Hands of Peace empowers American, Israeli, and Palestinian youth to become agents of change.
Our Mission

At Hands of Peace, we share these common values:

• We believe the future depends on the leadership, education and actions of the next generation.
• We believe global connections are learning connections.
• We believe the way to create impactful and lasting change in society is through cultivating young leaders who are committed to serving their communities.
• We believe in positive peace that goes beyond the absence of violence and builds constructive attitudes and systems that foster equality, freedom and justice.
• We believe all people deserve self-determination and basic human rights.
• We believe in the same freedoms for all, including freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom of movement, freedom from fear and violence, and freedom from oppression.
• We believe the existing conditions among Israelis and Palestinians are unacceptable and there must be an urgent, non-violent end to occupation that leads to safety and security for all.

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• The Holy Thursday Revolution, Beatrice Bruteau

  “Drawing from a wide range of disciplines Bruteau presents a unifying vision of a world that must move from…domination to one of equality and sharing… Presents [jesus’] two teaching events of Holy Thursday — Footwashing and Holy Communion — as entry gates into a new way of living and loving in a world of domination, power, and separation.”

How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It, Carlos Lozada

…But the German-born Hirschman — who in addition to being an academic economist was a U.S. Army veteran, an antifascist resister, an adviser on the Marshall Plan and a consultant to the Colombian government — was too intellectually honest, or simply had seen too much of the world, to stop with the right. The left displays its own unity of certitude, he suggested in the penultimate chapter of “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” and its habit of rationalization is “richer in maneuvers, largely of exaggeration and obfuscation, than it is ordinarily given credit for.”…

(read more) [Posted in Political/Democracy]

• The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has, By Jamelle Bouie

  The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign.

  It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants. (read more) [posted in Political/Democracy]

• The Uncomfortable Truths That Could Yet Defeat Fascism, Anand Giridharadas

  Polls swing this way and that way, but the larger story they tell is unmistakable. With the midterm elections, Americans are being offered a clear choice between continued and expanded liberal democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other. And it’s more or less a dead heat.

  It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds. (read more) [posted in Political/Democracy]

• Fareed Zakaria on Grassroots Democracy, From his 10/16/22 CNN GPS program.

  And now for the last look. The protests raging in Iran have been deeply inspiring, sparked by women demonstrating against the repression of a brutal regime, that has made control over women and their bodies a central tenant of its rule. And as the “New York Times” notes, the protests have now spread to include oil workers who have taken to the streets shouting slogans like “death to the dictator.”

  This is powerful stuff. But are the regime’s days numbered? In a fascinating piece in “The New York Times,” Max Fisher notes two puzzling trends. All over the world we are seeing an astonishing rise in protests. But this rise in frequency does not appear to correlate to a rise in efficacy. In fact, quite the opposite. (read more) [posted in Political/Democracy.]