Kawtar El Alaoui is an award-winning conscious leadership and diversity consultant and best-selling author of Unfolding Peace, 9 Leadership Principles to Create Cultures of Well-Being, Belonging & Peace. Since November 2023, she has been co-creating an experiment in radical empathy with David Rubin Sauvage, a teacher of emotional intelligence and founder of the non-profit Culture of Healing. The experiment, called “How We Make Peace,” is a series of raw, unguarded and embodied conversations between Kawtar, a Muslim Arab, and David, a Jew, about the war in Gaza, where all their feelings are quite literally on display. The effect is to bring healing, in real time, to the pain so many of us are experiencing right now. Kawtar and David are writing a book with all their learnings in a book tentatively titled “How to End War in Two Generations.” They also love sharing their work in front of live audiences, as they have been. You can reach out via Kawtar at Conscious Togetherness.
Sandy Tolan is a professor of journalism at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and author of two books on the tragedy of Palestine and Israel. Children of the Stone, about one Palestinian’s dream to build a music school in the midst of Israel’s military occupation, provides a history of Gaza since 1948. The book was a finalist for the 2015 Los Angeles Times book prize. Sandy is also author of the international bestseller, The Lemon Tree, an acclaimed history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He runs USC’s Specialized Journalism master’s program, helping to train the next generation of critically-thinking journalists. This spring has been writing and speaking extensively on the Israel-Gaza war, and on the crackdown on free speech at US college campuses.