Skidmore College and MLK Saratoga hosted members of Combatants for Peace to lead a discussion on the ongoing conflict in the Middle East with students and faculty.
Combatants for Peace is an Israeli-Palestinian-led coalition of activists that has been pushing for a non-violent two-state solution since 2006.
Speaking on behalf of the group for the first time on an American college campus, Suliman Khatib and Iris Gur outlined their experiences, the creation of the organization, and took questions from audience members.
Gur, an Israeli, had lived most of her life without acknowledging the occupation of Palestine. But she says that changed when her daughter refused the country’s mandatory military service and spent more than 100 days in prison.
“I was 52 years old when I met, for the first time in my life, a Palestinian person, a Palestinian woman in this case. It means you can live your whole life in Israel without meeting a Palestinian person. Before I met her, I couldn’t hear Arabic, I was afraid from the language,” said Gur.
Khatib was arrested when he was a teenager and spent more than 10 years in Israeli prisons after joining the Fatah Youth Movement. For him, Combatants for Peace has been about humanizing his “enemies.”
“Combatants for Peace presents a vision, a wholistic vision. A wider, kind of, heart that can really show empathy to what we call the ‘other’ without giving up your own pain. And out of that belief, we don’t need to be competitive; who’s more a victim, who’s suffering more. I think this is basically allowing people to be in their full truth,” explained Khatib.
Protests have erupted on college campuses across the nation since October 7th, and Skidmore students recently passed a list of demands to President Marc Conner including joining their calls for an immediate ceasefire and divestment from the Israeli economy.
One audience member question covered what the end of the occupation would mean for the guests.
“Everyone will have the right to do what they want, freedom to move around, and to feel safe. This is what I see, which is for me ending the occupation and the apartheid. And the day it will come will be the day that I, as an Israeli, I will be free also. I will be safe also,” said Gur.
After the event, Skidmore student Justin Pollard was grateful for the evening’s focus on productive communication across ideological lines.
“It’s really easy to kind of back yourself into a corner and feel like you have to connect with a certain group. And with so many atrocities happening on both sides it’s really easy to kind of think about it and sympathize with one side. But when you look at it broader you see that it’s on both sides. And they talked about it so much throughout that finding that peace, finding that middle-ground and having the conversations to really inspire change and create change is how we as students and members of the community can really bring the conflict to a better place,” said Pollard.
First-year student Sam Kleid was in the front row and said he was happy to have a space to discuss such a hot-button issue.
“As someone who has friends and family in Israel and friends who are Palestinian, I’ve had to have these tough conversations in these past couple months, and I think I’ve been able to do that but it is tough for many people. And I think just creating spaces where those conversations can be had, you know, where it’s not just sitting in the dining hall, or the library, or in the room, a place where you can really find people that just want to talk. Because, something like this, you can’t hold emotions, feelings, thoughts in with something so intricate,” said Kleid.
Sarah Ema Friedland directs Skidmore’s MDOCS Storyteller's Institute and commended the recent student organization efforts as well as the college for welcoming the speakers to campus.
“You could even tell when the Israeli activist said like ‘I joined this movement because I wasn’t allowed to say the word ‘occupation’ in other peacebuilding movements.’ So then you don’t have to question what are people actually having to give up in order to say that they are building peace. And so, for me, it was really exciting to see a kind of initiative that is asking Israelis to concede some very deeply held beliefs that are also deeply held in the American Jewish diaspora,” said Friedland.
Nurcan Atalan-Helicke co-teaches the course “Citizenship and Conflict,” and said that the evening’s focus on radical hope was inspiring.
“I was really impressed too in terms of the messages. Because for Suliman [Khatib], the main message, the emphasis was on hope, constantly on hope. And for Iris the message was also about how it’s difficult to achieve it, but at the same time with enough number of people collectively working it’s possible to actually achieve something against all odds,” said Atalan-Helicke.
