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Excerpt: Harvard Hillel played host last night to “Israel-Palestine: Bridging the Divide,” a discussion that featured speakers representing both sides of the decades-long conflict in the Middle East.
At the event, which was sponsored by the pro-Israel organization J Street, speakers promoted grassroots peace activism and the importance of the commonalities among all people.
Born and raised outside of occupied Jerusalem, Aziz Abu Sarah—a Palestinian activist and the Director of Middle East Projects at George Mason University—explained how the death of his brother at the hands of an Israeli soldier led him to join the ranks of the Fatah Youth Movement—a group built on the idea of Palestinian nationalism.
Kobi Skolnick, who is from southern Israel, shared his perspective from the other end of the conflict. As a teen, Skolnick was part of the fundamentalist Kahana movement. To promote “Jewish power,” he said that he and fellow Kahana members were encouraged to use violence against Palestinians.
But after seeing the suffering of their “enemies,” both Skolnick and Sarah came to question their ideologies.
According to Sarah, who has used the blogosphere to promote the peace process, both men recognized “the connection of one man to another in the face of universally understandable pain.”
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