2025-04-22

What Does Just Peace in Palestine and Israel Look Like? - QuakerSpeak

What Does Just Peace in Palestine and Israel Look Like? - QuakerSpeak


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What Does Just Peace in Palestine and Israel Look Like?
March 28, 2025


“How do I cope with genocide taking place every day against my people?” Joyce Ajlouny, the Palestinian-American general secretary of American Friends Service Committee, asks rhetorically. “And then, as an American, my tax dollars are supporting genocide against my own people—how do I sit with that?”

“It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to fight back, and wanting revenge,” Joyce says about conditions in Palestine, “because you get angry every day, humiliated every day, at what you and your people are going through.” But Quaker faith reminds her that “the solutions are not violent ones—people can transform, people can change.” AFSC continues to support efforts toward a nonviolent resolution to the longstanding conflict in Israel and Palestine.

“I am astounded when I hear Quaker [meetings] feel discomfort about saying we need a ceasefire,” Joyce observes. “This is not a political stand; this is a humanitarian stand… It’s a Quaker stand.” Have you found it difficult to speak about the violence in Gaza among Friends, or to find unity in speaking as a meeting?

Show Transcript and Discussion Questions
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Transcript:
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I have relied heavily on my Quaker faith in how I look at the injustice that is affecting my people. It is easy to fall into the trap, in Palestine, of wanting to fight back and wanting to revenge, because you get angry every day and humiliated every day. And to have our Quaker faith remind me that the solutions are not violent ones, it gave me an opportunity, especially in a in a place where we are living such a violent realities with occupation and apartheid day in and day out, to reflect back and inward. And to understand better what we mean by our testimonies of peace, our testimonies of equality.

My name is Joyce Ajlouny. I use she/her pronouns. I am a Palestinian-American Quaker. And I moved to the United States 12 years ago. And for the past seven years, I have had the honor of leading the AFSC, the American Friends Service Committee, which is a 107 year old global peace and social justice organization doing amazing work around the world and in the United States.

I am asked a lot of times to explain what living under military occupation is like, and I always say, “Do you have a few days?” So for me, yes, I did not live in a refugee camp. I lived in the city of Ramallah and had a relatively comfortable life. That does not mean that I did not struggle with daily humiliations and threats on my rights, on my life. There are so many examples of those experiences that haunt me till today. When you live in a place that treats you as subhuman, that your life is not worth living, you know, that continues to haunt every Palestinian. Unfortunately, my voice and the voice of my people for the past decades has been silenced. We have never been given the chance to speak about our history, and how we were there, and that Israel was not created on the land without a people for a people without a land. We have been dispossessed, massacred, ethnically cleansed for the past 70 some years. Gaza has been bombed and attacked so many times before October 7th. Generations families obliterated. Christians, Muslims, everyone. Occupation does not discriminate. This is not a response to the October 7th attacks on Israel. And this is not about Israel defending itself. This is a continuation of what I grew up with.

How do I cope with genocide taking place every day against my people? How do I cope? I don’t know if I’m coping. How do I accept that our world order has allowed this? And then as an American, my own tax dollars are supporting the genocide against my own people. Like how do I sit with that? I think if AFSC and Quakers play a vital role in showing a path in supporting also those so many Palestinians, so many, who believe and have been working all their lives to resist nonviolently. Accompanying them, empowering them, giving them agency, convening them, in the hope that they will one day attain their freedom and dignity back.

What does just peace in Palestine and Israel look like? Is a question that I have contemplated oftentimes. Everybody living in harmony with equal rights, dignity and freedom, no exceptions. This is what peace looks like — but when you add the word ‘just’ peace, then there’s another layer that you have to consider. And with justice means acknowledgment of the harms that have been perpetrated by the Israeli government and its supporters, including the US government. And then the second layer is a restoration of rights. Palestinians who are today living as refugees in Lebanon, in Syria, in Jordan, on the West Bank. Over 500 villages where obliterated in 1948. They have the right to go back. There’s a U.N. resolution, 194, that says they have the right to return. Reparations. Our water sources restored. Settlers today on the West Bank have a green light from the military, from the Israeli military, to do they want. So they continue to not only harass, but to commit pogroms against the Palestinian villagers. These are illegal settlements. So there has to be a restoration of rights. After that, then there’s space for reconciliation, for healing — so we can live in that beautiful piece of land from the river to the sea together.

