Video: People and Ruins: Remapping Narrative of Demolished Spaces in Haifa

June 04, 2025

Video Recordings and Transcripts

Dr. Orwa Switat, RPL Fellow in Conflict and Peace, launched an innovative digital map that traces the history of Haifa and its displaced spaces and memories. The event features segments of the map and website, a screening of short films, and a panel with Orwa Switat, Harvard Divinity School, Diane Davis, Graduate School of Design, and Diane L. Moore, Harvard Divinity School. Moderator: Hilary Rantisi, Associate Director of RCPI.

This event was held April 28, 2025.

The views and opinions expressed by the speakers during this ceremony are solely those of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Divinity School or Harvard University. HDS deeply values the diversity of expression and respectful dialogue in keeping with its commitment to foster a welcoming and inclusive community.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

HILARY RANTISI: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 1: People and ruins-- remapping narrative of demolished spaces in Haifa. April 28, 2025.

HILARY RANTISI: I think most people here know me, but my name is Hilary Rantisi.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. Thank you everyone. I will threaten to ululate and you will all. We'll leave that till the end for the real celebration. Thank you. I'm in tears. It is a real pleasure today to be welcoming you all to our last and final event for the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative here at Harvard Divinity School. And for those of you who don't, I will repeat again in case people don't really understand what our work is about.

So our work here at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence, and power and examines how a more broad and capacious understanding of religion can yield fresh insights into contemporary challenges and opportunities for just peace building. And our main case study in our work here has been on Israel-Palestine.

So today's presentation, of course, is linked to all of these themes, themes on structural injustice, violence, and power. And we will see these themes come through today's presentation. We'll be hearing today from Dr. Switat about the research he's been conducting here with us since last year. And in a few minutes I will introduce him. Followed by his presentation, we will be hearing from Dr. Diane Moore, former associate Dean of Religion and Public Life Program at Harvard Divinity School.

[APPLAUSE]

And Dr. Diane Davis, the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of regional planning and urbanism and former chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

[APPLAUSE]

Both have been academic advisors for this project, and it's a real pleasure to have them with us today and to be in conversation. So just a brief introduction of Dr. Switat before I hand it over to him. So Dr. Orwa Switat is an urban planning scholar, practitioner, and activist with degrees in philosophy, political science, and urban and regional planning, focusing on state minority relations in planning and the status of groups in cities, as well as promoting spatial injustice among minority groups against displacement.

From 2019 to 2023, he was a member of Haifa's Municipal Committee for Historical Building Preservation. So we are very lucky to have him here to talk about Haifa and take us to Haifa in his presentation. In this work, he steered policies to embrace the city's historical heritage, focusing on the Palestinian historical neighborhoods.

We first met Orwa during our experiential learning courses where we took students to Israel Palestine. Our course was entitled "Learning in Context Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine." And Orwa gave us a tour of Lydda, the town where my ancestors are from and where they were displaced during the Nakba in 1948.

And then in four years after that, he gave us tours of Haifa. So we've been very lucky recipients to learn from him, and especially lucky this year to have him with us as a research fellow in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. So I am very happy to welcome Dr. Switat who is going to be taking us tonight on a journey to Haifa. And so without further ado, please come on up.

[APPLAUSE]

ORWA SWITAT: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

OK, thank you everyone. I deeply thank you for coming. I want to thank the members of the panel, Hilary Rantisi, Diane Moore, Diane Davis, for honoring me with your presence and insights. I want to thank the organizers of this event, the RCPI and the RPL team, for organizing your last event, closing 8 years of inspiring work and impact, driven by steadfast principles and a deep commitment to humanity. Please everyone, give again RCPI a big shout out. I'm really privileged to be with you today.

[APPLAUSE]

So I want to start sharing with you my story, why I'm here. So 6 years ago, when I was doing my PhD, about the status of groups in urban planning, focusing on London, I was appointed to be a member of the Haifa Municipal Committee for Historical Preservation, as Hillary said. The first time, an Arab will be appointed in such position.

I was one of six. And I was really happy, honored, privileged to represent my community, and I was really excited because I succeeded or at least I thought I did in making a shift from destruction to preservation in the historic neighborhoods of Haifa. Three years later, in November 2021, Haifa municipality mapped for the first time a survey of Haifa [NON-ENGLISH], Haifa downtown.

