>>Good morning and welcome to Global Perspectives.

I'm David Dumke here in our studio in Orlando.

Joining us from Israel today is Meredith Rothbart.

She is the co-founder and CEO of Amal-Tikva.

Thank you for joining us.

>>Thank you for having me.

>>So tell us a little about what is Amal-Tikva?

What does it stand for?

And how do you get the idea to do this project?

>>Thank you.

First of all, David, I wanted to thank you so much for having me and for having the opportunity to talk about our work, especially in this complicated time.

Amal-Tikva actually means hope in Arabic and Hebrew.

Amal is Arabic and Tikva is Hebrew.

And I founded it along with my colleague Basheer Abu Baker, in 2019.

In the years before we founded Amal-Tikva I was the director of a small organization called Kids for Peace.

Here in Jerusalem is the Israeli and Palestinian Youth Movement of Youth in Jerusalem who are trying to create a better reality.

And I, like many other organizational directors working for peace, struggled a lot with being able to work toward being effective and create real change in Jerusalem, because on the one hand, running a nonprofit is very difficult in the best of circumstances, but in an active conflict with participants in conflict without clear borders, without clear issues of insurance and payments, and all the bureaucracy of running programs across an unclear border, focusing on impact was just so difficult.

And Basheer, my colleague who was working with me at the time, and he was also managing several other managing finances for several other organizations, some much larger than Kids for Peace kept feeling that all of these organizations, these NGOs in Israel and also led by Palestinians, are trying to work to create a better reality.

But they're spending so much time just trying to run their nonprofits that they're not able to really focus on impact.

And we decided to step down from our roles together and create Amal-Tikva to build capacity for a strategic peace building between Israelis and Palestinians, allowing the grassroots, the top down, the diplomatic efforts, the think tanks to have a space to communicate with one another and the donors so that we're all speaking a shared language of strategy focused on on creating a better reality.

>>Meredith, this obviously, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not not new.

It's been going on with different, different chapters for decades.

But the most recent bout of violence that started October 7th is particularly lethal.

How has that affected your work and what a lot of people - I mean do lot of people look at you and say, these are great ideas you're trying to do, but is there really hope?

I mean, your name is Hope in two languages, but do can you have hope in this context?

>>That's a really great question.

Listen, it's hard.

On October 7th, I was, you know, in synagogue with my family and we were at a sirens after sirens.

My husband was called in the middle of the day to go to the army.

And he was just released yesterday after 164 days.

Hey, I have four children.

I was home alone for several weeks.

They didn't have school.

It was not a simple time.

And people are scared.

And that's on the Israeli side.

On the Palestinian side, it's it's a different type of complicated right.

And in those first few days, I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know how I was supposed to stand up and be a leader for for creating peace.

And I decided to just give myself a little bit of time to calm down.

And one of my colleagues, Randhir, she is a Palestinian from the old city of Jerusalem.

She called me about two days in and said, We're going to have to change our whole curriculum.

I said, I'm really glad that you're there.

I'm not.

But what can we do in the meantime?

And so we decided that we would contact all of our participants, all of the staff of all of our NGOs, all of the participants in our leadership programs and our donors that we work with regularly and just reach out and see how people are doing.

We divided the list.

We were working from home in the beginning because everything was shut down and we reached out to everybody just to check in.

A few weeks later, we came back to the office.

We realized that a few things need to happen.

First, I need to make sure my staff is okay.

We need to provide space to listen to, to hold how difficult this is.

People lost friends, family members.

At that point.

So many people were missing, especially from our field.

Many of our brothers or husbands were called up.

It was very complicated.

And we saw that the staff of the NGOs and the donors themselves as well, especially the Israeli donors, were in similar situations and everyone really appreciated that we asked them how they're doing and what they need and we quickly created several forums.

We created forums for the directors of the organizations, forums for the fundraisers to answer questions like how do we talk to our donors in this time?

And we answered all these different needs.

Our professional development programs were supposed to start in March, like this month, and we launched them in December instead, because there was such a thirst that in the beginning I thought, Well, we're going to have to cancel so many programs and everything will be on hold.

But the opposite actually happened.

More organizations wanted our help.

Organizations that were a part of our network wanted even more help.

Donors were coming in, knocking at our door, asking who they can be supporting, how they can focus on peacebuilding.

And we ended up launching two whole cohort of leadership training.

We had 12 spots.

We had so many applicants for the program that we had to launch two entirely separate cohorts and we still turned away.

You know, I say more than 50 applicants.

>>What were you surprised at this, this kind of response?

I mean, you've been doing this for some time and obviously the emotional reaction and in addition to the practical realities, like having your husband go into the reserves, you know, the complications that both Israelis and Palestinians had in day to day life, let alone the bigger context.

Were you surprised at this positive feedback you got?