What has happened in Gaza? It put us back decades. If I had any hope for peace, just peace to be attained in Palestine two years ago…I’ve lost it now. The only thing silver lining I see, and I want to say that, is with the amazing solidary that I have seen from people. Not the governments, from the people protesting outside, calling their senators, calling their representatives, putting their lives on the line.

The solidarity of the Jewish community, especially, that has given me and my fellow Palestinians hope. Those communities, those allies, people of conscience, that have been speaking up, my message to them is not to tire. Whether it’s a conversation with a neighbor or the family member, is to continue and courageously speak truth about those historic harms and what is happening today on the ground. This is not a political stand. This is a humanitarian stand. It’s a human stand. It’s a Quaker stand. I feel like there’s a next generation that is going to understand the truth, is going to be able to lift it up and take us there to a place where we can be free and we can reconcile and we can heal. It’s just going to take a long time.

Discussion Question:
How can you stand with and advocate for just peace is Palestine and Israel?

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8 thoughts on “What Does Just Peace in Palestine and Israel Look Like?”

Ray Regan
Downingtown, March 28, 2025 at 6:01 pm
I see you and am with you 100%

Reply


Vivienne
Australia, March 28, 2025 at 7:07 pm
This is not an either/or issue. There is no contradiction or disconnect between the political and the Quaker or spiritual issue. Jesus was political (his upturning of the tables or criticism of the hypocrisy of the establishment). If we follow the light and are guided by it, we will be led to question injustice wherever it occurs and to do all we can to end the situation.

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Deborah Fink
Ames, March 28, 2025 at 8:56 pm
Yes. What we need to hear, keep in front of us, and act on every day in every way we can.

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Margaret Katranides
St. Louis, Missouri, March 28, 2025 at 9:47 pm
I don’t know how anyone maintains hope, given the inhumanity being practiced, and the impunity of people who don’t seem to care what they are doing to other human beings. I’m grateful to you for speaking of your hope.

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Sue Steinacher
Nome, AK, March 29, 2025 at 10:26 am
I’m still trying to figure out how to post this to my Facebook, and to share with my Senators and others. Your voice is important and needs to be heard by more. I have long stood with Palestine and AFSC. You are giving voice to something so misunderstood and horrific, and it’s happening in our time. Thank you for your calm but very clear words.

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Ron Hogan
April 1, 2025 at 1:07 pm
Thank you, Sue! You should be able to paste the URL for this page into a Facebook post — or if you wanted to go straight to the video, you could post its YouTube URL. (We were initially concerned about whether Facebook might block this episode due to its subject matter, but we don’t seem to have offended the algorithm, so you should be safe to post as well!)

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Judith Inskeep
Gwynedd, PA, March 31, 2025 at 8:22 pm
It’s tempting to feel despairing because neither the Israeli nor the US government cares what we think and will just continue on their destructive paths.

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Mary McCann
CHICAGO, IL, April 3, 2025 at 6:54 pm
Thank you very much for Joyce’s words of wisdom, experience and conviction. I will listen to this several more times as a source of inspiration and a life-giving force. I plan to share with others.

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David Mervis
This is why there will never be peace and this position is so unreasonable
It’s a proposal to destroy Israel.
Nothing else!
Shame on you AFSC for inciting violence.
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John M Codd
David Mervis Yep, this IS the world we live in - enforcement of UN resolutions is deemed by some to be unreasonable.
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Rebecka Snell
David Mervis thank you. I’m so confused how peace comes from denying Jewish existence.
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Nana Noor
Don't fight against children, that's a shame. Duško Radović 1922 - 1984 Niš - Serbia - - - - -

 https://www.betterworld.info/youth/children/organizations - - - - Justice for all the victims in the world who have been victims of cruel and evil people. The victims must never be forgotten, and the evil must be brought to justice and punished. All crimes in wars were committed by trained soldiers-killers out of hatred, fear, or the desire for rewards on the orders of inhumane killers without love - presidents, generals, religious leaders, media that support aggression and killings, those who sell weapons to aggressors and terrorists - . . . - let us not forget that accomplices should also be condemned and punished, those who support these crimes against children-humanity and genocide.