And honestly, when I saw the survey, I have to tell you the truth, I was really furious because first it ignored the Indigenous history and narrative of Haifa. Second, it named and framed the Palestinian urban modern heritage and architecture as a semi-rural, British mere Ottoman or the land of Israel architecture.

The absence of historical buildings excluded from the list, which exposed them to the threat of demolition. And I remember myself sitting there in the City Hall of Haifa at the table, looking at them, asking them why? And telling them that your work is lacking. And I remember, and I can't forget that, the answer that I got. There is no data. There is no maps that show the historical Arab spaces of Haifa before 1948.

By the way, city that was established in 1761 by Zahir al-Umar, the ruler of the Galilee. The maps were either German, like this one or that one, or British. As you can see, the historical city of Haifa in this British map in 1945 was only plain blocks and streets. I insisted, I refused to accept that. Luckily, according to the Israeli norms and legal procedures, such a document needs a consensus.

So the survey was failed to be approved and it got rejected. Two weeks later, they set a council meeting in the same hall, by the way. And they fired me, taking me out of the committee. And I remember the mayor of Haifa calling me, apologizing to me, explaining to me that she had no power to change the decision.

And I remember the dilemma that I had, either to say proudly, OK, no need, I will continue doing my work in other ways. Or to say, no, I won't give up. And I was really confused because, I'll tell you the truth, it shocked me. I was in my comfort zone doing my thing, but now I'm standing in front of a regime political economic structures, powerful structures.

In that moment I remember sitting in our living room and looking at the picture of my late father on the wall that included a drawing of one of his quotes, a sentence that says, [NON-ENGLISH] In free translation, to stand for what is right is the compass of our moral soul, and morals form the essence of our deepest faiths. Faith finds its life in deeds that are noble and fair. And through these acts humanity remains and lays there.

I immediately knew what should I do. After that decision was published in local media, there was an outrage in the community. And then I knew that it wasn't only important for me, it was important for everyone. I knew I understood that the historical, cultural, architectural heritage is crucial for the Indigenous people of Haifa. The people organized quickly, launched a campaign. We had meetings, community meetings, signed petitions by both Arabs and Jews who rejected the decision.

At first the municipality insisted and refused, but after a week of pressure they reversed the decision. I returned to the committee and the survey was corrected, repaired. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

However, despite the excitement of the accomplishment, I felt as an urban planning scholar that there's a problem here. There's something missing. The sentence that they told me that there's no data, there's no eligible data, there are no maps, stayed with me and couldn't leave me. In September 2023, I came here to Boston doing my postdoc at Tufts Urban Planning Department, continuing my international work on the status of groups and their rights in Western cities. Comparing between London planning and American sanctuary cities.

I bring a new approach, which I frame as seeing the North from the South. But then the war happened. I tried to continue my work and finishing writing my book, but still seeing the destruction of Gaza, the steadfastness of the people around its ruins took me back to my own trauma, to the trauma of my family, of my city Haifa, that its old city was almost totally destroyed in 1948.

And I couldn't stay in the North. I had to go back home. I had to return to my own self. And I asked myself, how can ruins and remains of heritage shape the restoration of displaced cities? How can memories and narratives help us reimagine those destructed cities? How do people revive? Destruction is never complete. It's always imperfect. There will be always ruins.

So how people do revive and reclaim their identities, rebuild their selves, reconstitute their entities and reclaim those spaces around the ruins of their cities. How can mapping, digitization, visualization, urban planning as tools help us to restore these spaces. I argue that the ruins of displaced spaces and the remnants of cultural and religious spaces have signified the revival, the resilience, and the cultural resistance of Indigenous peoples.

Ruins have given people a space of meanings, narratives, and practices to face ongoing disposition. But the main challenge is epistemic. It's methodological. The city was destroyed. The community was shattered to pieces. The archives are concealed and the spaces are still till today, under constant threat.

By the way, now one of the crowd talked to me like he's from Haifa. Azhar, can you raise your hand. Yeah. And also I saw some people here from Haifa. So have you heard about the Levantine market Suswam? Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE].

ORWA SWITAT: A roofed market with merchants from Lebanon and Syria. Do you know where it was exactly? What about [INAUDIBLE]? What about the Saraya governmental building? What about Kasbah Beth El Hamam? What about [? Al-Jarina ?] Tower or the Khan of Sheikh Hassan El-Khatib? Everyone I interviewed, including leading historians and experts of Haifa, didn't know where they were exactly, precisely on the map.