>>It was different.

You know, I have been through in my time working in this field several wars, several operations, and, you know, the knife intifada, 2016, so many different upticks and and and difficult times of violence.

This is a different level.

Everybody is shell shocked still.

Everybody is suffering trauma.

And we're now five months after the start of the war and everyone is still having a really hard time here.

And I think there is this desire, this intense need to figure out what the day after is going to look like and how can we make sure this never happens again.

Look, we had a community breakfast for our NGOs last February where everyone spoke about their theories of change, how they're creating impact.

And I wanted them in that conference a year ago to share their strategies, to share their theories of change with each other so that they could figure out how they complement one another.

So if there is an organization that is looking to help Palestinians in East Jerusalem solve conflicts more - less violently and using nonviolent mediation.

And then there was an organization inside Israel that was trying to help neighbors have the skills to resolve conflicts nonviolently.

They could share best practices from each other because they were both trying to create a less violent way of resolving conflict in their own society.

There were so many examples.

We have 28 active organizations in our network right now and sharing not including the donors, just the the work on the ground, having them share their theories of change and figure out how they complement each other.

It was huge and I didn't know what was going to be when the war started.

If it was going to pull everybody apart.

But I think this what we came out with a year ago was until everyone understands that the status quo is not sustainable, nothing will change.

Neither side wants peace, especially the Israeli side, because what peace with the other side looks like with as an Israeli, what peace with the Palestinians looks and sounds and feels like is giving things up.

And until October 7th, we as Israelis had this feeling of sense of security.

Why would we need to make peace if things are okay?

And so many, you know, peace activists and those of us from the field were saying it's not sustainable.

It's not sustainable.

Obviously, I didn't imagine something this horrible.

Nobody could have ever imagined anything this horrible.

But we were afraid of the complacency.

And now there's no complacency.

Now the status quo is over, it's broken.

And everyone is thinking, what is the day after?

And I think that some of the interest in our work is saying, I don't know if we can just keep fighting forever.

And and even if we can, I don't know if that's going to bring us safety.

I don't know if we keep fighting forever it's going to make sure October 7th doesn't happen again.

And so there is a desire to figure out a different answer.

And that's where we're stepping in.

>>I mean, you see, obviously no two conflicts in the world are alike.

But one of the common elements you see when conflicts are resolved or at least transformed, is a feeling of exhaustion on both sides that these tactics that have been used for so long are not getting us noticeably more secure, more safe, a better outlook on the future.

Is that fatigue in place among Israelis and Palestinians right now?

>>Right now?

I think that - listen, I can't speak as a Palestinian.

I'm not I'm not one.

I can tell you what I'm hearing and seeing.

But I can tell you here in Jerusalem, people are still scared on both sides.

People are still scared and there's still a tension.

There's still adrenaline.

They're not exhausted yet.

They're still nervous.

And there's no answer.

And there's not a feeling of strong leadership.

There's not a feeling that there's a plan.

And I think a big part of why there is no sense of security and sense of everything's been tried is because it's the opposite.

There's no there's no plan and there hasn't been one.

The plan was just kick the can down the lane.

Right.

We don't want to deal with this issue that we've had five elections in the last four years, and none of them ever talked about the conflict.

None of the political parties talk about the conflict.

No one will ever talk about the conflict publicly because resolving it is too controversial.

No one wants to deal with it.

You know, our job at Amal-Tikva our work started four years ago, way before October 7th because we had this sense of urgency and we were scoffed at.

And I felt that it was urgent then, not because I was expecting something like this, but because I just didn't understand how it could be sustainable.

You know, my military service was, you know, it mandatory military service in Israel.

I served in the West Bank, in the civil administration.

And I really learned what it means to have military occupation in the West Bank as a soldier.

And I really felt that my commanders and those working inside the Army in the West Bank were trying to do it the best that they could.

Many of them were left wing liberal trying to to be as kind as possible.

But the institution, the way that it was set up, the dynamic from from Oslo, that was never completely implemented.

It was never going to work.

It was never going to be enough.

There wasn't a comprehensive strategy.

A comprehensive plan is what we need.

>>Who would be championing that?

And I know you mentioned leadership, a problem of leadership, and obviously in the United States, we've had had older leaders the last, you know, the current president and the previous president and really are not offering necessarily either have offered particularly, you know, inspiring solutions to this.

But Israel, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister in and out of office for 30 years.

Abbas has been on top of the Palestinian Authority for quite since Arafat and was the number two before that forever.

Is a new generation of leadership needed and having worked with so many young people, Israelis and Palestinians alike, over the years, do you have any sense of optimism that new leadership and new ideas that come with new leadership can emerge?

>>There's two big challenges at play, right?

The political leadership doesn't want to talk about changing the reality because the public discourse doesn't speak about changing the reality.

