As the war in Gaza rages on, young Palestinians and Israelis are touring the Northeast together to speak their minds.
The tour, which began Monday in Albany, brings three Palestinians and two Israelis together to speak about their first-hand experiences in the war-torn nations.
Moriah Lavey is a 27-year-old who lives in Tel Aviv. She moved to Israel from the U.S. in 2019.
“When I think about what it looks like to move forward and what the day after is I think we have to find the places we connect on and the spaces that we agree and move from there,” she said.
She was in Tel Aviv when Iran began conducting retaliatory strikes on the country. Lavey says she was going in and out of the bomb shelter underneath her building up to seven times a night.
“You had to be essentially ready to take shelter and that would either be for 10 minutes or sometimes over an hour and it’s a really hard experience,” she said.
Lavey decided to participate in the tour because she doesn’t know what else she can do to spread awareness of the conflict.
“We have to find the places that we connect on and the spaces that we agree and move from there. And really the only way to do that is to get out of the hypersensitive kind of us versus them and step into something else,” she said.
Joining Lavey are three Palestinians. At a local church, they spoke about their experiences waiting for hours at Israeli controlled checkpoints and the day-to-day life of living with war.
While the Palestinians spoke to members of the audience, they requested that their names, faces and identities go unrevealed.
Daniel Moses is a board trustee with Encompass, which helped organize the tour. He says it’s a risk for the Palestinians.
Moses lived in Jerusalem for 11 years. He says Palestinians can be attacked from both sides of the conflict for speaking out.
“Israel has power in the West Bank, so there are things they might say that could get them in trouble with the Israeli authorities and there are things that they might say that when misconstrued when or only partially included, or just the headline could get them in trouble in their own society,” he said.
Still, it’s a chance to bring members of both communities together to find common ground.
“What we are trying to do is model and say the fate of the two peoples are intertwined, Palestinians and Israelis will be on the land forever,” he said.
Karen Abuzant is mediating the tour. She says despite the risks, the five young speakers did not need any convincing to join the tour.
“These are young people who have jobs or are in university or both and for them to free their schedules to come here or be willing to stay up in the wee hours of the morning, in order to get their work done remotely, they really wanted to come,” she said.
The war shows few signs of ending, with Gaza in ruins and the conflict with Iran intensifying.
Still, Abuzant says there are people in the conflict zone who want to work together.
“We want to be heard; we want people to know from us, not from the news stations that often bring faux news. That this is the way it is, this is the way we live,” she said.
The tour’s next stop is Manchester Center, Vermont on Wednesday at 6.
