Welcome to the Commian podcast. My name is Jeff Krasno.

Okay, before I set the context for today's episode, let me start by just saying that this

conversation was among the most emotionally salient I've ever moderated here on the podcast.

So today's episode is the fourth and final installment of the four-part series of conversations

from the Peace Initiative for Israel-Palestine that I hosted at Commune-Tupanga.

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 in this series in the introduction

to episode one in which I interview my mother, Professor Jean Krasno. In fact, the genesis

of the summit and this podcast series was rooted in her classroom at Columbia University.

She taught a class in the spring semester titled

Peacekeeping and Negotiation. In her class, there were prominent voices from both the

Palestinian and Israeli communities on campus, including today's guests, Mosen Madawi, and Aharan

Dyrdik. So Mosen is the co-president of the Palestinian Student Union

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

He grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank.

Aharon is the founder of Jews for ceasefire at Columbia University, and he grew up in a settlement in

the West Bank near Hebron. Episodes two and three of this series feature my interviews with

...