Once he was grown, Zeigen became an activist himself, soon moving to Haifa to study law, thinking that would be the best way to help forge peace. But after he married and became a father, while no progress was being made between Israelis and Palestinians, he began to give up. "Peace became irrelevant and I fell into a political coma," he told us.
He switched from law to social work and had two more children. "I tried to hold onto the fantasy that I could live a normal life." He did not wake from that political coma until Oct. 7th, when his wife told him what was happening. He called his mother at the kibbutz while it was under attack.
"We Decided to Say Goodbye"
"We talked through the morning about how the once celebrated Israeli Army was not coming, a dual experience of knowing something was happening but being unable to understand it, to grasp the scope." Then he heard shots and screaming through the telephone. "They are in the house," his mother told him.
"I asked her, what should we do? Keep talking or say goodbye? We decided to say goodbye." He paused, then told the audience, "I was lucky." He gestured to two other members of the Parents Circle sitting nearby, Layla Alshekh, a Palestinian, and Robi Damelin, an Israeli, both mothers who lost children to the conflict. "Most of us do not get to say goodbye."
Zeigen's own mother was killed in the safe room of her house that day, but he was unable to find out her fate for a long time because the house had been burned down. At one point, she was considered a hostage, then her bones were found and identified and he knew for sure.
"I sat down and said, 'What now? What should I do with this pain and helplessness? What should all of us do?' I realized my illusion of safety was gone. That we all need to shape an alternative reality where no one should pay this price. Otherwise, it will happen again and again."
"We Are Not Weak People Who Kill"
Aramin, who also wears his hair cut short and has huge brown eyes, spoke next, telling the rapt audience that he was only 13 when his sister died. She had just bought some candy and was standing outside her school when an Israeli border guard shot her with a rubber bullet and killed her.
"She was everything to me, my second mother, even though she was younger, because I was just a stupid, naughty boy," he said with a sad but wry smile. "I kept going into her room to find her before I remembered she was not there. All I could think about was taking revenge. But I had no gun, so I lied to my parents, stopped going to school, and went to the checkpoint instead to throw stones at Israeli soldiers."
Luckily for him, a friend of his father saw what he was doing and reported him to his parents. His father sat him down and told him it was time to have a talk.
Aramin's father, Bassam Aramin, had himself been arrested for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers when he was 16, and served seven years in an Israeli jail for his actions. But whenever Aramin asked his father how he had been treated in prison, Bassam refused to answer. A founder of Combatants for Peace, which describes itself as "an organization of former Israeli and Palestinian combatants leading a non-violent struggle against the occupation," and a member of the Parents Circle himself, Bassam only wanted to talk about peace.
"Abir's murder could have led me down the easy path of hatred and vengeance," he wrote in an autobiographical essay, "but for me there was no return from dialogue and non-violence. After all, it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but one hundred former Israeli soldiers who built a garden in her name at the school where she was murdered."
"My father is my hero," Aramin told us. "When I said I wanted to kill the soldiers who killed my sister, he told me, 'We are not weak people who kill. We have strength in other ways.' But I still needed revenge. So, he said, 'I understand, but first you must make peace with yourself.'"
Bassam then took his young son with him to Germany, where he had been invited to give a talk. While there, he and Aramin also toured the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald.
"He wanted to take me out of my stress, but he also wanted me to learn about the narrative of the other side," Aramin explained to me later.
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