“We cannot bomb our way to peace,” says Angela Mattar, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin and a founding member of grassroots group Standing Together.oren ben hakoon/The Globe and Mail
In the West Bank village of Beit Jala, with no access to a bomb shelter, Angela Mattar sits alone in her five-storey apartment texting friends while the missiles fall; between strikes, the 25-year-old continues her studies in Jerusalem to become a doctor.
In Tel Aviv, Itamar Avneri, 40, has moved in with his sister to be closer to safe cover; in the quiet in between, he organizes volunteers to clean the city’s shelters so they are ready for next time.
Just this spring, Ms. Mattar, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin, and Mr. Avneri, who is Jewish, were in Toronto, speaking publicly about their shared efforts to end the long-standing conflict between their two cultures.
“We cannot bomb our way to peace,” Ms. Mattar told the Toronto audience.
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“If no one is going to give us hope from above, we are going to build it from below,” declared Mr. Avneri.
But this was before Iran and Israel went to war, and cracked the foundation of that hope – barely a month after the pair had returned to Israel from a speaking tour to Toronto, Montreal and Chicago.
Ms. Mattar and Mr. Avneri are elected national leaders for Standing Together, the largest grassroots group of Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel. The organization has called for a ceasefire, protested human rights abuses and advocated for social justice.
Mr. Avneri recalls a Canadian-Israeli peace activist and friend telling him, “You cannot fight for justice without fighting for justice for the people on the other side of the wall.”oren ben hakoon/The Globe and Mail
“If we don’t recognize that we are all here to stay,” Mr. Avneri said from Tel Aviv this week, “the suffering will continue.”
“I fear for every innocent life caught in this storm,” Ms. Mattar wrote on Instagram after a long night of bombing.
Now friends, they could have easily been on opposite sides, especially after a brutal Hamas attack in October, 2023, ignited a devastating war – and a humanitarian crisis – in Gaza.
Growing up in the northern village of I’billin, Angela Mattar had always been told by her family to keep her head down and her voice quiet – to speak out as Palestinian in Israel, her parents warned, was too dangerous.
Itamar Avneri was raised on a kibbutz outside of Nazareth, secure in his Jewish identity.
But, when they were still young, life offered lessons impossible to ignore.
When Ms. Mattar was six years old, during the 2006 Lebanon war, a Jewish family comforted her like one of their own while she hid with them in a bomb shelter; they communicated with hand signals because she didn’t then speak Hebrew. She never forgot their kindness, even as she started to wonder why she felt like a foreigner in her own country.
At 16, Mr. Avneri watched his mother chastise her father for treating her like a servant at a family dinner and recognized the limits of tradition. Years later, he met Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli peace activist. He told her how he hardly slept, listening to the missiles launched from Gaza. “You cannot fight for justice,” she told him, ”without fighting for justice for the people on the other side of the wall.”
Separately, and a decade apart, Ms. Mattar and Mr. Avneri made the same choice, to join Standing Together and work for peace.
Ms. Mattar, whose family is Christian, joined Standing Together two years ago, after the Hamas attack. Then an engineering student in Haifa, she watched the mistreatment of fellow Palestinians, and was hurt by suggestions from Jewish friends that she was a terrorist sympathizer.
“It slapped me right in the face again that I’m never a real citizen here,” she said on the stage in Toronto. “I could not just stand by the side any more.”
She organized gatherings under the trees between Palestinian and Jewish students at the Israel Institute of Technology because they were banned from meeting rooms. In one protest, they stood on campus, holding photographs of the Jewish hostages taken by Hamas, and then, to avoid arrest, took a single step off university property to display sketches representing the Palestinian children dying in the bombing of Gaza.
Speaking out, though dangerous, gave her strength, but not without personal cost. She realizes now that by telling her to stay silent and not cause trouble for the family, her parents made her feel powerless and vulnerable in her own country. Their criticism over her activism became too much to bear. When she moved to Jerusalem to start medical school, she cut off contact with her parents.
Ms. Mattar has been raising money and awareness for the residents of the Palestinian village of Masafer Yatta, whose conflict with Israel was featured in Oscar-winning film No Other Land.oren ben hakoon/The Globe and Mail
They were still estranged, in late 2024, when Ms. Mattar led a 30-day protest camp to prevent the Jewish advance on a Palestinian family’s ancestral land in the Christian village of Al-Makhrour. There, she saw firsthand the West Bank occupation she had only read about.
The activists slept on rocks, with limited supplies. At one point, Ms. Mattar was bitten by a dog released by a Jewish settler. She asked herself: “Is this worth it? I have no home. I have no family. I have no money.”
