Megan Kamerick talks with Raed al-Hadar, Noga Harpaz of “Combatants For Peace”

MK: What was the first idea that somehow, if we can talk to each other, talk to Israelis, this could be another way?

RaH: In 2004, I met with a group of Israelis inside of Israel and I realized that these Israelis do want peace for Palestinians and don’t acknowledge the occupation of the Palestinians. Like the Palestinians, they want peace for them as well.
During the second intifada, I realized that not only were Palestinians being killed, also Israelis were being killed, not at the same rate, but also many Israelis lost their lives as well. Many people on both sides lost loved ones and through this they were able to relate.

I started meeting with these Israelis on a day to day basis and start discussing joining forces to bring about peace in a non-violent way. From their point of view, there were the Palestinians that were throwing stones and attacking them and using any chance they could to attack them. On their end, there were Israeli soldiers who could have killed their loved ones or destroyed their homes.

MK: The gathering, people give their own stories. Why is that important to building trust, even though it can be very difficult to listen to?

RaH: First of all, we can’t build trust with one another if we don’t open our minds to one another and open our hearts to one another and listen to each other very well because there are borders and walls built between us, those walls need to come down. If we actually stop to take the time to listen to one another and actually choose to listen, we can break down these borders between us.

It wasn’t easy for us to build trust with one another, even to be sitting at the same table. We actual weren’t believing it ourselves. The people around us thought of it as very weird.

My mother asked me, “Are you crazy? You’re going to meet with these people? One of them could have been the one that killed your friend.”

I think that speaking with one another and building trust and breaking down these borders is eventually what’s going to reach us to peace, not the violence, using weapons and attacking one another.

It needs a lot of support, what we are doing.

MK: I want to turn to Noga Harpaz. What was your experience like growing up in Israel? Did you experience attacks or fear attacks?

NH: My early childhood was during quite an optimistic time in Israel. It was the early ‘90s, so we had just signed a peace agreement with Jordan. We started negotiations with the Palestinian authority and there was this sense of optimism; that peace is possible and that things were going to change.

After the [Yitzhak] Rabin assassination, there were continued attacks in Israeli cities. The most extreme time was during the second intifada, about the year 2000 and on.

A lot of suicide bombers managed to come into Israel and they would search for the most populated sites like shopping malls and restaurants during an Israeli holiday where a lot of people would come out or they would go on buses and they would blow themselves up. One of the tactics that we saw again and again was that after the suicide bomber blew himself up, a lot of people ran towards the bus or the restaurant trying to help and then a second bomb would be exploded from afar by phone.
This kind of violence reached my personal life. When I was I the tenth grade, it was the year 2000-2001, a suicide bomber went on a bus in Haifa, my home town and a lot of high school kids were on that bus. He blew himself up right in the middle, the very center of the street and killed 19 people. Two of them were my classmates.

MK: What impact did that have on you? What was your view of Palestinians growing up?

NH: I didn’t understand this inherent violence or people who just want to kill all of us no matter who we are. I had a very hard time imaging a person planning these kinds of attacks, planning the ways to maximize the number of deaths including young kids.

It was so depressing because we already started this other way of action by diplomacy and again, all this violence. It became really hard to believe that Palestinians would some day be willing to renounce violence and accept us as people who live in the same land as they do.

MK: How did you get involved with the Combatants for Peace group?

NH: Around the year 2014, it became harder and harder for me to not be active. In that year, Israel started the last war on Gaza.

The way it was broadcast in the Israeli media was very hard for me to accept. We would get these horrific pictures from Gaza of entire neighborhoods being destroyed. We heard that the casualties reached the thousands just in a few weeks. Many of them were kids.

Growing up, we were always told that the IDF is unique.

MK: This is the Israeli Defense Force.

NH: Yes, the Israeli Army is unique because its whole purpose is defense. It has a very high moral standard in that they won’t directly attack civilian populations. But in Gaza, there were airstrikes on civilian neighborhoods. The way it was explained in the Israeli media was that these people were given a five-minute warning to evacuate the building. Five minutes is just not enough [time]. You can see the results in the number of casualties.

