MENA ACTIVITIES IN PURSUIT OF DEMOCRACY AND PEACE

page contents

• Background

  • My Education

  • ACIID & Leviathan

  • The Institute

    • NIMEP

    • The Iraq Project

    • Solar for Gaza

    • Daughters for Life

    • The Future of MENA

• Emeritus

  • Mentoring & Continuities

    • San Charles Haddad

    • Confronting Occupation

    • Embodying Peace

    • Civil Rights in Israel

  • Our Boston-Based Community

    • Memorial Day 2019

    • Creating an Agenda

    • Outreach

    • Memorial Drive Protest

    • International Peace Accelerator

For decades, I have been involved in many phases of Middle East peace and reconciliation efforts. My activities in the past range from Track II diplomacy to founding region-specific journals and publications.

As Emeritus, I continue to seek effective ways to pursue the ongoing struggle for peace, justice, development, and democratic governance in the MENA. I have grown more alarmed than ever by the political disintegration, religious schisms, deterioration of democracy, and insecurity of the region, but I refuse to give in to pessimism and cynicism.

I currently serve on the Academic Council of the American Friends of Combatants for Peace, and advise the International Peace Accelerator. I helped ignite an effort to coalesce a progressive Israeli-American diaspora and American Jewish community voice in my home city of Boston to protest the decades-long Israeli occupation and the corrupt Netanyahu regime. I advise and support the grassroots and reconciliation organizations Daughters for Life and Embodying Peace.

Yaron Ezrahi, another wonderfully brilliant friend, introduced me to military and security analysts Abrasha Tamir and Meir Pa’il. Yaron passed in 2019, and I, and so many of my community, miss his voice tremendously. His student and founder of the Democracy Institute, Emil Grunzweig, was also a friend and one of the first peace-camp casualties in 1983. Ehud Sprinzak, the Founding Dean of the Lauder School of Government at the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya, was another wonderful friend who passed away far too soon.

Likewise, I was fortunate in my roommate, a fellow Master’s students, Larry Stager. Larry and I spent many weekends at archeological digs, and studied together at Hebrew College, where I began Rabbinical studies. After encountering a detailed archeological study of the Old Testament with Larry - particularly its account of the destruction of Ai in the Book of Joshua - and after reading Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz, I terminated my Rabbinical aspirations and theistic belief.

I dedicate what I am doing now in my Emeritus life to their memory. They affirm what I still insist to my students - that they will often learn more from their peers than their teachers if they take their studies seriously, and if they engage in immersive education. In my pedagogy, I have intentionally created circumstances which oblige my students to work in teams, by imposing requirements that many of my colleagues felt were onerous, and which I knew could only be surmounted by students collaborating.

I had the great privilege of being taught by some truly brilliant intellectuals and academicians at HU in small seminars and experienced the value of intimate interdisciplinary learning. They included Shlomo Avineri, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Moshe Lissak, Jacob Leib Talmon - but none more distinguished and reflective than Martin Buber. There, I began to understand the power and value of critical thinking, and the imperative to appreciate complexity in political and social interaction.

I kept these interests at the University of Chicago, where I returned to pursue a Masters with the Committee on International Relations. I enrolled with the intent of finishing a PhD in International Relations and returning to teach at the Hebrew University. I also met great teachers there: Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau, Marvin Zonis, and Ari Zolberg.

The Vietnam War and my subsequent imprisonment as a result of my draft resistance - I was a particularly prime target for prosecution because of my military training and my involvement in the creation of the Chicago Area Draft Resistance (CADRE) - derailed my studies and my return to Israel.

I pursued my passion in other ways. I became the leader of the North America chapter of the World Union of Jewish Students, together with my good friend, Irwin Cotler, who was my WUJS counterpart for Canada. I am now a Senior Fellow of the Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights that he chairs. 

In 1968, I joined what was to be the first of many MENA Track II initiatives that I would participate in. It was in Ostend, Belgium[SM1]  with Palestinian youth leaders, after the '67 war. Our convener was the eminent North African psychiatrist Mony Elkaim.