- - Ben Gurion - the first Israeli Prime Minister 1886 - 1973 - speaks on whose side is Justice. 

- If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that? Ben Gurion
 - Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.. 

- Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it. 
- David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky‟s Fateful Triangle

- - It is the duty of Israeli leaders to clearly and courageously explain to public opinion a certain number of facts that are forgotten over time. The first of them is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish state without the emigration of the Arabs and the expropriation of their land. Ariel Sharon - Israeli general, the 11th Prime Minister of Israel
- - Videos from Dubrovnik - Croatia 2024 year - over one million tri hubndred thousand tourists visited Dubrovnik this year and see what they saw in Dubrovnik - 
- - Dubrovnik sends messages of peace to the world.
- - Any oppression, regardless of who it is directed at, is a crime against God and His Divine Spirit. Beinsa Douno 1864 - 1944
- - Dubrovnik - Croatia defended its own on its own land just as Palestine defends its own on its own land. Defenders are not terrorists, nor aggressors.

 https://www.thedubrovniktimes.com/.../16785-mysterious... - Aug 11, 2024. - Read 2435 times - - - - - 


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- Wars and participants in wars are judged by crimes against civilians. . . - It is incredible that the aggressor repeatedly targeted 17 Croatian hospitals, of which 14 were significantly damaged and four were completely destroyed. Andrija Hebrang - Minister of Health in the Government of the Republic of Croatia from 1990 to 1992 - - Defenders do not attack and destroy hospitals - they do not kill children and civilians, they do not kill non-combatants, destruction of civilian infrastructure, destruction of olive trees, is not self-defense but a war crime, genocide is not self-defense. Defenders do not colonize, do not implement apartheid, do not ethnically cleanse, and do not commit genocide.

- - Do not kill olive trees Palestine peace - - - Peace and freedom go together. J. Krishnamurti - Download above documents videos and read what Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Berrigan, Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Alice Bailey, Noam Chomsky, Ben Gurion,, Golda Meir . . . said about state of Israel? 
- - THE SAMSON OPTION – ISRAEL IS THE GREATEST THREAT TO THE ENTIRE WORLD - Posted on December 12, 2022 



- - Colonization, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, ecocide. - - - - The leaders of the Zionist movement of aggression constitute a real danger to world peace and human development and their activities have been endorsed by the expediency policy of the U.S.A. and, in a secondary degree, by Great Britain, under the influence of the U.S.A. It is the Zionists who have defied the United Nations, lowered its prestige and made its position both negative and negligible to the world.

- The world today still remains divided into people of evil intention and great power and their victims, plus the negative reactions of the remaining nations. There is no nation in the United Nations which has attempted to swing the tide of evil by ranging itself and other nations on the side of freedom. There are only groups of unillumined men who seek to control national destinies.. . . 

- The Jews, by their illegal and terroristic activities, have laid a foundation of great difficulty for those who are seeking to promote world peace. As a Jewish member of my Ashram pointed out (and I commend him on his soul vision), the Jews have partially again opened the door to the Forces of Evil, which worked originally through Hitler and his evil gang. The "sealing" of that door had not been successfully accomplished, and it is the part of wisdom to discover this in time. These Forces of Evil work through a triangle of evil, one point of which is to be found in the Zionist Movement in the United States, another in central Europe, and the third in Palestine. (pages 340-343) - The rule of force, of aggression and of territorial conquest by force of arms is demonstrated today by the Zionists in Palestine, as well as the demonstration of the power of money to purchase governments. ( pg 364 - 365 ) - Alice Bailey 1880-1949 - THE RAYS AND THE INITIATIONS . . . - Alice Bailey 1880-1949 - THE RAYS AND THE INITIATIONS - -

 - https://thecrowhouse.com/timi.html - It starts with Hitler's speech about Palestine - see the Gaza girl speaking at 3 minutes and 38 seconds to 4 minutes and 45 seconds, another girl at 8 minutes and 9 seconds to 9 minutes and 14 seconds, there are more videos of Palestinian children after this.
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Sarah Ellen Gonzalez Lauck
The Truth shines through the cracks despite the Lies placed over it.
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