To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
In this world, where everything and everyone is for sale, we must sustain independent media we can trust. If you believe independent journalism is critical to protecting democracy and the common good, please support Common Dreams this Giving Tuesday! We wouldn't exist without you.
The Parents Circle believes that the first step toward ending the cycle of revenge is for both peoples to listen to each other’s stories, learn each other’s language, and come to see one another as the humans we all are.
With the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel approaching, the death toll in Gaza climbing to more than 41,500, and Israel inflicting ever more extreme violence on the West Bank and now on Lebanon as well, something very different happened recently in a poky classroom at Columbia University. Two young men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both of whom had lost people they deeply loved to the conflict, came to speak not about fear and anger, revenge or oppression, but about reconciliation, friendship, and peace.
One of them was Arab Aramin, a 30-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem whose little sister, Abir, had been shot and killed in front of her school by an Israeli soldier. She was 10 years old.
The other was Yonatan Zeigen, a 36-year-old Israeli who grew up on the Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza border, where his mother, the renowned peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
“We all need to shape an alternative reality where no one should pay this price. Otherwise, it will happen again and again.”
Both men are fathers, both thin and lightly bearded, and both are members of the Parents Circle, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization of 750 bereaved people working together to end the cycle of revenge that has so scarred their lives. They and other members of the group were touring New York City and the Boston area to introduce the Parents Circle and its philosophy to Americans.
I went to hear the men speak when they were at Columbia and was surprised to find them tucked away in one of the most remote corners of the university, in perhaps the smallest classroom I’ve seen in all my decades teaching there. It seemed chillingly symbolic that a group carrying a message of reconciliation in this time of extreme violence and conflict should be relegated to such a hidden and shabby spot.
The visitors began by asking us, the audience of about 20 people, to introduce ourselves. Among us were several Israelis, a few Palestinians, a Jewish law student from Iran, and other students and teachers from a variety of departments around the university, including political science, Middle East studies, and in my case, the Graduate School of Journalism. One man startled us by saying he was a Palestinian who lived in Ireland and had once fought with and killed people for the Irish Republican Army but is now devoted to promoting peace. Like the rest of us, he had come to hear how the speakers had moved from grief and anger to promoting reconciliation and empathy.
After the introductions, Zeigen and Aramin, each squashed into one of the old wooden desk chairs cluttering the room, opened by telling their own stories with striking honesty, for it is impossible to talk about reconciliation in a land mired in conflict without also bringing up heartbreak, history, and hate. Zeigen, who wears his hair shorn tight to his head, emphasizing his finely boned face and huge brown eyes, began by describing his mother. “She was a feminist, a peace activist—she devoted her life to that,” he said, his voice instantly sad. “I grew up knowing lots of Palestinians because of her work. She would take us into Gaza to meet her friends. But I knew my Israeli peers did not experience this because of the divisions between our peoples.”
Once he was grown, Zeigen became an activist himself, soon moving to Haifa to study law, thinking that would be the best way to help forge peace. But after he married and became a father, while no progress was being made between Israelis and Palestinians, he began to give up. “Peace became irrelevant and I fell into a political coma,” he told us.
He switched from law to social work and had two more children. “I tried to hold onto the fantasy that I could live a normal life.” He did not wake from that political coma until October 7, when his wife told him what was happening. He called his mother at the kibbutz while it was under attack.
“We talked through the morning about how the once celebrated Israeli Army was not coming, a dual experience of knowing something was happening but being unable to understand it, to grasp the scope.” Then he heard shots and screaming through the telephone. “They are in the house,” his mother told him.
“I asked her, what should we do? Keep talking or say goodbye? We decided to say goodbye.” He paused, then told the audience, “I was lucky.” He gestured to two other members of the Parents Circle sitting nearby, Layla Alshekh, a Palestinian, and Robi Damelin, an Israeli, both mothers who lost children to the conflict. “Most of us do not get to say goodbye.”
Zeigen’s own mother was killed in the safe room of her house that day, but he was unable to find out her fate for a long time because the house had been burned down. At one point, she was considered a hostage, then her bones were found and identified and he knew for sure.
“I sat down and said, ‘What now? What should I do with this pain and helplessness? What should all of us do?’ I realized my illusion of safety was gone. That we all need to shape an alternative reality where no one should pay this price. Otherwise, it will happen again and again.”
Aramin, who also wears his hair cut short and has huge brown eyes, spoke next, telling the rapt audience that he was only 13 when his sister died. She had just bought some candy and was standing outside her school when an Israeli border guard shot her with a rubber bullet and killed her.
