On October 5th, 2023, I hopped on a bus from Jerusalem to Ramallah to interview peace activist Sulaiman (Souli) Khatib. I stared out the window as we passed the separation wall covered in murals and graffiti, as the shop signs gradually changed from Hebrew to Arabic, the license plates from the Israeli orange and black to the Palestinian green and white. I was going to talk with Souli about a series of ayahuasca circles he had joined in Spain the year before, organized by Palestinian peace activist Sami Awad; Armelle Lehman, an Israeli therapist; and Leor Roseman, an Israeli British neuropsychologist and psychedelic researcher. At the time, I wanted to know: What were a group of Palestinians and Israelis doing taking ayahuasca together? And more generally, could psychedelics actually contribute in some way to forging peace in Israel|Palestine?
I had been interested in the role of trauma and the potential of psychedelic healing in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years at that point. In 2018, I wrote a feature for Playboy Magazine in which I interviewed Antwan Saca, a peace activist in Bethlehem, on the topic. (Saca, it turns out, would later become part of the ayahuasca circle in Spain as well.) A few years later, I wrote a story for DoubleBlind Magazine on interviews that Leor Roseman had conducted with Israelis and Palestinains about their experiences in joint underground ayahuasca ceremonies—research that led to his work with Awad and Lehman in Spain.
What were a group of Palestinians and Israelis doing taking ayahuasca together? And more generally, could psychedelics actually contribute in some way to forging peace in Israel| Palestine?
Needless to say, the story I had initially set out to write on October 5th of last year lands differently now. Two days after my visit to Ramallah, Hamas launched an attack on Israelis near the Gaza border, killing twelve hundred people and taking over two hundred hostage. The Israeli military assault on Gaza that followed has destroyed most of the Gaza Strip, with the death toll now surpassing forty thousand, and counting. In the West Bank, vigilante settlers have stepped up their harassment of local Palestinians, while there continue to be rogue attacks on Israeli citizens in the settlements, as well as in places like Tel Aviv. In Israel, at the time of my writing, there have been missiles fired from Gaza, a constant barrage of rockets from Hezbollah in the north, an Iranian drone and ballistic missile attack, various attacks by the Houthi militia in Yemen, and, most recently, the military escalation in Lebanon. The war has reopened old wounds, triggering deeply rooted intergenerational traumas and perpetuating cycles of death, destruction, and existential fear. A deal between Israel and Hamas for a ceasefire and hostage exchange keeps being delayed, while thousands of Israelis protest in the streets in its favor. Suffice it to say, the air is thick with hopelessness and rage.
Still, part of me remains intrigued by the initial, admittedly naive, questions I had asked when I began reporting this story, much before October 7th. While politicians flail, people die, and regional tensions boil, maybe there is still room, even a need, for unorthodox approaches to this seemingly intractable situation. And yet, I constantly think to myself, It doesn’t have to be this way. Grasping at any glimmer of hope feels like a radical perspective, but maybe that’s an important part of the much-needed microdose of encouragement and imagination that this spiral of violence and injustice calls for. As I spoke with participants and organizers from the ayahuasca circles in Spain—both before and after October 7th—I began to feel more and more that hope itself is a radical act against the inertia of hatred, fear, and despair.
In the spring of 2022, Leor Roseman, Sami Awad, and Armelle Lehman gathered three dozen Israelis and Palestinians to sit in a series of ayahuasca ceremonies together, spread out over almost two months in Extremadura, Spain. The project brought together activists, artists, and social changemakers to address the trauma of the past for the sake of the future, Sami told me when I spoke to him in the summer of 2023. The participants included fifteen Jewish Israelis and eighteen Palestinians (ten from the West Bank, seven from Israel, and one from abroad).
One of the conditions for participation was previous experience with ayahuasca. When it came to Jewish participants, this was not difficult to find. Psychedelics have become widely accepted in Israeli Jewish society, among religious and secular communities alike. Leor posits that this stems from the ’90s psytrance scene in Israel, as well as from the fact that Israelis travel a lot (especially after their obligatory army service) to India and South America, where the ritual use of psychoactive plants is part of longstanding cultural traditions. Of course, such freedom of travel and movement is far less available to many Palestinians in the West Bank, and particularly in Gaza.