In 1972, I founded a publication, A Critical Insight into Israel’s Dilemma’s (ACIID), when I was at Washington University in Saint Louis. It was distinctive for its joint Israeli and Arab editorial board. It caught the attention of a group of American and Israeli Jews, deeply concerned with the rightward shift of the Jewish community. They included prominent academicians, professionals, and young graduate students, such as Michael Walzer, Tom Cottle, Stanley Hoffmann, Frederick Wiseman, Martin Peretz, Hillel Levine, Leon Wieseltier, and, my friend, Yaron Ezrahi.

In 1977, as the Director of Programming and Resources at the Hillel Foundation of Boston University, I founded Leviathan, a joint Israeli and Arab publication; this time stimulated by a demonstration sparked by the presence of a PLO UN representative on the BU campus. The demonstration turned it from a potentially violent encounter into a rally against terror, whether Israeli on Palestinian, or Palestinian on Israeli. The respect this approach won engendered a lengthy negotiation mediated by my friend, the renowned Bill Ury, that brought together students of different faiths, and led to an Israeli and Arab student led-editorial board. 

The Leviathan attracted wonderful students who typified the approach we argued for - that we had to respect the complexity of the conflicts we were covering. One that comes to mind is Joel Greenberg, who, before he became the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, served in the IDF. In 1983, at 28, Joel was imprisoned in Israel for refusing to serve in Lebanon; he then went on to cover military reservists who also refused to serve. 

Leviathan had quite disparate contributors, some of whom became close friends and advisers, including Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky, Yaron Ezrahi, Stanley Hoffmann, Jamil Mroue, Sari Nusseibeh, and Henry Rosovsky. When the New York Times came to explore the journal’s uniqueness, the Leviathan was forced to a controversial ending. The Arab editors tearfully explained to me that they had to leave the publication and denounce me because they would otherwise endanger their parents, one of whom was the commander of the Sudanese Air Force, and another, a prominent architect in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. 

It left me with a powerful lesson on the fecklessness of institutional leaders, who I would meet consistently over time, and ignore. In this instance, the New England Regional Director of B’nai Brith Hillel opined that, while he had not finished reading Leviathan, he thought it “unwise for students to work together outside the context of an international settlement.” He added: “The building of bridges is disruptive. It doesn't help anybody. It just isolates them from their communities.”

I am on the record calling for a Palestinian state in 1980 when I was a Professor of Social Science at Boston University.

To record the findings and experiences of their ensuing from their trips, the students created NIMEP ‘s journal, Insights. As with ACIID and Leviathan, I have long believed that creating a publication is a very meaningful educational tool. It requires students to vigorously debate issues and editorial policy, requires research, and for them to commit themselves publicly in print. In the best of circumstances, it creates a community respectful of differing opinions. 

It is worth noting that among its first editors were Matan Chorev and Negar Razavi, given what they have gone on to do. For me, what is pedagogically noteworthy about this activity, which took a strenuous amount of student’s effort and time, as with many of the activities of the Institute, is that the students never asked for, or received formal academic credit. Passion and a desire for change drove them.

For each issue of their journal, Insights, I was invited to write a personal introduction. They reveal my pedagogical approach, autobiographical information, and the background of our unusual programmatic initiatives.

Volume 1, Spring 2005 - "A Personal Note of Acknowledgement and Pedagogy

Volume II, Spring 2006 - "On Theory and Practice"

Volume III, Fall 2007 - "Beyond the Politics of Fear"

Volume IV, Fall 2009 - "On Controversial Encounters"

Volume VI, Fall 2011 - "Iraq, Kurdistan, and the Institute for Global Leadership: A Retrospective"

Throughout my teaching career, I have been fortunate to attract and mentor quality students, who have gone on to remarkable careers, Matan serves as Chief of Staff for Amb. William Burns, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Negar is currently a Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary, with a focus on security and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Other members of the original NIMEP cohort are now on the frontlines of policy and analysis of the MENA region, including Rachel Brandenburg, a Senior Policy Advisor to U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin and formerly the Director of the Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, and Sarah Arkin, the Deputy Staff Director of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and formerly a Foreign Policy Advisor to Senator Bob Menendez. Others have become leaders in social entrepreneurship, such as Matt Edmundson, co-founder of Violet Health.

