The following blogpost was written by an NIF fellow, one of the young people for whom NIF is offering guidance, support, and training through programs that help them better understand their relationship to Israel and civil society’s role on the ground.

In January 2017, I stood in Israel, in the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran the Negev desert, and watched in horror as it was violently demolished. Two people lost their lives that day, one Bedouin and one Jewish. And on October 7, 2023, I watched the news, again in horror, as the worst attack against the Jewish people since the Shoa unfolded. Both of these moments shattered who I thought I was, who I thought my allies were, and showed me a depth of human depravity that cannot be unwitnessed. I once considered myself *in* the work of peace-building between Israelis and Palestinians, but both of these moments shocked my system so profoundly, that afterwards I truly had no idea where I stood anymore. I still don’t, and am still trying to make sense of it all. One thing I do know is that I stopped believing that peace was possible. 

Given everything that has happened, I think this was and is a perfectly reasonable response, but giving up on peace disrupted so much of what I had hoped for: a shared venture and destiny between Israelis and Palestinians in the land that they both call home, and a different vision of what our Jewish homeland could look like. Giving up on peace scared me. How can we give up? How can I give up? 

So, after a great deal of research and emails with the ever-patient Rabbi Ephraim Pelcovits, NIF’s regional director for southern California, still unsure if NIF’s Elissa Froman Social Change Fellowship for future rabbis and cantors was something that would fit me, I decided to apply—and see if I could reengage with the idea of working for peace. My hope was that I might be able to move towards believing in the work of peace again, knowing that whether or not I believe in peace-work anymore, it is necessary and vital. So, I thought, maybe if I do the work of peace, belief will follow. Throughout the course of the last year, via this fellowship, I have been gently reintroduced to the practitioners and language of this work. I was welcomed to ask some tough questions, chief among them being: “How can we have a hope of moving forward together with a partner in peace, when there seems to be no partner in peace?” Slowly, I have begun to emerge from the haze that came from the shattering of my belief in peace. But I’m not out of the woods just yet.

Like so many, I remain caught between, feeling closed-in on from all sides. If you are too, I am right there with you. Who are our allies? What are our hopes? Who are we? I don’t know, so what I have to do to begin to get a fuller picture of things is to focus on what I do know. 

What I do know is that I’ve seen Israeli and Palestinian kids build friendships, make music, and dialogue together in my volunteering with the profoundly moving work of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus in 2016-2017 as part of a MASA program. I know that I’ve sat beneath a tent in yet another unrecognized and oft-demolished Bedouin village in Israel called al-Araqib, and shared coffee with its resident protector Aziz al-Touri, enjoying his hospitality, despite the travails of his village during that same time. I also know that progressive folks I once considered allies, left me and so many like me completely abandoned after October 7 by espousing a political rhetoric that bends towards—and perhaps is bent on—extremism. I also know that Eitan Mor, a regular smiling face on my morning walk to the Conservative Yeshiva, at Roasters Coffee, is still being held by terrorists in Gaza. I also know that I and many others are feeling and experiencing the sharp uptick in antisemitism. 

Now that I at least have some of this information in front of me, what do I and we do? Maybe we could harden our hearts—that might be easier? Perhaps we could sit in yet another dialogue group, and console one another with our intellectual musings of a brighter future? Or maybe we could delude ourselves in remembering only the good times, and blocking out the bad? Unfortunately, none of these options are satisfactory, and are merely bandages to cover up the deep psychological and spiritual wound that many of us are living in.

That wound was on display during the campus protests of 2023-2024. So many people, gathered together, hurting, and venting that hurt on one another through words, signs, and unfortunately sometimes even physical violence. My fiancé and I attended one such protest on the “pro-Israel” side of things, and the hurt was emanating from all sides. I saw “pro-Palestinian” protestors shouting down “pro-Israel” protestors, and we were even followed to our car by folks from the “pro-Palestinian” side of the protest, by people who were hurling antisemitic and homophobic slurs at us and threatening us with violence.  I thought “This is no way to communicate, these are not my allies, there is no way forward here”, and it was clear that the only thing that this particular protest was “pro” was figuring out a way to channel pain that had nowhere to go. 

So, there we were, standing shoulder to shoulder with our fellow Zionists of all stripes in our moment of pain. And there I was, being shouted down by folks that reminded me of my Berkeley days, folks who I might have once seen as my progressive allies. So did I retreat from the work? I did. Did I need space for my people’s pain? I did. Have I found that belief in peace-work yet? Not yet.

I still don’t know how this will all turn out, but if either side is bent on the destruction of the other, then they can’t expect that “othered” side to come to the table in any reasonable way. But herein lies that very same impasse we find ourselves at again, and again, and again. So, cards on the table? It’s a mess, full of contradictions. And even so, there is work to be done. So how do we begin again to believe in peace? Well, let me say that I’m not here to offer you hope that can go on a bumper sticker. There is no pretty, witty, shareable phrase that is going to put the fuel in the tank that we need to move forward. But in the same way that we sometimes do a mitzvah in the hopes that the proper “kavannah”/motivation might follow, so too that is perhaps one of the few ways to proceed at the present moment. 

So maybe this is a little like lighting candles on Shabbat when you don’t want to. It’s been a long week, a brutal week, and yet there are candles to be lit. You don’t want to, but you want to want to. So, you light candles, and then you light them again, and slowly slowly, perhaps the world has a little more light in it, and you find yourself wanting to light those candles, because hey, they make things just a little brighter. The alternative is darkness, and I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to sit in the dark, and at the same time I won’t be put in the position of calling darkness light, and light darkness again. So, the finding of the hope for peace will be in the doing, but with eyes open, in a kind of practical disillusionment. We shouldn’t operate under the illusion that any of this is totally possible, or easy, or that everyone has our best interests at heart, and we definitely shouldn’t wait for the credits to roll on a job well done. And even so, whether we find ourselves in Israel or outside of it, we’ve got work to do, and the struggle continues.