Combatants for Peace Iris Gur (Israeli) and Mai Shahin (Palestinian) will be attending the Re-Imagine Peace event in Florence; both have been invited to the screening of the film *There is Another Way*. Daniela Bezzi of Pressenza interviewed them:
DB – Let’s start with your personal stories: how did you decide to join Combatants for Peace?
Iris Gur – Throughout my adult life, I worked in education as a teacher and as a school principal. I always saw education not just as a profession, but as the way of life I had chosen for myself. I grew up in a Jewish Israeli Zionist family. My parents arrived in Israel as refugees from Europe after the Second World War, and I grew up on stories of the Holocaust and survival. The only narrative I knew was that we, the Jewish people, had always been persecuted, and that we had no choice but to defend ourselves and our small country. The only thing I knew about Arabs was that they all wanted to destroy us.
My father was a military officer. I grew up on army bases and was very proud of the Israeli army. For most of my life, I had no opportunity to become familiar with either the Palestinian narrative or with Arab friends. I deliberately use the word “Arabs” because, in the environment where I grew up, the term “Palestinians” simply did not exist. Neither did the concept of the occupation.
Today, I can see that there were cracks in my worldview over the years, but I never allowed them to grow. The person who ultimately transformed my perspective was my daughter, Noa. 11 years ago, when she was seventeen, she decided to refuse military conscription. Through her, an entirely new world of values, ideas, and community opened up before me.
Her decision meant four months in military prison for her, and for me was the beginning of a journey of discovery – one that confronted me with the reality of the occupation, apartheid, and above all, the Palestinian people.
My decision to join Combatants for Peace came from the realization that if I truly wanted to help change the reality we are in, it could only be done in full partnership with Palestinians and through nonviolent actions.
Mai Shahin: I didn’t arrive at Combatants for Peace as a single decision. I joined through a long process of living under occupation in the West Bank, where control is not only political, but physical, emotional, and psychological. It shapes movements, breath, relationships, and the ability to imagine a future beyond survival. In that environment, resistance is not abstract. It is daily life. But over time, I began to ask a deeper question: how to resist without losing our own humanity in the process? A question that led me into trauma work, community healing, and nonviolent communication. I began to understand that occupation does not only control land – it enters the nervous system, it fragments trust, it isolates communities, and it produces cycles of grief that, if unprocessed, repeat themselves across generations.
This is where my connection with Combatants for Peace begins. It was the first space I encountered where Palestinians and Israelis were not asked to erase reality to speak. We were rather asked to stay inside reality together, while refusing violence as a response.
What makes Combatants for Peace so powerful is that it is not only a dialogue space. It is a joint movement of resistance. It insists that ending occupation, dismantling systems of domination, and protecting human dignity are not separate from relationship-building: they are part of the same struggle.
Alongside this work, and deeply connected to it, I co-founded Satyam Homeland together with Palestinians, Israelis, and international practitioners. It emerged from the same understanding: that resistance requires spaces where people can learn to remain human even inside the struggle. Satyam Homeland is a community space where Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals come together to engage in trauma and grief work, embodied healing, nonviolent resistance education, dialogue, and storytelling—and from that ground, move into action in the world. It is not separate from Combatants for Peace. It is part of a broader ecosystem of what I do: one holds the political courage of joint resistance, the other holds the communal practices that make sustained nonviolent engagement possible. They speak to each other constantly.
After October 7, this connection became even more visible. As Palestinians witnessed mass killing and destruction in Gaza, and escalating violence, settler attacks, and displacement in the West Bank, the instinct toward separation was immense. Fear and grief were not theoretical – they were lived, immediate, and heavy. And yet within Combatants for Peace, something held. We did not collapse into silence or separation. We turned toward each other – not to soften reality, but to remain capable of facing it. We cried together. We named what was happening. We disagreed. But we stayed.
And then we asked the only question that matters when everything is breaking: What do we do now? A question that we can afford thanks to the several years of building relationships that can survive rupture. This is how to be with Combatants for Peace is not only part of my work – it is the central part of what I do.
This is also why I continue this work from the West Bank, where every act of nonviolent resistance, every meeting, every step of presence carries real risk – and yet also real meaning, faith, responsibility.
DB – This year marks the 20th anniversary of Combatants for Peace. What makes this movement so successful among the young people, in your opinion?
Iris – Combatants for Peace was founded twenty years ago by a group of young men who made the courageous decision to challenge the norm that defined their respective societies: instead of responding to one another through violence, they chose to meet with the people on the other side, and to look beyond the label of “enemy.” They chose to see “the other” as human being, to work in partnership, to take responsibility for their own actions – both personally and collectively – and to speak honestly, openly, without sugarcoating or denying the painful reality we live in.
