Ittay Flescher, like most peace activists who devote their lives to cultivating Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, has gotten used to being called dangerously deluded and naive.

“I hear it at least five or six days a week. Recently, there have been thousands of online comments saying that I am naive,” he told host Allison Kaplan Sommer on the Haaretz Podcast, in a conversation about his newly published book “The Holy and the Broken: a cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared.”

After teaching about Israel and the Middle East in his native Australia, Flescher immigrated to Israel from Australia six years ago. Since then, he has brought together Israeli and Palestinian teens aged 12 to 16 through Kids4Peace, a program where they talk about religion, identity, history, learn each other’s languages, play games and attend summer camp. The goal of the exercise is for participants to “become less afraid of one another and build friendships and build trust.”

Since October 7, that work has become significantly much more challenging. In his book, he writes of these challenges – including a personal crisis of faith sparked by seeing Palestinian teens he worked with expressing support for the actions of Hamas on October 7 on social media.

“I think anyone that works in peacebuilding and says nothing changed in the last year is not telling the truth,” he said. But at the same time, he stressed, “There are also hundreds of other stories of people who, as a result of these kinds of experiences and dialogue, are speaking out against October 7 if they're Palestinians. And Israelis who are speaking out against the destruction and bombing of Gaza.”

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