“She was everything to me, my second mother, even though she was younger, because I was just a stupid, naughty boy,” he said with a sad but wry smile. “I kept going into her room to find her before I remembered she was not there. All I could think about was taking revenge. But I had no gun, so I lied to my parents, stopped going to school, and went to the checkpoint instead to throw stones at Israeli soldiers.”
Luckily for him, a friend of his father saw what he was doing and reported him to his parents. His father sat him down and told him it was time to have a talk.
“I began to learn that if you want to kill yourself, keep hating your enemy. If you want to save yourself, then learn about your enemy.”
Aramin’s father, Bassam Aramin, had himself been arrested for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers when he was 16, and served seven years in an Israeli jail for his actions. But whenever Aramin asked his father how he had been treated in prison, Bassam refused to answer. A founder of Combatants for Peace, which describes itself as “an organization of former Israeli and Palestinian combatants leading a nonviolent struggle against the occupation,” and a member of the Parents Circle himself, Bassam only wanted to talk about peace.
“Abir’s murder could have led me down the easy path of hatred and vengeance,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay, “but for me there was no return from dialogue and nonviolence. After all, it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but 100 former Israeli soldiers who built a garden in her name at the school where she was murdered.”
“My father is my hero,” Aramin told us. “When I said I wanted to kill the soldiers who killed my sister, he told me, ‘We are not weak people who kill. We have strength in other ways.’ But I still needed revenge. So, he said, ‘I understand, but first you must make peace with yourself.'”
Bassam then took his young son with him to Germany, where he had been invited to give a talk. While there, he and Aramin also toured the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald.
“He wanted to take me out of my stress, but he also wanted me to learn about the narrative of the other side,” Aramin explained to me later.
“I started to cry like crazy for all the people who had died there,” he told us in that classroom. “But then I felt even more confused. I realized I knew nothing about my enemy. All I knew of them was that they had killed my sister, and that they were the soldiers who would storm into my house at five in the morning to harass my father because he had a Palestinian ID and my mother had an Israeli ID, so they were not supposed to be in the same bed.”
His mother was Palestinian, but because she had been born in East Jerusalem, she had a Jerusalem ID that looked Israeli. That was enough to subject them to persecution.
“So, I taught myself Hebrew and I began to learn that if you want to kill yourself, keep hating your enemy. If you want to save yourself, then learn about your enemy. I began to lose hate and fear of the other side. But it took me seven years to make peace with myself and to understand that behind every Israeli is a human being.”
Both Aramin and Zeigen agreed that the first step toward ending the cycle of revenge is for Israelis and Palestinians to listen to each other’s stories, learn each other’s language, and come to see one another as the humans we all are.
The Parents Circle conveys this message not only by holding talks like the one at Columbia, but through videos of bereaved people telling their stories, an online guide to conflict resolution, and an educational program aimed at both children and adults called Listening From the Heart. The goal is to move people away from thinking in binary terms of “us versus them,” “victim versus oppressor,” or “right versus wrong” to considering instead how to accept people’s differences while working toward peace.
“Our organization does not advocate a political solution to the conflict,” explained Shiri Ourian, executive director of American Friends of the Parents Circle, who was touring with Aramin and Zeigen. “Our vision is for a reconciliation process to be alongside any political solutions.”
Zeigen elaborated further in a text: “Declaring in advance a solution (one or two states, federation, etc.) is not constructive if there is no ability to reach that solution in total agreement. The point of the Parents Circle is to train both peoples to accept or reach a solution from a place of equity, of acknowledging each other’s narrative, pain, and reasoning, and to be able to build trust and a shared future.”
As one of the organization’s campaigns stated, “If you have lost a family member due to the conflict, and you are also tired of the never-ending cycle of loss of life, we would like to see you with us.”
At home in Israel, the Parents Circle has been sending bereaved Palestinians and Israelis to talk together in schools for some 20 years. It also runs youth programs and an Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day every spring, which the organization says is the largest such jointly organized peace event in Israel.
These actions have long been controversial in a land where so few Israelis and Palestinians ever get to know one another, but since October 7, the Israeli government seems to see the Parents Circle as downright dangerous—so much so that the Israeli Education Ministry recently banned its speakers from entering schools at all. (Twice!)
The first ban took place in April 2023 which, according toThe Jerusalem Post, the ministry excused by citing a new rule prohibiting any educational program that “slanders” the Israel Defense Forces or its soldiers. The Parents Circle sued, a judge reinstated its right to speak in schools, and then the Ministry barred them once again. The Circle has been battling that decision in court ever since.
