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ABE WON’T BE SILENT - I’m proud to announce a new initiative I’m involved with called PEACED OFF! — a film and conversation series between Israelis and Palestinians, born out of frustration, heartbreak, and a genuine desire to forge a peaceful way forward.
The mission is simple yet vital: to promote honest dialogue, move beyond polarization, and build common ground—one story at a time. The hope is that one day, we’ll all get “peaced off” enough to actually achieve peace in the region. Ohmmmmmmm!!!
Creating this digital table where people can come together — to break bread, or in this case, to form unexpected human connection — has been incredibly satisfying.
Episode 1: The Path Forward
In our debut episode, I’m joined by my brilliant co-host Orly Ravid. Together, we sit down with two powerful voices behind the new film The Path Forward:
- Mo Husseini, Palestinian American peace activist and co-producer of The Path Forward
- Julie Ruth Cohen, Emmy- and Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker and director of the film
When you hear people talking from the heart, it really resonates.
Mo Husseini:
“There's a lot more common ground than we are led to believe by the culture writ large. I think — from a news media perspective, it is deeply boring to bring on rational people who want to look at the issues and have a rational discussion. It is a lot more interesting to bring, you know, some lunatic right wing Jewish supremacists and some lunatic right wing, or a fundamentalist Muslim and put them on television and have them yell at each other. And what happens when you see that as a, ‘normal’ in air quotes, person is you throw your hands up and you go like, these people are crazy.”
Julie Ruth Cohen:
“We're out there on kind of, desperate, I would say personal search for voices of, sanity, I think, on the Palestine - Israel issue. And what interestingly, we both found is that when you look for them, you will find them, like, they're there. They might not be the main voices that one is hearing, in the mainstream media or God forbid, social media, or even like truthfully, like in, I would say, my own personal circles, there's a lot of flailing, unhelpful noise and, the way that we chose from among the quite ample supply of voices where we kind of made a decision pretty early on that we wanted to do this in pairs, that the most useful conversations about this seemed to be dialogues between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.”
Mo Husseini:
“When people ask me, like, what my dream is, you know, I always say, like, what I wish for Israelis and Palestinians is a boring peace. You know, the kind of peace where your worries are, prosaic. ‘Did I pick up, you know, did I pick up the dry cleaning?’ You know, when do I have to be at the ball game? Like those kinds of mundane, normal concerns. I want those to be the concerns that Israelis and Palestine have.”
The Power of Listening
PEACED OFF! is presented by The Film Collaborative, a nonprofit platform dedicated to exploring meaningful stories through podcasts, independent films, and dialogue rooted in empathy, truth, and shared humanity. I’m producing this series with the intention of creating space — not for debate, but for reflection, recognition, and sometimes even healing.
This is not easy work. But it feels essential — especially in today’s media climate, where rational, nuanced conversation can feel like an endangered species.
We’re not promising solutions. We’re offering connection. In a time when fear and fury dominate headlines, PEACED OFF! dares to ask what happens when we really listen.
Because maybe, just maybe, peace begins with getting “peaced off” enough to change the story.
Here is Episode 1:
(ABE GURKO is the executive producer of a documentary “LOUDER: The Soundtrack of Change,” about the extraordinary Women of Protest Music streaming on MAX. He's an Opinionator who hosts a podcast, "Won't Be Silent," engaging in conversations from the edge of democracy. Abe is a contributor to CityWatchLA.com. [email protected].)
