For 20 years, this unlikely Israeli-Palestinian alliance has been defying the odds

Linda Dayan reports in Haaretz on 5 November 2026:

Chen Alon pulls his car into a remote rest stop near the West Bank city of Jericho. There, waiting for him in the parking lot, is a grinning Sulaiman Khatib. Twenty years ago, the two co-founded a novel Israeli-Palestinian NGO: Combatants for Peace.

Khatib had driven in from Ramallah, and Alon from Tel Aviv. Because Khatib doesn’t have a permit to enter Israel – documents that have been heavily restricted for Palestinian citizens since October 7 – the two of them, and I, have to meet in territory that they can both access. These spaces have shrunken to the areas around the Dead Sea, and East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Beit Jala, where the NGO has its headquarters.

This is one of many changes in the decades since the two founded the group, and one that has been deeply felt in the past three years. Alon says that his partner used to visit him and his family regularly in Tel Aviv, but now he can’t. “The mechanisms of separation have always functioned very well, but since October 7, they allow for even more dehumanization.”

We sit in the Bedouin-style tent of a dusty roadside gift shop; outside, the shopkeeper has dressed up camels for tourists to photograph themselves with. Alon and Khatib settle into the cushions, and pour each other strong black coffee and sweetened tea. They laugh and talk shop, catching up and preparing for the group’s 20th anniversary activities.

Combatants for Peace has been best known over the last few years for its joint Memorial Day ceremony, hosted along with Parents Circle – Families Forum, where Israelis and Palestinians come together to mourn loved ones lost to the conflict. Due to the restrictions on Palestinians’ entry into Israel, the event has been held in recent years in separate venues, livestreamed to each other. They hold a similar, and similarly novel, ceremony to commemorate Nakba Day.

The group also coordinates non-violent protests and participates in direct action, providing protective presence to Palestinians from settler attacks. In April, its Israeli and Palestinian activists were fired on by a settler in Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem.

In the tent, Alon calls Khatib by the nickname “Suli”; Khatib presents his friend with a bag of sweets he’d picked up this morning from the West Bank. They tell me that they weren’t always this comfortable – their first meeting was one of mistrust and suspicion.

It was under the auspices of the Israeli-Palestinian partnership group Ta’ayush, who were bringing together former Palestinian prisoners and fighters with Israelis who were refusing to serve in the army – it was the midst of the second intifada, and groups of combatants, including pilots and special forces soldiers, had signed on to letters not to serve in the Palestinian territories.

Khatib had joined a group of Palestinians calling for a non-violent intifada, in opposition to the suicide bombings of the time. He was working with Fatah after having been released from jail, where he spent ten years for stabbing two Israelis when he was 14. “At the time, in the Palestinian arena, there was always a debate about what we should do – you know, armed struggle, non-violence, surrender,” he recalls. Khatib had discovered nonviolent resistance in jail, when he participated in joint hunger strikes as a teenager. “That was the first time I started to think about other options than armed struggle,” he recalls.

He started to read and explore the Israeli narrative. “It’s not like I fell in love with Zionism,” he laughs. “I come from a typical Palestinian narrative” where the conflict is a zero-sum game of Palestinian good and Israeli evil. “I started to think there is no zero-sum game, there is no military solution.” He saw how the trauma of violence had affected the adult prisoners who spent their nights screaming in their nightmares. “It made me think of what violence can produce, even when we are sleeping,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to be part of adding more trauma to the world.”

Alon had answered the same call. He had been drafted on the first day of the first intifada, he recalls. He saw combat from Rafah to Jenin, participating in arrests. He had moved up the ranks and become a major in the Armored Corps. But during the Second Intifada, he joined the Courage to Refuse movement, which had published an open letter in 2002 signed by hundreds of IDF soldiers and officers refusing to participate in the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Alon spent a month in military prison in November 2002 for this noncompliance.

In Bethlehem, the two groups met. “There was tension and mistrust,” recalls Khatib. “You always think, ‘oh, they might be members of the Shin Bet’ or something. These people represent the Israeli identity of the occupation, of the checkpoint, of the interrogator, the one who beat you [in prison],” he says.