Yuval Rahamim, Israeli co-director of the Parents Circle Families Forum, lamented the ban in a blog he wrote in September 2023. “A generation that grows up shielded from alternative viewpoints is ill-equipped to engage in meaningful dialogue, bridge gaps, and work towards peaceful solutions… In such a scenario, the cycle of animosity and mistrust continues unabated.”
In their talk at Columbia, Zeigen and Aramin also emphasized that understanding and even friendship between their peoples is essential if lasting peace is ever to be achieved. This doesn’t necessarily mean forgiving those who kill, it only means letting go of the need for revenge. “I do not want my son to see his sister or brother die like I did,” as Aramin put it.
Both men were quick to add that the members of the organization hold a wide range of views about how to solve the conflict, but the view they all have in common is this: Nobody wants anyone else’s child, brother, sister, mother, or father to die in the name of their own loved ones. As Rahamim wrote, “The tears shed by a bereaved Palestinian mother are no different from those of a grieving Israeli mother.”
Once Zeigen and Aramin had finished telling their stories, they took questions from the audience and, naturally enough, given that we were at Columbia, the subject of campus protests came up. Neither man seemed much impressed.
“Instead of exporting solutions, you have imported the conflict,” Zeigen told us. That made a few of us blink.
“If you want to promote peace in Israel, give up the flags,” he continued, adding that he has nothing against the flags and their symbolism, but that in protests, they only serve to emphasize divisions. “Put the flags down and hold up peace signs instead.”
Aramin agreed. “The land doesn’t belong to Palestinians and it doesn’t belong to Jews,” he said. “God gave it to us all.”
If only more people would listen right now, with Gaza lying in rubble; Israeli bombs crushing southern Lebanon; war spreading ever more widely across the region; and tens of thousands of children, women, and men maimed or killed.
A call for millions to take up the path of the political bodhisattva.
This is an invitation to those who behold the horrific suffering and injustice that plague our world and yearn to cool the flames of pain. To those who believe that we need both a deep shift in culture and consciousness as well as in laws and material conditions. To those who sense that love, connection, compassion, and truth must be at the heart of the revolution our world needs so urgently.
Perhaps you are a student activist, a labor organizer, a nonprofit staff member, a volunteer community activist in a social movement, or simply a citizen who votes and yearns to do more. Or perhaps you are a devoted meditator or member of a house of worship who wants to help free others from suffering in ways that won’t happen simply by bringing them to the cushion or the church pew.
From whatever position, alongside the natural joy of life and the promise of this moment in history, you see that our precious world is in big, big trouble. From the hellish catastrophe in Gaza and the grotesque inequality of our global economy to the rise of new authoritarian threats to democracy and the maelstrom of addictive misinformation and heart-wrenching dehumanization online, you sense the overwhelming difficulty. You feel the weight of knowing that ours is an era seared by interlocking crises escalating amid a climate emergency that threatens the very future of human civilization even as it drives countless other species to the verge of extinction.
Yet you know that we cannot give up. The call of love moves us to try.
But how?
In the face of such entrenched and powerful obstacles, can we really overcome? Is it truly possible to move so many so quickly? To shift our civilization in the direction of love fast enough to restore a safe climate and protect it and life on earth?
From whatever position, alongside the natural joy of life and the promise of this moment in history, you see that our precious world is in big, big trouble.
The future is always uncertain. And with life comes hope. I believe there is a way.
And I believe that part of that path lies in writing a new chapter in one of the great experiments of human history.
Along the journey of Gandhi’s life—which he called “my experiments with truth”—the Mahatma dreamed of a “nonviolent army,” or shanti sena.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called us to build a movement that was itself an embodiment of that into which it would transform society: a Beloved Community.
Each of their lives was cut short by assassin’s bullets, but their service and the movements they helped build changed our world, advancing one of the most profound and powerful traditions that exists.
I call it the integral nonviolent liberation tradition: a legacy of spiritually-rooted nonviolent leaders and movements who cultivated the most radiant dimensions of human potential—the most radical love, the most embracing truth, the deepest wisdom, the most encompassing compassion, the most profound courage—and applied those great capacities in devoted service and struggle to benefit and liberate all people and beings.
