Their story is so unlikely that it seems like it was made for a film. And indeed, Steven Spielberg even bought the rights to bring their story to the big screen. The Palestinian Bassam Aramin and the Israeli Rami Elhanan have been fighting tirelessly for peace in the Middle East for years. They're members of an organization called The Parents Circle – a group for those who have lost children in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East – and they are close friends. Indeed, they refer to each other as brothers, despite the fact that they have both lost a child in this endless conflict.

Elhanan’s daughter Smadar was on her way to buy a book with a friend in September 1997 when a Hamas suicide bomber attacked. She was 14 years old. Aramin’s 10-year-old daughter Abir was on her way home from school in 2007 when she was mortally wounded by shots fired from behind from a vehicle belonging to the Israeli border police. The border police initially denied being responsible for the girl’s death, but a civil court came to a different conclusion. The suspected shooter, however, never faced criminal prosecution.

Elhanan, 73, and Aramin, 55, decided not to succumb to hate and have since been promoting reconciliation and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian areas – which has generated regular accusations against both of them for being "traitors." The two have received numerous peace prizes, and their life stories have been recounted in documentary films and books, most recently in Colum McCann’s novel "Apeirogon."

Elhanan was in Haifa and Aramin in Jericho when DER SPIEGEL joined them for a video interview. In greeting, Elhanan said to his friend: "Brother! We haven’t seen each other for so long!” He was joking, however, since they had already given several interviews that day. They are currently in greater demand than ever before. After all, there aren’t many examples currently of Israelis and Palestinians working together for reconciliation.

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Aramin, Mr. Elhanan, you say that the madness won’t stop unless we talk to each other. Do you still have words after what has happened over the past several weeks?

Aramin: It’s very difficult to describe these atrocities. We knew that something like this would happen sooner or later. It’s not a big surprise. But we didn’t expect this number of dead or these horrific attacks, especially against children and woman. They are unjustifiable under any circumstances.

DER SPIEGEL: Why weren’t you surprised?

Aramin: People cannot bear suffering under brutal occupation for decades. That’s why I have always said to Israelis: Make peace with us now while you are strong, while there is no fighting. Otherwise, it will lead to a disaster, and no one will care about human rights anymore. We knew in advance that thousands upon thousands of civilians would pay the price.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you understand why people around the world are arguing that you have to be either completely behind the Israelis or completely behind the Palestinians?

Elhanan:No, I don’t. This is not a football game where you need to embrace your team and be against the other team. We always say: Don’t be pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. Be pro-peace, be against injustice. What’s happening today is a bloodbath, an orgy of inhumanity in all its ugly forms. And it really doesn’t matter if a terrorist cuts the head off a baby or a pilot drops a one-ton bomb on a house full of civilians. The outcome is the same.

DER SPIEGEL: Isn’t it too much to ask of the baby’s parents or the relatives of the dead civilians to understand the motives of the assailants?

Aramin: It’s absolutely too much, especially right now. They are stuck in this unbearable pain. But there is one fact: You will never meet your beloved ones again. It’s over. How do you take revenge for a dead child? By killing other people’s children? Does that ease your pain?

DER SPIEGEL: You have each lost a daughter in this endless conflict, Smadar and Abir. But somehow, you managed to overcome hatred. How?

Elhanan: I think the only way to do it is to understand that you will not see your daughter again. And that this endless cycle of violence will not stop unless you talk. It’s very difficult, but it is possible. We are proof that it is possible. The 600 members of our organization, The Parents Circle, prove it every day.

DER SPIEGEL: You never wanted to harm or even kill the people who are responsible for the death of your daughter?

Elhanan: I’m not that kind of person, I am not violent in any way. I was very, very, very angry. I was mostly angry about the situation that caused an innocent, 14-year-old girl to die. She was not a soldier. She was not a part of this conflict. In fact, when she was eight years old, Smadar wrote a letter to the presidents of Israel and Egypturging them to sit down together and reconcile. Having lost her filled me with such a pain, you cannot describe it. And it filled me with this energy, a nuclear energy. You can use this energy to cause destruction and darkness and death. Or you can take revenge in a different way and go to other people and tell them that there is another way.

DER SPIEGEL: What convinced you, Bassam, to not use this nuclear energy for violence?

