Welcome to the Commune Podcast. My name is Jeff Krasno. Today's episode is the second

installment of the four-part series of conversations from the Peace Initiative for Israel-Palestine

that I hosted at Commune-Tupanga in late August 24. This week-long mini-conference gathered

Palestinian and Israeli Jewish campus leaders from Columbia University, Brown University,

and UCLA, as well as a number of Middle East historians and expert mediators.

The goal of the summit was to engage in deep listening, to learn each other's narratives,

and to stand in each other's shoes, and then from this place of empathy and mutual understanding, work cooperatively to forge potential

structural solutions for peace and justice in Israel-Palestine.

I provide more context for the summit and this podcast series in the introduction to

episode one, in which I interview my mother,

Professor Gene Krasno.

In fact, the genesis of this summit and this podcast series was rooted in her classroom

at Columbia University.

She taught a class in the spring semester of 2024 titled Peacekeeping and Negotiation.

Now, in her class, there were prominent voices for both the Palestinian and Israeli communities on

campus, including today's guest, Mosin Madawi. Now,in is the co-president of the Palestinian Student Union

and the co-founder of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition,

uniting over a hundred student organizations.

He is both a passionate activist grounded in his identity and a bridge

builder. He has worked closely with opposing voices from the Israeli Jewish community to find

compromise and cooperative solutions. Today on the show, Mosin shares his story of growing up in the Al-Fara refugee

camp near Janine in the West Bank. We hear about the conditions of his upbringing and the many

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