Alon agrees. “The first time that I met Suli, I thought that he looked like a terrorist to me,” he says. “I mean, I arrested dozens of people who look like and talk like him… I remember that feeling of being afraid, being suspicious,” he admits. He says that that concept is foreign to him now. “Today I feel the opposite.”

At that meeting, both of them were urged to speak in the front of the group of Israelis and Palestinians. “They said, ‘You tell your story because it’s a good occupation story,'” Chen says, and Khatib laughs: “That’s what they did with me.”

Eventually, those meetings gave way for what would become Combatants for Peace – starting with small underground meetings in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian prisoners and militants in 2004. The next year, they had their first public meeting, which hosted 25 Palestinians and 25 Israelis. And in 2006, they held their formal debut, an event that brought in hundreds of people. A couple months later was the first joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony, an annual event that continues to this day, despite objections from right-wing Israelis.

“Our message was that we had legitimacy, because we were in the army, were in jail, so we know what we’re talking about, and it’s not easy for other people to criticize it; to be honest, there’s a bit of street cred,” says Khatib. “And if we can change,” and embrace non-violence, “there’s no reason that other people can’t change.”

Alon acknowledges that the Hamas-led October 7 attacks were a test for the organization and its sense of solidarity. That day, “I felt all those feelings when I saw the piles of the bodies, and the massacres. Everything came back to me – the anger, the fury. I literally felt the feeling in my body of wanting to get back into a tank and killing them all,” he says as Khatib nods beside him.

And then he began to receive phone calls from Khatib, as well as from other Palestinian members of the organization. “They were empathetic, and they were saying ‘how are you? We see the horrors going on,’ and that started a new journey for me.”

He says that Khatib woke up every morning and go out to Combatants for Peace amid the ongoing violence against Palestinians. “Now that the piles of bodies are ours, are we as committed as Suli was to this journey for 17 years, to the re-humanization, reconciliation, dialogue process, and the joint struggle? Or do we say no, that when you kill our people, we’re not committed to this journey.”

If it weren’t for his Palestinian partners, “I would probably, like the vast majority of Israelis, have stayed in that feeling – maybe gone to Gaza to fight, maybe joined a political party of people who want revenge and to erase Gaza and so on. The only reason that I didn’t go through this path was because of my Palestinian partners and my commitment to this journey.”

Over the years, the organization has expanded its membership, as well its guidelines for who may join. Initially, “we were addressing the message to ex-combatants and ex-prisoners,” explains Alon. “I have to be honest, it took us some years – too many years, actually – but [one day] we realized that we’d changed the definition of combatants.”

He says that they shifted the definition from the focus on those who have physically enacted violence to those who assume responsibility over violence.

Alon gives the example of an Israeli woman who sends her children to the army, or whose reservist partner participates in the occupation. “What are the ways that you are willing to take responsibility for violence?” he asks. This perspective “changed the paradigm of who’s part of Combatants for Peace, and we’ve broadened the movement over the years from actual combatants to people who feel responsible for violence.”

Now, the majority of its membership on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides are women, Alon says, and many of its members have never seen combat.

They experienced a similar shift in the last decade in how they relate to the international audiences with whom they speak. Alon says that in the beginning, they saw them as spectators, as impartial mediators. “We always referred to them as neutral, passive spectators until we reached the understanding that that isn’t an ethical position – neither from their side and nor from ours,” he says. “We want them to connect to their responsibility, that there is no such thing in the world as spectators of a conflict or oppression.”

The international community, though, is increasingly a source of challenge as well – partitioning itself into radical camps on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in ways that it hadn’t before. “There always used to be a division in the world, but it’s much sharper now, in the last few years specifically,” says Khatib, adding that he can feel it when he speaks to international audiences.

He and Alon regularly travel for screenings of the 2025 documentary “There is Another Way,” which follows Combatants for Peace’s advocacy. “In each space we go, there’s now opposition,” he adds. “In the [Palestinian and Jewish] diasporas, and with activists globally – even those who aren’t even Palestinian or Jewish – it’s become harder.”

