Jenan Taylor
26 October 2025
Palestinian student Suheir Abu Awwad was passing through a checkpoint near her village on the West Bank when she glimpsed a familiar face among the Israeli soldiers. The young man was a Jewish Israeli member of the joint Palestinian Israeli youth group she had recently joined at the Roots organisation.
There, they participated in facilitated activities including summer camps, and regular listening groups. These provided a chance to chat about their daily lives, dreams, and what mattered to them as they grew up in one of the world’s most violent places.
The youngsters had little doubt that at some point they might meet – Palestinian civilian and Israeli soldier – at one of the many checkpoints studding the West Bank. The shock for Ms Awwad when this actually happened, was immense.
“It was as if someone threw me in a hole,” she said, knuckling the distress now tightening her jaw. “The next youth meeting, I said to him, ‘I suppose some day you’ll be attacking my home or my village. What difference has being part of Roots made for you?”
It took Ms Awwad another year to grasp what difference being on the program had made for her. She realised there would be many hard issues and encounters between Palestinians like herself and the young Israelis in her group, unless someone made an effort to think differently.
She recalls thinking: “I have my narrative, they have theirs. We don’t agree on each other’s stories, but that is why we have conflict. They are part of my life. Perhaps if we start to believe and accept each other’s perspective, we can begin to live in agreement and peace.”
Ms Awwad is one of thousands of people who have participated in Roots’ programs since it was created in a West Bank settlement just outside Bethlehem in 2014.
Roots – Shorashim in Hebrew or Judur in Arabic – is an interfaith network whose co-founders include Palestinian peace activist and Ms Awwad’s father Khaled Abu Awwad, and Jewish Orthodox leader Hanan Schlesinger.
Their aim was to pave a path to peace through getting local Palestinians and Israeli Jews to dismantle the assumptions they might have of the other, discover each other’s truths, and open their hearts to each other’s pain.
Roots did this by providing a safe space for sustained interaction between the Palestinians and settlers. This was something that participants – clerics, students, families, peace activists, Israeli soldiers, teachers and others – might never otherwise do despite living side by side, sometimes for decades.
In addition to the youth groups, and through the help of local and international funders, it brings people together at facilitated inter-religious discussions, lectures, joint Iftars, pre-military programs, photography courses, and language classes.
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Since October 2023, it has conducted solidarity visits to Israeli and Palestinian victims of violence, organised Zoom-based sessions for communities in mourning who choose not to travel or are blockaded amid the escalating tensions. It has also raised emergency funds and food aid for Palestinian farmers who lost their livelihood amid Israeli settler violence.
It encourages high school students to be agents of change through instilling in them a greater awareness of the pervasive discourses about their communities. The group has taken them on holocaust museum tours, and promoted narrative analysis studies of the long-running conflict between Israel and Palestine stretching back to the British mandate in 1917.
Independent evaluations of Roots efforts show some nuanced and promising results. Between 2014 when the network launched and the start of the current Israel-Hamas conflict, it helped change how hundreds of settlers and Palestinians related to each other.
Rabbi Schlesinger believes Israeli-Palestinian solidarity is one of the most important outcomes of the group’s work
“The very thought that there could be Israelis and Palestinians who see themselves as part of the same team, as allied together, trusting, supporting, and depending on each other,” Mr Schlesinger said, “That’s absolutely insane in the reality in which we live here.”
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He is under no illusion the effort might have changed the larger picture in Israel and the occupied territories, but it offers a glimpse of what a peaceful future could be.
Key to these successes, Mr Schlesinger said, is each side recognising and respecting what makes the other who they are.
“What is foundational to everything is that this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is not just over land or interests or resources, but a conflict over identity,” he said.
“Many Israeli Jews don’t recognize the Palestinian people. They don’t think there is such a thing, and don’t believe Palestinians belong in our Jewish land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea.
“They see them as foreigners, and part of that is a sense that Islam is evil. On the Palestinian side, a lot of them think that Judaism is a distorted religion, and that the Jewish people are not a people. They’re just a religion. They don’t deserve to have a land and that the Zionist movement is evil from its roots.