Anecdotally, I have heard that psychedelic use is somewhat rarer among Palestinians than their Israeli counterparts. One Palestinian participant that I spoke with said that “an atmosphere of rejection” surrounds psychedelics in mainstream Palestinian society—in part, they said, because psychedelics aren’t considered halal, and also because “there’s a political background” to psychedelics that fosters wariness. As they explained, “In the ’80s and ’90s, the narrative the community would tell you [was] ‘Don’t fall for psychedelics; Israeli intelligence will use that against you.’” They had heard of cases in which drugs were used as a tool to coerce queer Palestinians under threat of exposure (which could be life-threatening) to cooperate with Israeli forces. “In the new generation, the question of psychedelics in therapy has more acceptance,” they said, “but it’s not in public discourse and is underground completely.”
In Spain, the Israeli-Palestinian group was split into three cohorts who sat together in ceremony over the course of nine days, drinking ayahuasca, singing, and praying together, inspired by the Amazonian tradition followed by most ayahuasca circles. For each cohort, the program was divided into two parts: the first four days dealing with the past, the second four dealing with the future. The intentions going into ceremony—a total of two nights—weren’t only about the collective Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also about other relevant topics, such as gender issues in both Israeli and Palestinian societies, and personal issues of individual participants. A few months later, they all reconvened for a series of group integration sessions in the West Bank.1
In the wake of the first anniversary of October 7th and the outbreak of war in Gaza, my original questions feel even more far-fetched—and even more fraught. We know that psychedelics are not a political panacea; they have been embraced by racists, fascists, and antisemites as well as mystics and peaceniks. The idea of a select few Israelis and Palestinians drinking ayahuasca together might feel profound to some, but what’s the actual impact in a bloodstained region imploding on itself in real time? I first spoke to several participants from these ayahuasca circles before October 7th, and then in the months following, I reconnected with them to hear their thoughts and reflections in light of this ongoing tragedy.
One point made over and over again by Israeli and Palestinian participants alike pertained to the role of trauma (both inherited and experienced) in perpetuating the distrust and anger driving the conflict. Sami Awad, one of the organizers of the Israeli-Palestinian ayahuasca circle, spoke about this at length. “To understand how trauma motivates people is a quest for spirituality—it’s a prayer,” Sami told me in an interview in July 2023, during a summertime visit to New York, following the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, where he and Leor debuted their presentation on this project.2 He described how the protests at Standing Rock in 2016, where Indigenous people blended ceremony and political activism, inspired him. “You can be engaged in resisting occupation, but from a place of love, compassion, and understanding, even to those who are my ‘enemy,’” he said.
“To understand how trauma motivates people is a quest for spirituality—it’s a prayer.”
Sami comes from a Christian family that lived in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem until the founding of the State of Israel. His grandfather was killed in 1948, during a war known to Israelis as the War of Independence, and to Palestinians as the Nakba—“the Catastrophe.” Sami’s grandfather was buried in the courtyard of his home by his wife and children. “A few days later, they were removed by Jewish forces who took over the neighborhood,” he recounts. “Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived as neighbors in this land, but that story has been taken out. Still, my grandmother was always committed to peace, always taught us as a family that we should never seek revenge and retaliation.”
From a young age, Sami has been influenced by his uncle Mubarak Awad, who opened the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in the early ’80s in Jerusalem. Sami formed his own peace organization in 1998, the Holy Land Trust, based in Bethlehem (near where he now lives with his own family). Eventually, his work as an activist and his quest for answers led him to visit Nazi concentration camps.
“I guess I could call it a spiritual awakening in the early 2000s when I began to really ask questions like: ‘Why did the peace process fail? Why did Oslo fail?’ Then, in Auschwitz, I discovered one of the key reasons why we have not been able to achieve peace in the land: the effects of trauma.”
He came to the conclusion that it was impossible to negotiate from a place of existential fear, with both sides overcome by terror and their own inherited narratives of trauma, frozen by the perpetual threat that “we as a people will cease to exist.”
It was at Auschwitz that Sami realized that peace was contingent on addressing collective trauma. “How can you achieve peace without trust?” he asked himself. It was a turning point, as he directed his attention toward efforts that would prioritize healing as foundational to the peace process.
Another theme that emerged throughout the interviews I conducted was the deep power that could be found in connecting with the land itself as a form of healing.
