The Work Carries On

One of the things we have learned over the years is that organizations can often achieve more when they stop working in parallel and start working together. That is why B8 of Hope created our Synergy Grants in 2022: funding specifically designed for organizations combining different areas of expertise around a shared goal. 

One of the Synergy projects we are supporting this year brings together our longtime grantee Women Wage Peace with Itach-Maaki: Women Lawyers for Social Justice. Women Wage Peace was born in the aftermath of the 2014 Gaza war and has since grown into Israel’s largest grassroots women’s peace movement. Itach-Maaki has spent more than two decades advancing women’s rights and representation, with particular expertise in law, policy and the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. 

That resolution, adopted unanimously by the Security Council in 2000, marked an important shift in how women were understood in relation to war and conflict: not only as people profoundly affected by violence, but as people who must have a meaningful role in preventing conflict, negotiating peace and making decisions about security. Among other things, Resolution 1325 calls for women to be represented at all levels of decision-making in the prevention, management and resolution of conflict. 

Israel was, in fact, the first country to incorporate parts of Resolution 1325 into national legislation, in 2005. Itach-Maaki was among the organizations pushing that process forward and has spent much of the past two decades working to turn the principle into actual practice: not simply more women in public life, but women from diverse communities having meaningful influence over the decisions that shape their lives. 

Together with Women Wage Peace, they are now working to institutionalize the Women’s Cabinet, a coalition of women’s organizations created during the Gaza war in response to a reality that remains remarkably persistent: women are still too often absent from the rooms in which questions of war, security, diplomacy, and peace are decided. 

With Israeli elections approaching this autumn, the timing is significant. This is not an electoral campaign, nor is it about telling anyone how to vote. Rather, the aim is to build an infrastructure that can remain in place regardless of which parties form the next government and ensure that women from different communities have the expertise, relationships, and access needed to influence political and security decision-making. 

In the first five months alone, the Women’s Cabinet held around ten meetings with Members of Knesset and their advisers from across the political spectrum, participated in four Knesset committee meetings, convened its first parliamentary roundtable and produced five policy papers—more than originally planned—addressing subjects ranging from women’s political representation to violence in the West Bank, regional diplomacy and education for peace and democracy. 

A new Knesset will soon be elected in Israel and a new government formed. The people sitting around those tables will make decisions with enormous consequences for everyone living in the region. Women should not have to fight their way into those conversations after the decisions have already been made. 

There is an opportunity now to make sure they are there from the beginning. That is exactly the kind of moment our Synergy Grants were created for, and one we are so proud to support. 

Over the past few years, emergency and humanitarian assistance has, by necessity, become a much larger part of B8 of Hope’s grantmaking. If a family has nowhere safe to sleep, if a child has no school, if a community has no functioning sanitation, it is difficult to ask people to invest in some distant vision of a better future. Human dignity is not separate from peacebuilding. It is one of its foundations.

In the past months, we have been relieved to find more ways of supporting work inside Gaza, both through organizations we already knew and through some remarkable new initiatives that have entered the B8 of Hope circle this year. 

Clean Shelter is one of them. Founded by Seba AbuDaqa, a Palestinian from Gaza, and Tom Kellner, an Israeli, Clean Shelter works through a locally led team inside Gaza to provide water, sanitation, and dignified shelter. Needs are identified on the ground and local engineers, welders, and contractors are involved in finding and implementing solutions. 

This last spring, B8 of Hope funding helped support emergency home repairs for 33 households—approximately 175 people, including 54 children—in Gaza City and Khan Younis. Because standard building materials remain so difficult to obtain, damaged windows, doors, and walls were repaired largely with wood and tarpaulin. Plumbing was restored. Toilets were made usable. Families regained privacy and some protection from the elements. 

Our recent report from Zimam, a Palestinian youth movement with a team inside Gaza, showed the same locally rooted approach. Their field team first assessed where needs were greatest and coordinated directly with camp administrations before providing food, hygiene supplies, and children’s clothing to 2,700 people across three underserved areas in northern, central, and southern Gaza.  

This is important to us: Palestinians in Gaza retain agency in identifying what is needed and shaping the response. 

That principle is also at the heart of the Gaza Support Network, an initiative begun by Israeli women and built around direct, ongoing relationships with people inside Gaza. They describe their work as coming “from the ground, out of conversations and collaboration with people in Gaza.” Rather than deciding from afar what should be done, the network responds to needs identified through those relationships and helps mobilize the resources to meet them. 

One initiative that has grown through these relationships is the Children of the Future School in Nuseirat, created by local Palestinian teachers for children from displaced families. Around 550 children between the ages of five and twelve now attend. Much of the teaching team had been working almost entirely on a voluntary basis. B8 of Hope is contributing to efforts to make the school more sustainable and strengthen the basic services surrounding the children. 

Finally, together with our partner Rozana, we are contributing to HeArtS: Healing through Art and Sport, a six-month psychosocial program designed to reach approximately 4,000 children aged five to twelve in northern and central Gaza. Through drawing, storytelling, music, games, sport, and movement, children are being given structured spaces in which to play, express themselves, reconnect with other children, and begin processing some of what they have lived through. 

Taken together, these reports also challenge a narrow understanding of what work toward a better future can look like. These are, first and foremost, humanitarian responses to immense need. But what also matters is how the work is happening: Palestinians inside Gaza identifying needs and leading responses, alongside Israelis and Palestinian partners who are choosing to listen, help, mobilize resources, and take responsibility through meaningful action. 

