[In Good Faith] How a Palestinian and a Jewish Canadian are trying to depolarize the country

This episode originally aired on The CJN's peace-building podcast, In Good Faith. To subscribe and hear more, visit thecjn.ca/faith.

Mainstream Jews, who support Israel and consider themselves Zionists, feel like they are under attack. When they see people wearing keffiyehs and storefronts stamped with Palestinian flags, they hear an implicit attack: "You are not welcome here."

But for Palestinians, watermelons and keffiyehs aren't anti-Jewish icons at all: they're symbols of national pride. 

How can everyday Canadian Jews and Muslims even start a conversation when words and symbols have such different meanings to different people? Telling people they're overreacting isn't an effective tool, nor is public shame, arguing over historical facts or posting online memes.

What might work: navigating difficult conversations. On today's episode of In Good Faith, The CJN's interfaith podcast miniseries, we speak with two people who are working toward exactly that.

Niki Landau and Bashar Alshawwa both came to conflict resolution through trauma. Landau lost a close friend, Marnie Kimmelman, to a terrorist pipe bomb on a Tel Aviv beach at age 17; Alshawwa was shot by an Israeli army sniper during a protest in 2014. Now they're touring Canada, bringing Jews and Muslims together for lengthy closed-door dialogue sessions, with a singular goal: create a toolkit to guide Canadians through conversations they desperately don't want to have.

Credits

• Hosts:  Yafa Sakkejha and Avi Finegold

• Producers:  Michael Fraiman and Zachary Judah Kauffman

• Editor:  Zachary Judah Kauffman

This podcast is sponsored by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, with support from the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation.