Ariel Markose, the Chief Strategy Officer of Amal-Tikva, Talks About How To Do Peacebuilding in Wartime
Newsletter #303 - December 6, 2024
On November 7, 2024 I (Heidi Burgess) talked with Ariel Markose, the Chief Strategy Officer with Amal-Tikva, an Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding NGO. Amal-Tikva has recently completed a study of 40 other peacebuilding NGOs in the Israeli/Palestinian area, which examined how these organizations have been affected by the ongoing war, and how they are adapting to it. We talked about that report, and about Amal-Tikva's history and activities overall.
Ariel joined Amal-Tikva after five years as the founding director of the Jerusalem Model, a coalition of diverse social entrepreneurs. Through her role in the Jerusalem Model, she helped guide the founders of Amal-Tikva, Meredith Rothbart and Basheer Abu Baker, in creating Amal-Tikva. As CSO, she oversees program design, process management, and external relations. She holds an LLB in Law and BA in Government from IDC Herzliya. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and children.
Ariel started out by sharing the founding story of Amal-Tikva, starting with its name:
Amal is "hope" in Arabic. Tikva is "hope" in Hebrew. So we are a Hope-Hope organization. We were founded by Meredith Rothbart and Basheer Abu Baker in 2019, after [Meredith and her assistants wrote] a comprehensive initial report on the state of Civil Society Peacebuilding before Corona [what we, in the U.S. call COVID], which assessed the needs, the gaps, the opportunities in peacebuilding. And this report, that we're talking about now, follows that report. The main finding of that [first] report was that if all of the money in the world existed for peacebuilding organizations in Israel-Palestine, it really wouldn't move the needle. And what the organizations were most lacking in was capacity. And so she started a capacity-building organization, which is our primary focus.
She went onto explain how they define capacity building:
Capacity building, in our opinion, is essentially the ability of an organization to execute its mission. In other words, an organization that clearly defines and understands a social problem, and then has developed a way of solving that social problem, and then has the ability or capacity to carry out their solution. So, for example, we were seeing, five to six years ago, many, many organizations in the field that had beautiful, inspirational missions, lacking in the ability to execute those missions. And that ability is staff, it's budget, it's retaining good people, and so on. And so we work with them, to make them more effective and better at what they're already intending to do.
I asked what typical "beautiful, inspirational missions" were, wondering if they were very broad (such as resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict, or something narrower. She explained:
we really push back when any organization's mission is to solve the conflict or end the occupation or anything along those lines. We really push for organizations to be much more specific in the problems that they're looking to solve, because we want them to see results. And no one organization is going to end the occupation, solve the conflict. It's not realistic. ... Their missions have to be much narrower and more focused. Women's empowerment is one example [of a focused mission] and that can even break down even further. So you can have ability or empowerment through language, teaching Palestinian women in East Jerusalem to learn how to speak Hebrew, so that they can access the job market, reach better opportunities, then break the cycle of poverty, that then breaks cycles of violence.
Other examples include working with religious leaders and doing interfaith work. Working within the Israeli school system to educate around tolerance, hatred, racism, things like that. We have organizations that do conflict resolution through the court system in East Jerusalem and in Palestine and working with the religious leaders of communities and teaching them mediation techniques to resolve conflict in a nonviolent way.
All of this, in our opinion, can be considered "peacebuilding," because, according to our definition of peacebuilding, initiatives that lower levels of hatred and violence, that create better systems of interaction, that create more sense of justice, all help to break the conflict down to manageable parts and then can mitigate those parts and solve the conflict piece by piece.
I asked Ariel how many organizations were doing that kind of work in the Israel/Palestine region, and she responded that it is a very marginalized field. In Israel, there are close to 45,000 registered NGOs, and in Palestine, there are 450. Yet there are only about 80 NGOs that are working on peacebuilding in either of those areas. When I asked her why that is so, she said people in both areas simply aren't interested in peace -- and this was true even before October 7, 2023. In Palestine, she noted, it is illegal to register an organization as a peacebuilding organization, although she said, there are ways to disguise that. You can form NGOs to work on women's empowerment, or nonviolence, or political education for youth. This is peacebuilding, she explained, but it doesn't raise red flags. And in Israeli society, she said "peace" "has become a dirty word. Israelis have completely lost interest and hope in peace and doing that kind of work."
What keeps her going, in such an hostile environment, I asked?
I have four kids —they're my motivation. I grew up in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. I served in the IDF during the Second Lebanon War. I was a young adult during the whole round of violence in 2014. I have seen and experienced so much war and violence from a place of privilege, right? Not even a place where I was evacuated from my home or I had family members...until now.
