avatarRebecca Sealfon

Summary

The website content details the author's journey in creating and managing "Unity is Strength," a successful Israel-Palestine peace space on Quora, which fosters respectful dialogue and understanding between diverse perspectives.

Abstract

The author of the article has been running a peace space called "Unity is Strength" on Quora for over a year, dedicated to discussions about the Israel-Palestine conflict. With over half a million views and three thousand followers, the platform has become a hub for respectful interactions among Israelis, Palestinians, and others worldwide. The author's motivation stemmed from a desire to take action on Israel-related issues, influenced by their Jewish-American upbringing and the historical involvement of their family in Zionism. The space aims to bridge the gap between opposing views, often obscured by ethnoreligious labels, and has been recognized for its surprising lines of agreement. The author acknowledges the need for a new name and reflects on their personal journey, including exposure to Palestinian culture and the realization of shared values across perceived divides.

Opinions

  • The author values peaceful coexistence and has a personal commitment to understanding different perspectives, particularly in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
  • They believe in the importance of honest and respectful dialogue as a means to find common ground, even on contentious issues.
  • The author respects qualities like bravery, determination, and loyalty, even in those considered adversaries.
  • They have come to appreciate Palestinian resilience and creativity, recognizing the value of 'sumoud' or steadfast perseverance, despite narratives that may label Palestinians as enemies.
  • The author is critical of the Oslo peace process, considering it to be overly ambitious and disconnected from the organic development of peace between the two sides.
  • They advocate for a grassroots approach to peace, emphasizing the potential of the press and peacemakers to counteract fear-mongering and othering.
  • The author draws a parallel between the harmonious coexistence of diverse students at Stuyvesant High School and the potential for peace in the Middle East.
  • They see the Internet, through platforms like Quora Spaces, as an opportunity to cultivate constructive dialogue and develop new social codes for interaction.
  • The author views their peace initiative as an ongoing experiment that has grown through community input and despite initial skepticism.

How I Came to Start a Successful Israel-Palestine Peace Space

So, I’ve been running Unity is Strength on Quora.com for more than a year. It’s an Israel-Palestine peace space. It has more than half a million views by now, and more than three thousand followers. It’s had dozens of people contribute — Israelis, Palestinians, and others from all over the world. It’s aired opinions from right of the Israeli center to supporting the Palestinian cause through the boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel. These stances are rarely found together, directly interacting in anything short of a shouting match. And we’re honest and respectful enough to often find surprising lines of agreement. The space needs a new name at this point, which is a discussion we might have soon. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out.

I started the space, honestly, because I didn’t want to be all talk and no action about Israel. I am hoping to grow a Jewish family and would like to lead by example in keeping them connected to our culture and heritage. My family is traditional-Jewish, and even if some of my distant relatives are Israeli, rather comfortably American. We were never militant. We would oppose and avoid armed conflict whenever possible. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has fought in several wars that helped shape its culture, and has a period of mandatory military service that is a rite of passage for young adults. My family did not serve in the Israeli army, or in the U.S. army after World War II. But we do make sure to vote in the U.S., where we are registered, and we sometimes even campaign for U.S. candidates. Rebecca Sealfon’s answer to What is it like to be raised by a Democrat? We talked a lot about supporting Israel, but were not very activist.

My family, though, was not always this way. I am the great-granddaughter of Jonah Gelernter and the granddaughter of Boaz Gelernter. Jonah was the publisher of Devarainu, the only Hebrew-language newspaper in Vienna. He was a prominent Zionist, focused on the restoration of Hebrew as a spoken language. Other prominent Zionists frequented his home. Jonah and his wife Sara were both killed in the Holocaust, although Boaz and his brother Gideon were lucky to make the immigration quota from Austria and escape to the United States. Boaz was a member of the Greatest Generation and a U.S. staff sergeant in World War II.

Jonah and Sara Gelernter (center) enjoyed swimming in lakes, which my family still does.

And ultimately, I started the space because I’m different in certain ways from other people. I spend a lot of time thinking about how not to cause harm, either physically or emotionally. And I’m terrible at changing my style and interests to conform to a group. Growing up, I rarely fit the traditional cliques in school because I loved being around people who came from a different cultural background. One of my old friends said I would talk to people in a particularly individual way, even where others might interact in the context of groups or social hierarchies. Israel-Palestine dialogue was a part of the larger picture of Israel that played to my strengths. It is an environment where the typical pattern of human interaction fails, since the ethnoreligious labels and stereotypes obscure the people underneath. Mine seems much more successful.

Thinking about Palestinian perspectives came to me slowly, beginning toward the end of childhood. When I was six, my family moved from our tranquil suburban ranch house on a half-acre of lawn to multiethnic Brooklyn. There was an Italian neighborhood on one side and an Arab neighborhood we’d walk through to get to the Italian neighborhood. There was a whole row of stores in the Arab neighborhood that sold hijabs, inlaid boxes, and spices. The smells of the spices were delightful. One day, my mom decided to visit the stores. We bought some of the foods they sold in jars and tried them for the first time. We all had our favorites. Chili-covered dried mangoes. Rice cracker mix. Pistachios. Despite the stores being Arab, we kept coming back.

My mom got to know the solicitous shopkeepers. She liked them — at first, even though they were Arabs. Gradually, without a question. We’d discuss whether the stores carried products made in Israel. Occasionally, she found some.

