Heidi Burgess talks with Ariel Markose, Chief Strategy Officer with Amal-Tikva

Heidi:  Hi, I'm Heidi Burgess. I'm here today with Ariel Markose, who is with an organization that I'm having a hard time pronouncing the name of, but I'll try: it's Amal-Tikva. I'll let her say it and improve upon it for me. It's an organization in Israel and the West Bank and maybe a little bit in Gaza, but not all that much, that has been working with Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding for a number of years. I'll find out from her how many in a minute. And they recently issued a report that was a survey of 40 other peacebuilding organizations in the Israel-Palestinian space, looking at how they've been operating since the war began, how the war has impacted their operations, and what they've done in response to that. And we'll put a link to the report in the transcript and talk about it today because it's very interesting. So Ariel, first, please tell our listeners how I butchered the name and help me there.

Ariel: Yeah. Okay. So I'm the head of strategy at an organization called Amal-Tikva. Amal is "hope" in Arabic. Tikva is "hope" in Hebrew. So we are a Hope- Hope organization. We were founded by Meredith Rothbart and Bashir Abu Baker in 2019, after writing a comprehensive initial report on the state of Civil Society Peacebuilding before Corona [what we, in the U.S. call COVID], which assessed the needs, the gaps, the opportunities in peacebuilding. And this report, that we're talking about, follows that report.

Heidi: So the first report was written before the organization existed?

Ariel: Yes. It was the impetus for the organization.

Heidi: Interesting. So who carried out that one?

Ariel: Meredith. Meredith did that as well, with research assistance.  And the main finding of that report was that if all of the money in the world existed for peacebuilding organizations in Israel-Palestine, it really wouldn't move the needle. And what the organizations were most lacking in was capacity. And so she started a capacity-building organization, which is our primary focus.

Heidi: Okay. So you've moved into my next question, which is to tell me what Amal-Tikva does. You said it does capacity building. What's that mean?

Ariel: So capacity building, in our opinion, is essentially the ability of an organization to execute its mission. In other words, an organization that clearly defines and understands a social problem, and then has developed a way of solving that social problem, and then has the ability or capacity to carry out their solution.  So, for example, we were seeing, five to six years ago, many, many organizations in the field that had beautiful, inspirational missions, lacking in the ability to execute those missions. And that ability is staff, it's budget, it's retaining good people, and so on.  And so we work with them, to make them more effective and better at what they're already intending to do. Should I keep going on what that looks like?

Heidi: Well, let me ask a question first. I'm curious about the missions of the other organizations. You said they had "beautiful missions."  And I find myself thinking, is the mission to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or is it something more discreet than that, a lower level than that?

Ariel: So. we really push back for any organization whose mission is to solve the conflict or end the occupation or anything along those lines. We really push for organizations to be much more specific in the problems that they're looking to solve, because we want them to see results.  And no one organization is going to end the occupation, solve the conflict. It's not realistic.

And so both having focused, intentional, critically thought-out missions that then result in tangible impacts, means that those missions can't be that broad. They have to be much more narrower and focused. . Women's empowerment, for example, and that can even break down even further. So you can have ability or empowerment through language, teaching, let's say, Palestinian women in East Jerusalem to learn how to speak Hebrew so that they can access the job market, reach better opportunities, then break the cycle of poverty, that then breaks cycles of violence.  

Other examples include working with religious leaders and doing interfaith work. Working within the Israeli school system to educate around tolerance, hatred, racism, things like that.  We have organizations that do conflict resolution through the court system in East Jerusalem and in Palestine and working with the religious leaders of communities and teaching them mediation techniques to resolve conflict in a nonviolent way.

All of this, in our opinion, can be considered "peacebuilding," because, according to our definition of peacebuilding, initiatives that lower levels of hatred and violence, that create better systems of interaction, that create more sense of justice, all help to break the conflict down to manageable parts and then can mitigate those parts and solve the conflict piece by piece.

Heidi: Great. That makes sense. So you did this report last year that just came out recently looking at 40 organizations that have been operating since the war began.

Ariel: Before the war began.

Heidi: Oh, okay. That are still operating. I'm sure you don't know exactly, but can you guess what percentage of peacebuilding organizations that are in this line of work in Israel and Palestine, that represents? Is it most of them? Is it a tiny sliver of them?

Ariel: We estimate that there's roughly 80 organizations in the peacebuilding field, so this would be about half.

Heidi: Okay.

Ariel: And can I just give a little perspective on that? Because, just to give you a sense that it's quite a marginalized field, in Israel especially, but also and in Palestine. In Israel, there's close to 45,000 registered NGOs. And in Palestine, there's something like 450. So this is not a hot area, let's say.

