Amira Musallam | West Bank
On a November night in 2000, 12-year-old Amira Musallam crouched in her family’s house in Bethlehem as bombs rained down and screamed for someone to rescue them. Feeling the heat of a bomb hitting the house behind them, her family crawled along the side of the road to the home of a neighbor in a safer position. She emerged in the morning to find half of her family’s home in ruins and their street splattered with the remains of a doctor who had tried to reach injured neighbors. It marked a first turning point: her friends in a neighboring Israeli settlement became ‘enemies’; her childhood sense of safety was shattered.
After rebuilding their house, her family moved back home. They were joined by a British woman from Women in Black who provided unarmed civilian protection, a method of preventing violence through protective presence. She invited a second woman involved in unarmed civilian protection, a Jewish American Israeli, to visit the household. This interaction marked another turning point: Amira says that she realized that the people she resented were not her enemies and that there were people who “didn’t want the circle of blood and hatred to continue.” (Click here to watch the interview) She cites this experience as the moment she became a peace activist.
Today, Amira is the head of mission for Unarmed Civilian Protection in Palestine (UCPiP), an initiative she co-founded to deploy and coordinate unarmed protective presence teams in the West Bank. Through UCPiP, Amira leads teams who accompany Palestinian families targeted by settler and military violence, document human rights violations, and build rapid-response networks with international allies. Her organization represents a growing global movement of unarmed protection rooted in solidarity and nonviolence.
After surveying existing protective presence work in the West Bank, UCPiP designed extensive training to better prepare volunteers for the realities of protective presence in the Palestinian context. The first cohorts of UCPiP-trained volunteers have been embedded in communities threatened by settler land grabs. UCPiP’s work has provided a sense of stability that has allowed the people they accompany to stay in their homes, even in the face of settler attacks.
Before founding UCPiP, Amira worked with Water Matters, a joint Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian project hosted by the Holy Land Trust to promote cooperation through sustainable water development in the Dead Sea region. She has also worked with B’Tselem and other human rights organizations, documenting abuses and building bridges between communities divided by fear.
Her work is tied to her Catholic faith, which she describes as a source of both courage and compassion. Her faith compels her to reject despair. “As a Christian, love is more powerful than hate,” she says. (Click here to watch the interview.)
Her approach to peace is deeply embodied. “This work is not abstract,” she says. “It lives in my body. It’s personal, and it’s political. Protecting life in a system built to erase is not just resistance; it’s survival.” (Mel Duncan Recommendation Letter) Amira’s story is tied to the land. In 2019, the Israeli military demolished her ex-husband’s family home in the Al-Mahkrour area and destroyed their restaurant. Despite proving ownership in court in 2023, the family faced ongoing settler harassment. In July 2024, settlers again invaded the land, destroying her son’s toys in front of him and forcibly evicting the family. Ramzi, like his mother, is learning what it means to face violence without surrendering to it. Her son’s right to grow up in Palestine drives her work.
Tanenbaum awarded Amira the 2025 Peacemaker in Action Award. Amira Musallam’s life stands as a testimony that nonviolence is not passive; it is an act of radical faith. She says, “For me, that means standing in front of a tent at midnight with nothing but my body and a flashlight, knowing that I am not alone.”