During our November Army of Healers workshop at Nes Ammim, one woman arrived a full day late. She is a Christian Arab from a small town in northern Israel. The night before the workshop, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed by Arab criminals while riding his scooter on a street near her home. He was a close friend of her son. She stayed behind to be with her child in his shock and grief.
In recent years, Arab-on-Arab violence in the streets of Arab towns and villages inside Israel has become tragically common. There is a deep sense that no real solution exists. The police response is widely experienced as insufficient, and many people are afraid to speak out, file complaints, or share what they know – fearing they, too, could become targets.
Tragic violence
A few days later, during a three-day workshop at the Moa Peace Center in the Arava, I met M., a remarkable Palestinian Arab man, a citizen of Israel, and an educator.
He told me he knew the parents of the murdered boy and had heard the boy’s father, a dentist, say: “My son was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s why he was murdered.”
“I don’t agree,” M. said quietly.
“I think the boy was in exactly the right place, a street near his home, at exactly the right time, seven in the evening, a perfectly normal time to ride a scooter and get some air after studying all day. The only thing that was wrong was the reality we are living in: the overwhelming number of weapons, and the unchecked violence within Arab society. We feel helpless. And we are afraid.”
Healing together
This is where the Army of Healers lives and works.
Not in abstract conversations about peace, but in the raw, overlapping griefs carried by people who are rarely invited into the same room. We create spaces where these stories can be spoken without being used as weapons, where pain is neither denied nor ranked, and where complexity is allowed to breathe.
When Jewish and Arab facilitators sit together, listen together, and learn tools to work with trauma, personal and collective, something subtle but essential happens. Fear softens. Certainty loosens. The “enemy” becomes a human being carrying unbearable weight.
The Army of Healers is not a solution to violence. It is a response to it.
A response that says: If we do not tend to the grief, the fear, and the helplessness inside our communities, the violence will keep moving – from street to street, from generation to generation.
This is the work: to stay, to listen, and to heal, together.
The writer is the director of the Together Beyond Words organization. She is one of the winners of the 2025 Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East for the Army of Healers project.