Heidi: Why do you think that is?

Ariel: It's really interesting. I'm actually working with an organization that's trying to bring the conversation around peace back to the public discourse. There's a very inspiring interview or not inspiring, actually. It's a very frustrating interview, but it's a groundbreaking interview between an Israeli reporter and Abu Mazen from 2012. And Abu Mazen states in that interview that this is the first time that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not on the ballot, that the Israeli people have completely abandoned the conversation.

And I think you see that expressed in the field and in the actions of the societies. In Palestine, it's illegal to register an organization as a peacebuilding organization. So there's a lot of ways to disguise that. A lot of it has to do with organizations for women's empowerment or nonviolence or political education for youth, which are essentially peacebuilding organizations, but it does create an environment that limits and lowers levels of interest.

And in Israeli society, it's become a dirty word. Israelis have completely lost interest and hope in peace and doing that kind of work.

Heidi:Wow. That's discouraging.

Ariel: Well, by the end of this conversation, I hope to encourage you.

Heidi:Okay. That's good. I hope you can, too. Can you provide us a link to that video?

Ariel: Yes, of course. I will send it to you after.

Heidi: So you know you're in what we might call a hostile environment. What motivates you to keep going?

Ariel: I have four kids —they're my motivation.  I grew up in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. I served in the IDF during the Second Lebanon War. I was a young adult during the whole round of violence in 2014. I have seen and experienced so much war and violence from a place of privilege, right?  Not even a place where I was evacuated from my home or I had family members...until now.

And this year, it has felt closer on my own skin and bones than ever before.  My husband was called up to reserves to the north on October 7th. He's done over 160 days of reserve duty and hasn't been home. My brothers and brothers-in-law were all called up to the IDF. My brother-in-law was injured. This is not a life that I want my children to inherit. I want something better for them. And so. even for some of my Palestinian friends, I'm not coming at this from sort of like a humanist international sort of liberal.  I want to create something different for my kids. And this is the only way that I see that that is possible.

Heidi: Okay. Let me go into some of the findings that I found surprising. The first one is that you say that civil society peacebuilding has gained capacity since 2020. I'm wondering, has it gained capacity — you maybe don't know this from the way your questions were worded — but has it continued to gain capacity since the war?

Ariel: Yes. It's just a question of, are those sustainable gains?  So capacity, as we define it, like I said before, is the ability to execute on the mission, right? So it's all the pieces that make up an effective organization. High-quality staff, budget, recipients of the programming, etc. So on the budget piece, as you see in the report, the findings were that most organizations did not experience budget cuts. And some, they even experienced over giving, like a surplus, right?

Heidi: So there's people out there who are giving to these organizations because they're concerned about the war and they want to help.

Ariel: Yeah. Right. But the question is, is that sustainable? And so when I said that the capacity has grown, it has. The organizations are more strategic. They have more sustainable staff. They have more sustainable funding. The question is, and will get to be seen, are those additional attention and funds that have come in since October 7th and the beginning of the war, something that continue over time? Or is it going to be like a high summit and then a drop-off?

Heidi: Right. Where are the funds coming from? Are they coming primarily from, I would assume, more Israel than the Palestinian side, but are they coming from international places?

Ariel: Yes. So the funding is not, primarily, local. And then on top of that, I think you see a lot of Jewish-American philanthropy, private Jewish-American philanthropy, private European philanthropy, and then European governments, like the donor states. Church groups, religious groups are also a big part.

Heidi: I find this a little surprising.  Because there is so much negative press in the West about how Israel is more at fault than the Palestinians and Israel needs to be forced into a ceasefire and that sort of thing. But clearly, people who are giving you money don't believe that narrative, I would guess.

Ariel: I think they see the ceasefire as momentary. I think they have a little bit of a broader perspective, a longer view where they see that ceasefire today, tomorrow, eventually, the deep social work needs to be done to move the societies forward to creating a more peaceful reality. And you cannot do that without civil society. Civil society has to exist and continue to exist. So from what I know from the majority of the funders that we work with, that conversation, fault, ceasefire, etc., they can hold those opinions and at the same time continue to support peacebuilding in whatever way it is expressed for the long view, for the investment in the future of the peoples who live in this land.

Heidi: Great. Makes sense. You sort of answered this question already, but you might have more to say.  What's it mean for peacebuilding to become more strategic? Is it just having a feasible mission and then carrying it out in a sensible way? Or is there more to it than that?

