Making a Way Out of No Way

The Incredible Story of the Middle East PeacePlayers

There aren’t any words that can fully do justice to how proud and inspired I am by how the young Palestinians and Israelis of PeacePlayers have weathered over 500 days of war and massive cuts to funding, to somehow, against all hope, continue to find creative ways of making peace with each other.

All of us can, and need to, learn from them.

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Hooping With the Enemy

I met the incredible people of PeacePlayers twenty years ago as part of a story I was doing for ESPN on sports and peacemaking, called Hooping With the Enemy (back then they were called Playing for Peace).

I had no idea that trip would change my life.

PeacePlayers was founded in 2001 by Brendan and Sean Tuohey, two brothers from Washington, DC. They were former college basketball players who had a crazy idea: kids who learned to play together could learn to live together. The Tuoheys’ goal for the organization was to bridge divides, develop leaders, and change perceptions in divided communities through the game of basketball.

In the Middle East, things were especially challenging. While all four of the countries PeacePlayers worked in had divided communities, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the only conflict that was still hot.

In the Middle East, people not only saw each other as objects, they saw each other as dangerous. Every encounter was a potential life threatening exchange.

Getting people to give up a sense of security to play basketball is a challenge in the beginning. Parents are resistant. Communities look on in suspicion. The kids are nervous about interacting with the other side. And besides all that, most of the young participants can’t even dribble a basketball. Wars, terrorism, political shifts, and unrest are constantly threatening the process. PeacePlayers is forging something new, something impossible, in the least fertile soil in the world. Every time community conflicts flare, parents pull their kids out of the program, coaches get angry, and those harrowing, exhausting two steps up the mountain feel like three stumbling steps back. In short, it is physically and emotionally exhausting work that rarely, if ever, says thank you in return.

Watching young and old Israelis and Palestinians try to carve out a future together was inspiring. There were so many reasons to choose hate. Instead they were choosing love.

I was especially touched by a young Palestinian coach named Ahmed (I changed his name at his request to protect his family). The first time I met Ahmed, in 2006, just six months after the start of PPI in the Middle East, he expressed his doubts about the larger goals of PeacePlayers.

Ahmed resembles Yul Brenner in the Ten Commandments. He can be a little stoic and brooding when you first meet him. For the first few days I was with Ahmed, he said very little, but one night, as the topic of discussion moved to middle eastern food, he opened up.

Ahmed told me that Israelis had stolen most of Palestinian food and labeled it Israeli food. Things like hummus and falafel were developed by Arabs but have been co-opted by Israelis.

“If you go into an Israeli restaurant and taste good hummus, go back and check in the kitchen,” he said with a smile. “I promise you you’ll find a Palestinian in the back.”

As we drove through the streets of Jerusalem, Ahmed started pointing out buildings with Arabic script from the Quran chiseled into the door. All of these building Ahmed pointed out were built by Muslims. This area of West Jerusalem all used to be Palestinian.

His family and friends all lived in the area until the war of 1967. Then they were pushed out. Israelis moved into their homes. They weren’t given compensation. Ahmed’s family was lucky. They live in the one Arab enclave on this part of town. Many other Palestinians fled to refugee camps. Almost 50 years later, many of them are still living there today.

Now his village is surrounded on every side by Israeli towns. A recent highway, built for Israeli settlers, cut his village in half. Some Israelis are pushing for the Palestinians to move somewhere else. He doesn’t want to move. No one does. But he also thinks it’s inevitable.

“What Israel wants it takes,” he told me grimly.

So when it came to PeacePlayers, he didn’t have the most altruistic motives.

“When I was a child,” Ahmed said. “I loved basketball but didn’t have anyone to teach me or a place to play. I finally learned when I was 16. When I was 17, I played my first game against Israelis. It was a massacre.”

The Israelis have an amazing basketball infrastructure and hundreds of club teams throughout the country. Ahmed’s team was destroyed by 40 points.

