Why We Persevere in Arab Lands

On Giving Tuesday, a retrospective on the Center for Peace Communications' struggle for a different future in the Middle East and North Africa.

Grassroots Forces for Peace and Integration Across the Region Need Our Help

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If there is one thing Iran and its Arab militias fear more than the Israeli Air Force, it is the yearning for change shared by millions who suffer under their brutal rule. In Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Gaza, and Iran itself, civilians know first-hand that Tehran’s brand of Islamist domination brings only war, state failure, and poverty. They want a different future, and they want the world to help them forge it.

Iran’s axis of terror wields lethal force against local activists who stand up to its authority — and sadly, Western governments do little to assist these brave people. So the Center for Peace Communications does everything it can to lend them a hand.

In November 2019, we convened leading civic actors from 15 Arab countries to publicly repudiate the boycott of Israel — and those who enforce it — as an obstacle to Arab development, and call for regional integration and partnership. This unprecedented action sparked a sustained, region-wide debate, serving to grow pan-Arab public support for the collective peace treaty which became known, ten months later, as the Abraham Accords.

One year after the Accords were signed, we went to Iraq — and bussed 312 Sunni and Shi’ite activists from Baghdad, Babel, Mosul, Anbar, Diyala, and Salahuddin to a public space in the ancient city of Erbil. In live-streamed speeches viewed across Iran’s axis of repression, these Iraqis defied their warlords to demand that their country join Israel, the UAE, and the other Abraham Accords signatories as partners in peace and development.

While The Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff described the Erbil conference as “perhaps the most significant citizen-inspired, people-to-people act of peacemaking in history,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah saw a threat to his authority. In a televised declaration of war against our effort, Nasrallah told Iraqi militias and their quislings in the Baghdad government to attack and jail the participants — “lest the Erbil conference be followed by more conferences like it.”

In response, we did what was needed to keep everyone safe and free — then seized the moment to advance Western legislation, which we had already proposed in both the U.S. and Europe, to defend Arab civil peacemakers everywhere. In March 2022, President Biden signed the first of our proposed bills into law.

These unusual cycles of cause and effect taught us to persist, and to stay nimble in probing the region’s problems and innovating remedies.

Consider the perverse reality that while powerful Iranian and Qatari propaganda outlets platform Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terror groups to speak on behalf of Arab peoples, their many opponents are not only silenced by local thugs; they’re also erased by Western media. We reasoned that if a creative way could be found to elevate local voices of dissent and do so continually, it could both enrich the global conversation and break the terror media monopoly inside Iran’s “axis.”

That is what led us in January 2023 to create Whispered in Gaza, a 25-part animated docuseries in which Gazans shared heartrending testimony about life under Hamas rule. Released in seven languages and viewed over 20 million times, these short films gave Arabs, Iranians, Americans, and others around the world their first clear window into the reality of Gaza which Hamas and its allies concealed.

Three months after the series’ release, a convocation of Sunni and Shi’ite clerics in Iraq and Pakistan issued a fatwa declaring Hamas illegitimate according to Islamic law, citing the testimony in Whispered in Gaza as proof of how Hamas persecutes a Muslim population. Then, on July 30, 2023, Gazan activists used the series and fatwa as tools of mobilization in waging one of the largest anti-Hamas street demonstrations in Gaza since the terror group seized power.

In pivotal periods of the Cold War, similar campaigns of nonviolent yet hard-nosed civil engagement were an important facet of America’s struggle against Soviet domination. It suffices to recall that one beneficiary of U.S. support was Polish labor activist Lech Walesa, co-founder of the Solidarity trade union, who eventually helped liberate the country. Today, the U.S. Government does not apply such approaches in the Middle East or elsewhere. CPC, an outlier among peace NGOs, believes that it should, together with nongovernment actors in every field.

Imagine if many groups like ours had been working for years, together with like-minded Gazans, to undermine Hamas within the coastal strip. Imagine if the U.S. and other governments backed these efforts. Imagine a world in which the atrocities of October 7, 2023 had never happened.

While imagining this better world, we persevere in the one we live in – most recently, with the production of Hezbollah’s Hostages, the eight-part weekly animated sequel to Whispered in Gaza.

The series provides an immersive experience of life under Hezbollah domination through the actual voices of its brave opponents. It debuted on September 16, one day before pagers exploded in the hands of Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon and Syria. It concluded, eight weeks later, with Hezbollah gravely weakened by Israeli air and ground power and Hasan Nasrallah dead. At a time when much legacy media coverage of Hezbollah-Israel conflict reinforced the group’s self-image as a “resistance” movement, Hezbollah’s Hostages exposed what it actually is: a tyrant in Lebanon, an occupier in Syria, a mafia cartel that traffics in drugs and sex slaves, and the command headquarters of Iran’s imperial project in Arab lands.

Now, a most urgent question facing Lebanese and the world is how to translate Hezbollah’s weakened state into systemic political change.

That is the context in which Hezbollah’s Hostages has been screened publicly in Beirut and Syria, seven times and counting. For the brave activists who organized these events, the series provides an unusually honest portrayal of the pathology that has wrecked their country, as well as an asset to reinforce their case for a different future.

In Lebanon as elsewhere, the Center for Peace Communications will continue to do its utmost to support hope and possibility in the Middle East. We invite those who share this aspiration to support us.

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