On the fateful morning of October 7, 2023, a surprise attack carried out by Hamas left more than a thousand Israelis dead and some 250 taken hostage, setting off a military counterattack on Gaza that has left it in ruins and claimed an estimated 72,000 Palestinian lives. Ever since then, it has been almost impossible to say anything about the situation in the region without upsetting somebody. But that has not deterred Parents Circle – Families Forum. A nonprofit that brings together bereaved families from both sides of the conflict, PCFF has never stopped speaking out and working toward a peaceful future. Indeed, its members argue, such a path is not only possible but the only viable way forward.

Started by Yitzhak Frankenthal, an Israeli Jew, in 1995 after his son Arik, an IDF soldier, was killed by Hamas, PCFF limits membership to Israelis and Palestinians who have lost immediate family members to violence in the region. Since October 2023, at least eighty new families have joined this club no one wanted to be a part of. The group’s effectiveness arises from the shared perspectives of fellow sufferers bound by the knowledge that they have all paid the same terrible price.

Today PCFF has more than eight hundred members. Two in particular – an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab who each lost a child – gained international fame after novelist Colum McCann featured their unlikely friendship in his 2020 novel Apeirogon.

One of them, Rami Elhanan, was born in Jerusalem to a Holocaust survivor and became an officer in the Israeli army, fighting in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1997, he lost his fourteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, to a Palestinian suicide bomber. He joined PCFF a year later, after Frankenthal invited him to one of the group’s regular sessions – a jarring but ultimately disarming experience, as he told me:

At first, I thought: these crazy people! But this meeting changed my life. I was forty-seven at the time, but I’m ashamed to say that it was the first time I had ever met Palestinians as human beings. I decided to join the group the next day.

The other, Bassam Aramin, was born near Hebron in 1969. At sixteen, he was sent to prison after throwing a hand grenade at an Israeli army jeep (no one was killed or injured). While behind bars, he unexpectedly learned “to see Jews as humans,” and following his release, he cofounded Combatants for Peace, an organization made up of former soldiers from both sides of the conflict. In 2007, his ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was hit in the head by a stray rubber bullet fired by Israeli forces. She died three days later. It was after this that – through Elhanan – he got to know PCFF and eventually joined.

Naturally, the events of October 2023 and its aftermath have affected PCFF, and Elhanan and Aramin personally, in every conceivable way. In Aramin’s words: “Wecannot travel. We cannot meet physically – everything happens via Zoom. But we will not be silent. Our suffering has given us a certain moral authority and an obligation to keep raising our voices to share the message we believe in.”

Dialogue – its importance and its limitations – was at the heart of a conversation I had about PCFF with Greg Khalil last November. An American-born Palestinian, Khalil is the head of Telos, a US-based nonprofit working for peace in the Middle East region. He is not a member of PCFF, but supports its work:

One problem many people have with promoting dialogue is that it can lead to normalization. In fact, people often leave such a dialogue more deeply wounded and more entrenched in their positions than before.

In the case of PCFF, however, there’s a difference. The sort of dialogue they promote grows out of a shared purpose: a realization that all sides have a common claim – our common humanity – which cannot be ignored or denied. We may never agree on this or that solution, but those disagreements are always an expression of deeper core values, and as long as we can hone in on those and find empathy, we will be able to keep talking.

Engaging in such conversations is often deeply uncomfortable – even dangerous – because it can destabilize what we think. It can trigger fears. But that’s precisely why it’s so important. PCFF takes all these big, complex historical and political questions and distills them, boils them down, to one fundamental argument: that it’s not permissible to use the slaughter of your own children to justify the slaughter of other children; or to put it another way, that you cannot use the loss of your own loved ones to excuse the sacrificing of other lives.

