Speakers from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spoke on Monday at UCLA to give their perspectives and offer hope for peace.
OneVoice, an international grassroots movement aimed at finding a resolution to the conflict, presented Malaka Samara of OneVoice Palestine and Shani Gershon of OneVoice Israel on their first stop of a weeklong regional speaking tour of Southern California.
The event was cosponsored by Bruins for World Peace, a new group founded this quarter.
“We are not like a lot of organizations that are out there. We have two parallel movements, one in Palestine and one in Israel, that are quite independent of each other. They’re working for different motivations but towards the same goal of peace,” said Laurel Rapp, international education program manager for OneVoice.
Samara and Gershon are youth leaders in their respective countries but had not met each other until a few days before the event.
Each spoke about the achievements their chapters had accomplished, projects underway for the future and personal experiences living in war-torn neighborhoods.
Samara, a first-time visitor to the U.S., said OneVoice Palestine does not have any political affiliations, but added that the organization has put on campaigns to encourage political activity, especially after the death of former president Yasser Arafat in 2004.
A Black Ribbon campaign featuring the slogan “Gaza in My Heart” was also launched to bring attention to the innocents who were caught up in religious faction fighting.
Samara said life in the Palestinian territories can be difficult, and she became emotional when she spoke about the arrests of one of her five brothers and her father.
But she added that she had “hope for a better life and to live under dignity and peace.”
“Both sides want peace and to end the conflict, but each side has to trust each other,” Samara said.
Gershon admitted that frequent terrorist attacks in Israel had caused her to develop a hatred of the Arab people, but working with OneVoice had allowed her to realize there are many people on both sides of the conflict who hope for an end to the violence.
This is reflected in OneVoice Israel’s “Halas Nimas” (Hebrew for “That’s enough, we’re fed up”) campaign, which involves taking pictures of 5,000 supporters of a peaceful resolution to the conflict and posting them on billboards across Israel.
Hershon said it would serve as a reminder to the government about what the people want.
“We both want a better future, not only for us, but for our children,” Gershon said.
OneVoice is currently pushing for a solution to be developed by the end of 2008 with their One Million Voices to End the Conflict campaign.
Talks have been going on in Annapolis, Md., since November of last year with the hopes of reaching an agreement on the formation of a free Palestinian state existing peacefully alongside Israel as well as determining a nonviolent approach to achieve such a resolution.
The presentation piqued the curiosity of some attendees, such as Jiae Koh, a fifth-year biology student.
“Before I came, I never really thought about the conflict,” Koh said. “(But when) I can really see and hear from two people who come from this reality, it made me really aware.”