Common Ground – Deconstructing Walls: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue

Accountability & Reconciliation

20-21 June 2026

Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien

Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna

Deutsch folgt

The fourth and last event in the series, Accountability & Reconciliation, builds upon the discoveries of the previous three events – Narrative & Recognition, Safety & Freedom and Dialogue & Partnership – and asks the uncomfortable and challenging question what accountability means in practice, how it is pursued, obstructed, or denied, and what conditions would need to be in place for reconciliation between the two peoples to be meaningful rather than premature. 

Through legal analysis, artistic practice, and critical reflection, the event approaches accountability not as a punitive endpoint, but as a necessary foundation for political responsibility, mutual recognition, and a future grounded in equality and the basis of any reconciliation process.

ما تبقّى מָה שֶׁנּוֹתַר Exhibition Opening | What Remains

ما تبقّى מָה שֶׁנּוֹתַר What Remains unfolds as part of the symposium Common Ground – Deconstructing Walls: A Palestinian–Israeli Dialogue / Accountability & Reconciliation. The exhibition brings together photographic and lens-based practices that engage with the traces left by violence, displacement, rupture, and survival.

Rather than offering direct representation, the works inhabit the terrain of aftermath: fragments, absences, residues, and lingering presences. They attend to what persists within spaces, bodies, materials, and landscapes shaped through enduring conditions of violence and dispossession. In doing so, the exhibition considers photography not only as a medium of documentation, but as a site of testimony, memory, and unresolved histories.

Bringing together artists from Palestine, Israel, and other geographies shaped by prolonged violence and processes of reconciliation, What Remains reflects on the tensions between visibility and erasure, silence and witnessing, accountability and denial. The exhibition does not seek closure or resolution. Instead, it opens a space for reflection on how histories continue to inhabit the present, and on the fragile, uncertain conditions through which reconciliation may, or may not, be imagined.

Decolonization from Within | Haya Abu Warda & Maya Yavin, Zochrot

Zochrot is an organization dedicated to exposing and disseminating knowledge about the ongoing Palestinian Nakba and advancing the implementation of the right of return. For over two decades, it has challenged dominant narratives within Jewish-Israeli society, advocating for acknowledgment, accountability, and justice, while opposing the ongoing displacement, dispossession and colonization.

Maya Yavin

Maya is a feminist political activist, rooted in grassroots movements and collective struggle for justice, truth, liberation, and anti-colonial resistance. A graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, she works across filmmaking, political education, and community organizing. As a member and now Director of Zochrot, she is engaged in efforts to confront the ongoing Nakba, challenge and dismantle Zionist and colonial structures of erasure, advance the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and contribute to broader struggles for decolonization, accountability, and a shared future grounded in justice and equality.

Haya Abu Warda

Haya is a human rights activist and former human rights lawyer whose work focuses on the intersection of land, community, and rights. She has spent years representing Palestinian communities in their struggles over access to their land, as well as developing resources and strategic initiatives to support advocacy against occupation and apartheid. Her work examines how systems of control shape relationships to land, belonging, and community, with a focus on how the preservation and development of knowledge, memory, and culture function as forms of resistance and community resilience. Through her work with Zochrot, Haya approaches this space as one of political imagination, a way to envision and build alternative realities, and a necessary foundation for processes of decolonization.

Accountability to Reconciliation in Palestine-Israel: The Role of European Actors in Practice (Panel) | Hannes Swoboda, Pete Hämmerle & Shoura Hashemi

This panel examines accountability as a practical and political tool for reconciliation in Israel–Palestine. It focuses on the role of European and Austrian actors and asks whether accountability is actually pursued in practice. Through policy instruments, advocacy, documentation, and civil society action, it asks how these processes interact with efforts toward political dialogue and conflict transformation.

The discussion is grounded in current realities of asymmetry, ongoing violence, and contested narratives. It explores what different forms of accountability (international legal proceedings, EU-level policy tools, sanctions, human rights reporting, and grassroots initiatives)- can realistically achieve, where they face structural limits, and how they are perceived by different actors

Participants:

Hannes Swoboda - President of the International Institute for Peace: Hannes Swoboda is President of the International Institute for Peace and a former Member of the European Parliament. For many years, he played a leading role in European foreign and neighborhood policy, with a particular focus on the Middle East and international dialogue initiatives. He continues to engage in peacebuilding, diplomacy, and policy discussions on conflict transformation and international cooperation.

