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“Simon Greer and Saad Soliman [Leading with Conviction™ 2019] should, by most accounts, be fierce ideological opponents.
“Greer is a Jewish social entrepreneur whose uncles fought for Israel in 1967; Soliman is a Muslim justice reform leader whose uncles died fighting for Egypt in that same war.
“‘We could have been enemies,’ Soliman has said of their shared history, ‘but we chose something else.’
“That ‘something else’ has become an intensive teaching partnership on Israel and Palestine, and an effort to use what they have learned from overcoming divisions to teach a new generation of leaders. Continuing this work in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the brutal war that followed has added immeasurably to this challenge.
You can’t build a just world if the only tools you have are shame and cancelation.
“Greer and Soliman first met several years ago at a retreat for criminal justice leaders. ‘We were at this retreat, talking about punishment, justice, and dignity, and then I find out that our uncles fought against each other in a war,’ Soliman reflects. The realization made their meeting feel like a fork in the road.
“‘We both could have retreated into the safety of our existing narratives,’ he recalls, ‘but that would have been a betrayal of everything we say we believe in.’ Instead, they chose to pursue a friendship, convinced that “transformation happens not when we simply defend ourselves, but when we also honor each other’s humanity. …
“Greer recognized that partnering with Soliman could help take bridgebuilding work into new and challenging terrain, through their shared appreciation for vulnerability and honesty, distinct sets of life experiences, and diverging views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“What began as a friendship grounded in shared questions about the struggle for dignity and justice in the United States turned toward a conflict in the Middle East that shaped both their family stories, and toward American students inheriting that conflict in real time.
“After the Hamas attacks, the war, and the spillover onto college and university campuses across the U.S., the University of North Carolina’s new School of Civic Life and Leadership invited Greer and Soliman, together with [The Nantucket Project] cofounder Tom Scott, to translate their bridgebuilding work on Israel-Palestine into a sustained, credit bearing class.
“The result was a pilot course at UNC in spring 2025 — ‘Courageous Conversations: Israel and Palestine on Campus’ — with Duke University developing a similar model some months later.
“The course invites small cohorts of students into a semester-long process: studying multiple historical narratives, practicing structured dialogue, and then traveling together to Israel and the West Bank. …
“Students practice what Greer calls ‘agreed upon bravery,’ signaling that courage is not an individual performance but a shared norm the group labors to cultivate and sustain. Participants are asked to speak from their own experience rather than rely on slogans, to listen especially for what is hardest to hear, and to resist the urge to collapse every disagreement into a referendum on their own goodness, or the goodness of others. Silence is treated not as failure but as a sign that something has landed with weight and might need time before the group can process it aloud.
“Soliman brings a complementary critique from his years in criminal justice reform and movement work where he has seen organizations fracture over purity tests and institutions retreat from hard conversations for fear of backlash. What excites him about this teaching is not that it produces instant consensus — ‘it doesn’t,’ he is quick to note — but that it offers students ‘a different script’ for what to do with serious conflict.
“‘You can’t build a just world if the only tools you have are shame and cancelation,’ he says. ‘You have to learn to stand in your story and still make space for the stories of others.’”
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