But how can we know? So I'm going to show you today how we faced this challenge of absent knowledge. So first we combine digitization of historical maps, governmental plans, and real estate plans, analyzing the urban development and tracing it from the establishment of the city. It also included digitizing oral histories and Indigenous archives.

And also interviews with 40 historians, scholars, planners, activists, architects, and displaced communities, I managed to reach refugees from Haifa in London and Rome, in Amman. And also where's [? Hany? ?] In Eastern. Yeah, [? Hany's ?] grandfather in Eastern here in Connecticut. And also using filmmaking to visualize narratives and practices around the ruins.

Building on that, we are in a process to think how we can create a restorative model that will restore demolished spaces. Of course, all that through working with an amazing, incredible team of students from the GSD with the assistance of local planners and architects, Maher Salameh and Abdallah Bayyari, with filmmakers and storytellers Iyad Barghouti, Firas Roby, [? Kenan ?] [? Tarboosh ?] and Alfred Haddad from Haifa, and, of course, advised by Diane Davis and Diane Moore and led by the amazing RCPI team, Hilary Rantisi, Reem Atassi, and Tammy Liaw.

[APPLAUSE]

This was Haifa before 1948. This was Haifa after 1948. This was Haifa before 1948. This is Haifa after 1948. The city was destroyed. However, the erasure was incomplete and it left the city with ruins and traces of its heritage. Today, it looks like that historical city covered, obscured by governmental buildings, real estate projects that are constructed on top of the ruined city.

I'm excited today to show you a restorative Indigenous map of Haifa. On the map, you can see the digitization of every building with a focus on cultural spaces, combined with the digitization of memories and narratives and Indigenous archives. The map shows a unique cosmopolitan Indigenous urban form of Haifa.

I know it sounds strange, but this is Haifa. 13 diverse neighborhoods, tailored by the hybrid integration and mixture of religious sacred spaces-- 3 mosques, 4 churches, 5 synagogues, 17 markets, 12 hands, 3 towers, 3 gates, Saraya governmental building, 9 schools, 6 bakeries, 3 pharmacies, theaters, cinemas, cafes, hotels, restaurants, 5 squares, 99 wells, 2 public baths, 2 public gardens, hospitals, mills, stairs, alleys, internal passages, cemeteries, maqams, sacred monuments, and Waqf Religious spaces.

Thousands of families from diverse communities living together in a wide diversity of architectural styles, using materials of sandstones from the Mediterranean, usually on the first floors. Mount Carmel stones and plaster on the top floors with flat and brick roofs, evolved according to different historical, political, and spatial transformations.

Now we know that under this street was a cemetery. Now we know that under this courthouse building was a school. Now we know where was [INAUDIBLE], the Levantine market of Haifa, the fish market, the yogurt market, the watermelon market, the chicken market. Now I know where Umm Kulthum, the famous Egyptian singer, sang in Haifa in [INAUDIBLE] in Shiraz.

Now I know under this parking lot was a city. What was one of the most dense neighborhoods of historical Haifa. Now I know what the ruins were. The ruins that I saw every day in my neighborhood. By restoring the displaced spaces, we have also restored a displaced spacial language. Meidan, Sahar, Khan, [? Yakka, ?] [? Hosh. ?] Different categories of squares and yards-- Ard, Malki, Hara, Mahalla, Hakura, Karm, Bustan. Different definitions of semi-private, semi-public gardens and parks, and semi-open, semi-closed neighborhoods. Zuqaq Sebat, Ma'mar [? Babubhai. ?] Different categories of passages. All are Indigenous categories of spaces and uses.

Today, it's difficult even to reimagine it in Haifa. Even we can't understand. We can't understand them because they were demolished. Restoring the demolished spaces opened the possibility to restore the Indigenous categories of these spaces. The spatial language, the narrative, spaces that you can't understand and comprehend from above. From the restoration of these ruins, we are making progress towards restoring or restorative planning by reimagining and reconstructing part of the demolished city.

This parking lot specifically, we are imagining the parking lot by attempting to restore its historical, cosmopolitan, Indigenous DNA to face, not ignore, the current urban realities. This project that I initiated at the RPL is not only about Haifa, but it deals with critical questions about communities and spaces that get devastated either by massive fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, or herbicides, wars and ongoing dispossession, climate and human-made catastrophes.

