This is a story that alternates between despair and hope, one strewn with disappointment. It is also a story of women who tried to establish a bridge of rapprochement, understanding and coexistence, and discovered how brittle and fragile the foundations were.

It began about three years ago with the women of Machsom Watch (Checkpoint Watch), a nongovernmental organization of Israeli women objecting to the movement restrictions imposed on Palestinians by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) checkpoints. The women wanted to deepen their activities within Palestinian villages in Samaria after two large IDF checkpoint crossings, Hawara and Beit Iba, were dismantled. Two veteran members of the organization, Dvora Oreg and Ra’aya Golmov, offered to organize English study groups for female Palestinian residents. Since those classes opened, Israeli-Palestinian relations have known many ups and downs. Every shock wave, such as the Protective Edge campaign in July and August of 2014, put another crack in the bridge they labored so hard to build.

Hadas Carmi is a Machsom Watch activist who used to teach English to a group of girls and young women from the Jorish village. “Girls aged 12 to 26 studied in my group,” Carmi told Al-Monitor. “Teaching with me was a certified English teacher named Shosh Chen. Shosh assembled the lesson plans and I taught English songs. They learned the songs of Paul Simon and Paul McCartney, and mainly they loved John Lennon’s 'Imagine.' By my request, they wrote their own words to the same tune.”

The Israeli Machsom Watch women who taught the Palestinian girls used to stand at IDF checkpoints and document confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, settlers and residents of the Samarian villages. A brave friendship evolved between the teachers and their Palestinian students. It seemed to them that the bridge they had constructed, though narrow, was stable and strong. But then came the July 31 terror attack against the Dawabsha family in Douma. Toddler Ali and his father, Saad, were murdered when their house was set on fire, and everything fell apart.