Interviewing Aramin and Elhanan by phone, I asked them how they envisioned moving from sharing personal stories to addressing the larger structural problems that lead to war. Could building empathy between individuals really make a difference on an international level? Aramin was emphatic:

Absolutely. Empathy is everything. If you lose your empathy for others, you lose your humanity. You become a monster. And you can only have empathy for someone if you know what they have suffered – if you are willing to listen to them and talk with them. This has the power to bring change at all levels of society. Of course, dialogue alone is not going to solve the problem. Our goal is for Israelis and Palestinians to enjoy freedom and democracy and peace and security together. But in the meantime, we will keep promoting dialogue.

Ari Goldman, a former writer for the New York Times and professor at Columbia Journalism School, taught a religion class there with Greg Khalil for six years. Together, they took students to the Holy Land to give them “the broader perspective gained by hearing as many stories as possible.” In early 2025, Goldman hosted members of PCFF at Columbia. Reflecting on the experience, he told me:

There is such a divide between the narratives, and such a tendency for everyone to remain stuck in their own grief, that there’s very little common ground for people to find. PCFF is an example of a group that helps people to reach beyond their own horror and to embrace someone else – another human being who is going through the same or similar thing – on a visceral level.

It’s terrible that this is where we are forced to find common ground, and I’m sure that for many people who are suffering, PCFF makes grieving even harder. Many would probably prefer to retreat and build walls than talk to others who have suffered, but that makes those who do participate – those who have found a lesson in all of this – all the more remarkable.

When I asked him to explain what he meant by “lesson,” he said, “The lesson is that we’re all hurting – and not just one side of the conflict. The lesson is that we’re all human beings.”

The same clarity of purpose marked a PCFF event I attended in New York City in October 2025. As at every forum hosted by the group, there were speakers from both sides of the conflict.Liora Eilon, a retiree from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, spoke first. A former civics and history teacher, she was caught right in the middle of the October 7 massacre. Seeking shelter in the safe room of her home and hiding there for forty-eight hours, she emerged to learn that her son, the leader of the commune’s civilian defense unit, had been killed. So had dozens of other kibbutz members.

Eilon’s counterpart at the event was Mohamed Abu Jafar. Born and raised in the West Bank, he was fourteen when, in 2002, he witnessed the death of his sixteen-year-old brother at the hands of Israeli soldiers who shot him and then barred bystanders from coming to his aid. The incident led him to study nursing – to give his life to “healing others.” Now a graduate student in public health at Georgetown, Abu Jafar has served as a facilitator at PCFF’s summer youth camps and told us about their work in bringing together young Israelis and Palestinians in Cyprus.

As is the practice at PCFF events, Eilon and Abu Jafar simply shared their stories – that is, they made no attempts to speak as representatives for their sides of the conflict. They also declined to promote any particular solution. Afterward, Eilon fielded a question about her work as a peace educator. She has spoken to thousands of young Israelis since October 2023, many of them on the cusp of joining the Israeli Defense Forces. While not a pacifist – she is unyielding about the necessity for self-defense – she always pleads with prospective soldiers to remember that there are human beings on both sides of every conflict. “Don’t lose your own humanity as you defend ours.”

As for Abu Jafar, he said that while growing up in Jenin, he had never thought of Israelis as fellow humans but only as oppressors. After his brother’s death, however, two Israeli mothers from PCFF reached out to his mother; it was she who dragged him to a meeting where he met a “refusenik” – an IDF soldier who had been jailed for refusing to serve in the occupied territories. The meeting transformed him.

Both Abu Jafar and Eilon noted an apparent difference between American and Israeli audiences they speak to: the Americans tend to gravitate toward abstractions like the future of Jerusalem; their arguments are (understandably) far more likely to be informed by their favorite social media platform or newsfeed.

Robi Damelin, a PCFF member I met last December, noted the same. A South African-born Israeli who moved to the country in 1967, she lost her son David to a Palestinian sniper in 2002. Three months later she joined PCFF. Today she is a spokeswoman on its administrative staff.