Souli Khatib was one of the activists who participated in the project in Spain. He is the founder of the joint Palestinian-Israeli activist organization Combatants for Peace, whose participants organize and resist the occupation together through civil resistance, education, public ceremonies, and other creative means. Souli comes from a Muslim family in Hizma (northeast of Jerusalem) that was, in his words, “very connected to the land and the cause.” Now fifty-two, he describes his teenage self as a “revolutionary spirit” fighting for a free Palestine, protecting “our tradition, land, and olive trees.” Around the age of fourteen, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and spent a decade behind bars for attacking a pair of Israelis who had just been discharged from the army in an attempt to steal their weapons. While incarcerated, Souli had a change of heart: he came to the conclusion that there was no military solution, no “us” versus “them,” no real resolution to the situation at hand based on the current paradigm.
“For me, it’s about showing there is another way,” Souli told me on October 5th, 2023, when I made the trip to Ramallah to ask him about his participation in the ayahuasca circles. “We’re taking baby steps. It’s a long journey, and there is no shortcut.” He insisted that for a paradigm shift to happen, there is no solution short of a gradual, collective shift in consciousness—one that will require both individual and collective healing.
Souli spoke to me that day about the need for “radical love and radical forgiveness” and the regional tradition of sulha, which he described as “consolation or reconciliation—an old Middle Eastern tradition that brings sides together.” Sulha is also translated as “to make peace.” It is a conflict resolution process that takes place over a cup of coffee, or, better yet, a meal—or perhaps ayahuasca?—at which point, Souli joked, the conflict ends. “Going back to the ancient wisdom here, once you eat together, a strong, deep thing happens.” That’s because eating, or getting through a psychedelic ceremony, is embodied, he explained to me. It’s about having a physical, sensory experience that grounds abstractions like borders in the earth itself, and the life that sprouts from it.
Olive groves carpet large swaths of the region, and the land surrounding Souli’s apartment in Ramallah is no exception. There used to be more, but many have been removed to make way for Israeli settlements. Souli said his family isn’t religious, per se, at least in an Islamic sense—but they are religious about the olive harvest. “It’s a ritual; there’s lots of ceremony about it,” he told me. “It’s very deep. My mom is getting older, but no way in the world would she miss the olive harvest.” It’s a tradition that’s been passed down through generations in his family for as long as anyone can remember, as is true for many Palestinian families in the West Bank.
“My family is part of the people, the trees, the water, the land,” Souli said.
The consciousness that ayahuasca opened up for Souli made him realize just how attached he was to the land itself.
“The land” was a term I heard often during these interviews; it refers not only to land in the sense of one’s human connection to the earth, but specifically to this land, the land to which both peoples are so profoundly connected. This connection is deeply encoded into the language in the region. In Hebrew, Israelis call their country simply ha-Aretz—“the land.” Just as the holiday of Sukkot points to Jewish indigeneity in the land—performing a ritual to invoke rain at the beginning of winter with native plants under the full moon—so too do traditions held by Souli’s family point to Palestinian indigeneity in the land. On his coffee table sat a bronze bowl (in Arabic, ṭāsat ar-ra‘ba3) passed down from his grandmother and used to catch rain. It must be placed under certain stars before sunrise, at which point the water is consumed in a kind of ritual. Souli described this as an “indigenous trauma healing technique with Islamic roots.”
The consciousness that ayahuasca opened up for Souli made him realize just how attached he was to the land itself. A Palestinian friend living abroad once asked him, “Why not just leave the mess behind, immigrate to California, and live in peace?” “But I just can’t,” Souli said. Having faced this question in ceremony, he had returned to his commitment to, and deep faith in, the healing wisdom of his homeland.
Mohammad Darwish, another Palestinian participant, holds a similar perspective. An Israeli citizen originally from East Jerusalem and now living in Jaffa, Mohammad grew up with deep-rooted anger toward Israelis, so much so that he didn’t even want to learn Hebrew. At one point, someone invited him to try psilocybin mushrooms—the first of many psychedelic experiences that came to soften his heart. Eventually, he even joined the Israeli-Palestinian camp at Midburn (a regional Burning Man festival in the Negev).