Ariel: Definitely, there's more to it. So being strategic and continuing to be strategic as a nonprofit in a conflict zone, I think is not just about having a really clear, identified problem.  It's very easy to get overwhelmed with all the aspects of the hardship and the issues that we live in. And I think an organization that is strategic has the ability to clear away all the noise and crystallize what social problem they're uniquely positioned to solve and then develop an objective or a solution or a mission that really answers that problem and then continuously measures their impact and improves and scales and develops out further.

An organization that maybe has a well-identified problem and a compelling mission, but is continuously solving the same problem in the same way, that's not a strategic organization.

Heidi: Oh, if what they're doing isn't working, I assume.

Ariel: Or if it's not growing, right? You want to see growth and scale and broader impact.

Heidi: Okay, but within the domain of whatever it is they're working on, like women's empowerment. It's not scaling into other areas. It's just getting more women involved, getting them more empowered. Right?

Ariel: Right! Or maybe empowerment is defined differently. It started off just with financial education, and then it becomes political education, and then it's running for leadership positions, right? But as long as the building blocks are there, and you're continually improving on and reaching to greater and greater heights, it can be siloed. It can be within your vertical. But as long as there's movement, I think.

Heidi: Okay. So another finding that I thought was interesting and worth talking about is your number three, which is that civil society peacebuilding NGOs demonstrated an organizational resilience in the face of trauma, as well as the capacity to stay strategic. So tell me a little bit more. Flesh that one out.

Ariel: So organizational resilience, I think, meant that we all came back to work. There was every reason on both sides to throw up their hands and stay home and say, "No." But an overwhelming majority of organizations showed up.  They showed up somewhere on October 8th.

Heidi: Wow.

Ariel: And kept doing the work and figured it out. And everyone was incredibly traumatized. And there's a concept called post-traumatic growth, right? And the ability to not shut down and to move forward and to keep your brain working and to keep engaging, that then encourages your psychological state to process and move past the event.

And that's kind of what the field did. And it had every reason to not. It had every reason to completely shut down. And so that, plus retaining staff, and helping the people working in the organizations deal with what they were dealing with, and continuing to do the work and stay on mission, on strategy, not completely pivoting or redirecting their efforts, but really doubling down, was seen across the board. And I don't think that was a given.

Heidi: I think that's one of the most astounding aspects of this report. The thing that we didn't clarify at the beginning that puts this in context is that you have people working with you who are both Israeli Jews and Palestinians. I gather both in Israel and somewhat in the West Bank and maybe Gaza. I understand there's not very many in Gaza. But this isn't just an Israeli endeavor.

Ariel: No. Our staff inside of Amal-Tikva, the leadership is half-half. The coordinators, the project managers, also half-half. And that was incredibly challenging. I share an office with my dear friend and colleague, Radeer, who's a Christian Palestinian from the Old City, who lives in the neighborhood next to mine in Jerusalem — because that's Jerusalem. But her whole family is in the West Bank and we're completely shut down with road closures and the checkpoints were closed, etc. And I walked in every morning with the entire IDF on my shoulders.  It was really complicated. But we held it — also because she's just an incredible human being. But in general, our workplace held it and other workplaces held it as well.

I didn't always work in peacebuilding. I worked in activism, but not in this field. And after October 7th, I came back and asked how are we going to do it? And Meredith [Rothbart, CEO]  said "the peacebuilding field has experienced war many, many times." And so that's back to the resilience and the post-traumatic growth I was talking about earlier. But before, it had never been this bad. It had never been this violent. It had never been this horrible. But it had been before. And so these people that have been doing this work for a long time kind of grew from those experiences and then were able to continue to engage.

Heidi: And for our watchers who don't know this, Meredith is the CEO Amal-Tikca, and the founder of the organization.

Ariel: And the primary author of the report. We all contributed, but yes.

Heidi: Okay. So that's really inspiring. And yes, it does give me a little bit more hope, although now we only need to multiply what you're doing by 1,000 or 10,000 or something. But there's a kernel there and it's super strong. So that's very hopeful.

Another finding was that within the first six months of the war, 40% of the NGOs surveyed, 15 organizations, were delivering aid to people in need. I wondered, was that above and beyond their original mission, or did they switch missions?

Ariel: It's not so much that they switched missions, but it was like a doubling down on community. So there were organizations that had within their mission sort of the cultivation or engagement of a community. And after October 7th, those communities' needs shifted. And so it was on mission with a different type of intervention, but there was a definite dramatic shift to aid, for sure.

Heidi: But only with 40%, that means 60% were doing what they did before. 

