“They play all these dirty games on different lands, and we are still burning in the same fire.”

Asghar, a 2019 GATHER Fellow, recounted his life growing up in Quetta, Balochistan, a city in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. Asghar described this community as a tribal one, where extended family all live together in a cluster of houses that share one gate to enter.

The area has been destabilized over the years from both the United States and the Russians—the capitalist and the communist bloc, as Asghar described it, one fighting to own all the resources and the other to distribute them.

Growing up, Asghar, like all of the boys in his class, was taught that virgins would await them if they died fighting, and that they could escape a life of poverty and illiteracy in heaven.

“When you don’t have means,” Asghar explained, “you feel ‘what am I doing?’ I can buy good stuff in heaven. I can have meals, I can have milk. So why should I not go there?”

These stories had been put in their minds from a young age, “so when the time comes, they are ready for war and suicide attacks and disaster. Same was the case with me, with my cousin, with all of my village,” Asghar said.

But at the age of 22, Asghar went to Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences to fulfill his family’s expectation that he would be able to support them in the future. It was there that his mindset—and life trajectory—began to change. He credits this change to his participation in study circles.

These groups didn’t lead to an immediate rejection of what he had learned growing up. The people in these discussion groups, who are his good friends now, he called infidels. “They are kafir, they are brainwashing our children,” Asghar said of his initial reaction.

These “infidels” shared documentaries and books that, as Asghar described it, began “to melt him.” The books—Dabang Musafari, Sarhaa, Da Laandhi Ghwasha, all written by Noor Mohammad Tarakai, the ex-President of Afghanistan—completely changed his thinking. The stories, which pointed out evils, reminded him of his own village. “I’m watching the different houses, how they are living, the key stakeholders of society and what they do with their position and power, and it hits me. ‘Oh! It is this!’”

Seeing his own community reflected in what he read began to “crack my mind and melt my extremist ideologies,” Asghar said.

In 2012, when he had completed his MBA, Asghar could feel a shift in his skill sets. He led a political organization during his final year at the university comprised of nearly 1,500 students. At the same time, he raised funds to cover university fees for four of his peers.

“I started to think that if I can collect charities for the fees of students in my university, why can’t I establish a school?”

As Asghar sees it, education is the tool by which he hopes to bring about peace. “I feel that illiteracy breeds poverty, and poverty breeds instability. And instability brings war.” So in 2013, he created the DEWA Foundation, which established its first school a year later in a small village known as Murgha Zakaria Zai. After that, he established two more schools, and hopes to have five campuses throughout the region.

Asghar literally built the first school, he and his team doing the actual labor. “I told my friends we cannot go for holy war; let’s not spill blood but we can at least sweat.”

His peers, which included doctors and MBA holders, collected large stones and drove tractors to create the structures that would teach more than 300 students ranging in age from 4 to 13 years old. About a third of his students receive scholarships that enable them to attend school.

DEWA, which stands for Development, Education, Welfare, and Advocacy, means “candle” or “light” in Pashto, the language spoken in the region where he lives. And Asghar hopes for his schools to be a light for his students, giving them the same critical thinking skills that helped him counter radicalism. “It’s easy to manipulate emotions when you don’t have education,” he said.

How does he convince people to support the creation of these schools, let alone send their children to them? “I share the success stories of people who are from here and now living a good life in other big cities of Pakistan, in the U.S., in Europe. There are doctors and engineers from the same society. I say ‘if you give education to your children, your future will be bright like theirs.’”

That’s not to say that preaching against intolerance and religious extremism is easy. On the contrary. In one village, Asghar began a discussion with a group of young men who blamed him, told him he was doing bad work, and said he should build a religious school instead. But he countered with science and war. He spoke of the Russian AK-47s and the American drones. “I told them, ‘we have to produce our own drones, but to do that, we have to produce scientists. And for that, we need universities. And we have to establish scientific schools where we will educate our children about war games and how to secure themselves.’ This is how I convinced them.”