NIMEP travelled throughout the region, from Egypt to Iraqi-Kurdistan, from Jordan to Tunisia. We had the support of an extraordinary Tufts Administration, especially President Larry Bacow, that enabled us to pursue what, in 1987, then-Provost Sol Gittleman termed “passionate scholarship,” in defending us against many critics. In Lebanon, we were able to have our students meet both the highly controversial Shiite cleric Hussain Fadlallah and then-US Amb. Jeffrey Feltman, and in Syria, the Hamas leader Khaled Mashal.

Our non-polemical approach and willingness to understand complexity and nuance, and to respect divergent views, won the Institute a reputation that enabled us to pursue an unexpected and ambitious diplomatic initiative, Iraq Moving Forward.

It turned out to be one of our most complicated and consequential undertakings.

I had formed a close professional and personal relationship with a good friend, Padraig O’Malley, starting in 1986. After participating in the first EPIIC symposium on International Terrorism, Padraig agreed to take one of my students to Northern Ireland as a researcher for his award-winning book, Biting at the Grave. It was the beginning of one of the most important ongoing aspects of the Institute - immersive education.

Together, in an attempt to create the possibility for the first secular election in post-Saddam Iraq, we endeavored to replicate the same framework that Padraig aptly describes in his chapter, “The Narcissism of Small Differences: What the IRA learned about negotiation from the ANC,” in Imagine: Reflections on Peace, a 2020 book of the VII Foundation that I helped to edit.

The result was a series of conferences with senior Iraqi officials representing all diverse tribes, sects, and political parties in post-Saddam Iraq - with the exception of Al Qaeda - with veterans of the South African and Northern Irish reconciliation processes. The two most important were held in Helsinki under the auspices of former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, and resulted in the Helsinki Principles, signed by all parties and ratified in Baghdad in the culminating meeting. (This initiative subsequently allowed us, beginning in 2014, to support another unique project to help nurture a Libyan civil society, created by Jean-Louis Romanet, one of our Fletcher PhD students.)

One of the Institute students we sent, Charles Cushing, wrote of the experience: 

I knew the challenges would be fierce, and acknowledged (as did most of the participants) that this particular project had a high likelihood of failure due to the utter intractability of Israel-Gaza relations. Yet I was satisfied in knowing at least by my own standards, the S4GS workshop was a success. We had brought together a group of like-minded activists who otherwise would never have met, and gave them a platform upon which to build trust and friendship. Without this initial trust, no other progress could be made.

In 2018, Peter asked me to co-author a chapter on the project for his second edition of Urban Energy Transitions. I reached out to my scholarly friend Sara Roy to help provide updates and context on the situation in Gaza, and with Hannah and Institute alum Cody Valdes, who was also instrumental in S4GS, we did so under the title of “Solar for Gaza: A Spatial Framework for Renewable Peace and Prosperity for Gaza and Its Greater Region.”

Everything described here is not, and never has been a singular effort. All throughout, the community we have built has been able to reinforce all my efforts.

I was honored to be able to help Izzeldin, when, that summer, Daughters for Life took on Institute students Garrett Friedman and Patricia Letayf as part of the Institute’s Oslo Scholars Program, which I had created for the Human Rights Foundation the previous year.

Then, in 2012-13, I invited Izzeldin to be an Institute INSPIRE Fellow during the Global Health and Security EPIIC colloquium, and awarded him the Dr. Jean Mayer Award. During that year’s symposium, we also brought four Gazan female students, supported by Daughters for Life, as part of our TILIP international student program.

