Winnipeggers wonder how to find common ground 1 year since start of Israel-Hamas war
Some Winnipeggers are reflecting on how to build bridges between local communities that have become polarized by war in the Middle East.
Monday marks one year since militants led by Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking with them about 250 hostages, at least 70 of whom have since died, according to Israeli media.
Israel’s ensuing invasion of Gaza has killed more than 41,900 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Ninety per cent of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants have been displaced, with more than a million starving.
Manitoba Friends of Standing Together, an activist movement encouraging dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis — in support of Standing Together, a Jewish-Arab anti-war organization in Israel — began meeting a few weeks ago, led by two Winnipeggers, one Palestinian and the other Jewish.
“We had some heated discussions, which … we knew that was going to happen,” Ramsey Zeid, one of the founders, told Weekend Morning Show host Nadia Kidwai. “But I think that those heated discussions are necessary, right? For us to move forward together.”
Ramsey Zeid, president of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba, and Emet Eviatar, co-founder of Manitoba Friends of Standing Together, meet for a conversation about building bridges between communities one year after Oct. 7, 2023.
Zeid is also the president of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba, which has been holding rallies in Winnipeg every weekend since the early days of the war.
“The whole purpose is to have the hard conversations,” Manitoba Friends of Standing Together co-founder Emet Eviatar said during the interview.
“You just can’t have them over text. People get hurt, people leave, people get mad because there’s no nuance.”
The group isn’t the only one working to find middle ground.
Gaser — meaning “Bridge” in Arabic and Hebrew — is an interfaith dialogue group that had been hosting meetings years before the latest flare-up in a decades-long conflict.
Loraine MacKenzie Shepherd, a retired United Church minister and the recent recipient of an Lt.-Gov. General Award for advancing interreligious understanding, has been involved in both organizations.
“There is a tremendous amount of pain and anger about what is happening right now in Gaza and what happened on Oct. 7,” she said.
“I think underneath the anger and the grief is fear, fear that … is it even possible to go back?”
Finding courage
The conflict has continued to escalate in the weeks leading to the anniversary, with Israeli strikes in Lebanon killing over 1,000 people as its campaign against Hezbollah ramps up.
The Iranian-backed militant group has been firing rockets into Israel since the early days of the invasion. Iran also recently shot a barrage of missiles at Israel, in the aftermath of the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
MacKenzie Shepherd said that as the conflict escalates there is a growing number of people eager to sit down and talk.
“I think that gives people a bit of courage to say, OK, we’ll start. We’ll try,” she said.
While community is an important resource for people going through grief, the fear of losing that makes people scared to speak up, she said.
“It takes a lot of courage for people to engage in it, and not be called traitor by their own communities. In fact, I’m seeing these communities become divided amongst themselves.”
‘Too much hurt’
Sometimes “people aren’t ready to listen because they have too much hurt themselves,” said Janet Schmidt, a conflict resolution mediator in Winnipeg.
“They themselves need … people in their life to listen, but they’re not capable yet of hearing another point of view.”
As a mediator, Schmidt said her role is to help people get to a place where they can share their story while also hearing others. But sometimes that’s not possible because there’s too much fear or anger, she said.
“There are so many people who have lost people, and that takes a long time to recover from,” she said. “How this all plays out in terms of the ongoing escalation of the situation again for both sides, it will take time.”
Once parties get to the point where they can sit down, Schmidt said mediators encourage people to focus on sharing their stories, and not hurl judgments that may lead to “arguments about definitions and whose side has been hurt more.”
“There is a lot of loaded language in this conversation, and that’s part of the problem,” Schmidt said.
“It’s not a matter of who’s right and who’s wrong, but how have we experienced the situation, how we experience the conflict.”
Through that conversation often surfaces a shared humanity, and from that “a way to find possible common ground,” she said.
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