He acknowledged that sometimes they call him an infidel, and sometimes they accept him. But just as his own turnaround took time, he recognizes that it’s a process with others, as well. He meets with potential supporters regularly, holding discussions, breaking the ice. He calls upon the same study circles that changed him to de-radicalize others.

“The basic point is, do not kill on the basis of differences of ideologies,” he said. “We should discuss the points; we should negotiate.”

While his views may run counter to those held by many young men in his community, it is welcomed by the mothers of his students, a lot of them are widows. “Those women come to my school and pray for me. They tell me, ‘please don’t stop this. Allah will give you a place in heaven.’”

He explained that parents, mothers especially, don’t want their children to fight. “They have raised them for 12 to 15 years, and how can a mother allow her son to go and never come back? When I talked to my mother about this [as a teen] she started crying, like ‘what the hell are you talking about? How can you think like that?’”

But he spoke of how it’s easy to manipulate the feelings of a teenage boy. “The blood is energetic and the age is energetic. Everyone wants to go.”

Growing up, Asghar never spoke to his five sisters about his plans. That is not something one does in a patriarchal society—involve the girls into certain conversations. “But right now,” he said, “I do discuss politics with my younger sisters. I’m doing this because I know that they will become mothers tomorrow and they can educate their sons.”

To unwind, Asghar meets his friends for tea. They discuss history, particularly the Roman Empire and American history. And of course, there’s Netflix. Asghar watches a lot of films and documentaries; these days he’s into the drama series, Vikings.

“I go to that time and I feel relaxed,” he said. “We are still living in the same stone age. The houses we are living in are of the same styles of the Vikings, or the Ottoman Empire. We are in a tribal society, exercising the same customs.” Asghar noted the similarities in the way he and the actors he sees on TV kiss their mothers on their hands, or how the mothers kiss their sons’ foreheads. He loves making these connections across time and cultures.

As a GATHER Fellow, Asghar is grateful to have expanded his professional network. “It has provided me a platform that helps me absorb the concept of pluralism. I’ve met people from different parts of the world.” He appreciates these new angles that help him think differently, and the skills he’s gained regarding fundraising and sustaining his school model. This is what keeps him up at night—generating the support he needs to build more campuses and reach more students.

“I’m doing it all to counter poverty, and promote peace,” Asghar said. “I want a world without war. Where every individual has freedom of expression, the right to live in peace, the right to education, the right to free health, and the right to employment.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Asghar and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

“I don’t have this American story of one thing that changed me,” Liel, a 2019 GATHER Fellow, said slowly, carefully, in a recent Skype interview from his home in Jaffa. “There were many steps along the way.”

Born to an Italian mother and Libyan father who was expelled with the local Jewish Community from Tripoli in late 1960s, Liel grew up in a very rightwing family.

“They saw the peace process as a danger to the state, or even to the Jewish people,” he said. “They organized demonstrations, they sent us to a nationalist/religious school, and for us, the Jewish values of the state, the connection to the biblical land, and especially not having trust in our enemies, was very central.”

So it might seem counterintuitive that today he is the co-director of the Israel Palestine Center for Regional Initiatives, works to form partnerships across lines of conflict and to build new frameworks of solidarity necessary for change in policies.

The first step in this transition to change was his mandatory service in the Israeli army.

“Like many of us who were educated about the importance of serving, I was excited in the first week,” he said. “I called my friends that were enrolled a year before me and I was happy to tell them the news that we were going to serve in the same unit, and he told me, ‘Liel, it is not funny, and it is not an exciting thing. Do whatever you can to leave the place as soon as possible.’ And from that first week, I began to have questions within the trainings, and I really didn’t like the answers that were given.”

As time went on, answers never came, and his friends’ warnings turned out to be even worse than he imagined—he saw time after time how people lost their humanity when dealing with civilians, and even with their fellow soldiers. He saw how those who didn’t want to be there suffered, some harming themselves: one friend even committed suicide.

It was an extremely painful process for Liel, and opened his eyes to truths that he might not have been ready to experience otherwise.