Prior to my becoming Emeritus, the last organized investigation with my students was the 2013-14 EPIIC effort on the Future of the Middle East and North Africa, in the middle of the chaos of the Arab Spring. That year featured remarkable Dr. Jean Mayer Award recipients, including Ambassador William Burns, Nicholas Burns and Robert Ford, and Hanan Ashrawi.

The themes under consideration in the symposium included: the future of the Kurds, the unraveling of Syria, borders flows of refugees, jihadists, money and weapons, and the competition for regional influence between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

TILIP international student delegations came from Brazil, China, Israel-Palestine, Iraqi Kurdistan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, and delegations traveled within the US from Stanford, West Point, and Annapolis.

A professional workshop that year explored the State of the State in the Middle East and North Africa, in the wake of the Arab Spring and its subsequent civil conflicts. The workshop considered contemporary events in a broad historical, political, and security context, assessed the responses of the diverse nations affected, and attempted to anticipate future developments and consequences, particularly with the emerging influence of non-state actors and communication technologies.

Since 2016, I have been deeply concerned about the deterioration of Israeli democracy, most recently with the Jewish nation-state law, its stalemated elections, the astounding revelations of the surveillance of Israel’s citizens, and the determined efforts by Netanyahu to avoid judicial closure on the charges of corruption against him. I am also deeply concerned with the virulent reemergence of antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia globally, and in the United States.

I have long maintained that, to teach young people, even at a university level, one had to have a sense of, and convey, optimism, even when realism needs to prevail. I have, with apologies to Gramsci, often invoked his mantra of pessimism of experience and optimism of the will - something difficult for me to find these days. When I addressed my students and alumni at the Gala commemorating the end of my tenure, I noted that virtually all thirty of the annual themes we had examined had, without exception, worsened in many ways. Even on Global Poverty and Inequality, for while we witnessed great areas of population lifted from poverty, inequality ran rampant.

I singled out the 1987 West Bank and Gaza Strip year, with particular dismay about how events of the ensuing decades had radically worsened the situation. But, as I looked out at the audience, I felt, and still feel, the conviction of this sentiment: that while we might have only been able to mitigate, rather than solve, the dilemmas we chose, I maintain my optimism, knowing what so many of my alumni are significantly doing in the world.

Decades of involvement have created wonderful opportunities to “harvest” what I have sowed, and to continue to seed. I am excited to continue to serve as a mentor to the next generation of activists and leaders of, and concerned with, Israel and Palestine, and the potential for a democratic MENA.

What gives me optimism is that by confronting the contemporary devastating impact of displacement and refugee flows on both individuals and nations, my alumni have risen to the challenge. One significant program that I have been privileged to help initiate with my alum and close friend Sasha Chanoff is RefugePoint. Sasha’s primary work with the MENA region began in the Sudan, and Darfur. Little did I know that in 1966, when I conducted research in the Southern Sudan while at the Hebrew University on what would become the world’s longest civil war, I would have, in Sasha’s work, the satisfaction of watching a new generation help improve desperate people’s lives. I had the honor of successfully nominating Sasha for the Charles Bronfman Prize for humanitarianism and Jewish values.

Many others have been involved in mitigating the harrowing consequences of the conflict in Syria, working with Questscope in the Za’atari refugee camp and elsewhere. I am especially proud of the work of Mike Niconchuk there with Questscope, who has served in a number of capacities, including emergency response coordinator. Mike is particularly concerned with trauma and resilience. Here is an interview I conducted with him on his work, published in EuropeNow.

For six years, we hosted the Project on Justice in Times of Transition at the Institute, which subsequently has become Beyond Conflict. One of its current core emphases is on neuroscience and conflict, for which Mike is their leading Senior Fellow. Having created BC’s Field Guide for Barefoot Psychiatrists, he continues to mentor the next generation, and has joined the beginnings of the Advisory Board of The Trebuchet.

We honored Curt Rhodes, the founder of Questscope, with the Dr. Jean Mayer Award, I stimulated the ongoing collaboration between Questscope and Music for Life International, which is now expanding its music program within the Za’atari camp.