There was only one answer, she decided: Palestinians, like herself, were not only part of the struggle, they needed to lead it.
Raised in a politically conservative family with a fierce, outspoken mother, and his citizenship unquestioned, Mr. Avneri, who joined Standing Together in 2015 and is now the group’s head of training, had it easier. At that dinner he so clearly recalls, his grandfather insisted on delaying the meal and the blessing for Rosh Hashanah until Mr. Avneri’s uncle arrived, and then started the prayer while his mother and grandmother were in the kitchen, sorting the food.
“How dare you?” his mother yelled at her father, storming into the dining room, with tears in her eyes. She rounded up her family and they drove home in silence. His uncle, he says, was never late again. And today, his mother is considered the head of the family.
Despite her outspoken, modern example, he says, they have had many difficult conversations – in particular, over his mother’s belief that his fight for peace is futile. Even today, he knows his mom supports Standing Together only because of his work.
“It took a long time for us to figure it out,” he says. Now when they talk about peace, she tells him, “I’m very proud of you. I hope that time will prove me wrong, and that you are right.” But his mom, like many people, have it backwards, he believes: We can’t wait for hope to inspire our struggle, he says. “Where there is struggle, there is hope.”
So much of the work that Mr. Avneri and Ms. Mattar are doing involves these open yet difficult conversations. In 2022, Standing Together successfully campaigned for a bill to raise Israel’s minimum wage by gathering support from low-income workers, including Palestinians, Jewish ultra-Orthodox women, and Jewish people of Ethiopian descent. Although smaller than they wanted, Mr. Avneri describes the wage increase as an example of positive change happening when citizens with different cultural identities find common ground.
A single identity, after all, is an insufficient definition of personhood, he observes. He is an Israeli and a Jew, but also is a gay man in a conservative country, an activist and a human being. Once you understand that these identities don’t have to exist in competition with each other, Mr. Avneri said, “you understand that the land itself can hold many identities, many different people.”
And yet, Ms. Mattar views the cost of identity more clearly. She tells the story of a Jewish man she met in the park who “climbed trees and went under bushes” to help find her lost cat. With her cat safe, he asked her nationality; upon learning she was Arab, and Christian, he began spewing hateful comments about Muslim Palestinians. She listened, reminding herself, “This is the same person who had enough humanity to help me find my cat.”
When he was quiet, she told him that she was not just an Arab Christian, she was also a Palestinian. The man, she says, had never spoken with a Palestinian before. Before they parted amiably, she invited him to a protest. He declined, but shook her hand. “I planted a seed, I’m sure,” she said.
Recently, she realized that she could not advocate for peace between Palestinians and Israelis without attempting peace with her own family. She has reached out to them again, trying to listen as a daughter, the way she listens as an activist. “It’s even harder than working on Palestine and Israel,” she said, “but we’re getting there.”
Since this latest escalation began, with Israel bombing a nuclear facility near Tehran on June 13, and Iran quickly retaliating, Ms. Mattar has been on her own, taking cover from the missile attacks, either in her apartment or under the stairs in her building.
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There are no shelters where she lives in Beit Jala, in the West Bank, 15 minutes from her university – or in I’billin, where her parents live, and where, one village over, four women recently died in the explosions. Not long after, a viral video appeared on Ms. Mattar’s phone: an Israeli family chanting, “May your village burn.”
“I carry that sound with me,” she wrote on Instagram this week. “In my darkest moments – in my most furious, broken-hearted moments – a part of me wants the world to feel what it’s like, to live in constant fear, to hear bombs before you sleep.”
She’s been in touch with Mr. Avneri, off and on, by text. He’s been moving around, staying with friends, his sister, even spending one night in the Standing Together offices – anywhere closer to a shelter than his own apartment.
In separate interviews this week, they both expressed worry that the suffering of the people in Gaza is now being forgotten – even as, with bombs exploding around them, they continue pushing for peace.
Ms. Mattar’s work has moved online for now; she’s been raising money and awareness for the residents of the Palestinian village of Masafer Yatta, whose conflict with Israel was featured in Oscar-winning film No Other Land.
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In Tel Aviv, Mr. Avneri has been trying to find safe spaces for seniors who have nowhere to go and people with disabilities – basic protection, he points out, that the government has failed to provide. Along with other Palestinian and Jewish volunteers from Standing Together, he continues to clean the shelters – building hope, as he says, even in hopeless days.
“It’s hard to be human at times like this. To carry grief and rage, fear and guilt, hope and despair – all at once,” Ms. Mattar wrote in her Instagram post. “But still, I hope. Still, I pray. May this land, our home, one day witness peace.”