During the ayahuasca ceremony in Spain, he felt deep empathy for his fellow participants. “I saw that we all live in trauma—a really big trauma that we keep going through, from our ancestors. It was amazing to see the pain of others [because] I couldn’t see it before. It was really good for me to see, and then to see my pain, and at the end, you see it’s the same pain.” And it’s pain that comes, in part, from “fighting for something that’s not even ours,” he said. “The land doesn’t belong to us. We belong to the land.”
The changes that psychedelics helped Mohammad uncover in himself inspired his family members to sit with medicine as well. “My mother told me, ‘I want this thing that you took in Spain.’ She’s sixty-seven. Last month, we did ayahuasca together with my little brother.”
“I saw that we all live in trauma—a really big trauma that we keep going through, from our ancestors. It was amazing to see the pain of others [because] I couldn’t see it before.”
But it wasn’t all strawberry fields forever.
“Of course there were tensions” in ceremony, Armelle told me. However, “a lot of it resolved, because when you get so intimate, the ‘other’ is not anymore the enemy; the ‘other’ is another person.”
The Jewish Israeli participants I spoke to all echoed this sentiment. Noam Enbar, a musician who lives in Jaffa, said that sitting in ceremony together created a shared experience that allowed participants to move beyond their narrow identities. “I felt like I was part of something, sharing these depths with people who are not in my immediate circle, people who I usually don’t get to sit with or communicate with because of the conflict, segregation, and separation.” There’s always “basic alienation and suspicion” inherent in Israeli-Palestinian relations, Noam said, but trust can help neutralize trauma and interrupt the cycle of fear and violence. “Our political views are part of our worldview. It’s not about transcending politics, but healing our political views.”
Ayelet Yekutiel is professional dancer, choreographer, somatic therapist, and activist. When I spoke with her last November, she recalled that both nights of ceremony began for her with intense shaking. “In the beginning it was unpleasant, but then it became more like a dance,” she said. “I was like, ‘Ah, I’ve been in this circle so many times. I’ve danced with these souls before.’” She also felt the presence of her grandparents, who are Holocaust survivors, and more distant ancestors. “There was this feeling that we are here together to pray for something that is real, to pray for our homeland.”
She told me that the medicine reconnected her with her basic essence and humanity. “I could have been in any role in this story—the child in Gaza, the soldier in Gaza, or the person who was a victim in what happened on October 7th, or the person who [committed] the crime,” she said. “Accepting this spectrum of what we can become as humans is a way to then take responsibility and choose what we do with those options and the power we have.”
“There was this feeling that we are here together to pray for something that is real, to pray for our homeland.”
While the project in Spain offered a vision of what joint healing could look like, almost everyone I spoke to agreed that during this moment in the war, the greatest task is to cultivate the healing process at home, among one’s own people, within one’s own community. Nine months into the war, Sami observed that both Israeli and Palestinian society have retreated into their polarized narratives of existential fear and victimization. He noted that Israeli politicians, who have consistently ignored the suffering of Palestinians under occupation, have shifted public attention to the link between October 7th and the Holocaust, while for Palestinians, it’s a “narrative of the continuation of the Nakba and ethnic cleansing.” There cannot be peace without addressing these realities and the deep wells of collective trauma that drive the perpetual cycle of fear, anger, and violence.
This moment demands that each side not “bypass” the work of “addressing our own challenges in our own communities,” Sami told me when we spoke again this past May. “It’s easier to sit with the other side who agrees with you than to sit with your own community that disagrees with you.” He invoked Jesus in Mark 6:4: “A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own community and among his relatives and his own family.”
Ayelet voiced a similar perspective about the need for grassroots work within one’s community during this time. “I feel that this work is still relevant now,” she told me, but she also stressed that the medicine is only a “gate opener” to a larger spectrum of peace building that includes relationship building and dialogue. She expressed fear that this moment is too fraught for Israelis and Palestinians to sit together, unless they know each other very well, something I heard from other Jewish participants, too.
At this moment in time, it’s hard to see what the future looks like, but Noam still feels that we need to remain open to envisioning something radically different from the current situation. “If we think about the limited consciousness that is controlled by trauma, fear, and militant values, we want to expand [that consciousness],” Noam said. “We want to think beyond it and feel beyond it toward collective liberation. You will never have security if the person on the other side of the fence or wall doesn’t feel security. This is the thing that promotes safety much more than violence and war.”
“You will never have security if the person on the other side of the fence or wall doesn’t feel security.”