I have many meaningful ongoing conversations with my alumni. In corresponding with a wonderful former student, Rena Oppenheimer, about her work with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence in Israel, I asked her which organizations she valued greatly in Israel-Palestine. She singled out Combatants for Peace (CfP).

In 2015, I had invited Sulaiman Khatib and Maya Katz of CfP to present for NIMEP’s speaker series, and awarded CfP with the Dr. Jean Mayer Award in recognition of their peaceful nonviolent efforts to end the occupation and to work for peace at the local level in both Israeli and Palestinian communities.

I reconnected with Combatants as Emeritus, and realized that one of my Professors at the Hebrew University in 1965, Dr. Galia Golan, is one of their leading members. I became active in supporting them, through the Academic Council of their American Friends organization.

In one of my 2019 correspondences with Rena, she wrote me:

I’m sitting in a cave in A-Tawani, a partner community in the South Hebron Hills, working on jail support for 17 people who were detained at our big action today. It’s been at intermittently heartbreaking and life-giving here—being a part of a growing nonviolent movement of Jews and Palestinians working to resist the systemic violence that hurts us all. Today the army used stun grenades and physical violence as we were rebuilding a road that connects five Palestinian villages to water, health care, education, and their greater communities. Especially in the South Hebron Hills, I can only use a word that I’ve avoided using for so long because I didn’t want it to be true: apartheid. There are separate legal systems, infrastructure, and standards of who deserves basic human rights, all based on whether someone is Jewish or Palestinian.  

Israel’s occupation has been foremost in my mind for decades. The sensitive and controversial comparison to apartheid inevitably comes up. In 2007, I asked a good friend, the noted Israeli-South African journalist Benjamin Pogrund, to become an INSPIRE Fellow at the Institute for our EPIIC year on Global Poverty and Inequality, and to advise NIMEP. I encouraged him to write a book on his experiences living in both South Africa, where he was a close friend of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Robert Sobukwe, and in Israel, where he led Yakar, a Jerusalem-based Israel-Palestine reconciliation center. In his time at the Institute, he wrote the original outline and first chapters of what became Drawing Fire: Investigating Accusations of Apartheid in Israel.

To help respond to Rena, I solicited Benjie, on whose insights I have always relied upon in this regard:

Rena is seeing horrible things. Unfortunately, she has fallen in with the apartheid word, repeated so frequently that the unwary come to accept it as true. It isn't. What she is witnessing is occupation, brutal and oppressive. Those who don't have a clue what apartheid was, or who are cynically manipulative like the BDS people, call it apartheid. This is dangerous and misleading. BDS use the word to try to have the world treat Israel as it did apartheid SA, as a pariah to be driven into isolation.

Having said that, I am also worried. I wait to see how the Nation-State law is applied. The Druze are enraged by it. It could take us into apartheid - institutionalised discrimination. I also wait to see whether the government annexes parts of the West Bank - that could take us into apartheid. I wait to see how the Supreme Court rules on the government's move to retroactively legalise the theft of thousands of Palestinian properties on the West Bank. We are sliding.

Contrary to the trend towards closing borders and erecting barrier walls, The Trebuchet is dedicated to crossing borders and barriers, as was the Institute under my directorship. The effort is truly global. I am now reconnected to Majd Al Waheidi, one of the Gazan students mentored by Izzeldin Abuelaish and Daughters for Life who participated in the Institute’s TILIP program during the EPIIC Global Health year. We were wonderfully reintroduced in 2019 by Ananda Paez, an Ecuadorian EPIIC alumna of that year, now working in Lusaka, Zambia, who remained good friends with her. After three years as a New York Times reporter in Gaza, Majd has now graduated Georgetown’s Walsh School with a Graduate Certificate in Diplomacy. She has now become a journalist with Rest of World.

I have now rejoined Daughters for Life as one of their advisors, helping the organization to create a community of its alumnae, Majd among them.

