The brand’s tagline is "peace through the eye of a needle.”
It’s no surprise what happens when a wall is built between neighbors. As the cement is poured, as the soldiers patrol by foot, as the barrier blocks a whole people from view, any semblance of shared humanity quickly erodes. The people on the other side are lumped into an opposing and unrecognizable mass of threat, and they become impossible to empathize with and easy to denounce. But coming out of that kind of toxic environment is what makes Two Neighbors, a joint Israeli-Palestinian fashion initiative, so unexpected. The brand offers a model for how fashion can be used as a force for good in a complex, political landscape.
Two Neighbors pairs Israeli designers and seamstresses with traditional Palestinian embroiderers to create stunning contemporary designs. Every garment is a transgression — passing over that physical barrier and through both Israeli and Palestinian hands. Two Neighbors has a workshop in south Tel Aviv and coordinators in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The company is a rare instance of cooperation in an increasingly segregated setting, and it offers a literal interweaving of the people who share disputed land. The tagline is "Peace through the eye of a needle,” and through the simple act of engagement, the brand speaks of “waging our own peace process.”
The story of Two Neighbors starts with a retired man in Idaho named Whit Jones. A decade ago, Jones was winding down his psychology practice and — along with his wife, Paula — starting a foundation, The Center for Emerging Futures, to try to do some good. At a leadership seminar in Nova Scotia, Jones met an Israeli and a Palestinian who had both “suffered significantly.” The Palestinian had spent considerable time in solitary confinement, says Jones, for driving down a road that Palestinians were prohibited from using. The Israeli had been shot twice in a drive-by shooting. “They both came out of it not looking for revenge, but to find a solution,” he says.
Inspired, Jones accepted an invitation to visit Israel. He recognized the magnitude of the conflict, and started looking for small opportunities to facilitate cross-conflict connections. The program that emerged — Global Village Square — is a series of dialogue sessions and projects between Palestinians and Israelis (and, more recently, Jews and Muslims in the United States). One of the first projects to emerge was a joint fashion venture featuring Palestinian embroidery. “It took a while to find projects that make sense, dealing with all of the challenges of three different countries and cultures and languages,” says Jones. He did not want to replicate the cheap embroidered craft projects found in many of the region’s markets and typically made for a pittance.
Jones was introduced to a Palestinian women’s collective in the south Hebron hills — the women often do triple duty, embroidering in groups while simultaneously caring for children and goats — and offered them piece work for a fair wage. A group of female seamstresses working together in a woman-owned workshop in Tel Aviv were tapped to make the garments. In 2013, eight years after the idea started circulating at Global Village Square, Two Neighbors formally launched its first fashion collection. There are now almost 50 women working on the project at any given time, including dozens of Palestinian embroiderers, about a dozen Israeli seamstresses, a Palestinian embroidery designer, an Israeli garment designer, and both a Palestinian and an Israeli coordinator.
I met Miriam Givon, Two Neighbors’ Israeli designer, one sunny afternoon in her workshop in a low-rise mixed-use building. The small space was lined with racks of colorful clothes, some from her eponymous collection and some from the Two Neighbors collection. The clothes are actually charming, not just the “gift shop cute” common to socially beneficial fashion. There are simple trenches with embroidered epaulettes, sophisticated cocktail dresses with embroidered edges, and even long white wedding gowns with massive golden embroidered neck pieces. “There’s already plenty of ‘craft’ embroidery,” says Givon. “We wanted to create something new together.” Fusing simple modern silhouettes with elegant, traditional embroidery, it’s already found a market in Israel, Europe, and the United States. Prospective customers can also arrange to visit the workshop, and the clothes are also sold through the Two Neighbors website and partner websites like Birdsong London (which distributes fashion ethically made by women).
Before Givon started working with Two Neighbors three years ago, she had few interactions with Palestinians. But when she first met with the embroiderers from the south Hebron hills, she was surprised by how familiar they felt. “My grandmother, who is from Yemen, speaks Arabic and used to do embroidery for Muslim women,” says Givon. “If you’re a Jew, you’re not supposed to recognize an Arab identity, but I felt a very strong connection to these women.”