There is nothing easy or sentimental about that kind of cooperation. It does not soften the reality in Gaza or pretend that working together somehow makes that reality less devastating. If anything, it asks people to confront the brokenness directly and decide what they can do about it. This is locally led and locally supported work of people choosing to uphold the dignity of other human beings and to take responsibility for one another, even across seemingly impossible divides. 

Our recent reports also reflected another deeply worrying development this year: the sharp rise in violence and insecurity across the West Bank. Palestinian farming and herding communities have been particularly affected, and several of our grantees have increasingly found themselves involved in protective presence and other forms of community protection alongside their regular work.

This will become especially important as the olive harvest approaches. For many Palestinian families, the annual harvest is a critical source of income, but reaching and working their groves—particularly those close to settlements and outposts—can also expose farmers to harassment, violence, theft of crops, damage to trees, and restrictions on access. 

This brings us to B8 of Hope’s newest grantee: Rabbis for Human Rights. 

Founded in 1988, RHR brings together more than 170 rabbis, rabbinical students, and other rabbinic leaders from across Jewish denominations, working on human rights issues in Israel and the West Bank. We first spent time with their leadership during our visit to the region in February and were deeply impressed by both the people we met and the very practical nature of their work. 

One of their longest-running activities is accompanying Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest. Every year, RHR coordinates with farming communities to identify where accompaniment is most needed and mobilizes Israeli and international volunteers to join families in their groves. The volunteers harvest alongside them, provide a visible protective presence, document incidents when they occur, and help address access restrictions with the relevant authorities. 

It is work that has become increasingly difficult. During last year’s harvest, attacks and movement restrictions repeatedly disrupted RHR’s activities, and volunteers themselves were injured while accompanying farmers. Yet more than 1,300 people still volunteered over the course of the season. 

RHR is already preparing for the 2026 harvest, which begins this autumn. Their team will assess needs with Palestinian communities in advance, recruit and train volunteers, organize and coordinate harvest days, prepare participants for the situations they may encounter in the field, and document and follow up on violations when they occur. B8 of Hope’s grant is helping make that mobilization possible. 

There is a very practical significance to this work. A larger volunteer presence can make it safer for farmers to reach their land and complete the harvest; documentation provides evidence when incidents occur; and Israeli volunteers can sometimes use forms of access and recourse that are much harder for the Palestinian farmers themselves to obtain. 

For RHR, the olive harvest is therefore about much more than picking olives. It is about helping Palestinian farmers continue to work their own land, and putting Israeli civil society physically alongside them while they do so. 

Youth work can sometimes be seen as the softer side of civil society. But few investments are more future-looking. The young people growing up in Jerusalem today will one day be the adults shaping its schools, institutions, politics, and communities. What they learn now about themselves, one another, and the realities they share matters enormously.

The Jerusalem Youth Chorus is a powerful example of what that investment can look like. On the surface, its work sounds fairly simple: bring together Palestinian and Jewish Israeli young people from East and West Jerusalem to sing in a choir. Except that in the context of Jerusalem, there is very little that is simple about it. 

Alongside rehearsals and performances, JYC’s singers spend years in facilitated dialogue, gradually taking on increasingly difficult questions about their identities, histories, inherited narratives, and perceptions of one another. This is not a nice little coexistence exercise. These young people are being asked to engage seriously with realities that many adults find difficult to face. 

In their first year, they begin by asking questions about safety: what makes each of them feel safe, and how differently that question can be answered depending on who you are and where you live. In their second year, they explore the realities that shape daily life in Jerusalem, including checkpoints and the very different meanings they hold for Palestinians and Israelis. By their third year, they are engaging with some of the deepest historical traumas carried by both peoples, including the Holocaust and the Nakba. 

This spring, JYC took its third-year singers and recent alumni on what they described as one of the most complex educational journeys they have ever facilitated: an overnight trip to the area around the Gaza border. 

Standing at the border and looking across towards Beit Hanoun in Gaza, they could see the destruction with their own eyes. There they were introduced to perspectives on the history and reality of Gaza that some of the singers had never encountered before. Some of the young people described themselves as almost unable to look away. They began asking the kinds of questions that become much harder when what you are seeing is no longer an image on a screen: Who lived in those destroyed buildings? What happened to them? Who might still be under the rubble? What were their names? What were their lives like?  

Later that day, they travelled to the Nova festival memorial at Re’im. There, the losses of October 7 were equally impossible to keep at a distance. There were photographs and faces. Some of the singers recognized names; some knew people who had been killed. One young person reflected afterwards that they had grown up with the sense that they were not supposed to grieve for people on “the other side.” But standing at the Nova memorial site after what they had already seen looking into Gaza, that boundary became impossible to maintain. “I couldn't help but cry,” they said. 

It is humbling to think just how much was being asked of these young people. They were not being asked to decide that all experiences are the same. They were not being asked to abandon their own identities or histories, or to arrive at one agreed version of what happened. They were being asked to listen to things that might deeply challenge what they already believed, and then to remain present to, and in relationship with, one another. That is incredibly hard work. 

And yet these extraordinarily brave young people are also, in the end, just young people. In between these extremely difficult encounters, the singers played games, laughed together, and got up in the morning to make breakfast for one another, like any other group of friends would do.  

Their friendships do not erase the unimaginably hard realities of the place they call home, nor do they erase the profound inequalities that shape it. The work is to bring those realities into a shared space: to hear what they mean for someone whose life is very different from your own, to say what is difficult to say, and to keep listening when what you hear is difficult to bear. And then, somehow, to keep singing together for a different, and much better, future.