Welcome to Episode 1 of Season 2 of our Campaign, Give Peace A Chance!

It's wonderful to kickstart our campaign once again, with Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, Palestinian Scholar, Peace Activist, and Founder and Executive Director of Wasatia in East Jerusalem, Palestine.

If you missed Season 1, be sure to catch up and watch our earlier discussions with Professor Dajani on Episodes 1, 2, 3 & 4.

In this episode, we discuss the Abraham Accords, the Palestinian Elections as well as some of the challenges the peace camps are facing in both Israel and Palestine.

"In the Wasatia vision we are talking about a future where everybody lives together, it means temperance, moderation, simplicity, and creativity and tolerance, and being in the middle, centrist, and as a result, if you look at our world today, you will tend to find that those who are the extremist they are a minority and yet they make a big noise. The majority are a silent majority but there comes a time, my theory is that there comes a time when things blow up, so basically we want to avoid that, we would like to build an environment where we will bring the best out of people, rather than the worst out of people, and as a result, we don’t want to see explosions, volcanoes. I have a theory about this, it is tap water and a glass. If you have a glass and a tap, and it drops one drop at a time, you don’t see it being filled up, and then one moment it overpours, this is what we don’t want to happen here, we don’t want people, whether Israeli’s and whether Palestinians, to actually be filled with hate and anger, and that it will explode because we don’t want violence and anger and massacres, and war and conflict.

This is something that we are working to avoid, and that is why we would like to reform the society from within and try to promote within that society a moderate culture, and we hope that through dialogue, between both, the Muslim Community, the Christian Community, and the Jewish Community, that this dialogue will bring about the best in the people, and make them more and more able to reach peace. Peace has so far been very elusive because we don’t know much about each and at the same time, we hate each other. We imagine that the other is the enemy while the other might be a friend and we never tested that, that’s why we feel it's very important that we build people to people programs, that we talk to each other, that we have dialogue among each other, and from this dialogue, we can build trust.

Trust is very important for future relations between the two people. And if you look at the situation we tend to find that people behave as religious teachers, not as what they think religion is, but what really religious is, because I think that here, we have spillover between politics and religion. And so we think that people exploit politics in order to reach their goals, their personal goals, At the same time, recently in the last few decades, we tend to find that people had ideological wars especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now we find that they are becoming more religious wars. And what we are hoping is to make religion work, for the benefit of the people, or rather they use religion or what they think is religion in order to incite among the people. And I think that this is partly the problem. I cannot make a political peace without having a religious peace. And I cannot invite someone to my house if my sons think that God is against them or they don’t believe in God, or that they are infidels or that they are non-believers, I have to clear this, clarify this in the minds of my child, that the other is not the enemy but rather he is a friend." Prof. Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, Founder Wasatia.

Thank you for watching, please share this and invite others for an alternative approach to the conflict as we focus on peace initiatives and inspiring change.

Give Peace A Chance Episode 15