Right?

And the public is not trying to create a better future because it doesn't feel possible without a political horizon.

Right.

And both ends, whether it's top down.

There's no reason to talk about peace because the people aren't even asking for it.

And the people don't even know that they could be asking for it because there's nothing to look toward.

We need to be working top down with political leadership that exists and with potential political leadership that are on their way there.

And we also need to be working at the bottom in the education system, on the environment, in schools, in the municipalities, religious institutions, at every level of society.

And once you gradually change a culture to realize we can have a better reality and we we need to build it and we need to demand it on the Israeli side, on the Palestinians, the leadership will have will have to answer to that.

And I believe that they will not, even if they're not coming at it necessarily from the best place, but because that's what it would take to stay in power.

>>All these grassroots efforts you're talking about, what are some of the areas that you think are most likely to be successful and what areas are the most difficult to to see progress?

>>One of the things we've been trying to change at Amal-Tikva is a standard of what's acceptable, right.

That organizations, for example, that raise millions of dollars and do very little work and bring people together to sit in a room for a few hours.

We are trying to change the culture within grassroots work that that's not acceptable.

And on the other hand, having, you know, mass rallies of people that are never going to be engaged, that don't even really know why they're there is not necessarily the most strategic either.

Right.

It's less about the specific work that they do and more about making sure that their models are effective, are scalable and sustainable.

Even if you have an incredible program, if you're only reaching a very, very small part sector of society without any ripple effect, it's not going to cause much progress.

If organizations are operating strategically and effectively, they're measuring their impact, they're in conversation with one another and they're being scaled, then they can create real change together.

>>What are some of the projects that you've seen succeed over over your years of working on these issues?

One of my favorite organizations is one called Lisan.

They are an organization run by run and led entirely by women.

They were founded in East Jerusalem when a group of Palestinian women from a place called Az-Zawiya approached a group of Israeli college students asking to teach them Hebrew for free in a volunteer capacity so that they could have access to health care without having a male member of their family who does speak Hebrew, help them, or so that they could enter the workforce in Jerusalem.

This organization really snowballed and became a network of volunteers.

When they came to us three years ago, they were a tiny volunteer led organization.

Now they're one of the largest in our space.

They have municipal partnerships, they have community center partnerships.

They're the official supplier of the city to teach Hebrew.

They have had regular - they teach Hebrew for Palestinian women.

They have different tracks, they have different levels.

They have swallowed up other smaller organizations, and they have stayed true to their values at all levels.

They actually have an event tonight that I'm missing that is bringing together in the midst of this war, hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian women who have been teaching together and teaching Hebrew and Arabic together over the last several years.

>>Do you get any blowback from Israeli citizens asking, why are you working with Palestinians?

>>Listen, it's complicated.

I don't get blowback.

I don't think people are worried that I'm doing something bad.

I more get pushback back on, you know, if you're so strategic, then why don't you try to pick a different sector to work in?

And, you know, people from my family or from my community may say, you know, why don't you work on ending hunger or some other issue that's more important?

And I think this goes back to that same issue of people really not wanting to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, really not believing that it's resolvable, thinking that talking about it, working towards it, investing in it is a waste.

And that was the way that people talked about this work before October seven.

It's changed since then.

You know, now when I say what I'm doing, I'm met with very different responses.

Sometimes people laugh and say, Well, I guess you didn't do a very good job.

I don't I don't blame the failure of the peace movement for where we are today.

>>Is the peace movement, though, going through hard times?

I mean, you have an optimistic outlook.

Obviously, you're explaining what your role is and Amal-Tikva has been doing.

But overall, the peace movement has suffered, you know, some would say has suffered some setbacks.

Do you feel that that's accurate assessment or are there you know, sometimes you also have the saying it's, you know, darkest before the dawn.

Is there hope that, you know, yes, things are bad now, but peace could be just around the corner?

Or is the peace movement really going to stay kind of in this limbo?

Because there are people not enough people see a vision of what peace looks like?

>>That's a great question.

I don't think that the peace movement, first of all, really exists and is very strong and is very clear.

There are over 50,000 registered nonprofits in Israel, and about 70 some of them focus on peace building.

There are activists.

They are really hurt.

I think that the work was not unified, was not strategic, was not part of a real movement.

And I don't think that peace activists are going to be the ones to bring about peace.

I think that we need to systematically change society from within, inside our communities.

Religious, secular, ultra-Orthodox, all of the different elements of our society need to understand why creating a more peaceful reality will serve their interests and is better for them.

They need to want to live peacefully with our neighbors because it's what's best.

It's what's best for it for themselves, for their children, for their communities.

It's what's best for our future.

We don't have to love each other.

We don't have to become best friends.

We don't need to sit around and sing Kumbaya.

If you look at the example of Northern Ireland-- >>Right.