I just couldn’t sit at home and accept that this is what my government is doing in my name. I started going to protests in Tel Aviv. There were big protests against the Gaza war.

In one of those protests, there were two speakers from an organization that I didn’t know at the time called Combatants for Peace. One of them was Israeli and one of them was Palestinian and they presented themselves and called us to join them in the non-violence struggle and to stop the war in Gaza.

The Palestinian speaker was so impressive. He talked to us in Hebrew. He called us to renounce violence. He called us to join hands in the effort to build a future for both nations.

I just thought, how brave is this man to come to us in the middle of Israel while there is a war going on. I just had to look up this organization.

MK: What was the atmosphere or the reaction in your community when you wanted to get involved in this?

NH: I have the support of my close family, my parents luckily are very, very supportive and proud of what I am doing.

I think other people consider me as a bit naïve for working towards peace. It’s not the ‘90s anymore. There are other parts of the Israeli society that I know through social media that consider me as very dangerous; working with Palestinians, working with Arabs, I’m naïve to the point that I am endangering Israel. Practically I am a traitor to my people.

MK: Are you both in danger for the work you do?

RaH: I always say that when we join forces and walk on the streets, it’s like they’re walking on streets with broken glass. There are people who are supportive of us and are in awe of what we are doing, but then there are people who are also against us and what we are doing.

MK: Noga?

NH: I think the most scary day for us is on Memorial Day. In Israel, one day before we celebrate our Independence Day, we have a day that we call Memorial Day. On that day, we commemorate soldiers who lost their lives fighting for Israel since before the formation of the State of Israel and since. Last year we also remembered the names of those who were killed in terror attacks. It’s a very emotional time in Israel.

For the last 12 years, Combatants for Peace have done Israeli/Palestinian joint memorial services in which we commemorate the victims on both sides. We remember the names of the victims, both Israeli and Palestinian and we share our grief and hear each other’s stories, even the most difficult ones.

This event, for many Israelis, is extremely moving and hopeful. Last year, about 5,000 Israelis attended the ceremony. Every year we have to get a bigger auditorium and last year was the biggest one yet and still, we couldn’t fit all the people.

This ceremony is broadcast live and we get hundreds of thousands of people watching it around the world.

Still, for many Israelis, it’s very hard. It touches them in a very soft spot. They feel that we don’t honor the ones that they lost, so there are protests in front of the ceremony. Last year, the protests got extremely violent. Members of Combatants for Peace had to join hands in order to enable people to just walk into the building. These are Israelis who chose to spend Memorial Day like this. These are bereaved parents who feel that the best way to commemorate their son or daughter is by doing something that will make us hopeful for the future to make sure there will be no more bereaved families. They got spit on and cursed and it was scary to get them back to their cars.

MK: Where do you find hope that you will succeed?

NH: The more people, both Israeli and Palestinian, who decide to work together, each day, each month and each year, we feel how much our cause is combined and how much we have in common looking towards the future.

I think whoever joins Combatants for Peace will be much more hopeful for the future.

RaH: I think that if we lose hope, we basically lose life. I get hope from an Israeli girl whose father is one of the founders of Combatants for Peace who refused to serve in the Israeli Defense Force and was imprisoned. He has hope from humanity that is stronger than bullets and tear gas and the violence that are being used by the occupation forces.

MK: Raed al-Hadar and Noga Harpaz, thank you for talking on Peace Talks.

RaH: Thank you.

NH: Thank you.

Megan Kamerick interviews Conflict Resolution Scholar, Peter T. Coleman,
Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University

PC: If you look at history, there have been many, what seem to be intractable conflicts. The Cold War was one, but even the conflict between France and England, they were at war for centuries.

At some point they came to a place where there was peace and integration and treaties and understanding and trade and those kinds of things. Even the more intractable or more difficult long-term conflicts do end, but they are much more demanding. They take much more time and attention and cause much more misery. They are extremely expensive in terms of financial costs, but also human suffering.

There is so much that goes into them that they are not usually resolvable with the tools that we tend to employ. Often times, there are different things that need to happen in order for these conflicts to change course.

