#peace work

[spanishsongs]

A new initiative recently launched by Palestinian peace activists called the "Realign for Palestine" project. Please consider supporting them. The leader of this initiative, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, has been doing amazing work in this space.

Professor Dajani is one of the members, and he's a personal hero of mine. He took the first ever group of Palestinian students to Auschwitz and then someone tried to assassinate him.

Realign for Palestine — End the violence. Start the future.

[theinwardlight]

[theinwardlight]

[theinwardlight]

[gaytrashdove]

Not everyone can be a peace hero. If they could, they’d all just be called people.

[jrich103]

There is no time left for anything but to make peacework a dimension of our every waking activity.

Elise Boulding

[uffkhudaya]

It is rare...to find women's groups with an adherence to non-violence and commitment to transformation of the state (be it for increased freedom of expression, democracy, or the end of a military occupation) that explicitly consider and plan against the use of violence by others (the state or nonstate actors). In other words, women activists, similar to ordinary people and peace activists more generally, are not effective at strategizing for worst-case scenarios. Hope for change and a better future is a powerful fuel and motivator, but it is not a strategy for dealing with the reality of communal violence or warfare. Perhaps it goes against human nature; perhaps change comes slowly and anything worse is too difficult to image; or perhaps it is easier to think of the eruption and escalation of violence - the chaos and random attacks; the assault and rape of women; betrayal by a neighbor, school friends, or colleagues - as something that happens to others, in faraway countries. Many a resident of Sarajevo thought so, even as Serbian troops were rampaging across the countryside, just a hundred miles away. Many Iraqis who supported the ouster of Saddam could not fathom a worse situation or believe that sectarianism and criminality would become the norm.

Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters  by  Sanam Naraghi Anderlini