(RNS) — As he returned home from a Jewish National Fund convention in December 2023, Alexander Kalish, a Jewish high school student from the Seattle area, kept thinking about the demonstrations that disturbed the event.
For days, pro-Palestinian protesters stood outside the Denver convention center to denounce the gathering of pro-Israeli students and donors. As he watched protesters condemn the event as “pro-genocide” and JNF attendees dismiss their concerns, Kalish, now 17, said he considered what the two sides would gain from having a discussion.
Back home, he shared his idea of creating a space for students to share their diverse views on Israel and Palestine with his longtime friend and neighbor, Kenan Khatib, whose parents are Palestinian.
As tensions reached an all-time high among their classmates at their high school and they said they saw both sides dehumanizing the other, the two teens founded Voices of Understanding last fall, a Seattle nonprofit that aims to bridge differences between students and help them challenge their stances on Israel and the Palestinian territories.
“We’re not here to have a debate,” said Khatib, 15. “We’re here to have a discussion where both sides learn and have an open mind.”
The organization aims to help students connect respectfully, despite their disagreements, Kalish explained. “Our goal is that when these people talk to each other, they go from being people who hate this other group to being people who are like, ‘These people really aren’t that bad.’”
The organization is supported by the American Friends of the Parents Circle, a national group that brings together Israelis and Palestinians who have lost relatives in the conflict; Solutions Not Sides, a United Kingdom educational peace-building program; the United States-based Alliance for Middle East Peace; and Atidna International, a U.S. college-focused Jewish-Palestinian dialogue organization.
VOU counts Hamze Awawde, a Palestinian peace activist based in the West Bank; Jadd Hashem, a Palestinian American who serves as vice president of Atidna International; and Elijah Kahlenberg, founder of Atidna International, as advisers.
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In hourlong confidential Zoom sessions, students are invited to share their views while demonstrating empathy and understanding for the other side. After they fill out an online questionnaire inquiring about their views and knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, students are paired with a participant who holds opposite views and a facilitator who moderates the sessions. Participants can also join small group discussions.
The founders aim to have facilitated 100 separate discussions by the end of September.
Each meeting starts with a video outlining the rules — to listen attentively, not to interrupt and to remain respectful — and describing the purpose of the session. Rather than lecturing participants on the history of the conflict, the sessions focus on getting students to talk openly, explained Aude Santelmo, a 24-year-old recent college graduate from France who started moderating sessions in May.
Guidelines for facilitators recommend not to correct each other’s statements, noting “facts are highly contested these days and you are not likely to agree on them in a one-hour conversation.” Instead, moderators should invite participants to accept that they “see certain facts differently rather than trying to straighten each other out.”
(Photo by Chris Montgomery/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
The document suggests students consider what they think the day-to-day lives of people living in Israel and the Palestinian territories are like, what they believe are the biggest misunderstandings about Israel and the Palestinian territories, and what peace would look like to them. At the end of the sessions, students are asked to reflect on what they learned from the conversation.
So far, the organization counts four facilitators, including Kalish’s father, Dan, who is also an adviser, and Awawde. All are expected to remain neutral during the sessions, a spokesperson for VOU told RNS.
Usually, Santelmo said, she starts by asking participants what they know about Israel and the Palestinian territories and where they’ve learned it from, she said.
“We try to bring a conversation where they can share their feelings,” said Santelmo, who moved from France to Israel to study conflict resolution and mediation at Tel Aviv University.
When she senses tensions, Santelmo offers participants a break. Afterward, she has students reflect on what triggered the discomfort and helps them reformulate some of their stances in a way that might be better understood, she said.
“Everyone has feelings — I’m kind of connected to this and so obviously I’m not objective, but I think that my feelings about this should be acknowledged, and especially the feelings of the other side should also be acknowledged,” said Santelmo, who is Jewish.
Taking breaks and switching topics when they hit a roadblock is also what helped Kalish and Khatib have fruitful discussions, they both said.
Khatib, whose maternal family has lived in the village of Majd al-Krum in Galilee, now part of Israel, since 1938, told Kalish about the sense of injustice Palestinians have felt for decades. His paternal grandparents were among the about 750,000 Palestinians displaced during the Nakba, the forced exile of Palestinians in 1948, and became refugees in Lebanon.
He tried to articulate why some Palestinians viewed the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel as an act of liberation, though he said he deplored the violence. When the attack happened, Kalish was completing a semester abroad in Israel as part of a JNF fellowship. The program takes Jewish high schoolers to the country to follow an “Israel studies curriculum.” Kalish left Israel a few days after the attack and told Khatib about what it meant for Israeli society.
The two teens, who prefer not to use the term “conflict” to talk about Israel and the Palestinian territories, spent weeks discussing the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and the history and meaning of Zionism, before they founded VOU. Though the two disagreed on many things, sometimes circling on one topic for hours, their tense conversations helped them broaden their understanding of the decades-long regional tensions, they said.
Eva Friedman, a 16-year-old participant from Seattle, said the sessions offered a much-needed space for open discussions. After the Oct. 7 attacks, Friedman, who is Jewish, said discussions were often very emotive.
“I saw the religious part of it a lot, and I also learned about it in school from a more unbiased perspective, and so I had already been able to see multiple ways to look at the issue,” she said. “I’ve always been cautious about it, but I also wanted to learn more.”