Aramin: I was in a different place than Rami when Abir died. I had spent seven years in an Israeli prison as a teenager for throwing stones at an Israeli tank. Afterwards, I became a co-founder of Combatants for Peace with Palestinian fighters and ex-Israeli soldiers. Rami’s son was one of them. So, for years, long before Abir was killed, I learned to understand Israeli society, how those people receive us, which kind of shook my worldview. I always say it’s a disaster to discover the humanity and nobility of your enemy.

DER SPIEGEL: You even learned Hebrew in prison. But did all that prepare you for the death of your daughter?

Aramin: It didn’t prepare me for the pain and the anger. Up to this very day, I am angry. But it helped me see the man who shot her as a victim – of his education, of his society and of the occupation itself.

DER SPIEGEL: Have you ever met him?

Aramin:I wanted to, but apparently the Israeli authorities didn’t allow him to talk to me. I only met him in court. I said to him, you are not a hero, you didn’t kill the enemy, you just killed an innocent girl. If you are proud of that, enjoy your crime. But if you ever want to come to me to ask for forgiveness, I will forgive you. And I will do so not for you but for me, my daughter and my family. I have another five kids, and I want to see them grow up.

DER SPIEGEL: Not many people would be able – or willing – to react in such a way.

Aramin: My brother Rami always says: Luckily, we are human beings. We can think. We can choose to build a bridge for dialogue instead of digging more graves.

DER SPIEGEL: Together, the two of you have spoken to thousands of schoolchildren, bereaved families, soldiers and even militants. But the feedback isn’t always positive, is it?

Elhanan: At times, it can be very difficult. One time, Israeli schoolchildren told me it was a pity I wasn’t blown up with my daughter. In a Palestinian school, the headmaster told the kids not to listen to me because I would weaken the will to fight for freedom. But we expect such reactions.

DER SPIEGEL: Why would you expect reactions like that?

Elhanan: When we get into a high school class, it’s like walking into the open mouth of an active volcano. Most of the kids have never laid eyes on an Israeli and a Palestinian who were not fighting each other and who were not placing their pain on the table, trying to compare whose pain was greater. We are facing two very angry and bereaved societies that are full of hatred and frustration.

Aramin: Sometimes, it’s even more difficult to talk to people in, let’s say, Berlin than in Tel Aviv.

DER SPIEGEL: Really?

Aramin: Yes, it’s unbelievable. We had a tour through Germany last year. At one point, a young man came up to convert Rami. A German, not a Jew. When I said that our common enemy is the occupation of Palestinian territory, he said to Rami: "Why don’t you say something? There is no occupation!”

Elhanan: I told him that as a German, he should know something about occupation. But he kept denying it.

Aramin: Even this simple fact is too much for some to grasp. But between right and wrong, there is a field. And we say: Let’s meet there.

DER SPIEGEL: How do you measure success?

Elhanan: When just one of the schoolchildren we talk to nods their head with acceptance in the end, it’s a miracle. It means that we have saved one drop of blood. In Judaism, one drop of blood is the whole world.

Aramin: We’re facing this stubbornly thick wall every day. And when we manage to create tiny cracks in this wall, that is a success.

DER SPIEGEL: Many Palestinians consider any contact at all with Israelis to be tantamount to accepting the occupation.

Aramin: Yes, my people call it normalization. But there will be no normalization because we will never, ever accept the Israeli occupation, even after another 3,000 years. Rami and I are friends, but we cannot meet like normal friends. We cannot go freely whenever and wherever we want to go, because there is no freedom of movement in many places. Talking about it does not mean accepting it.

DER SPIEGEL: The two of you have said in interviews and presentations that children in both Israel and in the Palestinian Territories are systematically indoctrinated by their respective societies.

Elhanan: We are talking about two societies at war. And they need to prepare the young generation to be able to sacrifice themselves when the time comes by joining the army or a fighting unit. And the best way to do that is by thoroughly demonizing and dehumanizing the other side. And by keeping them apart as best as possible. I was 47 years old when I met a Palestinian for the first time in my life. And I’m always ashamed to admit it in my lectures, because it’s not normal. We live on the same land together.

DER SPIEGEL: Martin Luther King said: "Men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other.” Do you think things would improve if Palestinians knew more about the Shoah and Israelis more about the Nakba, the forced displacement of 700,000 Palestinians in the late 1940s?

Aramin: Absolutely, yes. Most Palestinians here only know the occupation because they experience the checkpoints and the bullying. They don’t know what made the Israelis come here in the first place. And it’s the same on the other side. Israelis behave like people who turn up uninvited to live in your house and say: "Who are you? Go away!” It’s all part of this brainwashing system in both societies. If people at least knew their enemy and could see their human face, it would make a difference.