People love to talk about the Middle East even if they have no personal connections there. They throw around loaded terms like “colonialism” and “genocide.” But how many of them can name even one dead person? Who are they helping?

Damelin concedes that there is a place for protest – “of course people have a right to speak up in public on anything they feel deeply about” – yet questions
its merits:

Sure, you can try to draw attention to something by joining a demonstration, but at a certain point I wonder if it doesn’t become self-serving. It’s nice to have a cause you can serve without compromise when you live in safety – in New Jersey or New York, for instance. But who does it help? And a lot of what goes on in the name of protest these days is so fractured, one wonders what it can possibly achieve. People don’t really even coexist anymore: they are totally isolated, living in a million parallel universes, obsessed with their own personal information channels.

If you want to do something constructive, why not find an organization working to end the conflict and start supporting it – even morally, if you don’t have the money to do more. There are so many that could use support: Breaking the Silence, Women Wage Peace, Combatants for Peace. Why not find one whose aims speak to you? Join hands with others. Maybe that could make a difference.

Asked about her own journey from bereaved mother to international peace activist, she answered by relating the event that changed her from someone who, in her own words, was good at “talking the talk” to someone who was willing to “walk the walk.”

One night three soldiers came to my door to tell me they had caught the sniper who killed David. After that – with that information – what was I to do? There was no person, no face before. No one to forgive. I had been pleased with myself for traveling the world and talking about peace. But did I mean it? Eventually I wrote to the parents of the sniper and told them about David. I told them that we should meet – that we owed this to our children and grandchildren. I also called for the release of the sniper, more than once, if it would bring about the release of an Israeli hostage.

I asked her how she could be so generous – whether she wasn’t tempted by dreams of revenge. She shook her head vigorously:

How would that have helped? The search for revenge eventually destroys your capacity to achieve anything. It doesn’t bring your child back. You have a choice, you know. You can move forward in your life by remembering the loved one you lost in a positive way: by building a monument or establishing a scholarship, or something like that. Or you can become embittered and slowly die. Whereas talking with others brings about the emotional breakthrough that enables trust. When you discover shared pain, you discover a common basis for change.

Like Eilon, Damelin has traveled up and down Israel since October 2023. In the south, where the massacre took place, she took in “the smell of death, rusting tricycles, burned-out houses.” She knows there are countless similar scenes in Gaza. Still, she has hope. I asked her why. “Why do I have hope?” she asked in return. “How could I be cynical? If I didn’t have hope, I would just sit at home, useless to myself and everyone else. I can’t afford to give up. I have grandchildren. Their future is important to me.”

I asked Damelin about the PCFF’s Youth Ambassador program and the international summer peace camps it runs. After the camps, the Israeli and Palestinian participants return to very different realities. Could this compromise the fruitfulness of dialogue? Damelin demurred. Whatever disparities there are, she said, and whatever criticism might arise because of them make PCFF’s peace programs even more vital, if only because they “help young people put themselves in the shoes of the other.” She added that no matter how imperfect, dialogue is the one thing that can yield the “common ground of shared humanity and shared suffering” that brings about peace. “And the younger that starts, the better.”

Bassam Aramin would concur. Quoting Martin Luther King Jr., he said, “In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” He went on, “We are not asking you to take sides; we are simply asking you not to keep silent. It doesn’t matter who is suffering. Keep raising your voice for peace, because none of us lives alone in this world. We are all connected to one another.”

As for Damelin’s refusal to yield to cynicism, and her stubborn hope, Rami Elhanan shares both:

If you look back in history, people would never have dreamed that the British and the French and the Germans would become partners. We never thought the Berlin Wall would come down. We never thought that apartheid would end in South Africa or that there could be peace in Northern Ireland. But all these things have happened.

In the meantime, Abu Jafar and Eilon make no bones about it: being a “peacenik” these days is not likely to evoke admiration. On the contrary, plenty of people think they’re crazy. Eilon shrugs. “Call me what you want,” she says. “I know who I am and what I’m working for.”