Pete Hämmerle -  International Fellowship of reconciliation Internationaler

Versöhnungsbund - IFOR Austria:

Pete Hämmerle is a long-standing peace activist andhas been working with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) Austria, part of one of the world’s oldest interfaith nonviolent organizations. He has been engaged for many years in nonviolent initiatives for conflict transformation (e.g. in Austria, Western Balkan, Israel and Palestine and Colombia), dialogue and peacebuilding initiatives, with a particular focus on fostering understanding across political and societal divides. His work emphasizes nonviolence, reconciliation processes, and the role of civil society in addressing structural violence and protracted conflicts.

Shoura Hashemi -  Amnesty international Austria

Shoura Hashemi is Executive Director of Amnesty International Austria, where she leads the organization’s work on human rights advocacy and public engagement. She has extensive experience addressing issues related to international law, the protection of civilians, and the role of global actors in situations of protracted conflict. Her work focuses on strengthening human rights accountability frameworks and amplifying civil society perspectives in complex political contexts marked by asymmetry and ongoing violence.

Film Screening: There Is Another Way | Combatants for Peace

2025 1h 7m (67 min)

Director Stephen Apkon

In the midst of darkness, we discover who we truly are. There is Another Way tells the story of a group of visionaries who refuse to surrender to violence and injustice, and in doing so show that another path is possible - for them, for us, and for all humanity. As we are all faced with essential questions about who we are, will we choose collective liberation, where the needs, rights, and safety of all are prioritized - in which our humanity comes first, knowing that no one is free until everyone is free.

Combatants for Peace, nominated for two Nobel Peace Prizes, is an extraordinary bi-national group of former enemy combatants - Israelis and Palestinians - working together during an ongoing armed conflict. Faced with the devastation and escalating violence of October 7th and the war in Gaza, the very core of the movement must face great challenges and show that there is another way. The first question they have to face is their own belief…is this possible?

A Talk with Comedian & Activist Noam Shuster Eliassi

Noam Shuster Eliassi is a comedian, activist, and former UN diplomat whose work uses humor to confront difficult political realities and challenge deeply rooted narratives. Raised in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, a mixed Palestinian-Jewish community known as the “Oasis of Peace,” she performs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, bringing sharp wit and personal insight to conversations about identity, inequality, violence, and dispossession. Through her performances, public speaking, and viral satire, Eliassi has become a distinctive voice pushing audiences to face uncomfortable truths with honesty, humor, and humanity.

In her talk at the event, Shuster Eliassi will focus on questions of personal responsibility and individual agency within Israeli Jewish society, and how knowledge, identity, and public narratives are shaped and often fixed over time. Drawing on her work as a creator and performer engaged in both local and international spaces, she explores processes of unlearning and relearning, and the gaps between dominant public discourse and lived realities. The talk will also reflect on the role of prominent cultural and artistic figures in confronting racism, violence, and the willful ignorance and deliberate disregard of Palestinian realities, and what it means to take responsibility and act with integrity in the face of ongoing structural violence and entrenched inequality.

Reconciliation to a New Society in Palestine-Israel: Is It Possible? (Panel) | Elaine van Schalkwyk, Shirley Gunn & Walter Sauer

This panel explores reconciliation not as a symbolic idea or abstract aspiration, but as a long-term political, social, and emotional process shaped by power relations, historical violence, accountability, and collective memory.

Drawing on comparative perspectives, including the South African experience, the discussion examines what conditions would be necessary for meaningful reconciliation to emerge in Palestine–Israel today, and what structural, political, and social obstacles continue to stand in its way.Rather than treating reconciliation as an endpoint, the panel asks what would need to change for it to become a realistic and lived process rather than a purely discursive or distant ideal.

Elaine van Schalkwyk Conflict Management and Resolution

Elaine van Schalkwyk is a South African-born reconciliation and dialogue practitioner based in Vienna. Her work at the UN focuses on conflict management, trust-building, and the social dimensions of reconciliation processes in societies affected by violence and division.

Shirley Gunn Former Director of the South African Coalition for Transitional Justice Originally from Cape Town, she was recruited into the ANC political underground to resist apartheid in 1982, and into the military underground in 1985. (A decade later, she testified to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; after her and her son having been tortured by apartheid security forces in custody.)