DER SPIEGEL: Even if there were better understanding, the fear would remain. How can that be overcome?

Elhanan:It can’t. We carry thousands of years of victimhood on our backs. It’s not an invented victimhood, it really happened. The Holocaust happened. Every Jew is born with this fear. The question is, what do you do with it? If you use this fear to fortify yourself, to hold a gun and wait for the enemy to come, he will come. If you open yourself and try to understand, you have a chance.

DER SPIEGEL: Recent developments seem to be pointing in the opposite direction. Israel currently has the most right-wing government in its history. People who are in favor of the two-state solution are becoming rare on both sides. It is apparently much easier to sow hatred than understanding.

Aramin: For us Palestinians, the current Israeli government is nothing new. They have continued the occupation, the settlements, the house demolitions, everything. It has been going on for 75 years. Even Yitzhak Rabin…

DER SPIEGEL: …the former Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was assassinated in 1995 …

Aramin: …was a war criminal for us. He is responsible for the deaths of many of my people. But in the end, we considered him a combatant for peace because he understood that you cannot occupy another people forever.

Elhanan: Bassam is right. In occupation terms, there is no real difference between this government and the left-wing governments that came before. Golda Mier, our former foreign minister and prime minister, created the occupation with her friends. But this last government broke all the rules and violated the truce that existed in our democratic society and enabled us to live together. You saw the demonstrations before October, and there will be even more anger once we have buried our dead. The days of this government are numbered. Netanyahu will have to go.

DER SPIEGEL: Your wife Nurit was a schoolmate and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Is she still?

Elhanan: No, not for many years. When our daughter was murdered in 1997, he was the prime minister and had just created Har Homa, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. The bomb that took our daughter was the Hamas reaction to Har Homa. At the beginning of the seven days of mourning for our daughter Smadar, Netanyahu personally called on the phone. He wanted to talk to me, and when I refused, he asked for Nurit. She asked him: "What have you done?” They never spoke again.

DER SPIEGEL: Have you ever thought about leaving Israel?

Elhanan: I’m the son of a refugee. My father was a Holocaust survivor. He traveled from Hungary to Israel all alone; the rest of his family had been killed. I have nowhere else to go.

DER SPIEGEL: This whole conflict has always been a war of words in addition to being an armed conflict. Would you call Hamas a terrorist group, Rami?

Elhanan: They killed my daughter. I have no sympathy for them. But you have to keep in mind that the Israeli secret services helped create Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO and Yassir Arafat’s Fatah movement. Ever since then, Hamas has been a useful tool for Israeli politics.

DER SPIEGEL: To what end?

Elhanan: They need Hamas to show that there is nothing to talk about and nobody to talk to. Because then, you don’t have to give anything up. And what is a terrorist anyway? George Washington was a terrorist in the eyes of the British. Nelson Mandela was allegedly a terrorist. And look at Bassam here: He spent seven years in an Israeli prison. He’s a full diploma terrorist.

DER SPIEGEL: What is your word for the Israeli army, Mr. Aramin?

Aramin: They are the killers of my daughter. And for me, as a Palestinian, they are one of the biggest terror organizations ever. But I don’t believe that all of their soldiers are monsters or terrorists.

Elhanan: I joined the army in 1967. I fought the Six-Day War against Egypt, I fought in the Yom Kippur War, and I fought in Lebanon. And yet, Bassam and I call ourselves brothers today.

DER SPIEGEL: In this war of words, there are minefields everywhere. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently said that the Hamas attacks did not happen in a vacuum and warned Israel not to violate international law by attacking civilians in Gaza. He was immediately accused of anti-Semitism.

Elhanan: It happens all the time. If you criticize Israel under any circumstances, you are a traitor and you are anti-Semitic. But there is a simple fact: Oppressing and humiliating and occupying millions of people for so many years without any democratic legitimacy is not Jewish. Period. And to speak out against it is not anti-Semitic.

DER SPIEGEL: Have you ever been called an anti-Semite?

Elhanan: No, they call me a self-hating Jew. It’s beyond logic. We urgently need to understand that we are not better and not worse than other people. We need to redefine ourselves as Jews, as human beings, as Israelis. I really hope we are now at a point where the price is so high, and the pain is so great that people will rethink.