This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Dalia Goodhardt, an Orthodox Jewish Israeli who serves as program manager in Search’s Jerusalem office.
My husband shook me awake. “Dalia, Dalia—sirens!” The sirens wailed as I ran to gather my children and seek safety in our bomb shelter. We huddled together, singing songs to keep the children calm. We’d done this before; we knew what to expect. But this was the morning of October 7, and we never could have expected what would come next.
How do I explain this to my children? It’s the question I asked myself in our bomb shelter that day, the same question I’ve been asking every day since. How do I tell my four-year-old daughter about a real danger to our lives without repeating a false binary about “us” and “them”? Where I live—30 km east of the Gazan border—there are ample resources for talking to children about war and the sound of the sirens, or why they may see soldiers carrying guns. But there are no resources for having these discussions in ways that humanize others, allow for nuance, or resist a simple narrative.
This is why my work with Search for Common Ground has been crucial for me. For the last six years, I’ve served as a program manager in Search’s Jerusalem office. Our team is half Jewish, half Palestinian, which means that peacebuilding work happens as much in our office as through it. We do not have a singular view; we’re all experiencing the war in different ways. Some of us have relatives who’ve been killed in Gaza. Others have loved ones who’ve been called up to the IDF reserves. The fear and anger are real, and tensions sometimes rise. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be authentically engaging one another. We’re not reading about this war; we’re living it. So as we bring our perspectives and share our stories, we hold space to hear and understand one another. Especially when it’s difficult, our shared commitment to peacebuilding bonds us together.
In the days immediately following October 7, it felt almost impossible to resist a binary that pits me against my neighbors. As waves of grief and pain washed over me, there were moments I felt myself succumb to it. I’m convinced this is exactly what happens for many Israelis and Palestinians, that so much inflammatory and hateful rhetoric is really the expression of trauma and grief. This neither excuses nor justifies such speech, but it does help me understand it. Human beings are hurting, and their pain has to be addressed.
When you’ve lost someone you love, when you’ve suffered so much, it’s hard to hold anything but your own pain. But I know that to be a peace builder, I must learn how to hold multiple perspectives at the same time—not necessarily to agree, but to understand. This is precisely why I’m committed to listening to voices of those who do not look, pray, or believe the way I do, whose experiences vary from my own. I want to hear, and I want to learn.
Here’s an important truth: I cannot wait until a conflict erupts into violence to do this. It’s like a muscle that must be worked, a skill that must be practiced. If we want to be peacebuilders, we have to practice peace each and every day so that in the midst of a crisis, we can draw on the strength we’ve been building all along.
So what do I say to my children? I confess: I have no easy answers. But I tell them about the people I work with. I tell them about the Israeli and Palestinian citizens living in mixed communities who look after each other in the midst of war. I tell them about the Muslim and Jewish leaders seeking out training to better understand one another’s perspectives and traditions. I tell them that I’ll keep working to build peace for them and for all of our neighbors, that I have no other choice. We must find a way.