One of the unexpected yields of supporting Combatants was meeting and befriending Amitai Abouzaglo. He had spent the previous summer working in the West Bank for Roots, an organization that endeavors to bridge the gap between Jewish and Palestinian communities. A brilliant Harvard undergraduate student and Orthodox Jewish peace activist, Amitai has founded Embodying Peace, an initiative linking civil society groups on the ground in Israel-Palestine with supporters abroad, and creating curricula that map nonviolent activism efforts and humanize their participants and constituent communities. Amitai has attracted a team of students from across campuses in New England to create curricular content, engineer an interactive web platform, and begin cementing the EP community. 

I successfully recommended Amitai to the Oslo Scholars Program as its first Harvard Scholar. He was a valuable member of the cadre of Harvard students responsible for the success of the 2019 College Freedom Forum I led in organizing in Boston for the Human Rights Foundation.

I have become an advisor to Embodying Peace, together with Jerome, my former student and colleague in The Trebuchet, who likewise loves mentoring students. Among Amitai’s other advisors are Tamar Miller, an old friend, and Professor Diane Moore of the Harvard Divinity School.

Learn more here about our work with Embodying Peace, which has quickly progressed greatly. It is now an initiative under Amal-Tikva and Amitai is their director of international engagement. Here is their first annual report.

Amitai is currently living in Maale Gilboa in Northern Israel and, studying at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa which is “committed to educating a generation of young scholars who relate to a pluralistic and democratic Israeli society. The Yeshiva's diverse group of educators emphasize a commitment to rigorous Torah study, intellectual openness, and social consciousness.

Amitai has introduced us to the Israel-based Policy Working Group. Its members, ranging from retired diplomats to journalists and civil liberties activists, are Ilan Baruch, Jessica Montell, Susie Becher, Hillel Schenkin, and Alon Liel. Here is their report on the “Shrinking Space” of human rights NGOs in Israel-Palestine.

They have asked us for our assistance in selecting interns in the US to help their advocacy efforts for human rights and freedom of speech in Israel and Palestine. The efficacy and intelligence of Embodying Peace is that Amitai and his peers recognize that serious preparation is essential for successful internships.

Rachel Liel is the Chair of ACRI. While previously with Shatil, the New Israel Fund’s initiative for social change, from 1998 through 2003, Rachel worked closely with then Shatil Director Brenda Needle-Shimoni. Brenda is 1986 EPIIC alumna who helped create the 1986-87 year on the West Bank and Gaza. Rachel succeeded Brenda as Shatil’s Director.

Having reconnected with Brenda, she has alerted me to an informal coalition of progressive Jewish organizations she helped create in Boston in the late 1980’s with Donny Perlstein, who was then regional director of the New Israel Fund(NIF) for New England. Donny’s son Benjamin, another former EPIIC student and Institute Synaptic Scholar, is now at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and spent a year as assistant to the Director of YMCA in Jerusalem. Since, I have introduced Ben to San Haddad, as the early history of YMCA plays a pivotal role in The File.

I have long been concerned by the lack of a Bill of Rights in Israel. Recent election paralysis has interestingly led to a precedent-setting Israeli-Palestinian political merger, transcending obsolete and seemingly ossified political boundaries. I wonder in these new circumstances if advocacy for civil rights might be an effective cross-community mobilizing issue, or whether this is just wishful thinking. Working with ACRI will hopefully help rectify this, and enable us to better resonate the broad agenda of human rights and advocacy work of PWG and ACRI, as we help create a supportive Israeli diaspora voice in Boston.

May 7th, 2019, Israeli Memorial Day, was an ideal occasion for a meaningful non-polemical exchange in honor of the unique approach of both Combatants for Peace and the Parents Circle - a peacebuilding alliance of over six-hundred families from both sides who have lost a loved one to the conflict. Every year, these organizations gather in a Memorial Day Ceremony in Tel Aviv to emphasize the continued human costs of the conflict by commemorating both the Israeli and Palestinian dead.

