Sometimes, the stories are hard to hear.  Laila Alsheikh, a bereaved Palestinian mother, told of how she was barred, by Israeli soldiers, from taking her 6-month-old baby to the hospital in the occupied West Bank. Gravely ill from tear gas, the child died the same day. For 16 years, she would not speak of it.

“I was filled with anger and rage and vowed I would never look or speak to an Israeli person again in my life,” she said. “And then I met Robi.”


Robi Damelin is an Israeli citizen, the mother of two sons, one of them lost to a Palestinian sniper. The pain she shares with Laila Alsheikh drew the women together as mothers, and now friends, despite being from warring nations. Their commitment to channel their grief into reconciliation and peace has made them colleagues in a cause called The Parents Circle Families Forum (PCFF).


The PCFF is a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization of over 800 families, all of whom have lost an immediate family member to the ongoing conflict in Palestine and Israel, and all of whom have chosen a path of reconciliation rather than revenge. Alsheikh and Damelin’s stories, and those of many others, are in videos included in a new educational program the organization offers called Listening from the Heart. Developed through a collaboration with Georgetown University, Listening from the Heart offers communities a chance to engage in meaningful dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a human perspective. Its primary constituents are colleges and universities, many of whom are seeking ways to process the unrest that overwhelmed campuses after October 7th and the war in Gaza.


“You can’t really understand what this is all about, but you can understand what another human being may be feeling,” said Damelin, who is Spokesperson and International Relations Manager for the PCFF.  “When you recognize that, it creates trust.”


The impact of this work relies on the delivery of that message to people and organizations inside and outside of the Middle East. It asks us to consider “if those who paid the highest price for this conflict can understand and empathize, then shouldn’t we all?” 

The PCFF uses the “parallel narrative” method to communicate this message in conversations around the world. Typically, this involves two speakers -- one Israeli, one Palestinian – who talk plainly about the loss they have suffered from the conflict, yet, at the same time, they have come to see the person on the other side as a human being and they describe that experience. The power of this shared humanity las led them to work and pray for peace.


With offices in both Israel and Palestine, the non-profit organization is partly funded by sources outside of the Middle East, including the United States. Since 2013, Shiri Ourian has been the Executive Director of the American Friends of the Parents Circle. She had been working to raise awareness and funds in the U.S. to support the work that was being done on the ground when the Israeli/Hamas war broke out on October 7, 2023.


“After that day, we got calls from so many communities, corporations, colleges and universities, even the World Bank, all saying the same thing – ‘neighbors are not talking to each other, there is tension between my senior staff, students are shouting at one another.’”


Ourian says the high demand for some kind of guidance in how to respond to the war accelerated the development of the Listening from the Heart program.


“We didn’t have the resources to just send people all over the country,” she said. “It became very apparent, very quickly that we needed to create a standalone program that people could access whenever they wanted to. And that’s what we did. Listening from the Heart is all based on the model of the Parents Circle pedagogy - the power of storytelling to create an emotional transformation.”

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Continuing the Story

Well before October 7, 2023, Robi Damelin envisioned scaling the work of the Parents Circle with an academic partner who shared the organization’s mission. When the time was right, she immediately turned to Georgetown University. Her long friendship with then-president John DeGioia had pointed her in that direction since they first met at a Parents Circle forum back in 2008. As the highly-regarded leader of the Jesuit school, DeGioia had long embraced the non-profit’s mission of peace through dialogue. 

By the beginning of the new year, the task of turning compelling narratives into empathy-building and listening skills was in the hands of two of the university’s renowned teaching, learning, and innovation centers– the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship and The Red House, Georgetown’s transformative education unit.


“This work really relates to Georgetown’s values,” said Kimberly Huisman, a curriculum developer at the Center who led the project with her colleague Susannah McGowan from The Red House. “Our ecumenical approach is welcoming to all faiths and our global perspective encourages students to see themselves as part of one world,” said Huisman.


McGowan says she hopes the program will complement a number of efforts the university is pursuing to promote dialogue and civil discourse at one of the most polarizing times in American history. She believes Listening from the Heart will build skills students need to understand conflict resolution in any situation.


“The question we are always asking ourselves is how do you design programs that help students grapple with very real challenges,” she said. “We need to provide spaces for what we call ‘productive tension’ so students will be equipped to face difficult topics once they graduate.”

Huisman and McGowan spent six months with the Parents Circle Families Forum creating videos and developing the curriculum. Listening from the Heart has four modules revolving around three different phases: preparing for, presenting, and processing the personal narratives. The course can be taught consecutively or spread out over time. The first module helps facilitators learn the background of the program. What are the goals of Listening from the Heart? What is the program not about? In preparing for the presentations, groups work on understanding the barriers to listening, i.e., “How do I engage with something I disagree with?” Presenting the work is where the series of personal narratives are featured; and the processing section involves reflection and learning from what has been presented.


“How do we listen to somebody when we’re triggered? How do we let somebody else know that they are heard?

Ourian says the goal of the program is to generate empathy and to reject the binary notion of one side vs the other. But it also involves building skills that will serve students for life.


“We help people build their listening skills in difficult circumstances,” she said. “How do we listen to somebody when we’re triggered? How do we let somebody else know that they are heard? Listening isn’t just about taking in information, it’s about acknowledging the other side – how do you do that when the other person’s truth feels like it’s in contradiction to your truth?”


An important component to the program is providing facilitators and participants the historical context to discuss the nuances of the conflict, the absence of which has exacerbated tensions on campuses. The preparation materials for facilitators warn “When American communities adopt a binary, simplistic view of the conflict, they magnify its complexities and distort the narrative to fit American contexts, which
may not accurately reflect the realities experienced by Palestinians and Israelis. Outsiders must consider whether their actions and engagement help resolve or worsen the conflict.”


While the program aims to turn caustic debate into productive discourse, it also hopes to give people who are afraid to talk about the conflict the words to do so effectively. “Mostly, people are just silent,” said Damelin. “After all the shouting and the statements, people are just shutting down. And that’s where this program steps in.”


The Listening from the Heart curriculum is now available on the American Friends of the Parents Circle Parents website for any community, with reduced fees for non-profits and no charge for public high school teachers. It has been endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers but the initial roll-out of the program in the U.S. is focused heavily on colleges. This fall, Damelin, Ourian and Alsheikh have been on a campus tour throughout the Northeast, promoting the program at a number of schools including Brandeis, Barnard, Columbia and New York University. They will soon head to the Midwest and west coast.


In November, the Parents Circle Families Forum and Georgetown University hosted a special program at Georgetown, the same week the team was asked to speak at the Washington Post’s Global Women’s Summit in D.C. There, before an audience of faculty, students and community leaders, they once again told their stories; sometimes painful, often joyful, always hopeful.


“Sometimes at a meeting, there will be Palestinians who don’t speak Hebrew and some Israeli’s that don’t speak Arabic,” Alsheikh told the audience. “But when they look at each other, they understand what each one is feeling and they start to cry and hug each other, without saying a word.”