Long before B8 of Hope had a name, Mehra’s life had already placed her at the meeting point of identities, memories, and communities that are often kept apart.
Her connection to Israel began in Iran, before the Islamic Revolution, in a world that now feels almost impossible to picture: a world in which an Iranian general could be invited to Israel by Moshe Dayan—Israel’s legendary eye-patched military commander and former defense minister—and could bring his young daughter with him.
Mehra’s father was a senior general in the Shah’s army. When he traveled to Israel as an honored guest, Mehra went with him. The visit belonged to the formal world of adults: military leaders, official meetings, regional ties, and the presence of one of Israel’s most famous figures.
But for Mehra, still a little girl, the memory took another shape.
While her father was received by Moshe Dayan, Mehra spent the visit with a young Israeli woman of Iranian Jewish heritage who served as a guide and hostess of the group. She spoke Farsi and paid particular attention to Mehra, entertained her, and made the unfamiliar feel less foreign.
Once back in Iran, Mehra wrote her a thank-you letter in Farsi.
In November 1978, as unrest was spreading through Iran, Mehra’s parents sent her to France with a French expatriate family who had been asked to leave the country for a time. Their daughter was Mehra’s classmate at the French school she attended in Iran, and Mehra had already spent ten days with the family during the summer. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. She expected to remain in France only until the new year, when the situation at home had settled.
But the weeks passed, and the distance between Mehra and her family began to widen. At first, communication became difficult. Then it became scarce. Eventually, it stopped altogether.
In February 1979, the revolution overtook Iran. Mehra was still in France, separated from her parents and unable to reach them. She learned of her father’s execution not through her family, but on the news.
The country she had left only months earlier was suddenly beyond her reach. What had begun as a temporary stay became a permanent rupture: from Iran, from her family, and from the life she had known.
Mehra was later placed in a Catholic boarding school in Switzerland, where she remained until she was eighteen.
She was a secular Shia Muslim girl from Iran, now being raised among Catholic sisters in Switzerland, alongside girls from different countries and histories, many of whom also carried their own forms of displacement.
Long before she used the language of bridge-building, Mehra was living inside it: between religions, cultures, and losses; between the home she had lost and the one she had to build.
Years later, her life crossed another threshold. She married a Canadian-Swiss Jew from Geneva. Her family life became another place where identities, memories, and inheritances met at close range—not as an idea, but as part of daily life.
For decades, the Israel visit remained one of Mehra’s last memories of traveling with her father—a memory from another world, before revolution, exile, and loss divided her childhood in two.
Then, unexpectedly, it returned.
While searching for something online, Mehra accidentally came across an article that brought the memory back. In the article, a retired Israeli general reflected on the years when Iran and Israel had close ties and recalled an Iranian general who had once visited Israel as an honored guest.
Then he named him.
She contacted the general and told him who she was: the daughter of the man he remembered. Deeply moved, he invited her to Israel. In 2014, Mehra returned with her husband and their two children—no longer the child who had traveled beside her father, but a woman carrying the memory of that trip, the violence that followed, and the life she had built since.
There, she met the retired general.
And she met the Iranian Jewish woman who had once been assigned to look after her.
All those years later, the woman still had Mehra’s letter.
A thank-you note from a little Iranian girl, written in Farsi, had crossed the decades with her. It had survived the revolution that severed Iran and Israel. It had survived exile, silence, and time.
The journey could have ended there, as a private return to a personal memory. But it opened another door.
During that visit, a childhood friend of Mehra’s husband—a Jew from Geneva who had made aliyah years earlier—invited Mehra and her family to spend a day in the West Bank. They went to the Karama Center.
At the time, the Karama Center was not much more than a makeshift outdoor seating area: an assortment of flimsy plastic chairs and random cushions thrown together under an awning. But there, in that simple space, Mehra encountered something she had not expected.
Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders were sitting together, speaking across fear, grief, anger, and inherited narratives.
It was not a polished version of peace. It was not sentimental. The people gathered there were living inside the conflict and its consequences: occupation, violence, trauma, unequal rights, insecurity, grief, and fear. They were not pretending those realities away.
And still, they were choosing to meet.
They were choosing to listen. To speak honestly. To organize. To resist dehumanization. To build relationships in a place where separation had become the ordinary logic of life.
For Mehra, what mattered was not an abstract idea. It was the people.
Palestinians and Israelis who had every reason to turn away from one another were doing something harder. They were staying present. They were working through dialogue, nonviolent action, trauma healing, community organizing, co-resistance, co-creation, and practical solidarity.
Mehra began returning to the region. She listened. She built relationships. She met civil society leaders whose work was courageous, practical, and almost invisible from abroad.
She wanted people in Switzerland to meet them too.
In December 2015, Mehra invited Palestinian nonviolence activist Ali Abu Awwad and Israeli human rights lawyer Jean-Marc Liling to Geneva. She imagined gathering perhaps thirty people in her living room. Instead, word spread rapidly, the event took on a life of its own, and the two speakers found themselves addressing an audience of 700 people.
The gathering brought together Swiss, Jewish, Arab, student, diplomatic, and broader public audiences. The conversation was honest about pain, injustice, fear, and loss, while creating space for something too often missing from international discourse: the voices of Palestinians and Israelis working toward dignity, equality, security, self-determination, mutual recognition, and a shared future.
In 2016, Mehra co-founded the organization with seven other Swiss nationals from diverse backgrounds, including Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Iranian, Israeli, Palestinian, Indian, Swiss, and Canadian roots.
The name carried the spirit of what they were trying to build. “Beit” means “home” in both Arabic and Hebrew. The number eight honors the eight co-founders.
For Mehra, the word home was never abstract. She had lost one. She had rebuilt one. She had lived among different faiths and cultures, not as a slogan but as a life. Through B8 of Hope, she helped create another kind of home: a place of welcome, connection, and practical support for Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders whose work is too often unseen.
Since then, B8 of Hope has grown from a volunteer initiative into a Swiss nonprofit supporting Palestinian and Israeli civil society initiatives. Mehra now serves as its Executive Director and co-founder.
Her leadership remains rooted in relationships: direct connection with grantees, trust built over time, and the belief that support from Switzerland must be humble, useful, and close to the people doing the work.
B8 of Hope is not a distant Swiss checkbook. It is a supporter, amplifier, connector, funder, convener, and bridge.
For Mehra, bridge-building is not about smoothing over pain or pretending differences do not matter. Her own life has taught her that identities matter. Loss matters. Memory matters. So do the choices people make with them.