On March 3, 2002, Robi Damelin learned that her son David—a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces—had been killed by a Palestinian sniper. One of the first things she said to the soldiers who came to deliver the news was, “You can’t kill anybody in the name of my child.” On Monday, during a conversation at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), she explained those words: “There’s nothing worse than losing a child. It’s like somebody comes and slashes your heart.” Damelin’s belief that no mother should have to bear that pain led her to the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization for families who have lost a loved one in the conflict.
At HDS, Damelin joined Palestinian mother Layla Alsheikh for an event titled “Our Shared Humanity: Israeli and Palestinian Voices Against Violence.” Clad in black, the pair shared their stories of loss, grief, and reconciliation.
Cross-border friendship did not come easily for Alsheikh. On April 11, 2002, her six-month-old son Qusay woke up very ill. The prior night, Israeli soldiers had thrown tear gas in her village, she said. When she and her husband tried to bring Qusay to the hospital, they were repeatedly delayed by Israeli soldiers. By the time they arrived four hours later, it was too late to save him. “That day, I was full of hatred, anger, sadness,” she said. “But at the same time, I didn’t think to take revenge, because revenge for me will never bring my son back, and it will bring another innocent person to this cycle of violence.” Instead, she resolved to never associate with Israelis: “For me, all of them were responsible for his death.”
For 16 years, she did not speak about Qusay. She did not tell her children who were born after him about his death, fearing they would seek revenge. But a fellow bereaved mother persuaded her to attend a Parents Circle meeting in Bethlehem. Sitting with 30 mothers—half Israeli, half Palestinian—she said she felt “an aching in my chest” and wanted to leave that binational setting. But then she saw Israeli and Palestinian mothers hugging each other “like a family member, not even as a friend,” and was curious to see how those connections had been forged.
Hearing Israeli stories of loss was the first time Alsheikh believed grieving Israeli and Palestinian parents shared the same pain. “We share the same tears, even if we had different circumstances, but we’re still human, and there’s nothing worse than losing a child,” she said. “No one could understand that pain unless someone was in the same situation.”
Damelin quickly connected her loss with those across the border. “Some people die with their children—not physically, but just die,” she said. “For me, the most important thing to do was peace education.” When David was killed, he had been studying for his master’s in the philosophy of education. He was a member of the peace movement and led student protests. Damelin herself was a lifelong peace activist and, soon after her son’s death, quickly started rallying against Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza on his behalf. She also joined the Parents Circle to connect with families on the other side.
After both Damelin and Alsheikh embraced peaceful rhetoric, each faced a challenge that threatened to shake their mindset. Two years after David’s death, Israeli soldiers captured the sniper who killed him. Damelin fretted about how to respond. “I literally could not sleep because I thought, I couldn’t do this work in integrity if I wasn’t willing to walk the walk.” She wrote a letter to the family of her son’s killer, telling them both about David and about the Parents Circle. She understood that his family was suffering, too.
Alsheikh’s moment of self-reckoning came during a Parents Circle meeting. An Israeli said that he served as a high army officer in Alsheikh’s area and that he had prevented a Palestinian car from taking their sick children to the hospital. Alsheikh began to cry, and the man accompanied her outside where he continued his story one-on-one. He said that later, when his son was sick, he had been prevented from taking him to the hospital. Alsheikh said that the mirrored experience made the man reflect on the prior incident, leading him to quit the army, serve jail time, and found Combatants for Peace. She thanked him for sharing, saying, “If you hide that part of your story, I will never forgive you, but I will forgive you now because you have that courage and that honesty to speak in front of me.” She continued, “This is reconciliation. It’s easy to speak about peace and love…I realized I did the right thing.”
After sharing their stories, the mothers answered questions from event attendees. One first-year College student asked how to engage with people who do not want to associate with people holding different opinions, “who think that…dialogue like this is harming their cause in the long run.” Alsheikh recalled family members coming to her after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on southern Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Some called her a traitor. First, she empathized with them. “I was there one day, so I will not judge them,” she said. “I will not be angry about what they said because I understand how they could feel.” Then, she started probing their words. One critical relative’s father crossed into Israel daily for work. Did that make him a normalizer, too? “The problem is that in Palestine, in Israel, there’s not just that settlement wall that separates us,” she said. Anger, she continued, does not “give a chance for both sides to think and to even understand what’s going on on the other side.”
The pair implored the audience not to become partisans, but rather to productively work toward peace. “Please don’t [be] pro-Israel, and please don’t [be] pro-Palestine: [be] pro-peace,” said Alsheikh. “If you fight all the time, that will never help us in any way. But if you [are] pro-peace, that will help us much more than you think.” Damelin asked listeners to directly support peacebuilding in the region. “What if all [the students] decided to adopt one of the NGOs that are working for peace on the ground in Israel or in Palestine?” she asked. “It could be Combatants for Peace, Women Wage Peace, Breaking the Silence: all of these organizations that have hundreds of people like me doing this work on the ground daily. They need the support of the students, and then you would make a difference in my life and in Layla’s life.”
Near the end of the forum, Damelin addressed its strange circumstances. Since October 7, she has traveled to the United States five times to share her story. “It’s almost weird that I have to come to America to give people some hope,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be giving me hope?”
But the physical conflict in the Middle East has made its way to Harvard’s campus. Damelin acknowledged that the “importation of this conflict” has increased the tension between American Jews and Muslims. Now that students may encounter this foreign conflict on their way to class, Damelin asked them to act responsibly. “It’s so easy to be opinionated,” she said. “Recognize the consequence of the violence, because Layla and I lived the consequence.”
