This wall of not knowing one another is what creates hatred, which creates fear, which creates violence
Robi Damelin’s peace work begins with the deepest loss a mother can carry.
In March 2002, her son David was killed by a Palestinian sniper while serving in the Israeli army reserves at a checkpoint near Ofra. Ten people were killed in the attack. When Robi received the news, one of her first responses was not a call for revenge, but a refusal to let more killing be done in her son’s name: “You may not kill anybody in the name of my child.”
That sentence has shaped the moral center of her public life. As a bereaved Israeli mother and spokesperson for the Parents Circle – Families Forum, Robi speaks from grief without turning grief into hatred. She stands alongside bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families who insist that their pain must not be used to justify the next death.
Her story does not ask anyone to forget, excuse, or flatten the realities of the conflict. It asks something harder: to recognize the humanity of the other side while holding fast to one’s own loss. Through dialogue, public education, and international advocacy, Robi carries a mother’s grief into the world as a call for nonviolence, dignity, and a future in which no Palestinian or Israeli parent has to bury a child because of this conflict.