Aziz Abu Sarah

It's much easier when people attack me and say, oh, what you're doing is not okay, or you are a normalizer, which makes no sense because normalization means you accept the current reality.

And what we do is exactly the opposite.

We reject

the occupation we reject, injustices, we feel the pain of people.

But when the attacks come towards my family, whether Marie or my parents, I was interviewed by a media outlet when I ran for mayor of Jerusalem and I was told, how could your mother now

be welcoming Jewish people into your homes after Israelis have killed your brother.

And I told the interviewer, why attack my mother for that?

She's not welcoming occupation.

She's welcoming people who are working with me.

to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

And so it is very difficult to deal with that, but it will not stop us from doing the work that is terribly needed to be done because the alternative to what we're doing is accepting that my nieces and nephews and my oldest children will grow up in this reality actually much worse because things have gotten only worse since I was a child.

Yes, go ahead, Aziz.

I may add.

We keep hope because we know what happened in Northern Ireland.

It's right next to you.

And I've met many people there.

I've spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland, and I've been told that even weeks before an agreement was reached, a Good Friday agreement, people didn't think it's gonna happen.

And there were some of those who kept working in the civil society, the Women Peace Coalition, people like WAVE, Alan McBride, who I had the honor to meet, and his partners.

They kept working hard day and night to make sure that the future will be different.

And even when it looked impossible, they kept at it.