We can see some of the roots of this tradition in the lives of Jesus of Nazareth and Gautuma the Buddha. They each articulated in different forms an ethic of universal compassionate love and nonviolent service, offering teachings and practices to embody it. Mohandas Gandhi was, according to Martin Luther King, “probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.” In Gandhi’s case, he was drawing significantly on teachings and practices of the Hindu tradition and especially the Bhagavad Gita to inform his fusion of spiritual practice, service, and political action. Dr. King developed an approach rooted in the prophetic Christian tradition of the Black church. And many others like Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Thich Nhat Han, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, John Lewis, A. T. Ariyatne, Dorothy Day—and countless others less known to history—have made their own experiments in this profound field. All of them learned from each other or those who experimented before them.
Every moment is precious and every step a person takes on the path of a nonviolent spiritual warrior is a great and necessary blessing for us all.
There have been moments in history—like the visionary era of SNCC, Dr. King’s SCLC, and what the great Rev. James Lawson named “the nonviolent movement of America” that won the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts—when hundreds of thousands of everyday people were engaged together for years in these mass experiments in love and truth.
Looking back over this incredible history, I think we can identify several core elements to this tradition which are essential for us now.
These elements are:
We can practice this tradition in almost any field or arena of science, art, even business—by courageously and skillfully leveraging the resources available to us and working urgently to align the institutions we are part of with these values and vision.
In our time, the greatest need is for nonviolent organizing and action to shift policy and wield governing power to lead a society-wide emergency mobilization that restores a safe climate while establishing a planetary baseline of democracy, peace, and human rights.
Such strategic action looks like campaigns of nonviolent protest, civil disobedience, direct action, and noncooperation, running referendums or ballot initiatives, campaigns to organize or compel voluntary corporate policy changes, running for office or supporting candidate campaigns, building political parties or contesting for their leadership, organizing unions or other mass community or political organizations, forging governing alliances, and securing legislative and treaty agreements.
I believe that this crossroads in human history calls for us to carry this noble tradition forward by building a global army of millions of 21st century spiritual nonviolent warriors who will lead a surge of such efforts.
We... live in a time when millions of people worldwide are waking up to the mega-crisis we face and engaging in political and social action to confront collective suffering and injustice.
We must grow a fellowship of political bodhisattvas: people who commit our lives to cultivate deep, scientifically-informed spiritual wisdom and compassion and apply them directly—at an unprecedented scale and with a new clarity of intention—through strategic nonviolent action and leadership in the struggle to guide the dominant institutions of political and economic power that will determine our collective fate.
Where are the millions who can become this love army?
Thankfully, we live in a time when there is an explosion of interest in the teachings that cultivate the inner potential of a spiritual nonviolent warrior or political bodhisattva. Every day, new people begin learning mindfulness meditation and compassion practices rooted primarily in the Buddhist lineage, as well as contemplative practices of other traditions, including indigenous ones and renewed interest in the intentional, supported use of psychedelic medicines for spiritual growth—all informed and supported by burgeoning scientific research and insight. After many years of meditation, I’m training to teach mindfulness and compassion practices myself. Yet cultivating this heart and mind to confine it to the realm of personal peace and interpersonal harmony will not meet the challenge of our age. There will be a little less suffering as the ship of human civilization sinks in flames.
Thankfully, we also live in a time when millions of people worldwide are waking up to the mega-crisis we face and engaging in political and social action to confront collective suffering and injustice. Yet, our movements for justice and struggles against regressive, authoritarian forces are often plagued by currents of hatred, bitterness, cynicism, veneration of violence, hypocrisy, reductionist thinking, and dishonesty that repel countless potential recruits and cause debilitating internal conflicts. We are often severely constrained by our own unhealed trauma, reactive conditioning, and unhelpful and often deeply confused cultural legacies and contemporary tools, leaving us very vulnerable to opponents who would use deceit and manipulation to weaken us and our efforts. In my two decades as an organizer working to build nonviolent movements for peace, justice, and democracy, I’ve experienced and contributed to this dysfunction myself. I know well the pain, the challenge, and the possibility of healing through applying and integrating the medicine of the integral nonviolent liberation tradition.
The stark fact is the global progressive left is the only game in town for a mass political force to win an emergency climate mobilization and build a democratic, peaceful, just world. But we are beset by our shadows and struggling to self-regulate. If we can’t heal and correct, we will fail in our historic mission.
So these developments are great opportunities, but without integration they are unlikely to produce the kind of enlightened social force that is essential to intervene and enact the dramatic, rapid global shift our planet needs right now.
The stark fact is the global progressive left is the only game in town for a mass political force to win an emergency climate mobilization and build a democratic, peaceful, just world.