Ariel: Yes. Which is also a testament to the resilience and the strategic mindset of the organizations because the organizations that said, "This is so beyond our scope. This isn't within our capacity." They just said, "We're going to keep doing what we're doing instead of getting distracted."

Heidi: How many of these organizations, before the war started, and then after the war, how many of them were doing what you call bi-national work? Meaning, in my mind, and tell me if I'm wrong, bringing Israeli Jews and Palestinians either in the West Bank or Gaza together.  That's what I would think of when I think of "binational" or in Jerusalem where everybody mixes. And then uni-national work would be just working with Palestinians or just working with Israeli Jews. And then there's a question of Israeli-Palestinians. I don't know how they factor in there. So help me.

Ariel: Right. So I would say that the majority of the organizations are binational. That's really the core. I can't remember the exact percentages, but the majority of the organizations are binational. They bring both sides together. There are kernels of uni-national peacebuilding organizations, and we'll get to this, but I think the post-October 7th work has to really double down on the uni-national peacebuilding work and less on the coming together.

Heidi: And is that for practical reasons because it's difficult to do the binational work? Or is it for, I guess I'd call them theoretical reasons ,where you realize that the uni-national work is more important — or both?

Ariel: One thing, before I start — I just have my notes here — 32 of the organizations are binational with six being unnational. So just to give you the ---numbers before I answer your question. 

I think an answer to your question relates to our diamond approach that we mentioned in the report. I think we've seen that there is a very strong core of peacebuilding organizations. But in order to move the needle in our societies, we have to go much deeper to get the "not-usual" suspects. We need to really affect people where they are and change hearts and minds within our two societies. We use the core to bring the messages and the connection where it's necessary. But that doesn't mean that we have to bring both of our entire societies into the peacebuilding field, which, I think, is one of the main messages of the report.

Heidi:I  remember one of the lines that you used in the report is a line that is often used about peacebuilders all around the world — that we're preaching to the choir. So we get the same people involved over and over and over again. We're not really changing them, because they're signed on anyway, but we're not having any wider impact. So that's what your diamond, I think, is talking about. Explain that a little bit for folks.

Ariel: Would you like me to put it up on the screen?

Heidi: Sure.   [insert diamond graphic here.]

We have what we call the diamond approach to peacebuilding. And this is our post-October 7th recommendation theory, how we believe that we should value peacebuilding and create a more peaceful reality; how we need to be focusing our efforts.

What you see down the middle of the diamond is the core peace builders. These are the people that do the binational work. They've been doing it for years. They understand the nuances. They have relationships. It's very strong. And then on the top, you have top-down peacebuilding, which is basically political and diplomatic track two efforts to resolve the conflict. And then you have the grassroots on the bottom. 

And you have this flow from the core back into our societies and back to the core, right? And what we're recommending, here, is that every single one of us in the peacebuilding field is also a member of our society and can also be an agent of change in our society.  And we can go back down into the edges and influence our societies, without having to bring them back into the middle of the diamond.

And then from there, we can influence both the top and the bottom, which you can see illustrated here in the image.

Heidi: So it's the peacebuilders are going out from the center towards the Israeli society or towards the Palestinian society. And then the impact that they have is either going down to that grassroots well, probably is mostly going down to the grassroots peacebuilding, less so going up to the top-down peacebuilding.

Ariel: But you do have influence on the top down peacebuilding too. There are organizations that are on the right, for example, that influence decision-makers within Palestinian society, influence decision-makers in Palestinian leadership. And you have Israeli influencers and leadership that's influencing Israeli political leadership. So that would be sort of the top half of the diamond. They're both within their societies. They're not meeting in the middle, but they are influencing the top-down decision-makers, and they have relationships with the core peacebuilders.

And it creates sort of this flow of conversation, of relationship, of efforts, without needing the people to come to the center. Up until now, those people that were on, let's say, the top right or the top left had to commit to being peacebuilders and commit to the values of the peacebuilding fields and all sorts of things. And we're saying, "No, that they don't have to completely sign up and have the membership card. They can be influenced and influence decision-makers from where they're at."

Heidi: So what I'm hearing, tell me if I'm right — is that before the war, most of the work was binational, meaning in this diagram, going up and down that center line. And now you are encouraging folks to either, in addition, do the uni national work to try to encourage broader parts of the societies to start thinking a little bit more along peacebuilding lines, nonviolent lines, than they were before, not necessarily holding a membership card, but just beginning to think about some of these things.  Are they doing that instead of the binational work, or in addition to the binational work?

