Elik Elhanan

I grew up in Israel in a radical left household. Both my parents were activists, as were my grandparents before them. My mother, Nurit Peled, is a philologist and language professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who studied and denounced the way Palestinians are negatively portrayed in Israeli textbooks. My father, Rami Elhanan, is a peace activist who has called for the end of the occupation of Palestine. As a child, I remember them dragging me to protests and taking me with them to political meetings. This was already pretty rare in the Israeli society I grew up in at the time. 

When I became a teenager, I started rebelling against my parents. I wanted to join the army despite, or probably because of, my parents’ opposition to the military service. I was training hard in the hope that I would be recruited by an elite unit of the Israeli army. When I came of age, I joined the special forces as a paratrooper and served in 1995-1998 in south Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.

On 4 September 1997, my 14-year-old sister Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing carried out by three Palestinians from a village near Nablus in downtown Jerusalem. Four other people were killed and more than 180 were injured. Smadar had gone with a couple of friends to buy schoolbooks for the new school year. She was killed instantly - as was one of her friends - while another one was critically hurt with injuries she still suffers from today.

After this traumatic event for my family, I started asking myself questions that had been too abstract for me so far. “How do I go on living? How do I deal with the pain? What do we do now? What part did I have in this and why couldn't I stop it?” 

Members of my unit told me I should join them in fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon to help me get over the murder of Smadar and “make it even”.

The answer became clear: revenge through military retaliation would not bring back my sister, end my pain, allow me to sleep better or protect other Israelis. It would only create another reason for violence against Israelis. 

In 2002, I decided to join a group of refuseniks and in 2005, I was among the ones who met with a group of former Palestinian fighters who seemed to be wanting the same as I did: to find another way. 

It was not easy at first to talk; we all came with our traumas, our fears and our anger. I was not sure I would make it out of this first meeting alive but by evening’s end, I saw that nobody got arrested or killed, and more importantly, that we had a lot more in common than I thought. We mutually shared our desire for a peaceful solution to the conflict. We created Combatants for Peace because we knew that together, we could convince more people to join us. 

I still believe in what drove me to co-create this movement twenty years ago - that violence leads to more violence. I have never found space for forgiveness for my actions and grief for my loss in Israeli society. My Palestinian friends in Combatants for Peace were the ones who gave me this space.