However, after every disaster, communities can revive again and recollect their shattered pieces. The research shows that ruins reposition people. People reposition ruins. After the destructions, ruins remain. Even after decades, people go to the ruins, reclaiming them again through their daily and cultural practices and counter-narratives. Wide urban scholarship related to dispossession, focusing on the role of urban planning and the role of the state.

Yosef Jabareen recent work on the architecture of dispossession argues that dispossession is driven by three logics-- the political logic, that is the exclusion of presence, the aesthetic logic that shapes the supremacy and legitimize the violence of the architecture, and the economic logic that is based on accumulation.

Building on this work, I argue that the people counter this disposition by repositioning, repositioning themselves around and in the ruins. And also the remains of their cultural and religious spaces. I argue that this is based on three countering logics. How? So first, they are driven by an Indigenous aesthetic counter logic. They view ruins as beauty, as the foundation of their concepts of justice and rights. When they see ruins, they are thrilled, complete enjoyment. They are moved. But this enjoyment is always incomplete, combined with pain and heartbreak of a lost city.

Second, the research shows that people develop their own economic logic for the protection of the remains of their heritage facing urban renewal dynamics. They even use decolonial. Sorry. They even use neoliberal practices, neoliberal practices, using the margins of the market of the free market, but for a decolonial Indigenous agenda, which I frame as decolonial neoliberal repositioning. When states withdraw from the society, from the market, it appears that it opens new venues for Indigenous groups to reposition.

Lastly, people develop how they live, how they conceive their ruins and the remains, turning their daily and cultural practices into cultural resistance. The dynamics between people and ruins reposition them both. Through the physicality of the ruins and their meanings, people revive, resist, and are resilient to deposition, while through the people's narratives and practices, ruins are being reclaimed, protected, renovated, reimagined, and restored.

[? Eid ?] is over here. My kid. [? Andrea ?] next to him. My 10-years-old, he started to design the logo. Yeah, so it's haifa.com. This is the name. So please stay tuned. Yeah, thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

HILARY RANTISI: I don't where to start because there's so much in what we heard and what we saw that's beautiful. And I don't want to take too much time. But so many things struck me from what you shared. But as you started, you started with your father's words and what he left for you, and the heritage that you have and the mission that you are carrying on to revive the heritage, the stories to unravel, take away the rubble and to see the life of the city despite the destruction.

And it reminds me of when we took students on our course, learning in context narratives of displacement and belonging, and students engaged with people and spaces. And just to get a bit personal, for me, it was my engagement with these spaces as well that was very meaningful. And again, coming back to the heritage of my father and what I inherited from him about how to live my life, but also about where I am from and the importance of that.

So when people ask me, where are you from in Palestine, it's a difficult question to answer because most Palestinians are not necessarily from where they grew up. So I grew up in Ramallah, but my family is from Lydd. My father in 1948, like your father survived the Nakba. And his mother is from Gaza. And I was born in Jerusalem. And I am from all these places and identify with all these places, despite being told that none of these spaces belong to me, and that maybe I'm only confined to the one place, to Ramallah, to the West Bank, with certain restrictions and so on.

So space is important. Memory is important. Heritage is important. How we see these places. And in journeying with students, the way I encountered some spaces was different for me than it was for others. And Diane has seen me and she's nodding her head. I remember one specific home we went into in [? Be'er ?] Sheva in the Beersheba, which had been turned into a bookstore, and I was told that it was a progressive bookstore.

I was expecting certain things, but as I entered the space, I knew it was a Palestinian home. And something struck me in that space. I couldn't breathe anymore. The horror, the pain of the loss and the destruction of this space just hit me in different ways that it didn't hit other people on this journey.

And I'm sharing this because I think it's important. I think it's so important what you have done, Orwa, and that it's very important for us to revive these spaces, to share our heritage, but also what we saw in these stories, despite the ruins, there is life that comes through and we have to keep that alive. So thank you, Orwa, for what you brought to us, but also for everything you're going to continue to bring to us because this is a project that's ongoing and it's a project that we can engage with.

And I think there are a few people here from Haifa who came tonight, and I'm sure they will add to this. And as we encounter more and more people, these memories, these stories, these engagements will continue to grow. So I have two questions or maybe one broad question to professors Diane Moore and Diane Davis that you both were engaged as academic advisors for this project. But you come from very different disciplines. And so I'm wondering if you can from your own areas of expertise, you just comment your thoughts on the project on the presentation we heard tonight. And maybe we start with Diane if you could. Oh, which one.