The organization has been blacklisted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for its “normalization” of relations with Israelis. “When Suli and I go to Europe, we face BDS activists – let’s say, Dutch people, or members of the Palestinian diaspora or radical leftist Jews – who are telling us, people living on the ground here in Israel-Palestine, how to liberate Palestine or how to be to liberate ourselves from the occupation and the apartheid system. They ask Suli why he doesn’t boycott me.”

Alon points out that they and the group are not opposed to the strategy of boycotts per se – he will not buy products from settlements, nor will he teach at Ariel University in the West Bank – “but what we’ve discovered in this journey is that BDS is a tactical tool, and tools should always be applied in a specific context.”

Khatib is a bit blunter: “As a Palestinian, it’s stupid to boycott Israeli activists. It’s just stupid on a practical level,” he says. It also contributes to the infighting that destroys activist movements. “There are different strategies for our struggle, and the last thing I personally want to do is to fight each other. This is the most stupid thing that activists do, which is one of the biggest issues in my eyes – we want to change the system, but we’re fighting internally.”

Alon notes that “The only ones who are profiting from this dispute or infighting between us are the people who want the occupation to continue, not the BDS people, and not us.”

They recall some breakthroughs: in Holland, a young Hungarian woman started crying at one of their talks, and told them that she had cut off her Israeli friends over the past three years. “She said, ‘now, being with you guys, something broke in my heart, and I want to contact them again.'”

He says that they’ve had similar experiences with the pro-Israel side: an Israeli audience member in Estonia approached them at a documentary screening saying that he was upset by what he saw and heard. He explained that within Palestinian society, the Israeli activists are a humanizing force. “The only [Israeli] people they meet now are soldiers and settler, in the media and in reality,” he says. “But when they see me and Chen and others coming to help with the olive harvest or doing direct action, and when the settlers shoot at our guys, they are firing on Israelis and Palestinians together.”

Khatib adds that “at the end of the day, we’re not doing it for the sake of one group.” It humanizes both of them to each other. “It’s a search for unity and bridges.”

As the international community has radicalized, Khatib and Alon say that they’ve found people on the ground in the region becoming more pragmatic. “They live the reality, so I actually feel like they’re more supportive of us here,” Khatib says. He provides the example of the organization’s Freedom Schools, a leadership program in nonviolent activism for Palestinian youth. “They needed about 25 kids for each cohort, and each one got like, 70 or 100 applications,” including refugee camps and locales known for militancy.

When asked if the movement has been growing or shrinking, Alon says that it’s hard to tell. “The honest answer will be ‘I don’t know,’ because it’s very dynamic, and we’re not a mass movement anyway. We understood from the beginning that this is kind of an avant-garde thing, that we’re doing something radical for both societies.”

He’s aware of the criticism – that they’re preaching to the choir, for one, and also that they cannot prove that their theories and methods are the right ones. “My honest answer [to those arguments] will be the fact that we’re out there in the world, in Israel and Palestine. We’re already serving as an alternative.” The ones who need them know where to find them, “and a lot of them have joined us since October 7 – a lot of Israelis and a lot of Palestinians.” He’s also surprised by the amount of young people who have been joining, or at least who are receptive to their message.

Khatib notes that his teenage nephews in Nablus have been liking his Instagram posts. The activist has a complicated relationship with his family, who he says are not completely on board with his work – but that small sign of approval from his nephews is reassuring for him. “For me, the impact is not just the people that joining us. A lot of people, a lot of silent people, have seen what violence brings.”

“I may just be trying to convince myself, or rationalize it” says Alon, “but I saw it along the years, when we had these lower peaks of despair and hopelessness, people have always approached us at the Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony or the Nakba ceremony, saying ‘it’s the only hour that I felt hope in the past year, or in the past 10 years.’ I think that’s the most honest answer to whether we have more or less people now.”

It can be hard to keep up hope, Khatib acknowledges. But they’re not doing the work for themselves. “We’re doing this for the generations to come. Now is olive harvest season; we say ‘they planted and we eat. We plant, they eat.’ We don’t know when this big change will happen, but it can start with ourselves.”

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