Ariel: In addition, it has to be in addition. But we have seen that the binational has limits. It hits a wall. There's only a certain percentage of each society that's willing to engage like that. And it's not enough to move the needle and get to a point that we're really influencing the broader societies to demand a resolution to the conflict, to demand a more peaceful reality, to demand nonviolence. And so we have to figure out a different way, a different methodology, to get that to happen.

Heidi: And that's working within your own societies. Now, this brings me to the question that I wondered about as I was reading the report, is you used the term "spoilers." And the report says — Meredith wrote more of it than you did, so I shouldn't just say "you." The report says that not only do you need to get a wider audience involved, but including spoilers. And spoilers, in my head, means people who are very much against any peace agreement or conflict resolution and who believe that there are other means, often violence and war, that they want to pursue to meet their goals. And therefore, they spoil — that's where the term came from. They spoil peace agreements.  And my mind immediately went to Hamas, thinking about all that I've read that Hamas believes that it's their religious duty to wipe Israel off the map and kill as many Jews as they can in their process. That's textbook spoiler. And I find myself thinking, how in the world could you get Hamas involved? And would you want to?

Ariel: So I think this is where we get to the need to change the language. Because what has happened with the language around peacebuilding, up until now, is that it has been incredibly influenced by liberal, international, humanist values. And those perspectives did not really give expression to the national and religious aspirations of the people living in this land. And so any agreement couldn't hold. So the question around spoilers — those  are the people that hold the strongest views of the national and religious aspirations of either society. And so the question is, can you develop a language that can engage them, that they see that their aspirations are being met, but also in a nonviolent political method as opposed to a violent and war-driven method.

So how might we do that? I'm going to use a different example than Hamas because I just have more familiarity with my example. There is an organization working in the West Bank with religious Muslim communities in the West Bank and religious settler Jewish communities in the West Bank. And there's sort of an interfaith group. And the interfaith group acts kind of as a costume. It's kind of a smokescreen for the work that's actually happening.

The work that's actually happening is that these interfaith leaders come together, build relationships, and develop methodologies for diffusing moments of tension and heightened violence. In moments of tension and heightened violence, they go back into the extremes of their society. So for example, settler youth, and redirect all of the negative activities, all of the violence towards Palestinians, etc. They shut it down. They temper it. They redirect it.

So in answer to your question about spoilers, we're engaging the spoilers. If you completely eliminate them or push them aside and lock them out of the conversation, then they will continue to spoil and spoil and spoil. But if you engage and redirect and understand the needs and show that through nonviolent actions and political aspirations, their needs can be met, then everybody wants to create a better reality for their kids, right?

I think after the disasters that we've seen in Gaza, please God, there will be new leadership in Gaza and a rehabilitation of the space there. And there will be an attempt to de-radicalize and create another education system for kids living in Gaza. And what is that education system? And how is it working? And how are you engaging and empowering the spoilers not to be spoilers?  It's through high-level people who are willing to engage with each other, through the uni-national work, but then the uni-national work going back all the way to the edges of the society, and then bringing them back together with their language, with their Torah, for example, with their religious language, and formulating that in a way that brings them along towards creating a nonviolent reality.

Heidi: Do you think it's possible to go all the way out to the edges where you are getting to the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah? The farthest extreme. It seems to me that there are two ways to deal with them, three ways to deal with them, maybe.  One is to kill them, which is what Israel has apparently been trying to do. But then somebody just pops up in their place. So it's not a long-term solution. It might be a short-term change, but it's not a long-term solution. Another is to so overpower them that they can't effectively operate or discredit them so that they can't effectively operate. And the other is to somehow change their attitude so that they realize that their goal really shouldn't be to wipe Israel off the map and kill Jews, because that isn't going to lead to safety for their children.

Ariel: Or whatever their ultimate goal is — Palestinian independence or whatever it is, right?

Heidi: What if it's Palestinian independence, as is widely said around the United States, from the River to the Sea? What if it's the notion that this whole land is Palestinian and Israel shouldn't exist?

Ariel: That's where the working with religious actors is so critical. Because there's organizations that are very quiet, that are working behind the scenes that influence religious discourse within the societies. And imagine if that language changed, that there was a religious recognition of the Jewish right to ancestral homeland, whatever the language, you're speaking ? It would come from religious leadership. And it comes from relationships. And it comes from strategic relationships that are facilitated between religious leaders. And a lot of times, actually, those people at the very top are very rational actors and are able to understand the nuance and find the horrible word I'm about to use —compromise — as long as they are able to express their religious and national aspirations. And that's where the peace agreements, up until now, have fallen short. They haven't really recognized either of those on either side. There are organizations that are doing this.