[LAUGHTER]

Diane Moore.

DIANE DAVIS: Diane at Harvard.

HILARY RANTISI: Diane squared. Diane Moore, maybe you could comment on religion and public life and how this project relates to religion and just peace building.

DIANE MOORE: Well, first of all, I just-- can you hear me? I just want to thank you. This is an extraordinary project. It's extraordinary, innovative, extraordinarily moving, and extraordinarily important in these times. To pick up on Hilary's--

ORWA SWITAT: Maybe we'll give here this.

DIANE MOORE: Yeah, thank you very much. Can you hear me now?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

DIANE MOORE: Well, it's extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary. That's what I said. But I want to pick up on Hilary's story because I remember that powerfully your visceral experience of being in that home without any marker of the fact that that was a home, which I think was devastating. Hilary and Atalia Omer are wonderful colleague, and we ended up writing a story, an article about the experience of taking students to the region.

And one of the foundations of the story was that students would often say, we can't unsee what we've seen. So to go and be in a place is really different than reading about a place or to both be there and experience the people and the landscape. But there's a really important piece of this that you're picking up here that we tried to capture in our article, which is that you can't see everything because it's been erased.

So what you see, you can't unsee. So that's a lot of the consequences of the occupation. The amazing people who are thinking and working innovatively to create a more democratic, a more just, a more inclusive community, Palestinians, Jews, Israelis, Americans. But what you don't see in the intentional erasure of that is what you are restoring.

And the power of that is profound because you are connecting people with not only their own experience and their memories, but you are recreating the lifeblood of a community before occupation, and that provides a powerful opportunity for reimagining and remembering what was lost, but also what is still sustained because of the way that you are constructing your academic frame, which is ruins, reproduce and can reinvigorate people, and people can reinvigorate ruins. I just love that frame.

The only other thing I want to say is I'm so powerfully reminded about my experience of you in this entire project and how you've gone about it, and your story just reiterates this this afternoon. But there's a wonderful saying in the Tao Te Ching and it is about leadership. And it's basically the qualities of leadership. It says, the greatest leaders are barely known. The second-best are known and loved. The third are feared and the fourth are despised. But let's not talk about those.

[LAUGHTER]

The stanza ends with the greatest leaders are barely known because the people say, we did it. That's what you're doing. You're restoring voice.

[APPLAUSE]

You're empowering. It's amazing.

HILARY RANTISI: Thank you, Diane. And we'll move to the other Diane, Diane Davis. And your expertise, your work in urban planning and looking at this amazing project and work. Maybe you could comment on this idea of urban planning and resilience and how to think about spatial justice, which also, I think, aligns with a lot of your work. And maybe in a lot of your international work as well.

DIANE DAVIS: OK, I mean, what I really want-- a couple. I'll start by saying it's kind of a misnomer to call me an advisor to Orwa because I learn so much from you. You already were an expert activist, know the city, a planner, more of a planner than me. And then you did so much with this project with a team of students, and it's just been a pleasure to learn from you. And I want to congratulate you.

And I think this is a really important and amazing project. I learned a little bit more about-- I know something about the region, but I didn't really have the deep appreciation of the history of Haifa that you are revealing. So that's the first thing. The second thing I was going to say, I'm going to more or less give the same answer that Diane Moore did in that, I mean, I'm not going to put my urban planner hat on so much, but my hat as somebody who's an urbanist, who's studied cities because cities are sites of the public.

Cities are where humanity makes itself known and visible. And cities are, I mean, a lot of people don't like the word cosmopolitan. Our sites of difference and tension and change. And we have to acknowledge and love that. And we look at those transformations for good and for bad. So what you have done with this project, I like to think of it like a detective story. You've uncovered the history in the past in a way to give voice to the disappeared and the displaced and to make the forgotten remembered.

And it's not just the forgotten people, but the forgotten publicity and the forgotten interactions and the forgotten way in which this city has been shared over centuries and centuries and centuries. And that's such an important message. I think I also would like to say that there could be some positive planners try to think of a projective project to deal with past problems and make things better.

