Ali Abu Awwad and Robi Damelin on Nonviolence as The Path to Freedom for Palestinians and Israelis

Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. So before we jump into the podcast today, I wanna give you a little bit of context about kind of what's going on and what we're doing. I came back from the holiday. I took a couple of extra weeks. Many of you know that my mom passed away on Christmas day after a long and awful dementia journey. And I've also been off social for, I think, maybe a year. So I came back, got back on social, and plan to release kind of new podcast with unlocking us and dare to lead this spring. One of the things that happened when I got back on social is a collision of me wanting to address what's happening in Israel and Palestine and a call for me to do that, and a really reasonable call because I share my beliefs and thoughts about these kind of issues all the time, both globally and domestically. So I think it was a really reasonable question about where's your voice on this. So I wrote a piece and I posted on the website, and the reactions were swift. And there were some people that were supportive and thank you, and there were a lot of people who ago. And so I've spent the last this was probably a week and a day ago, maybe eight or nine days ago. We left comments open for a week. I just wanna say for the people who commented on the website, we did not leave social media open. We just did the website because we have a new platform on the website. The comments were smart, exacting, challenging, critical, impassioned, painful. And so I've spent the last eight or nine days reading every single comment, talking, and probably more importantly, talking directly with friends whose opinions are completely different than mine and people who challenge me in big ways. And a lot of learning, a lot of unlearning, and a lot of clarity about what I actually do believe and what I don't believe. And so I asked our new podcast partners at Vox if we could hold on the new podcast launch and if they would be willing to let me do three podcasts on these issues, commercial free, no monetization, no revenue tied to them. And they said, absolutely. This is important. Do it. And so in addition to a follow-up essay on brenebrown.com, I'm releasing three podcasts, one today, one tomorrow, and one Friday. And I'm gonna talk to activists on the ground in Israel and Palestine. I'm going to talk to Jewish Israeli activists, Palestinian Israeli activists, and I had an amazing conversation with a Middle East analyst who studies Palestine and mostly really looks at US involvement in not only failed attempts at peace brokering, but US involvement with Israel and Palestine. And so I have learned a ton, and I'm continuing to learn. And I I wanna give you the …