Heidi: Let me push you a little bit. Why is compromise a terrible word to use?

Ariel: Oh, I don't think it is. I think it's wonderful. I just see the discourse that I live in, and every single bumper sticker, store sign, whatever, says, "Together, we will win." That's the Israeli discourse right now. That's not exactly the language of compromise. Even on our eggs.

Heidi: On your eggs? 

Ariel:  Our eggs have stamps.

Heidi:. Wow. Okay. It's really interesting to me. We're in such different places in the United States and in Israel, thank heavens for the United States. But still, the attitude towards compromise is the same here as what you're saying. And I think somehow that's a key job of peacebuilders is to get people to understand that, really, you'll get more of what you want with compromise, than a hard line, I've got to have 100% of everything approach.

Ariel: But a true compromise, just to one-up what you're saying, it's a "yes and." True compromise in this space comes from a deep knowledge of the other side. And the only people that really have that deep understanding of what motivates each side, what is important, what the values are, what the history is, are the peacebuilders and the people that are doing the work. And they need to get to the table. We talk a lot about this of bringing civil society to the table of political decisions because they have that knowledge and that deep understanding.

Heidi: That's not happening at all?

Ariel: Not in this government, Israeli government. Maybe the tiniest bit on the Palestinian side, but not where it's actually impactful. But this is not a sprint. This is a marathon. This is 30 years of work, if not more. But it has to exist.

Heidi: Yes. 

Let me go back to something you just said, to see if you can expand on it more. That the Western liberal Europe-North American view of peacebuilding and the words we use for how it's done and what should happen don't work. As I understood it, you're saying, "Those don't fit the Israeli-Palestinian context." Can you talk a little bit more about what that means, what errors maybe have been made, and what errors need to be corrected?

Ariel: Yeah. What I mean by that is a lot of times the words for charters, for agreements, for galvanizing papers that are written by Western liberal bodies, use words that don't have meaning to the people living here. They fall short.  So "mutual recognition," for example.  "Recognition of rights," "recognition of pain." These different elements are, a lot of times, in charters, etc., but they are very western concepts. 

If I would go to an Israeli off the street and say, "Would you agree to recognize the pain of the Palestinians?" They'd be like, "No. What does that mean? Are they going to recognize my pain?" It gets into this whole very dysfunctional loop.

Whereas, if you change the discourse, and you talk about, in order to ensure the future of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, in order to ensure the safety of your children in the land of Israel, we need to find a nonviolent resolution to the conflict.  We need to create a relationship with the Palestinians that isn't a zero-sum game. You start coming from a place of their needs and not from these abstract terms, you move people along in a very different way.

I have seen this with my brothers who are very committed to the State of Israel and protecting the State of Israel, and we do not align politically. And they came out of Gaza, and they were just so sharp and clear that the whole place needed to be demolished. And it was very hard to hear, very forceful.

And then I went to them and I said, "And then what? What happens the day after? Okay, you did it." Right? You went in, flattened Gaza. Okay. And then what? Are you just going to continue to go back there every two years and flatten Gaza? Wouldn't you rather not have to do that, not continue to be called up to reserves and do that work, but rather have this gorgeous flourishing place on the Mediterranean? Don't you see how that ensures your safety? And then I started saying, "you know, what you need to do in order to get to that, you need to engage the people living there. They need a better life. They need to be deradicalized. They need all these things." And my brothers were like, "Oh, you know what? There's something to that."

But it's framed differently, right? It's not framed in the lofty language of humanity and recognition and all these other things. It's in the self-interest of the people.

Heidi: Okay. Now, I gather from where you started, that the vast majority of Israelis are still thinking more like your brothers.

Ariel: 100%.

Heidi: So how does that change? 40 peacebuilding organizations can't do it by themselves, I don't think.

Ariel: Nope. We have to widen the tent. We have to do much more uni-national work. And the values that are being promoted through that uni-national work need to be supported by philanthropy and large-scale funding. And we have to stop looking at peacebuilding as if the end goal is an agreement. Rather, it's social change. It's looking at the change that we need to create in our societies, as deep social change, with social change interventions and measurements. And how you would want to create social change in any other place with indicators for success and best practices and everything?

Heidi: So my mind goes to education. One of the things it seems to me you really need to do is to bring peacebuilding into the educational systems. I've read a lot about how the opposite is happening in the Palestinian educational systems, very much the opposite. What does it look like in Israeli educational systems?

