An Afternoon at the Peace Booths

Three Standing Together activists are standing on a Herzliya corner near Reichman University, being pelted with ice cubes by a group of young teenagers who grabbed them from a nearby restaurant. A man stands in front of their booth and yells at them that they support the terrorists, that he knows exactly what Alon-Lee writes, and that he is calling the police to have them removed. To the kids throwing ice, he says nothing.

Irit Levanon, organizer of the Sharon-Southern Triangle chapter of Standing Together, faces him with a cool head. "Do you want to talk with us about peace?" He looks at her, still worked up: "I'll give you one minute."

Irit originally had the idea to hold these peace booths after studying Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a path that later connected her with NVC facilitator Aya Caspi. A social worker by profession, she stepped back from activism during the two years of the Bennett-Lapid government to study NVC, and found in it what she calls a treasure: a way to express things she couldn't before, and to work through barriers in how she spoke. When she returned to activism, and to Standing Together, she knew the two worlds had to meet. "You can't think you'll convince people without listening to them and without doing the work on how you speak," she says.

So when the movement began talking about peace booths about a year ago, Irit insisted they be more than a table and a sign. "The very idea of going out and talking outside, and not just among ourselves like we usually do at protests, is really, in my opinion, the most important thing the movement can do," she says, "but it has to come with a lot of support." She knows that one-on-one conversations with strangers are harder than a big demonstration. "But we already have those people," she says of the people who show up to protests, "so our work needs to be where it's hard."

Nonviolent Communication was developed by the American psychologist Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s. At its core is the idea that behind every position, even a hostile one, there is a universal human need, like safety, dignity, or belonging. Instead of arguing with what someone says, NVC practitioners listen for what the other person feels and needs, reflect it back without judgment, and only then share their own feelings, needs, and requests. The goal is not to win an argument, but to create a connection in which both people can actually hear each other.

For Irit, the method answers a problem she sees in herself and in many fellow activists. "A lot of the time we're peace activists, we really want to advance peace, but we even do damage by yelling at someone, cursing someone who thinks differently," she says. "I do it too, because it's really hard, because these are really not simple places." Facing people who think differently, she explains, "we either want to fight them or want to run away." She remembers standing with signs in Kfar Saba and Ra'anana two years ago, when teenagers came to snatch them, and reacting with anger, knowing even as it happened that she wanted to do it differently.

Back on that Herzliya corner, she did. Instead of defending herself, she reflected the man's words back to him: "So you think we come here as if we support violence?" She listened as he spoke about how hard things have been since October 7, and told him that yes, of course it is terribly hard. "And I see how he softens," she recalls. When the police arrived, the man told them, "No, it's fine," and then turned to the kids himself: "You won't throw ice here." As Irit puts it, "We managed to talk, calmly, and he no longer saw me as an enemy."

Irit Levanon has been doing this deep canvassing for about a year, along with a number of other volunteers, in Kfar Saba, in Herzliya, and soon in Ramat HaSharon. The idea is simple: set up shop in a public place with signs in Hebrew and Arabic and postcards to hand out, and catch people passing by. Then comes the important part. First of all, they listen: to people's thoughts, ideas, worries, and fears. After that, they talk about what they think about peace: why they still believe in it, and why it needs to be part of our public conversation again. "It's no longer standing with a sign in front of someone and telling them your opinion," Irit says. "It's managing to talk about your opinion and also hear theirs."

No one has to do this alone. On top of the movement's training for booth activists let by Carmel Yaari (lead campaigner for the Yes, Peace campaign), Irit built a support team of volunteers with Moshe Katznelson, who has spent three years running street booths with Let's Talk Democracy, and NVC facilitators Galit Sasson, Debbie Katz and Aya Caspi. Every two weeks, activists meet on Zoom with a rotating NVC facilitator and bring in the hardest moments from the field: an incident of violence in Tel Aviv, a difficult encounter in Rehovot, a reply they didn't know how to answer. "It's a place where you can talk about it, and talk about it from the NVC angle," Irit says. "I feel the Peace Booths experience is also held, and it moves us to a better place in the way we talk."

