Sabrina Thaler, Contributing Photographer

Last Thursday, Rawan Odeh, an activist for dialogue and joint advocacy between Israelis and Palestinians, visited students at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. 

Odeh is a board member and former executive director of New Story Leadership, an organization that trains Israeli and Palestinian leaders in joint political advocacy in pursuit of peace and justice in the region. At the Slifka Center library, Odeh shared her experiences as a Palestinian American and highlighted the role of personal relationships in mobilizing for peace.

The national J Street U organization, which advocates against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank through the lens of Jewish values, planned the event as part of their “Voices Paving the Path to Peace” speaker tour, which took place across five universities in the Northeast. 

At the beginning of the talk, Odeh detailed her upbringing as a Muslim in Brooklyn, New York, and her time living in Huwara, a town in the West Bank that is fully occupied by the Israeli army. She described complete segregation and hostility between Palestinians and Israelis in Huwara.

“To survive, if you see an Israeli soldier in the streets, you put your head down and you pray,” Odeh said. “If you see an Israeli settler, you run for your life. We do not meet in the West Bank or in Israel other than in circumstances of violence.”

Odeh described her first meeting with an Israeli woman on a bus, a meeting which led to a friendship and an invitation to spend Passover with the woman’s family in Haifa, Israel. However, in trying to get to Haifa, Odeh discovered that there was no way to cross from Palestinian territory into Israeli territory exclusively for a social purpose.

Motivated by this friendship and the barriers that exist between Israelis and Palestinians, she became involved in policy advocacy in Congress. She became the executive director of New Story Leadership at age 22, coordinating Israeli and Palestinian delegates to meet with legislators. 

As part of her work, Odeh attended a 2017 Congressional Hearing for the Taylor Force Act, a bill to cut U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority, which controls Palestinians’ access to food and education. She noticed that none of the panelists at the hearing were Palestinians themselves.

“A lot of people are talking about us without us,” Odeh said. “My story and Palestinian stories just aren’t really heard.”

By bringing these underrepresented stories into policy forums, Odeh hopes that long-term justice is possible. Amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, she has encouraged legislators to focus on long-term goals once a ceasefire has been reached.

New Story Leadership is advocating for the Phoenix Plan, a policy agenda that focuses on stabilizing Gaza, strengthening Israeli and Palestinian leadership and effectively engaging the international community to achieve long-term peace. 

“To me, liberation means a Palestinian state living side by side with an Israeli state,” Odeh said. “I think the loudest voices want to do away with it all. But I think the majority of Israelis don’t want to see Palestinians dead.”

When a student asked about how to be an effective ally to Palestinians, Odeh emphasized the value of recognizing nuanced opinions and the overlapping goals of most people in both Israeli and Palestinian communities.

Odeh encouraged student attendees to prioritize transparent storytelling, empathy and inclusion as they approach advocacy. 

“Acknowledgement means a lot,” Odeh said. “There’s something about the defense of a human that allows them to hear you if you acknowledge them. I see you as my ally, but you have to bring me in to facilitate those conversations.”

Student attendees were interested in Odeh’s account of her own life and saw the event as a rare opportunity to hear from a Palestinian voice in a Jewish space.

Maya Viswanathan ’28 said she came to the event because she is curious about the work of organizations like New Story Leadership, which are focused on facilitating conversations between Israelis and Palestinians as a tool for peace.

“In general, the news is detached from personal stories,” Viswanathan said. “But really, it’s about people, and if you simplify things into statistics or black-and-white, you don’t get the full understanding.”

Samuel Ostrove ’25 felt that conversations like these in the United States and on college campuses can be meaningful forums to bridge ideological gaps and prevent the formation of a “bubble.”

For Ostrove, the event left him wondering how Palestinians and Israelis can form meaningful relationships when social interaction is so policed in the region itself. 

“The whole thing is about human stories and human connections,” Ostrove said. “But there’s no line on the form for ‘I’m going to visit my friend in Haifa.’ Maybe in certain ways today that’s possible, but if it’s even possible, it’s very difficult.”

Ostrove feels that, in the wake of student protests for a ceasefire and divestment, there has not been enough interaction between people with diverse lived experiences.

Ostrove added that more students should strive to connect with people who have different views on contentious issues.

“It’s important for Jewish spaces, spaces that affiliate with Israel, to invite Palestinians in the same way that I think it’s very important for pro-Palestinian spaces to invite in Jewish Israelis,” Ostrove said. “There needs to be respectful presence of people whose views differ from the normative views in spaces on campus.”

The Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life is located at 80 Wall St.