Antwan Saca, the Palestinian peace activist from Bethlehem who participated in the ayahuasca circles, also remains hopeful. Still, he acknowledges the limitations of psychedelics. Not everyone is up for the experience, and because psychedelics are still illegal, they are off-limits to many. “Doing this work doesn’t mean it will create peace; it’s not as easy as taking a pill.” But when “the potential is high for people to act from a healed place, it can lead to healthier relations.”
I heard this call from multiple people—not to fetishize psychedelics as the ultimate solution, but to use all the peace-building tools available, to recognize that this is not only a ground war, but (as Souli put it) a war of consciousness. Sami hopes for the day when a new crop of “visionary leaders” will arise, because neither psychedelics nor joint spaces, neither boycotts nor political organizing will work alone. “We need multiple tools, levels, and ways of engagement to fix this.”
The project in Spain was “not all about the medicine,” Sami said, but more so about “collective peace work—creating a community of leaders who can influence transformative change in the land.”
“I see this work as a drop that falls into this lake full of emotions, creating ripples that expand,” Indios Brasil, the Indigenous medicine server who facilitated the ceremonies in Spain, told me. “It’s difficult to imagine that this will change reality, but it’s through the ripples that this work will make a difference.” He, like many people experienced with ayahuasca, sees ceremony as a space of prayer, but it’s the action that a psychedelic experience inspires us to take that will make our insights manifest in real life. This is what’s referred to in the psychedelic community as “integration.”
He invoked Jesus in Mark 6:4: “A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own community and among his relatives and his own family.”
Indeed, it can be isolating for someone who has had a profound psychedelic experience—one that pushed them to think beyond a common paradigm—to then go back into their collective silos where few people, if any, can relate to their experience. “We stay loyal to the psychedelic events in our lives,” Leor said. “We look back at them as part of our identity. The individual becomes a kind of messenger of sorts,” sharing the message of that experience with others.
To that end, in the wake of the project in Spain, Leor, Souli, Noam, Sami, Armelle, and others founded a nonprofit called Ripples to continue group psychedelic work with the goal of conflict resolution, exploring collective traumas, and enabling the consciousness of the medicine “to enter the zeitgeist,” as Leor described it, through activities like art, education, community building, activism, and other initiatives. “It can trigger hope, and hope is fuel for action.”
“Doing this work doesn’t mean it will create peace; it’s not as easy as taking a pill.”
This reminded me of a concept that Sami and Leor have discussed at numerous conferences, one that came up several times in our conversations: sacred activism. This orientation resonates deeply with Souli’s peace work as well. “For me, sacred activism touches the deepest challenges that we have,” Souli told me. “It’s a holistic approach that reconnects us with our truth fully—with the land, the elements, the water, with everything—and that gives me much more hope in a real, I won’t say ‘solution,’ but a real, full truth of life.”
“But what’s the goal of the project?” I asked him.
There isn’t one necessarily, he replied, at least “not in this lifetime.”
“It’s about collective liberation, but there’s no shortcut. We plant seeds, and it might not be for our generation. But the way the generations before us planted the olive trees and we eat from them, we plant so the next generation may eat.”
This long and loving view hit home. May we plant seeds of peace, however we’re able to—in our hearts, in our families, in our communities, and in the earth itself—so that our children may enjoy the fruits and labors of our love.
Madison Margolin is a journalist covering psychedelics, cannabis, spirituality, and Jewish life. She is the cofounder of DoubleBlind Magazine and has written for publications like Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Vice, among others. Also a cofounder of the Jewish Psychedelic Summit and host of the Set & Setting podcast on the Be Here Now Network, Madison has traveled from cannabis farms in Northern California to underground ceremonies in Brooklyn to the shores of the Ganges River and all over Israel|Palestine, reporting on the role of entheogens in religion, culture, and healing. Find out more about her work here, or follow her on social media.
Footnotes
- The project was hosted by the nonprofit organization Elham – The Day After. Leor’s observational research was conducted through Imperial College London; Leor, who now works as a senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Exeter, is working on a paper based on his observations from the project, which he is planning on publishing.
- You can watch the presentation here.
- طاسة الرعبة.
Ayin Press is deeply grateful for the support of the Dr. Bronner’s Family Foundation, which made this project possible.