since that’s the avenue she sees as most important for ending Israel’s conflicts.
“It’s important for children to understand the diversity inside Israel … and that can be an easier path to understanding and accepting the Palestinians,” she says. “They can be more open to talking about coexistence and reconciliation and demanding an end to the conflict if they see others as human.”
But she’s not naïve. She and like-minded youth activists, who were ecstatic when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo peace agreement, wept when he was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish fanatic three years later. That was followed by the deeply traumatic experience of the second intifada and three conflicts with Gaza.
Today, the peace activism that bloomed in the wake of Oslo has withered in the prevailing atmosphere of cynicism and distrust. But she is among those who press on.
“We are the generation – some of us – who still believe and hold this candle still burning,” she says, finishing up a long day of work in her Tel Aviv office.
What’s left of Israel’s peace camp is mainly concentrated in Tel Aviv. It’s often belittled for its idealistic slogans and posters, paraded through a cosmopolitan city where the conflict is only vaguely seen, if at all, through the steam of cappuccinos – not the searing fog of tear gas.
But Finkel-Perl is different. She has a steeliness that makes her more believable. And she’s in the trenches. Until recently, she was the executive director at the Peace NGO forum.
“It’s not that I’m naïve.… I encounter the challenges and the risks of working together everyday,” she says, insisting she’s not an optimist but a realist. “What is the alternative? I see no other options.”
