A word from Achvat Director, Yoav Peck:

As winter arrives, I have a good feeling about my wood pile, outside in the garden. I have collected, over time, enough heavy branches to enable the security that I will have enough wood this winter, even if the winter is extraordinarily harsh.

This is not the case in al-Shati Camp tonight, on the edge of Gaza City, beside the sea. There is no security in Shati. The army notified the residents of al-Shati on Thursday that they must evacuate to the South. Again. Aside from the inability to see the suffering of the Palestinians, most Israelis are convinced that we must ride the recent wave of military successes. To where? The reason to maintain a strong army is to see to it that we do NOT have to fight.

We Israelis have got it all wrong. We think that if we are strong, we will be safer. And yet, lurking beneath the surface is our awareness that military power can only get us safer, but it cannot get us safe. And deep down, we also understand that we cannot be safe until ALL of us are.

So is there a way to get all of us safe, and soon? This is the wrong question. There may not ever be “A WAY” that will lead us home to peace. However, there certainly are “WAYS” to peace, a multitude of ways to peace, many roads leading to Rome. To home. I just arrived back in Jerusalem after traveling one of them.

I got to be with twelve young folks in their 20’s, traveling the south of Israel/Palestine for four days and three nights. This current cohort of Achvat Amim, met with a plethora of players and stakeholders.

We stayed with our friends in Umm al Khair in their village in the South Hebron hills, with a settlement towering over them fifty yards away.

We heard a fascinating Bedouin law student and activist, Bashir, whose relatives are among the hostages in Gaza. An Israeli professor of Moroccan origin brought us into the story of Israel’s 50 year discrimination toward them, the struggle of the Israeli Black Panthers, the ongoing battle for a deeper cultural equality between mizrahim and ashkenazim.

At Achvat, we place our participants in various peace/human rights orgs. One of our cohort goes out several times a week to pick olives alongside West Bank farmers, to try to deter harassment from marauding settlers or aggressive soldiers. Action, taking action.
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At the moment, when we all seem to be helpless in the face of the political/military reality, we revive our spirits when we look to what we CAN do to advance things. Achvat Amim enables in-depth learning, activism in the field. A myriad of other projects, in civil society, are taking small, incremental steps forward. A beehive of decency and solidarity, somehow laying the human infrastructure for the peace that inevitably will come.
What else can we do?

Solidarity, 
Yoav 

A word from Elly Oltersdorf, Outreach Director at Achvat Amim: 

I had one friend in Gaza. His name was Khalil.

Khalil Abu Yahia was an activist, writer, and educator living in Gaza.

A year ago, at 9:41pm on October 30th, I got a call from Daniel, a fellow activist and founder of Achvat that Khalil had been killed with his whole family. I can barely remember my thoughts in that moment. But I remember how I felt. I was crying hysterically. It came in rapid-fire waves. A sick kind of dread. Then disbelief. Then white hot rage. My stomach was flipping. I felt sick. I felt nothing. I felt everything.

Achvat Amim only had a team of 3 at the time and I was the only staff member in Jerusalem. I gave Daniel a moment and then called Elianna. I braced myself because I could feel a cold hard shock cushioning the pain, but I knew it wouldn’t last. Hearing Elianna’s voice smashed painfully through any numbness. She was sobbing “I don’t understand.” She kept saying. “We knew it could happen. We knew. But I didn’t think… I didn't think…”
And I knew exactly what she meant. Even when Khalil had texted me about so many near misses. His neighbor’s house. His whole block. Fleeing from one place to the next. Fleeing South when the IDF told them to. Somehow there’s this beautiful and horrible and necessary trick your brain plays when someone you care about is in danger . A voice that says “not them. surely it wont be them.”

My last message to Khalil was October 31st.

Khalil please be there. We heard news you and your family were killed , please still be alive with your family . I’ve been crying all night

The message remains in my phone with only one check mark. My prayer didn’t go through.
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Every person is a universe. This is what is said in Judaism when someone’s life is saved. Or when someone’s life is not.

There is a strangeness in this. Because we are of the world, we are each a world in and of ourselves, and yet, we can be worlds apart from each other. Separated by radically different experiences, relationships to power, ways of thinking, upbringing, circumstance — we can be walking physically shoulder to shoulder and still somehow infinitely apart. Sometimes, someone rare comes along who is able to transgress these huge chasms. Khalil was one of these rare people. Like some bender of physics, he spanned unimaginable distance — both physical and spiritual — when he spoke with our participants over zoom.

He was one of the only speakers on our program who we spoke to over zoom, and yet each cohort I saw how he was one of the most impactful people the participants met. His body and physical space was so rigidly controlled — by borders and guns, and advanced military technology, and yet, his words brought you close, brought you face to face. He brought the brutal reality of the siege and the Israeli airstrikes throughout his life into the room with us.
“When I hear explosions I go to the window and I know that someone has died. Maybe a whole family. It is not easy to describe the situation in Gaza. The feeling of being in danger and not having any protection is terrifying, but worse is that you can’t protect your children, your siblings. I am the oldest sibling and I cannot protect them. Last night more than five American-made rockets hit my neighborhood. One was less than 30 meters from my house. My neighbor was killed…We are people who love life. We will struggle again and again for a free society for everyone”
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Khalil Abu Yahia gave testimony about non-violent resistance from behind the blockade. He told us about his life in Gaza, the friends and family he’s lost to Israeli bombings and his deep belief in resistance through education. Khalil talked about what it was like to grow up under siege. He talked about teaching children who asked about the world outside of Gaza as if was truly another planet. Children in Khalil’s classes asked him if people outside Gaza truly looked the same as people inside the strip. In a zoom box projected onto the wall of the Gisha office he said:
“Some of my young students asked me recently ‘are people outside of Gaza the same shape?’. The siege has left us so separated from everyone. But us talking right now means that the siege doesn’t work. We are building bridges. This is how liberation happens.”
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Every person is a universe. This is what is said in Judaism when someone’s life is saved. Or when someone’s life is not.

Khalil’s life was ended. Taken violently. By Israeli bombs. But his world was not. Because against all odds, Khalil shared his world. He spread the edges of his universe. His words and his kind smile and his vulnerability stretched like a massive tent with endless corners. And he stitched us together. And now the people who knew Khalil, who felt his strength, who felt his trust, are scatter across the globe, pulling those fine threads taught.

In March I went to protest at an air force base in Be’er Sheva to demand a ceasefire. The protest was small. Maybe thirty of us. One of the organizers passed out pictures of people who had been killed in Gaza. I was passed a picture and froze. It was a picture of Khalil’s one-year old daughter. She looked up at me with curious brown eyes. As I held her picture above my head, my arms sore from battling with the wind that day, the paper of the poster felt insultingly flimsy. The wind whipped it around. But I refused to let it blow her away.

I can’t think about their last moments as a family. Their last moments on Earth. When I try, my stomach clenches and my eyes fill with tears, but I can’t think of a single thing. There’s this beautiful and horrible and necessary trick your brain plays when something monstrous has happened to someone you care about. A voice that says “not them. surely it wasn’t them.”