The Courage of Conscience Speaking Tour and Piecing the Peaces Exhibition, sponsored by September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, the Peace Abbey, and the Rebuilding Alliance, presents Americans with a tangible way to stop the brutality between Israel and Palestine. Our tour begins on Feb 27th in Boston and continues throughout the East Coast until closing in Washington DC on March 27th. Speakers Bassam Aramin and Yaniv Reshef are being awarded the Courage of Conscience Award by the Peace Abbey in Sherborn MA on March 13th. Funds raised on this tour will help Combatants for Peace build the Abir's Garden Playground at the Si'ir Girl's School near Hebron where Abir Aramin's cousins attend school. The Courage of Conscience Speaking Tour detailed schedule is available here.

Combatants for Peace are former Israeli and Palestinian fighters who no longer see each other as enemies. They are a movement numbering over 600 former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters, who now work together without revenge, using nonviolence to build justice, peace - and playgrounds. Aramin lost his ten year old daughter to an Israeli soldier's rubber bullet, Reshef lives in range of Gaza missiles--yet both hold a deep commitment to working with one another, to end the violence and make peace.

"On both sides, we have been made instruments of war. On both sides, there is pain, and grieving, and endless loss."

Yaniv Reshef, 37, is an active member of Combatants for Peace, working with former Palestinian and Israeli combatants in the southern Israel / Hebron area. Mr. Reshef lives in Israel, just 19 km from Gaza in an agricultural community that suffers frequent missile attacks. He believes that Combatants for Peace offer a tangible way for people to stop the brutality - and he helped organized C4P meetings in the neighboring large town of Sderot so that townspeople could hear his Palestinian and Israeli partners first hand. Formerly a foot soldier in a sabotage unit of the

Bassam Aramin, 40, was awarded the 2007 Eliav-Sartawi Award for Middle Eastern Journalism by Search for Common Ground in NY and the Bremen Peace Award, in Germany. Born in a Palestinian village near Hebron, he is a former member of Fatah who served a 7 year prison sentence after being arrested at age 17 for helping to plan an armed attack against Israeli soldiers. As he has written in the Jewish Daily Forward, "But as I served out my sentence, I talked with many of my guards. I learned about the Jewish people's history. I learned about the Holocaust. And eventually I came to understand: On both sides, we have been made instruments of war. On both sides, there is pain, and grieving, and endless loss." Mr. Aramin is married and had 6 children, including his late daughter Abir who was 10 years old when she was killed by an Israeli soldier's rubber coated bullet. The investigation of her death was closed without charges despite 14 eyewitnesses and an independent autopsy. Besides being a founding member of Combatants for Peace, Bassam Aramin heads the Al Quds Association for Democracy and Dialogue in Jerusalem and is a director at the Palestine National Archives in Ramallah. He has been accepted into the Masters of Peace Studies Program at Bradford University in England and looks forward to moving his family to Bradford this summer to pursue their studies in English.