“I was humiliated and said I’d find a way to give Palestinian kids a chance to develop the same way Israeli kids did,” Ahmed said.

When PeacePlayers came looking for coaches, Ahmed was ready. He saw a well funded program who could give his team resources like shoes and a real basketball court to play on. He volunteered despite the potential ramifications he faced.

On the court, his passion and dedication were evident. His two hour practices often stretched to three, sometimes four hours, until the sun went down. His players huddled around him like chicks to the mother hen. Every word he spoke was met with rapt attention – no small feat for a group of 11 and 12 year olds.

While his dedication to the basketball program was unwavering, Ahmed was less enthusiastic about the other goals of PeacePlayers.

“I don’t know if I believe in peace,” he said to me in 2006. “I appreciate what they are trying to do, but I don’t know. There is too much suffering. Too much hate. How can we love a people who are trying to destroy us? Everything here is a reminder of what we had and what was taken from us. I just want my kids to become good players. I know we have to live with them and maybe this is the first step. But peace … I don’t know.”

Ahmed’s sentiment was shared by numerous coaches on both sides. Getting a staff that was both competent in teaching basketball and in teaching peace was especially challenging. As it turns out, many of the best basketball coaches were turned off by the peace aspect of PeacePlayers.

Basketball? Yes.

Peace? Probably not.

And many of the best peace facilitators were turned off by the basketball aspect.

Peace? Yes.

Basketball? Probably not.

Peace work like this is largely frowned in Palestinian communities as well. When PeacePlayers decided to expand the program beyond boys to girls, the animosity deepened. At times, Ahmed and his family, along with the Palestinian kids in the program were ridiculed and even threatened both by Israelis and by other Palestinians.

As I left for my flight home, Ahmed was standing in the shadows. We said goodbye, and he made one final request. "Do me a favor," he said. "Don't write what I told you. I said I don't believe in peace. Maybe I do now. I see this tonight.

"Maybe it is not too late for us."

I was so deeply touched by the change in this man in the space of two weeks that I made him a promise back.

“If you are going to do this, I am going to do it with you.”

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The Long-Short Way of Peace

Said Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah:

“Once a child got the better of me.
I was traveling, and I met with a child at a crossroads. I asked him,
‘which way to the city?’ and he answered: ‘This way is short and
long, and this way is long and short.’

“I took the ‘short and long’ way. I soon reached the city but found
my approach obstructed by gardens and orchards. So I retraced my
steps and said to the child: ‘My son, did you not tell me that this is
the short way?’

“Answered the child: ‘Did I not tell you that it is also long?’”
—ERUVIN 53b

I’ve visited the program more than sixty times over the past twenty years. I have attended workshops with the coaches and staff, played basketball with the kids, and been inspired by this small band of peace pioneers who put aside careers, family, and friends to make a difference in their communities.

As the program grew Ahmed, the coaches, the kids and parents who supported the program, quietly realized that they’d be seen as threats.

Wars, terrorism, political shifts and unrest were constantly threatening the process. PeacePlayers was forging something new, something impossible, in the least fertile soil in the world. Every time the conflict flared, parents would pull their kids out of the program, coaches would become angered, and those harrowing, exhausting two steps up the mountain would, in a heartbeat, be three stumbling steps back.

In the midst of such an endeavor, it’s easy to lose the forest among the trees. We may feel as if progress isn’t being made or that our efforts are only a drop of water in a vast sea.

How can any one person or group of people make peace when the odds and obstacles are stacked so heavily against them? Nine years into the project, the answer to that question came into sharper focus in Jerusalem.

In April 2014, the PeacePlayers Under-18 All-Stars team—the only mixed Israeli and Palestinian girls basketball team in Israel at the time—made it to the Israeli National League Championship game versus Elitzur Yavne. The fact that these young women, many of whom had never seen a basketball before they started PeacePlayers, were even competing in the league was extraordinary.

The game was extraordinarily tight. Elitzur Yavne hit a shot with seven seconds left in the game to put them up by one point. The PeacePlayers team rushed down the court and with two seconds left, a young Israeli girl named Toot hit the game-winning shot.

