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Hands of Peace offers personal insight into global issue

Hands of Peace offers personal insight into global issue

The world has a lot of problems. This is especially true in the last several weeks. Although it’s easy to be brought down by all the negative news we’re bombarded with, it’s important to remember the people at the heart of the solutions. This summer I participated in Hands of Peace, and it definitely consists of people in that group.

Hands of Peace is a program founded in 2002 that takes groups of Israeli and Palestinian teens and brings them to Chicago for two and a half weeks of bonding. Every morning has two and a half hours of dialogue about the conflict, and the afternoons include other activities, like tourist things or parties.

Like many issues, a large part of this conflict is the fact that the groups with the most extreme opinions are the most vocal and, in this case, the most powerful. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic organization, wants control over the entire region. The current Israeli government has similar goals. Because of this, most of the participants’ only knowledge of the people on the other side was that they wanted them out of their land.

At the beginning of the two weeks, I had a fairly solid knowledge base of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but no real experience with or investment in it. I knew how biased most American media was, and because of that I didn’t really feel comfortable having an opinion.

I also knew the conflict has religious and emotional roots that stem way further back than the 66 years the state of Israel has existed, and that’s what makes it so hard to solve. Without that understanding, I would have viewed the conflict through a lens of idealism and religion, something I tried desperately to avoid.

More importantly, though, I made friends. I finally went to the Sears Tower with one of the participants and his host family, and I participated in one of the most delightfully low-key games of softball in human history. We all spent the majority of our time together for two weeks, and by the end of it, we were a family.

I cried a lot on the last day of the program. Like, a lot. There was the whole best-friends-going-home-in-the-middle-of-a-war sadness, but the worst part was I had actually been holding it together pretty well until one of the Israeli participants told me they were terrified of running into one of the Palestinian participants during their time in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and having to directly contribute to their friend’s oppression. (All Jewish Israeli citizens have to serve for at least two years in the IDF).

When you get down to it, it’s a fight over land. It’s also a fight over principle, based largely on religion and entitlement and a desperate aversion to compromise that dates back hundreds of years. Regardless, no one is going to pack up and leave and, to be honest, I have no idea how to solve it. And yet, on an individual level, the community which Hands of Peace creates is a pretty amazing place to start.

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