Dear Friends,
As the Israeli Co-Director of Combatants for Peace, one of the questions I am asked most often is what it takes to become an ex-combatant. After eight years at Combatants for Peace, I have learned that there is no single answer. Every person who joins our movement has their own story, but they all arrive carrying the same moral dilemma.
For our Israeli members, that journey often begins with questioning ideas they have grown up with all their lives. Military service is not widely seen as a choice, but as an expected part of becoming an adult, and decades of violence, loss and fear within their own society has reinforced the belief that military force is necessary to keep people safe.
Yet military service can also expose people to another reality. Many of our members have witnessed the devastating daily impact of occupation on Palestinian communities. Today, they are also grappling with the unbearable human cost of the war on Gaza. Holding these realities together raises difficult questions that have no easy answers. How do you honor your own grief while recognizing another people's right to live in freedom, dignity and security? How do you seek safety without accepting the suffering of others as inevitable?
Asking those questions can change everything. Over the years, I have watched people lose friendships, face rejection from their own communities, and be branded traitors simply for imagining another way forward. Choosing this path can be lonely, but it is also an act of hope and the belief that our societies can change from within.
This is what makes Combatants for Peace unique.
Our members do not become ex-combatants once the fighting has stopped. They are not turning their backs on Israeli society - they are working to change it from within. They believe that real security will never come through occupation, domination or endless war, but through recognizing that Palestinians and Israelis are equally entitled to freedom, dignity and safety. Working alongside Palestinians is not a rejection of their own community; it is an expression of hope for what that community can become.
This summer, your support helps more people take that difficult step toward the other. It gives Israelis and Palestinians the opportunity to question what they have been taught since they were children, meet the people they have been taught to fear, and choose a different path - not after the conflict has ended, but while it is still unfolding.