As the girls fell into a mass huddle of celebration, their parents joined in, then the PeacePlayers staff. There were no more Israelis or Palestinians—just friends, teammates, joined together as one. It took nine years, but it was impossible to ignore the work of PeacePlayers anymore.

As impressive as their work was on the court, what they did the next few days off the court was even more amazing. The next morning, those same girls all shuffled into a small classroom in a local hotel for facilitator training in conjunction with the Arbinger Institute. The curriculum uses short lessons, games, and basketball to teach participants about the power of seeing people as people.

The girls were participating in a program for PeacePlayers called the Leadership Development Program (LDP). The LDP’s purpose is directly tied to sustainable growth for the PeacePlayers team members. The idea is that after four to six years in the organization as a player, members of the LDP graduate from players to assistant coaches and then to coaches. They were learning how to teach the younger participants in the program the same curriculum they themselves had learned over all those years.

These young women spoke eloquently about how relationships both at home and with people on the other side had changed. When they stood up to teach, they spoke with the conviction of someone who had tried, failed, and then tried again to live their lives a different way.

Their change is key to becoming the leaders PeacePlayers envisioned.

Said one of the Israeli participants,

“I learned the importance of sharing a personal story during every session that will both humble us in front of the kids and humanize us to them. If the kids see that I have viewed people as objects just as they have, then they can feel more comfortable and open to believing the ideas I am teaching.

“We are [now] the leaders for the kids. The kids want to be like us, so we make a great example for them. The kids trust us, so when we explain to them the peace curriculum, it makes a strong impact on them.”

In that moment, everyone captured a joint vision of how PeacePlayers could grow, and all LDP members left determined to make an impact on the places that they lived. They didn’t have to wait long for the opportunity to use everything they had learned.

Several years later, many of the same girls came back to Stamford, Connecticut, and were asked to speak to the same congregation, only this time in the synagogue during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement—the holiest day of the year.

The synagogue was full. I’ll never forget the closing words from Jasmine, one of PeacePlayer’s oldest LDP members:

“I know many of you are skeptical of what you have heard today. But I want you to consider me for a second. Here I am, a Muslim, Palestinian woman who grew up hating Jews, standing in your holy place, on your Day of Atonement, the church of my enemies, telling you that I love you. That I forgive you. That we can have peace. If that doesn’t make you believe, I don’t know what will.”

After she was finished, members of the congregation, many with tears in their eyes, flocked to the girls to embrace them and thank them. Several told me it was the most powerful Yom Kippur sermon of their lives.

The power of PeacePlayers is its long-term investment in people who are willing to do the work of peace. Many of the young people that started working with the organization when they were 10 or 12 years old, are still working with them 15 years later. PeacePlayers has helped them get professional coaching training, job skills, language acquisition, and in a few cases, thanks to generous donors, has paid for the university education.

As those young people graduate out of the program at 18, many of them stay on to coach teams, be mentors to the younger generation, and in a few cases, are now the leaders of the organization.

Where many peace organizations focus on short experiences where people can meet the other side, PeacePlayers is engaged in decades-long thinking about how to build a more sustainable future in the region.

They are practicing the long-short way.

But how would that investment hold up in the midst of the worst war in the region in decades.

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The Winds of War and the Roots of Peace

Five years later, PeacePlayers faced the biggest test of their organization — October 7th and the resulting War in Gaza.

Roughly 1200 people were killed (many of them at a peace music festival), and several hundred more kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th. Israel responded with a mass invasion and attack on Gaza. Since the start of the war, over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been reported as killed, over half of them women and children, and more than 110,000 Palestinians have been injured. More than a million people have been displaced from their homes.

In such a hostile environment, you would expect the hurricane force winds of war to topple the small peace movement happening there.

For many organizations, that’s exactly what did happen. Israeli and Palestinian participants and leaders walked away — some of them even took up arms. The lines that were crossed were too much for them to bear.

