Santa Fe-based nonprofit even more committed to bringing Palestinian and Israeli women together

Santa Fe-based nonprofit Tomorrow’s Women has brought together Palestinian and Israeli girls to forge connections and move toward peace for 20 years, producing roughly 400 alumnae.

The organization’s leaders believe that work is more important now than ever.

“The Palestinians have the chance to meet the Israelis in a different context than the uniform and the checkpoints and everyday life,” Lama Abuarqoub, Palestinian dialogue facilitator for Tomorrow’s Women who’s from the West Bank, said Thursday. “And the Israelis also have the opportunity to meet Palestinians who are not throwing stones, who are not saying hateful things, who are not angry. Just giving them the chance to have a normal life together makes them feel that it’s possible. If it can be done here in the camp, in the seminars, then it can happen also in the conflict zone that we share.”

For the young leader program in Santa Fe, every summer a cohort of 16 teenage girls, eight Israeli and eight Palestinian, have the chance to live together, participate in dialogue sessions together, do therapeutic art together and enjoy fun activities together for 21 days. Sometimes those conversations are painful.

“We think about our work as ‘track two’ diplomacy,” said Executive Director Tarrie Burnett, who works out of an office in Santa Fe. “Track one is like what happened when (President Joe) Biden went to meet with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu. We’re track two. We’re people-to-people peacebuilding. Even if a peace treaty was signed tomorrow, there would still be deep animosity on the grounds and civil conflict. And so we’re working on building a strong civil society.”

Alumnae of the nonprofit’s foundational programs have gone on to lead marches to end violence against women, created bi-national preschools to bring together Israelis and Palestinians before stereotypes can set in, and worked with the Harvard Negotiation Project, Burnett said.

The bonds the young women formed in the most recent cohort of young leaders have been tested by the recent outbreak of war. One girl lost a father, while others have lost friends or had friends kidnapped, said Noa Ma’ayan, Jewish Israeli co-director.

“What we thought is to bring them together, but it was too much for them,” Ma’ayan said in an interview with the Journal via Zoom.

The younger girls began to fight on social media, comparing the painful things they were going through.

“They almost forget all the dialogue and the compassionate ways of listening and talking. It was too much for them, and I understand,” Ma’ayan said. “And you can see that for the campers who just came out from camp, the younger, the youngest, it is much more difficult than the more grown-up (alumnae).”

So Tomorrow’s Women created two separate groups of Israeli and Palestinian girls to give them space to talk through the difficult experiences they were going through. The nonprofit uses the same model during the camp experience, letting the girls talk and vent in separate groups first before coming into dialogue.

“People get very polarized,” Burnett said. “Think about our own major events here, OK to show empathy to the other side and to remind them of the skills that they learned with us, and then to give opportunities for them to come back together.”

In those separate groups, the girls have talked about how they know and love the other group of girls, Ma’ayan said. In the groups, the girls also are being taught how to deal with trauma in their bodies.

Living through war while working in peacebuilding is difficult.

“Being in that area, the area in the middle between both sides, listening to both sides and living with the sadness and the pain of both sides is very difficult,” Abuarqoub said. “At the same time, it’s one of the things that fuels the faith that we have in what we are doing now.”

Images of violence are ever-present in the Mideast conflict and the sounds of rockets overhead have become normal.

“If you ask me how I am today,” Ma’ayan said, “I’m exhausted.”

Ma’ayan hears rockets and fighting from where she lives on the Lebanese border. “The new normal way of living is to try to recognize from the bombs which is from there to here and which is from here to there,” she said.

Ma’ayan has a shelter in her home, so her daughter, grandchildren and sister are all staying with her.

Abuarqoub has five of her own children — all grown-ups.

“As a mother, you have to take care of them and you have to keep the balance in there, and to bring them to their senses again, back to their senses,” she said. She also listens to the frustrations of the teen girls she works with.

“You have to listen to them, to their frustration, to their sadness, to their desperate statements about what are we talking about? What future do we have?”

Thursday morning, one of Abuarqoub’s friends called to say that she and her husband had been drafted into the Israeli military.

“And I could hear in her voice how her heart is torn apart,” Abuarqoub said. “And she was telling me how it is difficult for her to think of my kids and her kids under the current situation. And on the same day, today also, we have to go to be with one of my colleagues whose brother along with his wife and three children were killed last night.”

Some of the Israeli girls who participated in Tomorrow’s Women also reached out to her, sending messages about how it was difficult for them to have conversations with their Palestinian friends.

“Under the current circumstances, for Israeli girls to reach out to a Palestinian facilitator — for me that was something that the credit for that goes to the program,” she said.

Tomorrow’s Women is apolitical, but not neutral, Burnett said.

“Our goal is not to influence American politicians or Israeli politicians or Palestinian politicians. And we’re not neutral,” Burnett said. “We very much recognize that there is an occupation going on, and that it’s asymmetrical — that there’s one side that has more military might than the other and that one has more control over the other and that creates an asymmetrical dynamic. We’re not neutral about human rights. We’re not neutral about what a just peace looks like. And we’re not neutral about who we believe should be in charge: young women and women.”

While the 20-year-old nonprofit has paused in-person programs before in times of conflict — the last time was in 2021 — this moment is above and beyond what it has seen before, Burnett said.

“This is going to change the field of peacebuilding forever. I hope it changes it for the good. But it’s certainly going to change the landscape,” Burnett said.

Two weeks ago before the war started, Tomorrow’s Women had an event for the 2022 campers in Tel Aviv.

“We had permits for the girls from the West Bank,” Ma’ayan said. “It was so nice to see them together, hugging, you know, when they finally met each other after a few months that they didn’t.”

When the donor who supported the event saw the hugging, they told Ma’ayan that they understood what the donations were for.