“After the Army, a friend of mine invited me to help her with an educational program that was a mixed group of Jews and Arabs, and it was the first time I saw the option of having positive interactions with the other side,” he said.

He began to become involved in more organizations that worked to shape policy—including within the Knesset, the United States Congress, and the European Union—as well as with peacebuilding organizations like the Arava Institute, Seeds of Peace, Givat Haviva, Mejdi Tours, and Combatants for Peace.

“In the beginning I was addicted to these spaces where I had the option of having positive relationships with the other side. I found something was healing in me regarding all the pain that I had, and I wanted to be there all the time,” he said. “Slowly, slowly, I became very passionate, and I voiced my opinions a lot, engaged in a lot of arguments with people around me and also with my family.”

But then, an unexpected thing began to happen: Through his Palestinian friends he began to learn the history of the region and to speak Arabic, the language of his father’s homeland.

And with time, especially with his growing understanding of the Arabic language and the history of the Middle East, a new connection with his father emerged.

“We started speaking about the history of the region, the problematic presence of foreigners, the importance of recognizing the expulsion of various groups, including Jews, from Arab countries, and I was telling him all the time that I bring into dynamics the connection of my family to Libya and the fact that they cannot go there anymore. And from this his heart opened, because he felt like he was being heard and his story was being heard.”

THE ONLY OPTION

In order to change the framework in which the peace process is discussed, Liel promotes a regional approach throughout his projects while trying to highlight lessons from other regions.

At the time of this interview, Liel was in the thick of organizing “In Between: Visions From Contested Cities,” an IPCRI conference that will bring together representatives from cities that were divided by conflict—Belfast in Northern Ireland, Nicosia in Cyprus, and Sarajevo in Bosnia—to share perspectives and expose Jerusalemites to how conflicts were handled in other places.

“It seems that we have been talking about the conflict in the same way for many years now, we’re stuck in the same language, the same solutions,” he said. “It’s important to show the people that it’s possible to solve conflict—we’re not stuck with it, but we should think creatively about how we solve it.”

In other projects that he leads, he tries to build forums of people from across the region aimed at promoting a regional agenda towards social change. And when he’s not working on a project directly related to the Middle East conflict, he’s spending time with people who work in the field, and even his “getaways” are typically more like work retreats, for example, working in the desert as opposed to the city.

“I really like the phrase ‘if you do something you love, you won’t work one day in your life.’ I really don’t feel it is work. I’m passionate and dedicated to what I think is right, and I don’t need to count hours or find time for vacation days,” he said.

That’s not to say that the work isn’t incredibly challenging. He draws strength and resilience from his friendships and the communities he’s become a part of, including the GATHER Fellows.

“I was really inspired by the idea of bringing together a community of changemakers from around the world to learn from each other, to connect, to rejuvenate our energies,” he said. “Even across communities we can strengthen each other to not fall into the national divisions that made the problems in the first place.”

His focus in GATHER is to create a space for discussion between groups working on evolving the conflict, allowing activists to learn more and engage more fully, and organizations to bolster effective programs. And while he sees signs of progress in connections between individuals and various groups, he said the most difficult part “is understanding how far we are from where we want to be.”

“When you create these groups and feel connections from both sides, it’s really painful that you cannot see your friends on a regular basis. You actually cannot meet legally,” he said. “You see with your eyes the marginalization and the discrimination that is happening on a regular basis. You’re hearing about demolition orders and inciting racism. It shows you again and again, day after day, how far we are from what we wish we would be able to achieve.”

And personally, he is locked in an ongoing sort of internal tug-of-war with his place in it all. Growing up, he didn’t want to be involved in the conflict, but now that he knows what he knows, and has the friendships that he does, he feels he has no other option.

“The greatest endangerment for me is to become numb to the situation,” he said. “When you know the other side and connect to it, it’s very hard to ignore the atrocities and the conditions of life that people have under occupation. And as a person who is more privileged in this specific context, it is very important to use the privilege in order to support the fight for equality. I think this is what true activism is and what true friendship is.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Liel and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.