I was going to ask you about that, actually.

So.

>>There - nobody that I've met with.

You go to Belfast.

Nobody is would say that it's utopia, right?

Right.

But they're not where we are anymore.

The violence has really, really calmed down.

And the the tensions have changed.

It's really become a different level.

You speak to a younger, you know, Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland who have grown up without the violence.

And the way they speak about the other side is really different.

And I believe we can get there.

But it takes investment, it takes finances, it takes a strategy.

It takes really hard work in Northern Ireland.

The peace didn't come as a fluke and it didn't just come with the Good Friday agreement.

It came with 12 years of investment and social change leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, intensive intensive investment in creating social change at all levels.

And that's what we need here.

We need to decide that that's what is happening and that's what we in Amal-Tikva are trying to do.

We're trying to make it clear inside each society, each element of society, at our leadership and at the bottom, that this is what needs to happen in order for us to be able to live here safely.

>>So, Meredith, you've you've you mentioned Northern Ireland.

We obviously have mutual mutual friends there, which is how we met.

So our viewers actually know.

Truth be told.

But but I wanted to ask you, because one of the lessons that that I picked up being there, talking to people in Belfast is, you know, neither the Republican or the loyalist side.

You know, they had a reluctance to even validate the other.

So because every time you actually would recognize them that they had a point, it would delegitimize your own position, seemingly.

Do you have that same kind of trend in in Israel in Palestine?

And how do you how do you get to the next step of saying exactly what you said?

I don't have to like this person.

We don't have to love each other.

We don't have to do things together.

But we do occupy the same space.

We have different narratives and we have to find a way forward.

>>I think that that is starting to happen, and I've heard a few times lately the sentence "We're doomed together," you know, and maybe it to some sort of a realization that's happening in society that we have no choice but to figure this out, whether we want to or not.

And I think that this is a real it's a real trauma.

And we have to take a look at what we're living and what the day to day is like here in the midst of this war and and and be honest with ourselves and say, what will it take to make things different?

I personally, you know, in the religious Zionist ideology of believing that Israel is a Jewish homeland and wanting to find a way for Jews to live here safely, I want to make peace from that place.

I want to make peace with Palestinians because I believe that it is it is what's best for the Jewish people, is what's best for Israel.

And it will be what's best for the Palestinians as well.

And I think that if we can really look at ourselves honestly and figure out as individuals what will be best for each of us and our people, it is to figure out how to live here in a way that is going to be enabling both sides to thrive.

>>How will this play out in the next six months?

How do we get back on track in terms of I hate to even use the term peace process because as you mentioned, Oslo, you know, we are talking on those parameters even to this day.

And peace wasn't fully delivered.

And so there's a lot of skeptics as to, you know, this is great, this utopia you're talking about.

But, you know, getting there as failed for so long.

Do we give up and say we're going to do two state two state solution?

Sure.

One state solution.

Nothing has worked.

So what what what do we do to get things on track?

>>Unfortunately, David, I don't think it's going to take six months.

I think it's going to take a lot longer than that.

And I think that if we as the people who live here and those that are really invested in stability for Israelis, that - and or Palestinians, anyone who who's really in favor of supporting one side and wants stability for that side is going to have to understand that that stability takes investment of time, of money and of real hard work and creating a long term strategy.

You know, our our dear friend Gary Mason from Northern Ireland says if you aren't going to make the time over the next 20 years to be fighting to make peace, then don't come complaining to me in 20 years when the situation is the same or worse.

You know, I have small children and I. I can't promise that the next year of our lives is going to be calmer and is going to look much better.

And I don't have a magical solution.

I don't think there is any solution right now that will create a miracle of calm.

We're in crisis, an insane crisis.

>>What what can-- >>We think long term.

We have to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future.

>>What what can outside organizations and individuals do to help your work?

>>I think that we really need to change the discourse.

We need to change the discourse toward understanding that what's best for one side is creating stability for both.

It is very easy for us to become more and more polarized as and I struggle with it.

I'm on one side.

All of us struggle with it.

My team is half Israeli and half Palestinian, and we're not outside of this work.

Right.

So even us, and especially people that are interested or part of the side of either identity or attached to either identity need to start to internalize that what's best for each side is stability for both sides.

Educate yourselves.

We everybody needs to educate themselves about the reality and try to see the whole picture.

And then you can get involved supporting organizations that are doing real work here and speaking out, speaking out in support of hope for change.

Stop saying it's intractable.

It's not intractable.

Intractable conflict have been solved.

We need to just break it down into manageable parts and start to address each part one by one.

>>Meredith Rothbart, thank you so much for joining us today and we wish you the best of luck for Amal-Tikva moving forward.

Very important work you're doing.

Thank you.

>>Thank you so much.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week for another episode of Global Perspectives.