Meeting OneVoice in Israel

Man, this is a crazy way to blog (on a blogger bus in Israel with a deputy consul talking in a Hebrew dialect on his cell phone in my ear).

On Sunday afternoon, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (who is on OneVoice’s board of advisors), Susan Mernit and I met with seven leaders of the Israeli branch of OneVoice, Roi, Noam, Gil, Sara, Yanna, Tal and Marina. I conducted a brief video interview with the head of the Tel Aviv office of the organization and will post that next week.

The group, at Onevoicemovement.org, now has 630,000 members in Israel and the occupied territories — Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians — with a presence in the United States, Canada and Great Britain as well. They have offices in Tel Aviv, Gaza and Ramallah Some snippets from our conversation:

Executive Director Gil Shamy told us, "It’s a mass movement of moderates" who are seeking to find common ground for a just and lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The effort is less a political effort seeking specific legislative action than a broad-based social movement that is seeking to find common ground.

A hard-edged realism

This is not a traditional peace movement based on hopes and idealism, but it is a collection of people (every one of the seven representatives was between 20 and 35) who accept the fact that there needs to be a transition period — "the divorce," Shamy put it — before the two sides can realistically hope to come to an accord that ends the fighting over land, that accommodates all the religions’ holy places, that holds out hope "for the kids."

It’s a practical approach that says any long-term settlement will arise from the parties’ own self-interest.

Most importantly, it’s also about changing a mindset that’s become rooted in despair and cynicism.

OneVoice reaches the public through lectures from educators and government officials and takes its message of "careful optimism" to the streets by mobilizing students and residents to press ahead with a commitment to core principles that could prove a foundation for peace. 

"We have to form our own reality, or war is what we’ll deserve," Tal Harris said. (They all spoke in English.) "We want to give people a safe haven to express their own moderate views."

Marina, another OneVoice leader, said, "It’s about active advocacy that comes not only from political leaders but involves citizens as well. We’re trying to trigger them to think and question assumptions. … This helps people to become makers of policy, not just consumers of policy."

Looking ahead

The OneVoice members framed this as a battle between moderates and the extremists on both sides.  They cited a political event in Jericho that had to be called off after Palestinian militants threatened the lives of those who wanted to support OneVoice’s call for moderation. 

A new initiative, imagine2018, asks young people ages 13 to 18 to write an essay on how they see israel and Palestine coexisting in an era of peace a decade from now. The effort is drawing compeling entries and they expect it to be compiled into an hourlong documentary that showcases five stories from both sides of the conflict.   

"Youth culture should be playing an important role in this," Shamy told us. "They’re the one sitting on the bridge in the middle of the conflict."

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.