This article is an excerpt from a report titled Palestinian and Jewish Canadians in Transformational Conversations: Hope for a Sunrise We Might Never See. Read the full report here.
Over three months in late 2025, Khouri Conversations, in collaboration with Digital Public Square, convened a small group of Palestinian and Jewish Canadians to meet regularly in Toronto for what we called “Transformational Conversations”. In a post–October 7 atmosphere marked by fear, polarization, and growing distance between communities, this group chose to do something counter-cultural: to sit together, listen, and stay in it.
This report invites you into that space. Our goal is not to claim success or resolution, but to show how, session by session, both cohorts moved: first into discomfort, then into recognition, and slowly toward a fragile, shared sense of responsibility.
The overarching goal of this exercise was to build emotionally-centred communities as a vehicle for creating transformational conversations aimed at decreasing polarization.
The objectives were to:
1. Build compassionate conversations centred on common values instead of political opinions and tribal affiliations.
2. Replace the binaries of identities (Jewish, Palestinian) and political views (pro-Israel, pro-Palestine) with a shared identity of common humanity (create a community based on shared values).
3. Overcome polarization and binarism by building capacity to listen across differences.
4. Reclaim community narratives from political agendas to human relationships (empower individuals to build their own narrative separate from the dominant voices in their communities).
5. Enable individuals to overcome the fear of rejection from their tribal affiliations by building a stronger affiliation with the community of shared values.
What we learned about Palestinian experiences
Across the three months, the Palestinian participants carried with them an unmistakable emotional weight, one that often entered the room before they spoke. It showed up as exhaustion, vigilance, and a kind of grief shaped by decades of erasure. Many spoke about the “banning of history,” describing how Palestinian stories before October 7 rarely appeared in public discourse: stories of displacement, military occupation, everyday loss, and generational harm. When they did appear, the stories arrived stripped of context or surrounded by suspicion.
Several people said in different ways that they were used to explaining themselves, used to meeting doubt or defensiveness before they were met with care. Phrases like “desire for justice has led to hopelessness” and “why do I keep seeking justice from people who don’t see us as people?” captured the emotional core of this experience. These were not political positions. They came from deep emotional memory, inherited across generations.
A pattern emerged: Palestinian participants were often asked, in their lives outside the room, to perform empathy, condemnation, and offer clarity for the comfort of others. They described feeling pushed to denounce Hamas instantly or risk being seen as threatening, dangerous, or complicit. For many, this narrowing of what they were allowed to feel created profound loneliness. They spoke about losing belonging in Canada during a period of rising anti-Palestinian racism and surveillance, and about the pain of being reduced to violence rather than seen as whole human beings with complex histories.
Even so, they continued to show up, not just physically but emotionally. Their willingness to speak about displacement, generational grief, and the vulnerability behind anger created space for Jewish participants to hear something they had not been able to hear elsewhere. And in turn, they also listened. The work was not symmetrical, but it was reciprocal.
What we learned about Jewish experiences
Jewish participants walked into the room carrying a different, but equally heavy, emotional history. For many, October 7 reopened fears rooted in older family stories, memories of antisemitism, hiding, persecution, and the constant precariousness that Jewish families have carried across continents and generations. Some spoke openly about feeling “on edge” since the attacks, or about watching global antisemitism rise in ways that felt familiar and terrifying.
At times, they struggled with the collapsing of identities they saw in public conversations, the difficulty of separating critique of Israel from attacks on Jewish people themselves. Several described being treated as representatives of a government and other civic organizations whose actions they did not control nor support. Participants spoke about how easily nuance disappears when Jews are spoken about as one undifferentiated group, with little room for the diversity of experience and opinion within their community.
There was also a grief that surprised even some of the Jewish participants themselves. They spoke about family members afraid to wear Star of David necklaces in public, or how fear had settled “in the body,” not just in the mind. When Palestinian participants spoke about the “banning of history,” Jewish participants recognized a parallel: the way antisemitism, too, carries a long memory that shapes how danger is perceived, even far from the region.
What became most striking was how much the Jewish cohort wanted to be understood through the vulnerability they felt and not through the lens of power or privilege. They allowed others to see their fear as real and legitimate, not as political positioning. Descriptions such as “fearful,” and “aware that intolerance is on the rise in general” became part of the shared story in the room, a story that Palestinian participants began to understand more fully as weeks went on.
Moving towards recognition
The core movement over the months was not toward agreement and never needed to be. What shifted was that the two histories, the two emotional worlds, finally had room to sit beside each other without competing for moral space. The work became less about persuasion and more about recognition.
An important arc emerged: from position, to emotion, to meaning.
At first, participants spoke from positions of historical community narratives. As trust grew, the conversation shifted those positions to emotions: fear, shame, helplessness, rage, longing, exhaustion, numbness, love, and hope. When people stayed with those emotions long enough to recognize them in the other, something deeper became visible: the meaning underneath the fear, the meaning underneath the grief. This is where people began to understand one another.
Language fatigue played a surprising role. After weeks of trying to negotiate charged words like “resistance,” “genocide,” “Zionism,” “occupation,” and “apartheid,” people began to talk less about the words themselves and more about what those words meant in real terms.
Conversations shifted from debating definitions to describing experiences and recognizing them in the other. This was the beginning of a shared emotional literacy.
Across sessions, mistrust slowly softened into cautious reciprocity. Participants started responding to the emotions they heard, rather than to the motives they feared. They noticed, became curious, asked questions of each other. They paused together. They held silence together. They walked together after sessions and exchanged books. They moved, slowly and tentatively, from fear-based assumptions toward human-based understanding.
From the outside, this may look simple. Inside the room, it was profound.
What began to form was a great sense of camaraderie despite enduring disagreements. Not a merging of political histories – those remain distinct and must remain distinct – but a shared story of what it feels like for Palestinians and Jews to meet in Toronto in 2025, and to remain present with one another, with everything they carry. It is not a political narrative, but a human one: a story about what it takes, psychologically and emotionally, to remain in the room with someone whose history is so entangled with your own pain.
This article is an excerpt from a report titled Palestinian and Jewish Canadians in Transformational Conversations: Hope for a Sunrise We Might Never See. Read the full report here.
About Khouri Conversations
Khouri Conversations (with its sister organization, Conversations Without Walls) works with institutions to break down barriers to understanding between groups, and foster welcoming spaces that hold multiple truths and binary beliefs in tension. We focus on groups who struggle with the Israel-Palestine discourse to create pathways towards a deeper understanding of the complex histories, traumas and narratives. We offer listening circles aimed at healing and recovery; conflict prevention workshops that move groups from combative positions towards constructive engagement; and group presentations that seek empathy, understanding, and a re-humanizing of “the other.”