And I really think making the connection between the past and the present that you've done in the films and in the mapping lays the groundwork for a future of maybe recovering the multiplicity, the pluralism of the city that was always there but has been forcibly disappeared or invisibilized, to use Diane's word. And I think sometimes in urbanism we think about historical change in cities through a temporal linearity. But if we thought about the city as a palimpsest of these different religions and experiences and historical moments, if we thought about that in a more-- could that be recovered in one moment, again, in a more horizontal way, not a linear way over time.

What would it take to build into those spaces with some of the films you've done a sense that there's the multiplicity of the past alive in the present. That is the basis for, I would say, moving forward in as humanity, as a site of a shared past and a shared future. The last thing I would say, and I have some great friends here, Leila Farsakh is here and I saw Anat Biletzki. The last thing I want to say about the importance of the public's recovering the public, the public is a concept I happen to teach.

I'm the head of a domain at the Graduate School of Design on publics. But I like to think about the public in juxtaposition to sovereignty and the sovereigns. So if we think about-- the destruction is sovereign projects, trying to impose themselves. If we put the public at the center of the city, what would it take to make Haifa again a place of publics? That makes me think, again, I wanted to give a shout out to Leila of a project that I started at MIT when I was there after the Second Intifada, many years ago, where we had a seminar and we called it cities against nationalism, which is an idea that we can use in every country of the world these days, not just in Israel-Palestine.

But I mean, to think about how to recover what tied people to each other at the scale of the city and the human and the public, and has nothing to do necessarily with how they are organized politically or under a regime, a sovereign regime. That's the promise of your project and with the arts, and with the historical narratives, you are laying the groundwork for that. And I want to congratulate you. It's just a great project.

[APPLAUSE]

[LAUGHTER]

Speechless.

ORWA SWITAT: Yeah. So thank you. Really I'm really honored by everyone's presence and by your remarks. And you are both an inspiration for me with your always looking at the soul and searching for it. And if I'm thinking about this project as I'm searching for my soul while seeing our cities destroyed. And this move that when you see that we are in a deep despair and you see that everything around you are ruins.

The moment that-- because of that, I brought my father to the thing, to the story that the moment that I thought about the ruins, I remembered him as four-years-old, under the Nakba from [INAUDIBLE]. It's a displaced village in the Galilee, erased today. And thinking about him and our family, how they survived, seeing what's happening today and how people survive, from there there is hope.

So I'm optimistic and I have hope people have enormous powers. And ruins as an Indigenous people, it's the essence of this powers. So I really thank you for coming and yeah. Have questions? I don't know.

[APPLAUSE]

HILARY RANTISI: I think with this, we have a perfect ending for tonight's event.

DIANE MOORE: I think not quite perfect.

HILARY RANTISI: Oh.

DIANE MOORE: If I may, first of all, let me just say thank you again for the privilege of being agreed that we were not your advisors. We were your students. And it was a real pleasure.

ORWA SWITAT: And wonders.

DIANE MOORE: I just can't end this evening without acknowledging the fact that this is the last program for RCPI that Hilary Rantisi has led with great imagination, with great care, with great love, with great ambition, with great heart for eight years. Hundreds of programs, dozens of students taken to the region. I have learned more from this woman in these last eight years than I have the rest of my 68 years, and I just want to pause to just invite you all to acknowledge the extraordinary gifts that she has brought all of us over her leadership of this very important program. That and the power of this program will continue through the people that she has.

[APPLAUSE]

HILARY RANTISI: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Please stop.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you all. Thank you. I mean, this is very moving for me. It's very gratifying to know that the work continues. It continues through all the people who have come through the program, who have been touched, and the impact grows. And a huge reason behind that is Professor Diane Moore. None of this would have been possible without the vision, the courage, the encouragement, and also all my colleagues who have made this evening possible. But Reem Atassi has been with us from year 0.

[APPLAUSE]

Yeah.

[APPLAUSE]

And many of you have also been with us in this journey. Whether it's students or we don't have a former Fellows here, other than Orwa, but many members of the community who have also felt this space as a home for them, for coming to events and to being part of these discussions that we've had over the years. And hopefully the learning continues. So it doesn't end here.

And I want to thank every one of you because you have showed up and you've shown up tonight and you've showed up, especially during the last few months, the difficult times. And I know that you recognize the importance of these events and these spaces. And so we will find other ways to continue this work. The work continues and through you as well. So thank you all and thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 1: Sponsor-- Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Religion and Public Life.