On that evening, with my friend and neighbor Shai Schubert, we convened a small gathering of Israelis and American Jews to watch the Memorial Day Ceremony. Among those who came were Eva Armour, Director of Impact and Strategy at Seeds of Peace; Shai Feldman, then-Director of the Crown Center at Brandeis, and now President of Sapir College; Sara Roy, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard; Miri and Michael Chorev, the parents of Matan, who as my student was one of the initiators of NIMEP. Matan has subsequently led an extraordinary professional life and is currently the Principal Deputy Director for Policy and Plans at the U.S. State Department. Previously, he was Chief of Staff for Ambassador William “Bill” Burns, currently the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

We sought to encourage a discussion with a full breadth of perspectives. This post-2019 election headline in Haaretz, “It Feels Like it is Memorial Day,” captured my own sentiment, but does not necessarily reflect the thinking of all we welcomed into the conversation. And this article from the London Review of Books, “Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel” by Adam Shatz, likewise proved to be provocative and valuable.

One notable attendee was Northeastern Professor Amir Grinstein, a friend of Shai. Amir is a leader of 50 50 Startups, an organization promoting peace and social reconciliation in Israel and Palestine through meaningful connections in venture creation and technological innovation. Its founders believe that truly equal partnership between Israelis and Palestinians is a powerful idea that can drive business and social change in the Middle East.

• We believe that when entrepreneurs learn to take risks together, start something, fail, and learn from their failure to start again, they will develop deep trust and faith in cooperation.

• We believe that when people from both sides create and sustain a livelihood together, as completely equal partners, they, their families, and others around them will be less likely to feel like adversaries.

• We believe that partnering in technological innovation can foster creativity and mutual respect, lower geographical barriers, and drive economic prosperity in the region.

We re-convened on November 7th, at the home of a close friend Ted Kurland, with an expanded steering group that grew from the May 7th meeting: myself, Jerome, Amir, Shai, Ted, Amitai, and  Tamar Miller - a veteran of Israeli-Palestinian community-building and activism here in the US.

Over forty people came, among them professors, lawyers, doctors, photographers, journalists, people involved with J Street and the New Israel Fund. They included Susannah Sirkin, a director of Physicians for Human Rights; Martin Oppenheimer the former counsel of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and now General Counsel at Boston University; Tovia Smith, my EPIIC student from 1987, and NPR's New England correspondent; and Barry Bluestone, the former head of the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University.

The gathering featured a productive and meaningful group discussion about different approaches we might take in our community activism, including engaging US organizations like J Street, the New Israel Fund, and the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP); resonating civil rights groups in Israel like the Association of Civil Rights in Israel and the Policy Working Group; and supporting grassroots organizations in their localized work in Israel and Palestine.

We heard productive presentations by Amir on 50 50 Startups, and Amitai on Embodying Peace.

Amir invited Tomer Cohen, a co-founder of Tech2Peace, which is a partner organization to 50 50 Startups. Tech2Peace equips Israeli and Palestinian young people with career enhancing skills in web-building, 3D and graphic design, and mobile app development, and people-to-people peacebuilding through workshops on conflict resolution. It is a recipient of the “Israeli Hope” award.

Embodying Peace, 50 50 Startups, and Tech2Peace are excellent examples of organizations that fit the profile of our community.

One core member of our group is Shula Gilad, a Senior Fellow at the Program on Negotiation of the Harvard Law School. She initiated a meeting between J Street and the New Israel Fund, and shared other programming that our group would find interesting, including a Harvard program on post-colonial settlements, using Israeli Settlements in the Palestinian Territories as a case study.

I have introduced our Boston community to LEAP, the Embedded Action and Practitioner Program in sustainability research and practice that I am developing with Peter Droege as a Senior Fellow at his Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development (LISD). LEAP is one means of supporting projects in Israel and Palestine concerning clean energy, sustainability, urban development, and the environment. The Solar for Gaza project that we published with Peter is an important precedent, and proof of concept. We are working with Amir and 50/50 Startups, and Tomer of Tech2Peace, to identify LEAP candidates.