While there has been a positive response to this project, it is not without controversy and pushback. As a result, Two Neighbors no longer posts pictures of the embroiderers or even discloses their specific location in the West Bank. Resentment here — on both sides — runs deep.
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank (the area known as Palestine), and there are no optimistic indications for Palestinian self-determination. While the conflict is relatively static, with little progress and no formal peace talks, divisions between Israelis and Palestinians are widening. These divisions have largely destroyed nuanced perspectives and instead foster ease with stereotyping and vilification. With limited exposure and magnified grievances, it becomes all too easy to point fingers and elide cooperation.
In defiance of this growing norm, Segal Kirsch, the Israeli coordinator, and Adeem Amro, the Palestinian coordinator, meet every two weeks, and the entire group assembles once or twice a year in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. It can be difficult to organize these larger meetings. The women coming from Palestine require hard-to-get permits, and travel to Israel is often complicated by road closures and delays at checkpoints. Israelis are not permitted to travel into Palestinian-controlled areas. Points of intersection are so rare, in fact, that the business was incorporated in the United States because there is no option to register a joint Israeli-Palestinian venture. “We’re a partnership and not an Israeli company with Palestinian employees,” says Kirsch. “We do everything together.”
Two Neighbors is committed to being a “social business,” paying all of the seamstresses and embroiderers — who are typically low-income — a living wage based on Israeli minimum income guidelines (higher than average wages in the Palestinian territories). Any additional profits earned (a portion is retained to pay investors and reinvest in the growth of the company) are dispersed to the respective women’s cooperatives. “Most of the women working with us now had never made a single dollar in their lives,” says Jones. “This has changed their lives and their view of themselves.” Israel has a developed economy without the same level of abject poverty as Palestine, but it is extremely stratified and there are many low-wage workers. “One of the Israeli women used her first paycheck to take her husband for dinner for the first time, and she was so thrilled to be able to do that,” says Jones.
While the primary motivation for working with Two Neighbors may be economic, Jones says that typically shifts when the women come face-to-face. “People would bring their new babies to show off, and real connections have evolved,” says Jones. “They’re committed to showing the world and themselves that they can be real partners with the other side.” Amro acknowledges that, at first, she simply wanted a job. “As I got more involved, it became a more personal thing,” she says. “Before I worked with them, I wasn’t mingling on the other side, but this has opened another world. The people I work with are not like what we hear about on TV — about how they want to just kill Palestinians and take the land. They want peace, just like us.”
Jones says he’s seen a lot of change on an individual level. “They let go of that basic belief that people on the other side are innately evil and dangerous. Very quickly, they realize that they’re struggling with many of the same kinds of problems.”
No one who works with Two Neighbors is under the delusion that this project is going to solve the seemingly intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But each is committed to doing their small part to compel reconciliation, beginning on a personal level. “We can’t make peace with our project, but it’s a step,” says Amro. If they want to seek peace, they need to work together and convince other people to do the same. “They’re not waiting for some bigger entity to declare peace,” says Jones. “They’re doing it for themselves right now.”
Two summers ago, the entire Two Neighbors group got together for dinner in Tel Aviv, and translators were present so the women could talk without relying on a mix of broken second languages. “We started talking not about what we do for work, but about life and kids and such,” says Kirsch. The Israeli and Palestinian women soon found an easy commonality in day-to-day lives that can seem worlds away.
One of the Israeli women turned to Kirsch and noted an unexpected approval of the Palestinian women, who were both more familiar and moderate than she expected. She leaned into Kirsch and intimated, in Hebrew, that the political situation might be better if only their husbands were similarly enlightened and pleasant. “I said to her, I know all of their husbands and they are like this,” says Kirsch. “She was surprised to hear that they talk like this, and that even their husbands might be willing to talk to her.”
Kirsch’s story underlines the importance of dialogue and exposure of reaching across a wall and meeting the gaze of someone supposedly at odds. “Maybe I opened a small window for her that not all Palestinians are the same,” says Kirsch. “That maybe there are people on the other side that share values with you, that are more like you than you think, and who are willing to work with you to find a solution.”