My early conversations with PeacePlayers after October 7th were focused on the safety of our participants and not wanting to do any harm. PeacePlayers, like most organizations in the region, stopped work and tried to focus on providing emotional support to the families they worked with.

But then something amazing happened. Several weeks after the attacks, the mothers of the children in the program began calling, asking for the program to re-start.

When they were told about the safety concerns, they offered to guard the gyms and protect their children. As one Israeli mother said, “We cannot afford to wait while our children are learning more and more hate. They need to be playing together again.”

PeacePlayers initially thought only a few families would return, but after several months, 95 percent of the families were back. A year later, PeacePlayers had more participants than they had before the war. Somehow, impossibly, the movement had grown in the harshest of conditions.

How do they do it?

Margaret Wheatley offers a wonderful illustration of what I think is happening.

I recently heard from my son’s fifth grade teacher that the largest living organism on the planet lives in Utah, where we now live. My son got excited and thought it was a Big Foot, but it’s not. It is a grove of aspen trees that covers thousands of acres. When we look at them we think, “Oh, look at all the trees.” When botanists looked underground, they said, “Oh, look at this system, it’s all one. This is one organism.” You see, when aspen trees propagate, they don’t send out seeds or cones, they send out runners, and a runner runs for the light , and we say “Aha! There’s another tree...” until we look underground, and we see that it is all one vast connection.

Aspens are among the oldest trees in the world. They are incredibly difficult to uproot and kill. PeacePlayers is growing Aspens in the desert. The roots PeacePlayers are nurturing run deep and are interconnected in ways that aren’t easy to break. When the winds come, trees and people with shallower, disconnected roots blow over.

Craig Gilliam, one of my mentors and an incredible mediator and peacebuilder, was the firs to share this analogy with me. He writes in his excellent book, Where Angels Dare to Dance,

People and organizations are like those acres of aspen trees. On the surface, the persons and issues look like separate entities, but if we go deeper, we will see that, like those trees, they have a deep connection; thus, what affects one, affects all. Pragmatically, this means that we cannot deal with one part or one person without considering the effects our actions will have on the whole. And conversely, we cannot consider the whole without being mindful of the effect on the multiple, interrelated parts. Parts and people make sense only in the context of the system of which they are a constituent element.

If we want to create peace in the communities we live that are being torn apart by polarization, this is the way.

I visited PeacePlayers again in February to see for myself what was happening. What I saw was both inspiring and heartbreaking.

I ran an overnight retreat with the next generation of PeacePlayers — their first one since the war had begun. The participants and the coaches spoke about the hardships they’ve endured, the fear and frustration they’ve felt, difficult encounters they’ve had with each other, and the hope and pride that they felt that somehow, they’ve endured all of it.

And they talked about a new challenge — the loss of funding from USAID thanks to an executive order from President Trump, pausing and/or ending USAID funding for all programs — which represented roughly 50 percent of their budget.

They had survived a year and a half of war somehow. Can they also survive a massive reduction in funding to the cause of peace?

My heart broke as coaches and staff quietly raised fears about what would happen to them and the kids in the program without support. I, along with others, began trying to find new donors to the program.

This week I’m writing from Washington D.C. where I have spent the last few days in fundraising meeting and retreats with a select group of participants. They are telling their stories directly to funders in hopes that those who still believe in peace, might open up their hearts and their wallets to what I believe is one of the most successful and significant peacebuilding organizations in the world.

So many would say what is happening with PeacePlayers was impossible. Here are people who should hate each other, who have every reason to fight, holding hands, dancing, speaking out, and dedicating their lives to the cause of seeing others as people.

It’s taken two decades, but something is happening in the Middle East that has the potential to fundamentally change the culture on the ground.

The world needs more peacebuilders. The world needs more people willing to dedicate their lives to waymaking — making a way out of no way. The world needs YOU more than ever. Want to join the movement? Here are some great ways to get involved in being a PeacePlayers.