On the occasion of the NCAD Gallery exhibition Empathising with the Enemy | Louis Scully we are delighted to present the In Conversation event Empathising with the Enemy | Collective Liberation for All.
Journeying from the West Bank to Dublin, guest speaker Sulaiman Khatib, Palestinian peace activist & co-founder of Combatants for Peace will be in dialogue with community activist Amel Yacef (The Rowan Trust) on nonviolent communication methods and what it means to be a peace activist in the contested geographic areas of Palestine-Israel.
Reserve a seat here: https://lnkd.in/eAuxqNeH
Speaker Biographies
Sulaiman Khatib is Co-Founder of Combatants for Peace, and was nominated for the 2017 & ’18 Nobel Peace Prize, on behalf of Combatants for Peace. He is a Board Member of ELHAM – the Day After and a local organiser who has been recognised internationally for his contributions to promoting, peace, social justice and equality for all. He is a renowned speaker and lecturer worldwide.
In 2006, Khatib was the co-founder and General Director of Al-Qud’s Association for Democracy and Dialogue. The program works with youth in order to create effective and sustainable projects and programs focusing on the promotion of peace, democracy and civic participation in the Palestinian Territories. In 2008, he co-founded the People’s Peace Fund. In 2010, he became the director of Alquds, an organisation that organised joint Israeli-Palestinian sports teams for youth.
At the age of 14 Khatib was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and served a term of ten and a half years where he spent his time learning about history, Hebrew, English and about other world conflicts and peace activists such as Ghandi and Mandela. He acquired his entire education and worldview in jail. This is when he started to have new thoughts about the conflict and the means for resolving it. As a result he is today a committed advocate for peace in the Middle East and an has been an active member of various programs aiming to promote a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the last twenty years. During the second Intifada, he was one of the main voices calling for non-violent resistance.
In 2004, he went on a mission to Antarctica with a joint group of Israelis and Palestinians. Their team consisted of eight members: four Israeli, four Palestinian – many of whom were former fighters from both sides. They sailed over 100 km in the world’s most dangerous waters and climbed a previously unclimbed peak. The objective: “to find common ground."
Sulaiman and Chen Alon, another co-founder of Combatants for Peace, were nominated twice for the Nobel peace prize in 2017 and 2018. Both times the nomination was on behalf of CfP. Sulaiman starred alongside fellow CfP activists in ‘Disturbing the Peace‘, an award winning film detailing the origins of the Combatants for Peace movement, which was released in 2016.
Sulaiman is the author of In This Place Together: A Palestinian’s Journey to Collective Liberation, alongside co-author Penina Eilberg-Schwartz. The work chronicles the powerful experiences that led him to dedicate his life to joint nonviolence, through encountering the deep injustice of torture, witnessing the power of hunger strikes, and studying Jewish history. Combatants For Peace Link
Amel Yacef, an Algerian who made Ireland her home for over 20 years, describes her practice as transformative and compassionate justice. She has extensive experience in organising and mobilising young people, women and grass roots community leaders coming from communities marginalised by systems and institutions that were not built for and by them. Amel has managed and coordinated projects with a focus on social justice, racial justice, gender justice, equality and human rights. She has served in multiple Boards of organisations working towards social justice, in Ireland and Europe.
She is passionate about facilitating processes that enable those voices in the margins to sit in their power, and impact political discourse, believing in the importance of creating and holding spaces of radical transformation and healing justice for the individuals and communities harmed by oppressive systems. The Rowan Trust Link