To strengthen awareness of the activities of J Street and the New Israel Fund, and to increase their impact, we met with Shula Gilad, Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, Stephane Acel-Green, NIF's Deputy VP for Regional Development in Boston, Janette Hillis-Jaffe, the Director of J Street in Boston. COVID - 19 sidelined plans for a series of public forums.

Increasing our outreach, Susannah Sirkin created a panel at Temple Hillel B’nai Torah in Roxbury, for Human Rights Day on December 14th. I spoke along with Joshua Rubenstein, a longtime friend, who served as Director of Amnesty International for nearly four decades, and Jane Rocamora, who sits on the Board of Directors of the Center for Justice and Accountability.

We reached out to Palestinian and Arab friends, transcending the anti-normalization boycotts. Having read this article, “Arab Thinkers Call to Abandon Boycotts and Engage With Israel,” we learned about a distinguished group of journalists, scholars, diplomats, and artists that share the view that isolating and demonizing Israel is self-defeating. We reached out to one of their members, Dr. Mohammed Dajani, the Palestinian professor who created the Wasatia Initiative. It was great to reconnect. I had brought him to Tufts in 2014 for EPIIC’s “Future of the Middle East and North Africa” colloquium, and honored him with a Dr. Jean Mayer Award. We contacted Eglal Gheita, a British-Egyptian lawyer also mentioned in the Times article, through my friend Mona Mowafi, founder of RISE Egypt.

On the evening of February 22nd, with Shula, I hosted a private screening at my home of the documentary Gaza. Following the film, our discussants were Yousef Alzaeem, a Gazan entrepreneur and Founding CEO of the Gaza-based Everest Group; Amira Hass, the renowned Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories; and David DeBold, the Deputy Director of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip and currently a Mason Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. One deep concern was the psychological stress of the conflict on Gaza’s people, which has led to fundraising on behalf of mental health facilities in Gaza. My neighbor, Maria Luisa Victoria, a psychologist, has contributed, and begun a crowdsourcing effort. Likewise, Rivka Perlmann, another psychologist, is supportive.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, our efforts migrated to Zoom-based virtual meetings in the March of 2020.

Though the Memorial Day Ceremony of Combatants for Peace and the Parents Circle could not gather its Israeli and Palestinian constituents in Tel Aviv as in previous years, the streamed event drew its largest international viewing audience yet, and allowed for unprecedented audience participation through video breakout sessions, as described by the New York Times. From the organizers:

200,000 people around the world watched the 15th annual Joint Memorial Ceremony live on dozens of different virtual feeds and online watch-pages, and that number is still growing. On one feed alone, we had over 25,000 Palestinians watching. This Ceremony forever changed the size and scope of the peace movement. 

We are concerned with the foreboding consequences of annexation of much of the West Bank by Israel. On June 28th, The Trebuchet co-sponsored a discussion with Dr. Khalil Shikaki, Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, on his recent findings regarding Palestinian public opinion on annexation, the popular willingness to confront Israel through armed struggle versus nonviolence, and anxiety about an uncertain future. In his words, annexation would mark the end of the Oslo Era that began in 1973. During his time as a Senior Researcher at the Crown Center at Brandeis University, Khalil presented twice to EPIIC, for the 2006-7 Global Crises and 2013-14 Future of the Middle East and North Africa years, alongside then-Crown Center Director Shai Feldman. Together, they co-authored Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East.

On July 19th, we convened one of our first Convisero webinars, with Benjamin Pogrund (mentioned above), on Annexation and Apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza. Benjie spoke on the nature of Israel’s internal governance, politics and social attitudes, its occupation policies, the looming annexation of large sections of the West Bank, and the potential reality of Israeli Apartheid.

In August 2020, members of the Israeli community of Boston organized a series of demonstrations on Defending Democracy in Israel on Memorial Drive and the Boston University Bridge, protesting against the corruption of Netanyahu and his government, and demanding his resignation.