Israeli and Palestinian activists meet with Lula and call for peace.

Opera Mundi - Palestinian Nabeel Sweety is 48 years old. At 27, he lost his older sister, Siham, who was murdered by the Israeli army while shopping at a market in the city of Ramallah in 1994. That same year, Israeli Yitzhak Frankenthal, now 63, had his firstborn son, Arik, kidnapped and killed by members of the Palestinian group Hamas.

Since the year they faced the devastating loss of close relatives in the emblematic conflict, both have made a commitment to peace and campaign together for an end to the Israeli occupation and the creation of a Palestinian national state. "We don't think about revenge, but about dialogue," they repeat.

Sweety and Frankenthal were in São Paulo this week, where they participated in a meeting with former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On Tuesday (April 28), they held a round of talks with members of Brazilian civil society — including representatives of the Jewish and Muslim religions in Brazil — and discussed alternatives for resolving the conflict in the Middle East.

Letter to Rabin

"I realized I lost my son simply because there was no peace," says Frankenthal, an Orthodox Jewish Zionist. After Arik's death, he decided to abandon his business ventures in Israel and fully commit to peace activism. In 2005, he founded an institute that bears the name of his son, a victim of the conflict.

In 1994, when Arik was assassinated by Hamas, Frankenthal sent a letter to the then Prime Minister of the country, Yitzhak Rabin. He did not call for violence against the Palestinians nor did he criticize the Prime Minister for establishing dialogue with the Arabs—the previous year, Rabin had been involved in the historic handshake with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, for which he would receive both the Nobel Peace Prize and a fatal shot from an ultranationalist Israeli who opposed the talks.

In his letter to Rabin, Frankenthal called for an end to the illegal occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state. The Prime Minister was moved by the unprecedented nature of the speech from someone whose loss of a son seemed to signify a natural aversion to any kind of dialogue. "Rabin came to visit us. And then he invited us to Oslo [the Norwegian capital where talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian National Authority began]," Frankenthal recounts. "It was there that I met Arafat. After that, we met dozens of times," he says. Thus began his journey as a pacifist and activist.

Daily harassment

Nabeel Sweety's story is similar. Years of daily harassment by Israeli forces culminated in June 1994, when soldiers entered a market in Ramallah "irresponsibly firing at the crowd at point-blank range."

"I realized that avenging my sister's death wouldn't bring her back to life. It would only cause more bloodshed," says Sweety. The Palestinian says he seeks to "promote reconciliation and peace" because it's the only way to end the occupation, which, in addition to fraternal grief, forced him and his family to move several times because they couldn't bear the harassment from security forces and the unequal treatment from public institutions—social security, medical care, and education, for example.

Now, he "focuses all his energy" on maintaining dialogue, and works at the same Arik Institute for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, which is named after the son of his Israeli colleague.