She founded the Human Rights Media Centre that promotes awareness and activism through narrative history projects, art, media, education and campaigns for redress and reparations for victims. Gunn also serves as the director of the South African Coalition for Transitional Justice.

Walter Sauer, Univ. Prof. (ret.), is a historian at the University of Vienna specialised in African colonial history and relations between Austria and Africa. He is a Chairperson of the Southern African Documentation and Co-operation Centre, the successor organisation of the Austrian Anti-Apartheid Movement. His last publication is called “Jenseits von Soliman. Afrikanische Migration und Communitybuilding in Österreich – eine Geschichte”.

Building Community Beyond Borders | Combatants for Peace talk Suhair Ghanem & Tamar Alon

Combatants for Peace is a joint Palestinian-Israeli movement committed to nonviolence and to ending systems of occupation and oppression through shared action and public advocacy. The movement works to challenge dominant narratives of separation and fear, and to build political partnership, solidarity, and collective resistance to violence through grassroots organizing and joint initiatives.

Suhair Ghanem

Suhair Ghanem is Palestinian from Bethlehem. She has been part of Combatants for peace for nearly six years and currently serves as Project Manager at CFP’s Beit Jala office, as well as Director of Combatants for peace’ s annual Nakba Remembrance Ceremony. She previously worked in alternative tourism, focusing on raising awareness of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict through fact-finding missions and educational tours in Israel and Palestine. Joining Combatants for peace represents a continuation of her life’s journey and longstanding belief in peace and joint action toward a future of collective liberation, freedom and justice.

Tamar Alon 

Tamar Alon is a social worker and activist currently based in Vienna. As a child, she grew up as part of the bi-national community of Combatants for Peace. After refusing to serve in the Israeli army, for which she spent about six months in jail, she became active in various movements opposing the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide, including Free Jerusalem and RoR. She also lived in Masafer Yatta for four months as part of a protective presence project. For the past five years, she has co-organized the Nakba Remembrance Ceremony of the Combatants for Peace movement.

Music Performance | Marwan  Abado

A celebrated ambassador of oriental music in Austria, Lives in Vienna for over 40 years. Deeply rooted in the classical Arabic tradition of TAQSIM, his music transcends specific rhythms, emanating from inner artistic impulses. Abado's melodies draw strength from his palestinian diaspora roots while engaging in a cross-cultural dialogue with European traditions, resulting in a distinctive cosmopolitan sound.

Marwan will perform at the closing  event of the symposium

Common Ground - Deconstructing Walls is a project by OneState Embassy Art Collective and Standing Together Vienna. Hosted in Cooperation with ÖH.Dok der Akbild, and is funded by SHIFT, a funding program of the City of Vienna for alternative, artistic practices

in decentralized cultural work.

The event will be held in English with German translation.

Deutsch

Accountability & Reconciliation, der vierte und letzte Termin der Symposienreihe baut auf den Erkenntnissen der vorangegangen Symposien – Narrative & Recognition, Safety & Freedom and Dialogue & Partnership  – auf und behandelt die heikle und komplexe Frage, was Verantwortlichkeit in der Praxis bedeutet, wie sie erreicht, verhindert oder verwehrt werden kann und welche Bedingungen eine sinnvolle und zeitgerechte Versöhnung zwischen zwei Völkern erfüllen muss.

Mithilfe von rechtlicher Analysen, Kunst und kritischer Reflexion nähert sich das Symposium dem Thema Verantwortlichkeit nicht als ein repressives Endstadium, sondern als ein notwendiges Gerüst für politische Verantwortung, gegenseitige Anerkennung und eine auf Gleichheit basierende Zukunft, sowie als Grundlage für jeden Versöhnungsprozess.

Key speakers:

Zochrot, Combatants for Peace, Noam Schuster Eliassi, Shirley Gunn, The International Institute for Peace, Internationaler Versöhnungsbund - IFOR , Amnesty International Austria und viele mehr. Musikalische Einlage von Marwan Abado. 

Common Ground - Deconstructing Walls ist ein Projekt des OneState Embassy Art Collectives und Standing Together Vienna.  Ausgerichtet in Kooperation mit ÖH.Dok der Akbild und gefördert durch SHIFT, ein Förderprogramm der Stadt Wien für alternative, künstlerische Praxen dezentraler Kulturarbeit. 

Die Veranstaltung findet auf Englisch mit deutscher Übersetzung statt.