Fighting for peace in fog of war

Ittay Flescher believes that despite hatred and distrust, there is hope for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

“At the moment, there are a lot of people in Gaza that aren’t fans of Israel, and they are going to hate us, not just for one year, for a thousand years. Because what we’ve done in Gaza is immoral and disgraceful,” said Flescher, the author of The Holy and the Broken: A cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared, at Limmud Johannesburg on 17 August.

“There are many Jews who will look at what happened on 7 October and look at the fact that Evyatar David is still digging his own grave in a tunnel. They will hate Palestinians not for 10 years or 50 years, but for a thousand years,” he said.

“We are going to build many museums that will tell the story of 7 October in the same way that we built Yad Vashem after the Holocaust,” he said. “And when this is over, in Gaza, they’re also going to build a genocide museum in Gaza City, and there are going to be genocide museums all over the world where people will learn about what Israel did to Gaza. It’s inevitable that that is going to happen. And those two museums and those two stories are going to fuel hatred between Israelis and Palestinians for generations to come in the future.”

Though Flescher believes there’s a good reason for people on both sides to hate, he thinks that by doing small acts to further peace, reconciliation can be possible. This is done through his book, as well as the work he does with the organisation Kids4Peace Jerusalem of which he is educational director. Kids4Peace Jerusalem creates spaces for religiously and socially diverse youth to connect, learn, and grow to become agents of peace in their communities. It unites Jewish, Muslim, and Christian youth in Jerusalem through weekly sessions to discuss different elements of their culture.

Flescher has had to grapple with running a peace organisation at a time when the nations of these two people are engaging in probably the most violent and lethal war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Flescher shared a story of how, on 10 October 2023, he was talking to a friend of his who is Palestinian, and he noticed that his friend’s profile picture was a paraglider. Flescher was a bit concerned because the paraglider was one of the vehicles that Hamas used to get over the border into Israel to massacre people at the Nova festival and kibbutzim.

When Flescher asked him about it, his friend said the way he saw it was that the people of Gaza had broken out of the prison that they had been locked up in for 17 years, and the paraglider was a celebration of that.

“On the news I’m watching, I’m being told that on 7 October, they’re killing people at a dance party and that they’re kidnapping children from their rooms in pyjamas and setting houses on fire. And he’s like, ‘No, that’s not happening. There was just an attack on army bases, and they kidnapped some soldiers who were guarding us and we’re trying to be free.’”

He has seen similar denialism among Jews in Israel about the situation in Gaza. “I’m speaking to my Jewish friends, and they’re telling me, ‘There’s no hunger in Gaza’; ‘There’s no innocent people killed’; ‘The people killed are terrorists’; ‘The Israel Defense Forces is the most moral army in the world’; ‘Food is abundant’; all of these sorts of things,” he said, “And I’m thinking, ‘Where are you getting your information from? Eylon Levy? What’s going on?’ If you’re looking at any reputable news source, you know that there’s a humanitarian catastrophe here.

“I’m living in a society that’s entirely in denial, and now I’m thinking, hold on, that’s what I said of the Palestinians after 7 October. Now I’m living in a world where my people can’t see what we’re doing to them in the same way that they can’t see what they did to us.”

Though he doesn’t judge the desire for revenge for what happened on 7 October, he doesn’t believe that this is the way to peace.

“You can go to a base in the south of Israel, and can sign a missile fired into Gaza, and a lot of people who lost loved ones on 7 October autographed missiles and said, ‘This is in memory of such and such,’ and the missile is fired into Gaza. A lot of Israelis did that because it gave them comfort. This notion of, “I know that a missile will go into Gaza with one of the names of someone killed on 7 October.”

However, there are some who still believe in peace, like Yonatan Zeigen, who lost his mother, Vivian Silver, on 7 October, and has built a soup kitchen in Gaza in his mother’s name.

The idea of peace is made harder as both sides seem adamant about war, Flescher said.

One of the problems is incessant messaging that the war is necessary. “War is normalised in both Israeli and Palestinian society,” he said. “So there’s a great deal of support for using extreme acts of violence against the other side to liberate yourself or defend yourself. That’s common. You get what I call pro-war messaging. You’ll get it 100 times a day. You’ll see it on billboards, on your social media, and on WhatsApp. And we’re giving a peace message maybe once a week or month.”

“We’ve given war a go so many times, and it hasn’t worked. And the threshold is so low for trying war again and again and again,” he said.

However, Flescher believes that through Kids4Peace and similar organisations, they are saying that they want to give peace a chance because war clearly isn’t working.