Ariel: So the Israeli education system has four parts.  Every part looks a little bit different. So the ultra-Orthodox education system, it doesn't even relate to "the other," even within Israeli society. It is very siloed. It is very internally focused. There's no education around "the other" whatsoever.

Heidi: The other being Palestinians or other non-religious Israelis?

Ariel:  Other non-ultra Orthodox Israelis, even. Anyone outside of the community. So there's a long way to go there.

You have the Arabic-speaking Palestinian citizens of Israel curriculum, which is, a lot of times, seen as anemic. In other words, it doesn't take a stance, because it is subsidized and supported by the government. It has to be very careful. But there's a lot of things that are very complicated. Sort of how do you teach to Palestinians whose families have been here since before '48, about the War of Independence, or the Holocaust? It's very complicated, and I don't think they've hacked that quite yet.

Then you have the religious school system, which is where my kids are, which is very coded. There's a lot of talk about "the other" and educating towards recognizing the other and respecting the other.  But they would never blatantly discuss Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs in any clear wording like that.

And then you have the secular school system that is much more sort of Israeli left-leaning politically. And they do celebrate peace agreements. They discuss Palestinian history and things like that. And again, it varies from school to school, but you'll find much more of that kind of clear peace education in the secular school system.

And as you go farther and farther right in the religious spectrum, you get less and less and less.

Heidi: How big of a percentage are each of these systems?

Ariel: Got me there. Roughly, the ultra-Orthodox is like 16%. The Palestinian citizens of Israel Arab is about 20%.  I think the secular school system is like close to 60%, and then the religious school system is the remaining bit.

Heidi:6 0%, you've got a fairly large part of the population that's getting peace education.

Ariel: I think I misspoke. I think it's lower. I think it has to be like in the 40s.

Heidi: Okay. Well, it's still a substantial portion of the population that's getting some of that.

Ariel: But it depends on who's in the government. Because a lot of that curriculum, those extracurricular programs, etc., don't get funded when you have a government like we have right now.

Heidi: And you've had this government for a long time.

Ariel: Somewhat. I mean, we still can't make it to the four years that the Americans have.

Heidi: Okay. You're using "government" more broadly than I was thinking. I was thinking Netanyahu, and he's been there for quite a while.

Ariel: But he's had different configurations.

Heidi: Ah, yes. He's had different governments because you have a much more volatile system than we do, although ours is looking kind of volatile at the moment, but you have a different system.

Okay. We've only got about 10 or 15 minutes left, something like that. I want to check through here and see if there's other things that I really wanted to ask. The spoilers was a big one, and you've done a nice job on that.

Here's an interesting statement that I pulled out of the report. It says, "Civil society peacebuilding must change the way activists relate to peacebuilding from protest movements focused on rallying large turnouts to social change focused on scaling measurement impact." Can you explain what that means?

Ariel: Sure. I think if you're following Israeli politics, it's a very good metaphor or image to think about when we're talking about this. People have been taking to the streets since corona, protesting BiBi [Netanyahu], protesting the government, protesting a lot of different things. And even at its peak, it hasn't changed much. And the focus of rallying people to the streets, it doesn't create societal buy-in. Anybody who isn't interested in taking to the streets stays home. They stay on their couch. It doesn't change hearts and minds deep within our societies the way we need to.

And so talking about it from a social change perspective, instead of a rallying perspective, means that, like I said before, you go out deep into your society and meet the people where they're at. And you change their hearts and minds where they're at. So that when, please God, speedily in my days, the day comes that there's a referendum, let's say, on a peace agreement, it's in a language that resonates with them and they vote yes.

If you continue to focus on getting people on the streets and those people continue to stay home, even if we get to a referendum, they're going to vote no, because they don't understand the language. They haven't been engaged. They haven't been brought into the tent. So, when you think about it from a social change perspective, it breaks down to a lot of different kinds of interventions that can impact people. It breaks down into healthcare. It breaks down into religious studies. It breaks down into youth empowerment and pre-military education for Israelis, and a lot of different ways that you can work with people to bring them along to a place where they're then receptive to social change. And those methodologies allows for a lot more creativity, nuance, other alternatives, as opposed to this very narrow perspective that has limitations.

Heidi: Is this an either/or or a both and?  Should the protests, the masses of people in the street, stop going to the street and do the social change work instead, or should they be going on both tracks at once?