We must set about the work of intentionally recruiting, training, organizing, and deploying a quickly-growing fellowship of people who can effectively lead in political struggle from a strong spiritual foundation. That foundation must sustain loving, hope-affirming action guided by integrating intelligence through the inevitable tumult of ups and downs, conflict and suffering.
Our people are so hungry for real connection, peace, hope, and belonging. Hungry for a vision of a human life and society in which we can really imagine ourselves and our children and grandchildren—all of us—thriving in a healthy, sane world. For leadership that embodies real wisdom, integrity, service, courage, common sense, and genuine emotional and spiritual maturity. This is what leaders rooted in the integral nonviolent liberation tradition can offer.
Those who walked this path in history were not angels, gods, or superhuman beings. They were people, human beings just like me and you who devoted themselves to a path and grew in it.
They may have been exceptional, as LeBron James is a truly exceptional basketball player. But you don’t have to be LeBron to score a couple points, make some assists, or grab a few rebounds. Most of us can become decent neighborhood basketball players if we commit ourselves and work at it. And this “way of the political bodhisattva” requires no special physical talent nor even an able body. Instead it builds on the most basic capacities of the human body-heart-mind. To breathe, to be aware of our experience, to learn, to care, to help another through communication, presence, action. And like basketball, this path can be studied, practiced, and shared.
Now is the time.
Billions of years of the evolution of life on earth and tens of thousands of years of human cultural evolution have brought us to this precipice—and given us the tools to meet it. We must make a great leap forward as a species, as a civilization. And we need millions of political bodhisattvas to guide, encourage, and skillfully push us to make that leap.
Billions of years of the evolution of life on earth and tens of thousands of years of human cultural evolution have brought us to this precipice—and given us the tools to meet it.
If this vision resonates with you, there are many resources to explore it and find community in enacting it. One way to start is by learning about the lives and work of any of the exemplars I noted above, applying lessons that resonate with you in your life and work. Community with others on a similar path is so helpful. You can connect with aligned programs like the King Center’s nonviolence training, join love-guided movements like the new Poor People’s Campaign led by Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Liz Theoharis, or learn from spiritual teachers who encourage compassionate action like Tara Brach or Lama Rod Owens. One new opportunity is joining the inaugural fellows program of my organization, For All, a small group fellowship of study and practice in this tradition that we hope to expand from this pilot into a much larger force.
Whatever particular form or flavor you choose, begin or continue. There is no time to lose. Every moment is precious and every step a person takes on the path of a nonviolent spiritual warrior is a great and necessary blessing for us all. May millions of us walk it together and so help heal our planet and make our world a Beloved Community.
Will someone have to die on our campus tonight for you to intervene, Gene Block?
Note: The following from The Daily Bruin editorial board was published in the early hours of May 1, 2024 amidst a violent attack by a right-wing mob on a student encampment on the UCLA campus calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and university divestment from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid.
It began with ear-piercing screams of wailing babies loudly emitting from speakers.
Counter-protesters tearing down the barricades. Laser pointers flashing into the encampment. People in masks waving strobe lights.
Tear gas. Pepper spray. Violent beatings.
Fireworks sparked at the border of the encampment, raining down on tents and the individuals inside.
At around 5 p.m. yesterday, Chancellor Gene Block sent an email to the UCLA student body claiming that security presence in the area had been increased. That was not visible in the midst of escalating violence. And even with the security present, there was no mediation far into the night.
UC President Michael Drake expressed support for Block’s decision to declare the encampment “unlawful” Tuesday evening, adding that action was needed when the safety of students was being threatened. And yet, in spite of official statements from the university and the UC, we witness little being done on the university’s part to ensure the protection of students who exercise their rights.
Mary Osako, vice chancellor of UCLA Strategic Communications, released a statement at 12:40 a.m. acknowledging the violence, adding that the fire department and medical personnel were involved.
“We are sickened by this senseless violence and it must end,” Osako said.
This came after a source in the encampment told the Daily Bruin that at least five protestors have been injured.
But for hours, UCLA administration stood by and watched as the violence escalated. LAPD did not arrive on the scene until slightly after 1 a.m. – once Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass sent them in for assistance at Block’s request.
Daily Bruin reporters on the scene were slapped and indirectly sprayed with irritants. Despite also being students, they were offered no protection.
The world is watching. As helicopters fly over Royce Hall, we have a question.
Will someone have to die on our campus tonight for you to intervene, Gene Block?
The blood would be on your hands.