A PALESTINIAN AND AN ISRAELI FATHER: “We must all stop being victims; victimhood causes the violence!”

Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan (peace activists with Parent’s Circle) are the two protagonists from Colum McCann’s Booker-Prize-longlisted book Apeirogon. Both lost their daughters to the conflict, ten years apart. Yet in spite of – or because of - this horror they became dedicated friends, or “brothers”, committed to opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestine and working with “the enemy” via Parent’s Circle, a peace group set up for parents from “both sides” who’ve lost a child.

I spoke to Bassam and Rami on day #169 in the conflict and they’d just come from seeing the Pope. We cover how Bassam decided to study the Holocaust while imprisoned in an Israeli jail as a teenager for seven years, why Israelis are trapped by their victimhood and how we’ve all been locked into seeing this conflict as a football game of two sides.

This interview is a chapter in an incredible story that involves a big-time Hollywood actor, who reached out to me while I was camping in remote Western Australia, a secondhand book find, a six-way email chain and an incredible love that reaches across history, walls and global fragmentation.

NOTE: I will cover the very intersecting story of how we (the dads, Colum, the actor and I met) in the next episode.

SHOW NOTES
• Read Apeirogon by Colom Mcann (amzn.to/4aIgTXY)
• Learn about Parent’s Circle (theparentscircle.org/en/about_eng-2) and donate here (theparentscircle.org/en/contribution_eng).
• If you want a bit of extra background to this whole story, I write about it here on Substack (sarahwilson.substack.com/p/gaza-an-observably-…).
• I mention Naomi Klein’s work on the role of victimhood. A good starting point is this podcast interview with On the Nose. (podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/naomi-klein-on-i…)
• Naomi has also released two chapters from her latest book Doppelgänger (naomiklein.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Isra…) for free online that cover her thesis super well.

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