And this year, it has felt closer on my own skin and bones than ever before. My husband was called up to reserves to the north on October 7th. He's done over 160 days of reserve duty and hasn't been home. My brothers and brothers-in-law were all called up to the IDF. My brother-in-law was injured. This is not a life that I want my children to inherit. I want something better for them. And so. even for some of my Palestinian friends, I'm not coming at this from sort of like a humanist international sort of liberal. I want to create something different for my kids. And this is the only way that I see that that is possible.
After this background conversation, we dove into some of the findings of the report that I found most interesting. I was particularly interested to learn, that not only was peacebuilding still happening after October 7, 2023, but it was growing in capacity. Not only has more money been flowing in, but peacebuilding NGOs are getting more strategic in their work. They not only have clear, doable missions, but they have developed an ability to
clear away all the noise (not getting overwhelmed with all the aspects of hardship and the issues that we live in) and crystallize what social problem they're uniquely positioned to solve and then develop an objective or a solution or a mission that really answers that problem and then continuously measures their impact and improves and scales and develops out further.
An organization that just does the same thing over and over again, she explained, isn't being strategic. "You want to see growth and scale and broader impact." So, continuing with the women's empowerment example, you not only want to see the organization working with more women, but also broadening their definition of "empowerment."
[If they started out doing] financial education, and then it becomes political education, and then it's running for leadership positions, [that's what we're looking for in growth and scale]. As long as the building blocks are there, and you're continually improving on and reaching to greater and greater heights, it can be siloed. It can be within your vertical. As long as there's movement, [we'd say they are being strategic.]
A second notable finding in the Amal-Tikva report was that civil society NGOs exhibited "organizational resilience," even in the face of the grave trauma of October 7 and its aftermath. I asked Ariel to flesh that finding out more — how did they measure "organizational resilience?" She replied that
Organizational resilience meant that we all came back to work. There was every reason on both sides to throw up their hands and stay home and say, "No." But an overwhelming majority of organizations showed up. They showed up somewhere on October 8th. And they kept doing the work and figuring it out, even though everyone was incredibly traumatized.
There's a concept called post-traumatic growth, right? And the ability to not shut down and to move forward and to keep your brain working and to keep engaging, that, then, encourages your psychological state to process and move past the event. That's kind of what the field did. And it had every reason to not. It had every reason to completely shut down.
And so that, plus retaining staff, and helping the people working in the organizations deal with what they were dealing with, and continuing to do the work and stay on mission, on strategy, not completely pivoting or redirecting their efforts, but really doubling down, was seen across the board. And I don't think that was a given.
Keep in mind, Amal-Tikva is led and staffed by Israeli Jews and Palestinians in a 50-50 ratio. In Ariel's words:
Our staff inside of Amal-Tikva, the leadership is half-half. The coordinators, the project managers, also half-half. And that was incredibly challenging. I share an office with my dear friend and colleague, Ghadeer Sabat Kort, who's a Christian Palestinian from the Old City, who lives in the neighborhood next to mine in Jerusalem — because that's Jerusalem. But her whole family is in the West Bank and we're completely shut down with road closures and the checkpoints were closed, etc. And I walked in every morning with the entire IDF on my shoulders. It was really complicated. But we held it — also because she's just an incredible human being. But in general, our workplace held it and other workplaces held it as well.
I didn't always work in peacebuilding. I worked in activism, but not in this field. And after October 7th, I came back and asked "how are we going to do it? "And Meredith [Rothbart, CEO] said "the peacebuilding field has experienced war many, many times." And so that's back to the resilience and the post-traumatic growth I was talking about earlier. But before, it had never been this bad. It had never been this violent. It had never been this horrible. But it had been before. And so these people that have been doing this work for a long time kind of grew from those experiences and then were able to continue to engage.
Another topic we explored was the nature of the work the NGOs they surveyed were doing. Fifteen of the 40 organizations surveyed were delivering aid to people in need. The others kept on doing what they had been doing before, which was mostly bi-national work (work with Israeli Jews and Palestinians together). This often became harder to do after the war started, but for organizations that had very specific missions, they were able to continue their work.
At the same time, Ariel noted, uni-national work became increasingly important. She explained why by talking us through their "Diamond Approach to Peacebuilding," a graphic and a construct that they developed after the October 7 attack to illustrate how they thought peacebuilders should be focusing their efforts to create a more peaceful reality, after the war had started.
What you see down the middle of the diamond is the core peace builders. These are the people who do the binational work. They've been doing it for years. They understand the nuances. They have relationships. It's very strong. And then on the top, you have top-down peacebuilding, which is basically political and diplomatic track two efforts to resolve the conflict. And then you have the grassroots on the bottom. And then you have this flow from the core, back into our societies, and back to the core.
What we're recommending is that every single one of us in the peacebuilding field is also a member of our society and so we can also be an agent of change in our society. And we can go back down into the edges and influence our societies, without having to bring them back into the middle of the diamond. And then from there, we can influence both the top and the bottom, which you can see illustrated here in the image.