“Neither side accepts the basic identity of the other … and religion is a part of that identity here. So, if religion is part of the problem, then religion must be part of the solution.”
Roots, he said, strived to bring each side to see the humanity and the identity of the other, so that they recognised the other side belonged in the land and was just as legitimate as they were.
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Mr Schlesinger believed that things would change for the better throughout the Holy Land if more people took this approach and were prepared to listen and be accepting of each others’ truth.
“People’s minds would change. They would be more generous to other peoples, other cultures, other religions, other ways of thinking. There would be listening, there would be conversation, there would be understanding, there would be less polarization.
“There would be a generosity of spirit and opening of hearts, and a sense of human brotherhood and sisterhood that does not undo your identity,” he said. “Rather, it expands your identity.”
He wanted people outside the Holy Land to know that it was not in the DNA of Israelis and Palestinians to kill each other, and that it was possible to have a different reality where they lived in brotherhood and not hate the other side.
People outside the situation who were interested in justice and humanity were essential contributors to this vision of peace as well, but Mr Schlesinger said, they needed to carefully consider what they stood for.
“Support Palestine, if that’s what you’re so inclined to. Support Israel, if you’re so inclined. But don’t support one side at the expense of the other side. Support both sides,” he said.
“Because if Israelis don’t get what they need, Palestinians won’t. If Palestinians don’t get what they need, Israelis won’t.
“What we need is a growing number of people around the world who are demonstrating not just for Israel, not just for Palestine, but demonstrating for both sides.
“Demonstrate for peace and reconciliation, not for the victory of one side over the other side.”
Peacebuilding work is hard at any time in the region, and since the Israel-Hamas conflict, the conditions for many organisations conducting it have become even tougher.
Mr Schlesinger said perhaps the biggest challenge to peace building was the Israeli government’s policies.
Under these, movement has been restricted and people prevented from going in and out of almost all Palestinian cities and villages. They cannot go to work, school, the doctor, or even get daily necessities.
“It prevents the Palestinian people from living normal lives and most young people see no future and feel they have to leave. Some are being terrorised by gangs of young Israeli extremists,” Mr Schlesinger said.
“There is no money because the economy doesn’t exist anymore.
“In addition to that, this Israeli government is always destroying Palestinian schools, homes and businesses. We, for example, in Roots, we raised money to buy a food truck for a Palestinian in Samaria and that was taken away by the Israeli army a few days ago.”
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But Mr Schlesinger felt some optimism about the 20-point peace plan put in place by United States president Donald Trump. “It recognised the importance of interfaith dialogue, so there is some understanding of the role of religion and identity in solving this conflict,” he said. “This gives me hope there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Now in her mid-20s, Ms Awwad is Roots program director of the women’s group. She is looking ahead to a new plan under the theme of The day after the war, in which she will be involved in training more women to see themselves as peace makers as well as mothers, sisters or wives.
Ms Awwad lives near the Gaza border, and during airstrikes the booms often shook her bedroom. There have been many barriers for her in trying to go about her work in the West Bank.
All this has left some emotional scars that not even 13,750 kilometres, a nine-hour time difference and an unstable Zoom connection could conceal. Like Mr Schlesinger, however, Ms Awwad was more hopeful the conflict would end soon.
Recently an old youth group friend, still wearing his Israeli army uniform, approached her eager to relate his recent tour of Gaza. He had killed some bad people, he began to tell her.
Ms Awwad refused to let him continue and avoided him for the next two weeks. But the lessons she had learnt at the organisation, kicked in.
“I wondered what made him so eager to speak with me, as if I would celebrate that he had been a commander in Gaza, and I went to find him, prepared to have a difficult conversation,” she said.
He told her that one day in Gaza he’d received orders to bomb a certain house, but noticed children among the buildings in that area.
“He went to them and told them. ‘Move away. Go far, far away from here for a while.’ They greeted him in their language and told him “Salaam” which means peace, and told him thank you, then they moved away from there. They were able to understand each other because this Israeli soldier had learnt during the youth language program to speak Arabic to understand properly the other.”
Ms Awwad smiled slowly through tears. “It was like a spark of light in the blackness,” she said. “He is now the commander in my area where he’s trying to help people as much as he can.”
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