There are two men, Paul Diehl and Gary Goertz who are political scientists who study something called the Correlates of War database. It’s a database that is about 200 years long that looks at how different states, different nations around the world have treated each other over the 200-year period.

What they’re able to do with a database like that is look at relationships between nations that get stuck in these more contentious difficult, what they call “enduring rivalries,” but what I would call “intractable conflicts” where there is a lot of contempt and suspiciousness and enmity and competition that takes place between them, sometimes for 30, 40, or 50 years.
But even those kinds of more destructive relationships between nations can change and can end, but usually, the things that lead to that are not what we usually employ like diplomacy or attempts at trade. Usually, it takes something else to change that relationship because they’ve become so stuck in these quagmires.

One of the things that that they found from their research is that when these situations change, and about 75% to 80% of them change within ten years. It’s what is called a “political shock.” Something big happens either locally, there is a coup attempt or an assassination, or even at a higher level, the end of the Cold War was a major political shock, 9/11 was a major political shock. Something happens that destabilizes the status quo and it leads to changes, which leads to other changes which leads to other changes.

Then, what you can see about ten years later is a delayed effect of the political shock, a qualitative change in the nature of the relationships from these more intractable destructive conflicts to an actually fairly rapid transition to peace.

MK: You have written that we lack sufficient understanding about how to promote and sustain peace. Why do we have this gap? You eluded to the fact that, in some of these conflicts, the things that we usually try don’t work.

PC: What’s interesting is that, in some ways, you and I are having two different kinds of conversations right now. One is to try to understand conflicts, particularly difficult conflicts, that settle into destructive patterns, when do those change and how do you move out of those. A different conversation is about peace. Why do some communities actually have sustainable peaceful societies?

There is a colleague of mine named Douglas Fry who is an anthropologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and he has, for about 30 years, studied peaceful societies around the world. He started because people didn’t believe that humans were ever peaceful and that is in fact wrong. Humans were basically mostly peaceful in most of our history. For a couple of million years on this planet, humans, particularly in hunter/gatherer societies, were peaceful societies.

About 10,000 years ago when human groups stopped and settled in areas and laid claim to areas, where there is good salmon fishing for example, and started to gather stuff, that’s when groups began to attack each other and move into war. War is a relatively new invention for humans. It’s not that there wasn’t violence and murder that would take place, but group on group war is fairly new.

What Doug has been able to document in his research is that there are many societies, some are more traditional, local societies scaling all they way to places like Costa Rica, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, who are sustainably peaceful societies, who have chosen peace for 50, 100 or more years.

What we argue is that the international community, the UN in particular, has been trying to understand how to sustain peace. They’ve been trying to reorganize their peacebuilding and peacemaking infrastructure at the UN towards the goal of sustaining peace.

What they find is that most of what they do is mitigate crises and try to deal with the more acute problems. A lot of what they do in terms of peacemaking isn’t sustainable. It doesn’t last, so they’ve been trying to set a more aspirational goal towards sustaining peace in their work at the international level.

Part of what we argue is that one of the reasons why the international community doesn’t do that well or really doesn’t even know how to do that well is because peaceful societies are rarely studied. There are very few academics or policymakers that study peaceful societies. Humans study the things they fear; cancer, depression, anxiety. Those are the things that we put so much time and energy into trying to understand. We rarely study more pro-social or positive experiences and environments.
It has taken many disciplines decades to shift and study things like love and joy and flow at work. The same is true for peace. There are peace studies and peace scholars, but mostly they are studying peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding in the context of war; how do you get out of war, how do you transition away from that.

What we found is that the conditions that lead to sustainably peaceful societies are fundamentally different from the conditions that keep a nation from sliding back into war. You need them both. You need to understand the things that prevent violence and that mitigate violence and destructive conflict and you need to understand those things that foster more sustainably peaceful relationships between groups and societies.

MK: What are the components of a peaceful society?