There are organizations that are on the right side of the diagram, for example, that influence decision-makers within Palestinian society, and influence decision-makers in Palestinian leadership. And you have Israeli influencers and leadership that's influencing Israeli political leadership. So that would be the top half of the diamond. They're both within their societies. They're not meeting in the middle, but they are influencing the top-down decision-makers, and they have relationships with the core peacebuilders. And it creates sort of this flow of conversation, of relationship, of efforts, without needing the people to come to the center.
Up until now, those people that were on, let's say, the top right or the top left had to commit to being peacebuilders and commit to the values of the peacebuilding fields and all sorts of things. . And we're saying, "No, that they don't have to completely sign up and have a membership card. They can be influenced and influence decision-makers from where they're at."
I asked Ariel whether they were advocating that peacebuilding NGOs stop doing bi-national work, and instead do uni-national work. No, she said, they have to do both.
In addition, it has to be in addition. But we have seen that the binational has limits. It hits a wall. There's only a certain percentage of each society that's willing to engage like that. And it's not enough to move the needle and get to a point that we're really influencing the broader societies to demand a resolution to the conflict, to demand a more peaceful reality, to demand nonviolence. And so we have to figure out a different way, a different methodology, to get that to happen.
That led us into a discussion of spoilers, because the report argues that not only do you need to get a wider audience involved in peacebuilding, but you should include "spoilers." In my mind, the term "spoilers" means people who are very much against any peace agreement or conflict resolution and who believe that there are other means, often violence and war, that they want to pursue to meet their goals. Hamas and Hezbollah, I noted, were to my mind "textbook examples." So I asked her " how could you get Hamas involved? And would you want to?" Her answer was:
I think this is where we get to the need to change the language. Because what has happened with the language around peacebuilding, up until now, is that it has been incredibly influenced by liberal, international, humanist values. And those perspectives did not really give expression to the national and religious aspirations of the people living in this land. And so any agreement couldn't hold. So the question around spoilers — those are the people that hold the strongest views of the national and religious aspirations of either society. And so the question is, can you develop a language that can engage them, that they see that their aspirations are being met, but also in a nonviolent political method as opposed to a violent and war-driven method.
So how might we do that? I'm going to use a different example than Hamas because I just have more familiarity with my example. There is an organization working in the West Bank with religious Muslim communities in the West Bank and religious settler Jewish communities in the West Bank. And there's sort of an interfaith group. And the interfaith group acts kind of as a costume. It's kind of a smokescreen for the work that's actually happening.
The work that's actually happening is that these interfaith leaders come together, build relationships, and develop methodologies for diffusing moments of tension and heightened violence. In moments of tension and heightened violence, they go back into the extremes of their society. So for example, settler youth, and redirect all of the negative activities, all of the violence towards Palestinians, etc. They shut it down. They temper it. They redirect it.
So in answer to your question about spoilers, we're engaging the spoilers. If you completely eliminate them or push them aside and lock them out of the conversation, then they will continue to spoil and spoil and spoil. But if you engage and redirect and understand the needs and show that through nonviolent actions and political aspirations, their needs can be met, then everybody wants to create a better reality for their kids, right?
I think after the disasters that we've seen in Gaza, please God, there will be new leadership in Gaza and a rehabilitation of the space there. And there will be an attempt to de-radicalize and create another education system for kids living in Gaza. And what is that education system? And how is it working? And how are you engaging and empowering the spoilers not to be spoilers? It's through high-level people who are willing to engage with each other, through the uni-national work, but then the uni-national work going back all the way to the edges of the society, and then bringing them back together with their language, with their Torah, for example, with their religious language, and formulating that in a way that brings them along towards creating a nonviolent reality.
But what do you do, I asked, if the religious aspiration is that Palestine reaches (as is being said in the U.S.) "from the river to the sea," and Israel no longer exists? Ariel responded:
That's where working with religious actors is so critical. Because there's organizations that are very quiet, that are working behind the scenes that influence religious discourse within their societies. And imagine if that language changed, that there was a religious recognition of the Jewish right to ancestral homeland, whatever the language, you're speaking ? It would come from religious leadership. And it comes from relationships. And it comes from strategic relationships that are facilitated between religious leaders. And a lot of times, actually, those people at the very top are very rational actors and are able to understand the nuance and find the horrible word I'm about to use —compromise — as long as they are able to express their religious and national aspirations. And that's where the peace agreements, up until now, have fallen short. They haven't really recognized either of those on either side. There are organizations that are doing this.
I have reached the length limit for newsletters now, so I will end this summary of our conversation here. But there is much more available on the full interview page. Go there to learn more about what Israeli-Palestinian NGOs are doing now, and how, and how this work is being received by the general populations on both sides. We had a fascinating conversation!
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