As the world woke up to the horrors of Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel on October 7th, deep divisions were cemented and sown. I watched as the tit-for-tat rhetoric of ‘if you’re not with us you’re against us’ took over our airwaves and timelines; and then as these same divisions played out in families, communities, in classrooms and workplaces.

Nuance, complexity, and the holding of two perspectives concurrently were lost in this polarisation of opinion. And because cruelty and excessive butchery can destroy the possibility of compassion, for many it soon became almost impossible to empathize with both sides at the same time. Dialogue was an instant casualty of this binary narrative, while Rumi’s field ‘beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing’ became unreachable terrain.

Like others working for peace and reconciliation I felt heartbroken and powerless. At first, I didn’t know how to respond as my social media timelines hardened into black and white thinking. I felt my heart constantly wrenched in both directions. Even some of those who had been peace advocates took positions with one Anglican vicar stating categorically that this was not the time to think of both sides.

Julie Siddiqi, the founder of Together We Thrive, a platform for Muslim women was like me confused about speaking into this space. She told me she was receiving a lot of criticism for not using the words Ceasefire, Genocide or Holocaust. “I have had close friends turn on me in ways I was not expecting nor properly prepared for,” she said. In this gulf of pain the Palestinian story became one of numbers rather than people, while many Israelis felt their trauma was being met with a deafening silence. When I reached out to the Israeli film-maker, Yulie Cohen, to say I was thinking of her she replied: “Your email is very meaningful for me; many people whom I know and know me well through the years and my films didn’t write a word and it says it all.”

And so when The Forgiveness Project was invited to join the Together for Humanity vigil – a coalition of political, faith and community leaders aiming to combat extremism and bring people together – for many of us who had been looking for another way it felt like finally we had found space to breathe. Politicians from all three main parties spoke alongside faith leaders from Islam, Judaism and Christianity, plus a Palestinian and an Israeli whose lives had been torn apart by the present conflict. As founder of The Forgiveness Project and also representing our storyteller, Jo Berry’s organisation Building Bridges for Peace I was invited on to the stage to light a lantern for peace. There were no flags, no banners and no slogans.

Later that evening I facilitated a discussion between two members of the joint Israeli/Palestinian peace organisation The Parents Circle. Robi Damelin had come to London from Israel and Mohamed Abu Jafar spoke on a screen in the West Bank. Here was an Israeli mother who had lost her son to this intractable conflict and a Palestinian man whose 14-year-old brother had been shot by an Israeli soldier manning a tank – both were uniquely qualified to talk about grief and conflict in the context of holding onto our shared humanity.

“I beg you not to take sides,” Robi said, “because your opinions are importing our conflict into your country and creating hate between Jews and Muslims. It doesn’t help us.” She wasn’t saying don’t protest, she was just saying do it with less righteous anger, and demand an end to violence and the occupation with an emphasis on peace and inclusion. For me the “both sides” argument doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to the inequality between these two sides. It doesn’t mean being neutral. It means recognising that there is pain and trauma in both communities and navigating around this agony. If you don’t acknowledge this, you create a vacuum of silence. From talking to an Aboriginal elder in Australia I know that silence leads to erasure, and erasure is just another a form of oppression. In silence wounds deepen which is why victims always long for acknowledgement of their suffering. Nelson Mandela knew that silence needed to be filled with compassion, declaring during a visit to the Aboriginal people that, “Leaving wounds unattended leads to them festering, and eventually causes greater injury to the body of society.”