I believe these are the values at the heart of Combatants for Peace. They are the reason the movement has endured for twenty years and has been able to face enormous challenges. The clearest proof of this is the way our members have navigated the profound crisis that many Israelis and Palestinians experienced after October 7, 2023. Many people who had believed in coexistence and peace, felt the collapse of their world.
What enabled us to continue was our determination to keep talking, to keep loving and respecting one another, to hold each other’s pain, to continue seeing each other as human beings, to understand the needs of “the other” even when we disagreed. And above all, to remain committed to our shared vision: freedom, justice, personal and collective security for everyone. We are united by the conviction that this is both the right path and an achievable one.
I believe that many people – especially young people – are looking for this kind of community option, in terms of belonging, compassion, guidance, and hope. They want a place that not only speaks about coexistence but shows that it is indeed possible to live together with dignity, respect, and love. And this is what they find in Combatants for Peace. In an age marked by cruelty, hatred, and uncertainty, we have the responsibility to offer to the next generation not only a path forward, but also hope.
Mai – What has sustained Combatants for Peace for twenty years is not ideology – it is the quality of the relationship even under pressure. It is Palestinians and Israelis choosing, again and again, to remain in shared commitment even when history pulls them apart. This is not just symbolic unity. It is disciplined nonviolent resistance rooted in clarity.
We do not normalize occupation. We do not erase asymmetry. We do not avoid naming injustice. We stay inside the truth, and we stay in a relationship. That is not easy. It carries a cost. For Palestinians, it can mean suspicion, political pressure, and physical risk in a context of occupation and instability. For Israelis, it can mean isolation and confrontation with dominant narratives in their own society.
And yet people remain. And what holds us together over the years is not only political commitment—it is also the quieter infrastructure of survival: the work of healing grief, the awareness about traumas, through emotional and collective holding.
This is where the deeper connection with our sister organization, Satyam Homeland, becomes essential. Because movements cannot survive on political principle alone, they also require the capacity to metabolize grief without turning it into hatred and exhaustion.
Young people recognize this honesty. They are tired of language that misses the reality. They are not afraid of complexity: the courage to name occupation, apartheid structures, displacement, mass violence, without losing sight of shared humanity.
The determination to reject antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism at the same time, completely. CFP resonates among young people because it refuses simplification.
DB – It is quite extraordinary to see so many Israeli and Palestinian organizations mobilizing in coalition. What is the ingredient in your opinion for this kind of activism, based on cooperation despite the differences?
Iris – The very existence of so many Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations reflects the fundamental desire to live together without violence, in mutual recognition and respect.
There are, of course, different opinions about the best strategies for achieving peace, different visions regarding the future political framework in which Israelis and Palestinians could live together in this shared land. But despite these differences, the common aspiration is stronger than what could divide us.
It took many years for these organizations to come together as one broad “peace camp”. Sometimes it takes a profound shock to realize that our collective strength is far greater than what each organization can achieve on its own.
The political upheaval in Israel, the October 7 massacre, the genocide in Gaza, the escalating violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the war in southern Lebanon, not to mention the growing influence of fascism within Israeli society and politics, have led many of us in the Israeli “peace camp” to understand that cooperation is not only desirable – it is essential, if we want real change. After all, despite our different approaches, we are all striving toward the same goal: freedom, justice, security, and equal rights for everyone.
Mai – What makes these coalitions possible is not only agreements; it is our commitment to the truth under unequal conditions. The first step is always a clear definition of what is real. Palestinians live under military occupation, fragmentation, restrictions on land, movement, and sovereignty. Only from that honest recognition can something deeper emerge.
And that deeper layer is where Combatants for Peace and Satyam intersect most powerfully. Combatants creates the space for joint political resistance and nonviolent action. Satyam Homeland, co-founded by Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals, creates spaces where people can engage in trauma and grief work, embodied healing, storytelling, dialogue, and education in nonviolent resistance – and then brings that learning into action in the world.
One without the other would be incomplete. Because if we only act politically without healing, we harden or burn out. And if we only heal without confronting oppression, we adapt to injustice.
What we are building is something more difficult: a movement that can hold grief without turning it into dehumanization; a movement that can name violence without reproducing it; a movement that can stay in relationship without denying truth. This is not softness. It is discipline. And it is the strongest forms of resistance I know.
By Daniela Bezzi. The second part of the interview can be read here.