Ariel: If there were unlimited resources, I would say yes to both tracks.  And I think in some ways, the going to the streets does have unlimited resources. Because it speaks to people that are also approaching those protests for different reasons, not peacebuilding. And that could allow the small pool of philanthropists and people that do invest and support peacebuilding to really double down on the social change work. I think, from a broad perspective, of course, they should exist at the same time. But in reality, I feel that we're at an either or moment. And the logic or the language behind the protests right now can be  funded or addressed differently, more like "democracy for Israel", something that's much more like part of the Israeli conversation, allowing for support and the peacebuilding work to be done in a deeper way. And not necessarily demanding the focus of the peacebuilding camp to be at the protests.

Heidi: The social activists will say that Netanyahu is individually a big source of the problem, that he is going to turn Israel into an autocracy much in the same way that the left in the United States is worried that Donald Trump is going to turn the United States into an autocracy. And my image from the West, not knowing all that much about it, is that there's some justification in those fears, certainly looking at the judicial reform proposals. So people went to the streets in masses to object to the judicial reform, which appears to me to have successfully stalled it. And now, according to what I've read in the last 24 hours, that people are being encouraged to go to the streets to protest the firing of Gallant, who was the last progressive liberal, peace-leaning person in Netanyahu's government.

Ariel: I wouldn't go so far to call him peace leaning, but yes, up until then. Not peace-leaning, super aggressive, very militaristic.

Heidi: Right. He wasn't, Netanyahu is? That's the image we have here. So if people don't go to the streets, they don't visibly object to that move, then it stands.  And then Netanyahu doesn't feel threatened and keeps on making even more and more aggressive moves, can the peacebuilding culture change approach make any changes that are fast enough to have meaningful effect? [Note from Heidi: I've done more reading about Gallant. No, he is certainly not a peacebuilder! Quite the opposite, but perhaps less hawkish than Netanyahu. (Perhaps not.) ]

Ariel: Okay. Can I break your question down to different parts? So the first part is that Netanyahu is not scared of the protests. They don't really influence him. And especially, we can see over the last 24 hours that there were not masses of people in the streets the way that there had been the first time Gallant was fired. People are tired. He really doesn't see that the people in the streets are a threat. It is, again, the same camps, the same communities, the same people. It's a very small and closed percentage of Israeli society that's really going out and protesting, and they do not threaten him.

More so, I'm not advocating to not go into the streets. I just think the people that are protesting in the streets do not necessarily consider themselves part of the peacebuilding camp. They see themselves as Zionist defenders of Israeli democracy. They probably wouldn't be for a peace agreement right now. They probably don't care that much about what's happening to the Palestinians in Gaza. They care much more about the essence of Israeli democracy. And again, I think they should keep going to the streets. I wish there were more of them in the streets.

But the real peace-building work that needs to be done, funded, expanded, scaled, is not encouraging more and more people to go into the streets. What I'm advocating for is deeper and deeper engagement within the societies and changing hearts and minds and perspectives, so that when there is a solution on the table, when there is movement, they're primed to vote yes for it, to engage with it. And so I think that the going to the streets and protesting is an important tool. Right now, it's a blip in the process. And that, as a peacebuilding field, our focus does not need to be getting people off of their couches and out into the streets.  It's about thinking about creative ways to engage and invest deep within our societies, to create social change there that can move the needle in the long run.

Heidi: Okay. So we are at our end of our hour. What haven't I asked you that you wish I would have asked?

Ariel: Oh, it's such a pleasure. I haven't gotten to talk about this in such a sophisticated way in a while.  I think you could ask what should people abroad be doing, if they are interested in peacebuilding and it is important value to them. And I think the field is lacking in productive allies. So what has happened to our discourse on the international stage since the 7th of October in the war in Gaza, is that it has become a very polarizing conversation, that is not helpful not to the future of Israelis, and not to the future of Palestinians.

And what needs to happen is questions of how might we support and build effective social change in these societies, as opposed to delegitimizing one side or the other? And what does that look like? And then supporting that. Creating more conversations that are yes-and as opposed to these rejectionist conversations. We're starting to work on this now. So if any of your listeners have what to add to that conversation, resources, etc. We're really all open and interested.

Heidi: That's great. And I will admit we are probably part of the polarizing narrative because we've taken a very strong stance on this. 

Ariel: That's our next conversation!

Heidi: Right. I think the notion of going a different direction is one that we ought to explore more, and I'd be very interested in that. Well, I really thank you for taking the time to do this. I thank you so much for doing what you're doing and keeping hope alive. I think your name is wonderful. Didn't know it. And let's hope that this work continues to expand. And we can see more long-term success that this isn't just a flash-in-the-plan blimp that goes away in a year or two when everybody forgets about this and moves on to something else.

Ariel: Thank you so much for having me.