This is not us, but is a local store.

My freshman year of public high school in New York City, I studied the Middle East. I learned a different perspective, about the aftereffects to the Palestinians of Europe’s cowardice in confronting its own antisemitism and anti-Arabism. Later, I learned about the rising antisemitism in the Arab countries during the twentieth century, leading to the expulsions of their ancient Jewish populations — largely to Israel. I fundamentally value bravery, determination, and loyalty. I am loyal to my family, my people, and the values I was raised with. But I respect these qualities even in my so-called enemies.

From hearing about Palestinian activism through a Zionist lens, I learned about the eloquence, creativity, and resilience of Palestinian culture. Often, this was something Zionists refused to admit. They denied the existence of Palestinian peoplehood, said Palestinians should give up on what seemed to be core aspects of their cultural identity, and then said “they don’t want peace.” The Palestinians, like Jews in the Jewish stories about ourselves, would not surrender. Then I read about the fundamental Palestinian value of sumoud, steadfast perseverance. I have a soft spot for it, even when I’m told someone is my enemy. I aspire to something quite similar.

The Oslo peace process made me skeptical, even though I was a child. Our president, Bill Clinton, was hunting the White Whale of diplomacy, the ultimate elusive prize. Many of us wanted peace between Israel and the new state of Palestine, at least in principle. But the leaders were working on an artificial timetable, their term limits, on an agreement that would require seismic shifts in public opinion. They seemed to be moving too quickly. They were probably missing the undercurrents, the little quirks and details that could slowly bring the two sides into alignment more organically. Even my family, fairly liberal-Zionist nowadays and probably centrist-Zionist then, was worried that Israel was compromising its own security. We had barely heard of the Palestinian people as distinct from other Arabs. But if Israel took them seriously, my family gradually followed suit.

I took the entrance exam and won a seat in Stuyvesant High School, where students came from all over the world. I met my first Korean there, my first Puerto Rican, and my first Pakistani. We were the elite of the New York City public school system, sheltered in a safe school where many people’s greatest concern was which four-year college they’d attend. Compared to students in other schools, we were trusted. Security just let us in assuming we wouldn’t bring weapons. This is what peace looks like, I thought. They don’t really know each other, the Israelis and the Palestinians. They need to live together, like New Yorkers do. We know how to have peace. And of course, they didn’t.

Students coming out of Stuyvesant

By the time I left for college, the Oslo talks had finished and seemed to mostly lead to another round of mistrust. Still, I imagined a sustained grassroots peace effort, perhaps hundreds of years from now. It would involve a fundamental redrawing of the conflict as one between the side that fundamentally wants peace and the side that wants othering and fear-mongering. The key players would be peaceful members of the press. In my mind, the peacemaking contingent, if it could be organized properly, had several natural advantages over the fear-mongers. The fear-mongers were overtly divided, in ways the peacemakers were not. And theoretically, the peacemakers could leverage both sides, while the fear-mongers were restricted to only one. I would later learn this paradigm was similar to some established activists’, such as Mohammed Dajani Daoudi of the Wasatia Movement.

But first I needed to become established. I finished a solid education at top universities, and began a successful career in software engineering and software instruction. Contrary to what the press says about some of the schools I attended, such as Columbia University, Zionism rarely came up in the highly diverse STEM fields that were my focus. My specifically Jewish practices made me different in other ways, though, and that I’ll leave as another story.

One day, I relieved myself on Quora.com of some of the musings I’d had for many years about J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy books. Soon, one of my answers had thousands of views, hundreds of upvotes, and positive comments from some of the top writers on the site. I was hooked. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings appears black and white, good and evil, binary. Meanwhile, he wrote about entire races describing them as monstrously ugly and possibly corrupted beyond redemption. Characters he presented as “good” had performed outright genocide. Apparently, you could commit serious atrocities siding with the right powers against “the Enemy.” Skeptical, I wrote with passion about Orc determination, the Orc scavenging mentality, and Orc culture. I mentioned that if I lived in that world, I would want to serve a specific one of its deities, tasked with the project of understanding Orcs and working to identify and develop a path to their redemption.

Ugluk the Orc looks kind of cute as a Lego figurine. Here’s what I wrote about him that got popular.

I was not an expert on Israel-Palestine topics when the new feature of Quora Spaces, or collaborative blogs, came out. I was just an interested person fed up with being a passive observer unable to carry out my projects, as I was when I wrote about Tolkien’s fantasy world. I had not known many Palestinians and wanted honest answers to how Palestinians felt about the two-state solution, what they actually wanted, and whether there was a path toward common ground. With my background in technology, I wondered whether the Spaces feature could bring intelligent minds together as Quora did on so many other topics. I also thought about what social codes would be helpful. Which types of dialogue and framing were constructive, and which were not? Using one of the most contentious topics as a test case, Unity is Strength was an experiment in developing new mores for the Internet. After several months of praise and criticism from both sides, and with input from the community, I learned a lot and wrote some ideas.

At times, I hear the writing on the space as concordant and discordant music. I began playing my own music with my own instrument, at first very quietly, aiming to deflect the discord and build on the concord. When I began playing such motifs so quietly, some people were skeptical of what would happen. But as the Space slowly grows, more and mightier instruments are joining. The music is growing steadily louder.

Enjoy.

Israel
Palestine
Middle East
Quora
Peace
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