I asked Irit if she felt that, in order to speak with people, we had to water down our messages and avoid talking about ideas of solidarity and injustice. "No, no," she said. "We do focus on the issue of peace and on making peace present. We can also have conversations about the occupation and the settlers, and all those things can come up. But our aim is to open it up, to air it, to talk about it, and outside." What they do keep is focus: when a conversation slides back into arguments about the past, "we do bring them back to the future."

Much of the work happens at the level of shared needs. "What they say is: 'Were you here on October 7th? Do you want this to happen again?'" Irit explains. "Through NVC I try to understand what the underlying need is: most likely lack of trust or security. So they feel a need for security. This is something that I can relate to more and find empathy for, and continue the conversation from that common starting point." "I say: 'Yes, right, I want us to be safe, and I also want our governments to think about how to solve this, and how to reach an agreement.' I meet him at the level of the need or the feeling, and at that level it's easier to understand, and then you automatically become more empathetic."

I asked Irit what she felt the biggest impasses are that she sees in people. Her answer: a lack of trust in a partner, and with it, a lack of personal security. She sums up what she hears again and again: "We don't believe that's what the other side wants. They want violence, and look, October 7, everything proves it. We wish we could believe it, we really wish we were with you, but how can we be with you if it's not true? You're naive."

Rather than arguing, she names what she hears: the fear, the lost trust, the feeling of being unsafe. Then she asks: "And still, what do you imagine? How do we solve this? How do we make things better here?" Many activists dread the answer, expecting to hear that the only solution is to wipe out the other side. To Irit's surprise, that is rarely what people say. "I was sure everyone would say it," she says. "And it's not so."

It can be tough being out facing the public; you never know what you are going to get. A year ago, during the war, the activists tried setting up in the center of Herzliya. Within seconds, kids threw eggs at them, and a shell-shocked veteran walked by and overturned their booth. "We couldn't even stay there," Irit says. Children are often the hardest: they yell, they throw things, and by fifth or sixth grade, she has noticed, the sight of Hebrew and Arabic side by side is already enough for them to file the activists away as traitors. Some adults find stranger ways to make their point, like the passerby who stopped just to tell them, "I threw up at home."

Then there are the moments that make it worthwhile. One man approached the booth filming the activists and announcing, "Look at the terrorists." By the end of the conversation, he and Irit had agreed on the need for what he called "non-fighting." "Coming from a place where he's filming me and saying 'look at the terrorists,'" she says, "that just tells you what a treasure this is."

And some moments are just funny. Offered a postcard, one man replied: "I'm so right-wing I don't know what to do with it."

What speaks louder than the voices who interact with the booth are the ones that pass by. The activists have now found a spot at the entrance to Herzliya's Seven Stars Mall, where no one has ever told them to leave and no one has been violent, and where, as Irit says, everyone passes by. Some make a face, as if asking what this thing is doing here. Some walk past and say, "We're with you." Younger adults tend to stay in their bubble without even glancing over, while people in their forties and fifties are the ones who stop to talk, usually because they disagree. For many passersby, simply seeing people stand in public and talk about peace seems to come as a surprise.

Irit admits that, unlike the rest of her activism, going out to the booth still isn't easy for her. "I leave the house and I don't feel like it," she says. "But always, always, I gain so much from it. Because we always see that it's possible." Before the booths, she points out, activists rarely got to talk with people who don't think like them at all. Now they go outside, manage to talk, manage to listen, and keep improving the way they speak. "The whole thing," she says, "is a kind of miracle."

In a public environment where the word peace has virtually disappeared from conversation, the peace booth activists are doing some of the most important work there is: bringing it back one interaction at a time, not through a megaphone, but through empathy, listening, and a deep commitment to the cause.

Interested in Nonviolent Communication? Want to know how to handle tough conversations around you about Israel and Palestine? Check out Aya Caspi's talk on how to talk about the war in Gaza without making war: watch it here.