Get Peaced Off – Finding The Path Forward
Bringing Together Israelis and Palestinians born out of frustration, heartbreak, and the desire to forge a peaceful way forward.
Dear Won’t Be Silent Friends & Family,
I’m proud to announce a new initiative I’m involved with called PEACED OFF! — a film and conversation series between Israelis and Palestinians born out of frustration, heartbreak, and the desire to forge a peaceful way forward.
The mission is simple yet vital: to promote honest dialogue, move beyond polarization, and build common ground—one story at a time. The hope is that one day, we’ll all get ‘peaced off’ enough to actually get peace in the region. Ohmmmmmmm!!!
I’ll be honest, working to create this digital table to bring people together to break bread — or in this case create unexpected connection — feels very satisfying.
Episode 1 features my brilliant co-host Orly Ravid with our special guests who produced and directed a new film “The Path Forward”.
Mo Husseini: Palestinian American peace activist and co-producer of The Path Forward
Julie Ruth Cohen: Emmy- and Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker and director of the film.
When you hear people talking from the heart it really resonates.
MO HUSSEINI: “There's a lot more common ground than we are led to believe by the culture writ large. I think — from a news media perspective, it is deeply boring to bring on rational people who want to look at the issues and have a rational discussion. It is a lot more interesting to bring, you know, some lunatic right wing Jewish supremacists and some lunatic right wing, or a fundamentalist Muslim and put them on television and have them yell at each other. And what happens when you see that as a, “normal” in air quotes, person is you throw your hands up and you go like, these people are crazy.”
JULIE RUTH COHEN: “We're out there on kind of, desperate, I would say personal search for voices of, sanity, I think, on the Palestine - Israel issue. And what interestingly, we both found is that when you look for them, you will find them, like, they're there. They might not be the main voices that one is hearing, in the mainstream media or God forbid, social media, or even like truthfully, like in, I would say, my own personal circles, there's a lot of flailing, unhelpful noise and, the way that we chose from among the quite ample supply of voices where we kind of made a decision pretty early on that we wanted to do this in pairs, that the most useful conversations about this seemed to be dialogues between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.”
MO HUSSEINI: “When people ask me, like, what my dream is, you know, I always say, like, what I wish for Israelis and Palestinians is a boring peace. You know, the kind of peace where your worries are, prosaic. “Did I pick up, you know, did I pick up the dry cleaning?” You know, when do I have to be at the ball game? Like those kinds of mundane, normal concerns. I want those to be the concerns that Israelis and Palestine have.”
PEACED OFF! is presented by The Film Collaborative created to explore important stories through our podcast series, independent films, and the dialogue centered around empathy, truth, and shared humanity. This podcast produced by yours truly!
Please watch and let me know if you have any questions. We invite the dialogue.
Peace…literally and figuratively,
ABE