Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Approximately 200 gathered at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center to hear Layla Alsheikh, a Palestinian, speak of her son, and Mor Ynon, an Israeli, speak of her parents. Layla and Mor are spokespersons for The Parents Circle, one of a handful of organizations in Israel that are working to build what they call a "shared society." What binds together the sharers in The Parents Circle is bereavement.
All of the quotes in the two stories below are based on notes.
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Mor Ynon is based in Tel Aviv. She grew up on a kibbutz, and worked in global high-tech for 25 years, developing strategies and performance metrics. On October 7, 2023, her parents, Belha and Yaakov, were killed by Hamas. Today she serves as the Israeli co-Chair of the Parents Circle Board.
"My parents moved to a kibbutz on the border with Gaza. The night before October, they were celebrating Succot with the family until after midnight, and then they drove home. That was the last we saw them."
"On October 7, I woke up at 7am, turned on the TV, and learned that Hamas was in the streets. My brothers and I kept phoning our parents, but there was no answer. We finally got hold of a neighbor who was hiding under the staircase. She was the one who told me that my parents were likely dead."
"In my many years at a tech company I fell into the prevalent view that the occupation can be 'managed'. October 7 showed that we cannot manage this conflict - that we have to take this head on and end the occupation. I left my job after 25 years at the company and joined The Parents Circle."
"In my new role I talked to a group of women who were Israeli soldiers. After the talk, one asked whether the purpose of my talk was to persuade them to leave the Israeli army. I said that I couldn't tell them to do this or that, but they always had a choice. When they look at the person they are fighting, they could see them as a human beings – it is not black and white.
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Layla is from a village between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. There's a twist at the end of her story.
Layla was married in 1999 and had two children in three years. "On April 11, 2002, my 6 month-old son woke up very sick because Israeli soldiers had used tear gas in our village. The doctors in our village could not treat him, so we tried taking him to Bethlehem. But they said it was a military zone, so we tried Hebron [35 km from Bethlehem]. But Israeli soldiers kept us waiting for more than 4 hours. By the time we finally reached a hospital it was too late to save his life. Our son died for the crime of being a Palestinian. I hated all Israelis for killing him."
"For years I never talked about that day, not with my husband, not with my other children. I thought I'd learned to live with bereavement, and then a friend called to tell me about The Parents Circle. I said 'Are you crazy, you know what the Israelis did to us.' He said 'Why did you not tell your children about what happened?' I said 'Because I don't want to lose another one, they might think to take revenge.' And he said 'Maybe this will be a good chance for you to not just save your own children, but other families too.'
"After many such calls, I agreed to go to a conference. For the first time I met Israeli families who had lost family members. As Palestinian we just meet soldiers or settlers, and Israelis just meet workers they often do not even talk to. But now there we were, in the same situation."
"The first activity was to speak about something we endured during the conflict. For the first time I talked about my son. When I was done I started to cry. Then an Israeli woman came up to me and said 'Yes, I am a mother too, I can understand your pain. I can understand even the words you couldn't say. Yes, I hurt that the people who hurt you were my own people.' Then she hugged me. Her simple words changed my life."
"We met 8 times after the conference. We went to a holocaust museum. We went to the site of a Palestinian village that disappeared in 1948. Not to compare suffering, not to decide who was right and who was wrong. It was to learn about each other, to understand the situation from a different point of view. We have walls of not knowing, of hatred and anger, that need to come down.'-
"I joined Parents Circle and gave lectures in Israel and Palestine, spreading the message of peace and reconciliation. It was easy to say lovely words, to think I was doing my best, that everything would turn out OK. But at a meeting in Jerusalem, after we told our stories, a man stood up. I'd known him for three years but this was the first time I heard his story. He was a high officer in the IDF stationed in my area, and one day he prevented a Palestinian car carrying a sick child from going to the hospital."
"I couldn't cry, I couldn't even breathe. For him to be one of them was shock. We went outside the room to talk. He said that his own son became sick, and then when he tried to rush him to a hospital, the guard stopped him to ask questions And that was when he realized what he had done to that Palestinian family. He quit the army and was jailed for it. When he got out he joined with ex-Palestinian fighters to create Combatants for Peace, and set to work to end the occupation and to build peace."
"I told him it was hard for me to listen to his story, but that I wanted to thank him. Because if I knew that part of him existed, but he kept it hidden, I could never forgive him. But I could forgive him now because he spoke the truth even though it was difficult. For me, that is the real meaning of reconciliation — knowing that you mean what you say, that you acknowledge what you did."
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The evening was not all about pain. Layla and Mor were introduced by a Palestinian-American (Sam) and an Israeli ex-pat (Tal), both now San Francisco restauranteurs. They co-host weekly gathering where participants use food as a way to bridge their differences. They provided a lavish dessert spread after the meeting, which attendees devoured avidly. Sam's recipe for Mid-East peace is "Make hummus, not walls."
Groups in Israel Working for a shared society.
