Religion repeatedly plays a role in harboring conversations about human rights and peacebuilding in times of conflict. Examples range from Desmond Tutu’s involvement in human rights and anti-apartheid messaging in South Africa, Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thich Quang Du‘s actions of self-immolation to protest the Vietnam War and the Pope directly intervening by facilitating negotiations between Chile and Argentina to avoid war. Religion proves a vital avenue of interfaith dialogue. 

The Fellowship of Reconciliation is one of the biggest global interfaith organizations. It continuously pushes anti-war messaging and interfaith communication to de-escalate conflict. The organization’s philosophy promotes nonviolent resistance, the rights of conscience resistance in military conscription and dismantling systems of hate.

Although in many conflicts religion either heightens divisions or increases violence through complicity, religious leaders are often overlooked as key players in restorative justice. 

The United States Institute of Peace is a national and independent organization focused on international peacebuilding, global security, preventing new conflicts and mitigating current conflicts through peaceful resolution. USIP’s Religion and Peacekeeping program has served as an important organization that promotes religious peacekeeping around the globe.

Found in the USIP’s various reports, religion is usually an underutilized avenue of peacebuilding, religious leaders can mediate conflicts and serve as a channel of communication, religious leaders can organize their respective communities to oppose repressive measures taken by the government and religious leaders can help build interfaith dialogue to build reformative justice. 

It’s important to note that the war in Gaza should not be viewed solely as a religious conflict, and the propensity to label it that way should be avoided to prevent misinformed narratives. 

David Mivasir, a retired Rabbi, mentioned how important religion is in peacebuilding and how this philosophy has impacted him. Although he is retired, he is very active within the Jewish community and serves on the United States chapter of the Jewish Voices for Peace on the Rabbinic council. 

Mivasir has been invested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation of Gaza since the 1970s. Although he began his political activism as a liberal Zionist — acknowledging a Jewish state shouldn’t disadvantage local Palestinians — his viewpoint was changed through Joe Sauko’s journalistic accounts of the displacement of Palestinians in “Footnotes in Gaza.”

Mivasir grew up in the U.S. and noted that he had learned about the Fellowship of Reconciliation, specifically the Jewish Peace Fellowship, while he was subjected to the draft of the Vietnam War. 

The message from the government, that he was raised to respect and be obedient to, was “completely ready to send me to kill or be killed on the other side of the world.” Millions of his fellow peers were put in the same paradigm, while millions more didn’t think about it as “a process of unquestioned consensus.” He mentioned how important that paradigm was in his formative years when building his consciousness for his current work. 

After the October 7 attack, Mivasir stated he had a “moral responsibility” as a Jew, a Rabbi and a person with a platform to immediately call for a ceasefire. He noted he was the only rabbi in Canada to “say and do the things” he has done, knowing that serving Rabbis would lose their job. 

Mivasir was one of the 300 people arrested on October 18 in Washington DC. He was protesting, with thousands of Jewish Americans, and calling for a ceasefire after ten days of relentless bombings in Gaza. 

“We were very successful in creating clarity and shifting the narrative that lots of Jews oppose — what the big loud voices that claim to speak for the Jews are saying [like] JPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel [and] people who arrogantly claim to speak for the Jews. We made it clear on every media that not all Jews support this. That was extremely effective.”

Mivasir mentions that, at this point, the best way to help is by giving to local humanitarian aid funds which can directly help people in Gaza. He started a GoFundMe and has raised over $100,000 for local families who are trying to escape the active war zone.  

Mivasir pulls from his religious leadership to highlight the importance of religious leaders in peacekeeping conversations. 

“Every religion clearly teaches, that all people are one. I don’t know of a religion that doesn’t teach us. Also, tragically, I think all religions have the opposite element in it. Religious leaders can uplift the universalistic side to it.”  

Religious leaders have a responsibility to pull from the universality of the concepts to bring a united front to end suffering. 

“These days I think of reaching the ideal state of what the world should be asymptotically, and it might not ever get there, but we can get closer and closer and closer, less suffering, less killing, little by little by little we can get there,” Mivasir said.