PC: It’s really when members of any one group, take a religious group, any one member of a religious group treats a member of another religious group with respect and rapport and dignity and that is reciprocated. When you have that basic dynamic where Muslims treat Hindus in more respectful, dignified ways and Hindus respond in kind, when you have that, what we call “positive reciprocity,” it’s a basic mechanism at that level that emerges into norms and institutions and taboos about how people and groups treat each other that become sustainable.

What we find is that in any kind of community you need to have a strong ratio of more positive encounters between members of a group and a weaker ratio of negative encounters.

It doesn’t mean that negative encounters don’t happen or shouldn’t happen because in fact, what people in groups learn from negative encounters with one another are insights to prevent it or how to work through it constructively.

Those kinds of conflicts are useful in terms of helping communities grow and deal with inequalities and injustices, but if you don’t have a sufficient context of respect, what we call a “positivity reservoir” between members of different groups, then those negative encounters take over and they really start to lead to more competitive, contentious dynamics.

What eventually that does is affects how the groups think about the future, how they plan for things together. It ultimately affects the norms and institutions that exist in that society; how children are socialized to treat members of other groups, how they’re educated about their histories in relation to other groups.

When you have members of different groups treating each other with respect as opposed to with contempt, then what bubbles up are these norms and institutions and historical memories and plans for the future that perpetuate more peaceful societies.

MK: You and your colleagues have written about the necessity of having a vision of what peacefulness looks like. What if people have competing visions of what they think peacefulness looks like?

PC: There are often times these kinds of competing narratives that are out there. The question is whether or not the case is made.

One of the cases that Doug Fry has studied is the Iroquois Nation that existed in Upstate New York. There were multiple tribes. The tribes were at war for centuries. At some point, the myth is, a great leader came up and had a vision of a federation where they would join together and support each other in a more cooperative, collaborative way.

There was a group of wise women that were running safehouses who became disciples of this vision. They started to promote this idea, this vision for how these nations would come together. It perpetuated a vision of peace and a reality of peace for centuries until of course the Europeans came in and basically slaughtered many of them which led to another set of problems.
The point I’m trying to make is that, at a time when there is a lot of suspiciousness and enmity and contempt for members of other groups, you can get charismatic, visionary leaders that step up.

I want to be careful about how we think about leadership because it isn’t always just one great man that stands up, it’s often times a group of people that see it together and mobilize it together, men and women who are able to make that case and make it in a compelling way and really articulate what that vision is and the benefits of that for moving societies forward.

MK: How would things change in the world if we implemented some of these ideas you’re talking about, if we actually studied peaceful societies?

PC: What we’ve been trying to do here is we’re about four years into a ten year project to identify the research that’s out there on peaceful societies and then present it in ways to policymakers that help them understand it as a system. There is no one magic bullet. It’s a combination of things that feed each other that create these more robust, peaceful communities and nations.
And then, to give them some decision-making tools to help them understand that there are sometimes unintended negative consequences of well-intentioned actions. I think that’s often times what happens with a lot of international policymaking or programing that is top down is that there is sometimes equal harm and equal good done.

Part of what we’re trying to do is education policymakers and decisionmakers at the UN and elsewhere about complex systems. How do you work with complex systems? What are the things that you shouldn’t do that will harm? What are the things that you should do?

In a complex system, local solutions that emerge from within the system, from within the community, if they’ve come up and been sustained in the community, they’re usually much more sustainable than anything an external actor can bring in from the outside.

I had a colleague named Laura Chasin who was a brilliant colleague who worked on a lot of divisive issues through a group out of Cambridge called The Public Conversations Project.

What Laura would do when she was invited into a community to help them work on some very polarizing issue is she would try to identify what she called the “networks of effective action;” who are the local actors on the ground, even in a very polarized, sometimes unsafe place, who are still in communication and dialogue across the other side. Sometimes they’re clergy, sometimes they’re merchants just trying to run their café and keep the doors open to members of both groups, but who are those folks that are already effectively navigating this polarization and mitigating it and is there a way to support what they do and encourage what they do already that will help it scale up and help it be a more robust internal intervention? Usually, those are much more effective than bringing any half-baked ideas in from the outside.