Daniel Wade

Daniel Wade has  a background in documentary film; drawing on his own experience of growing up in Israel and serving in the army, Daniel developed the pedagogic structure of Beyond Violence. Daniel began his career in photography at a young age having his first exhibition at 12 years old. He has taught documentary film, written film scripts, acted as a consultant and worked as a cameraman.
He and his partner Eti Wade challenged traditional art form and middle class family myth in their live installation the 2.4 project; the public were invited daily into their home to view the Wade family as art. Daniel is a marathon runner supporting projects for disabled people, specifically with learning difficulty and depressed young men. Daniel lives in London with Eti, their three boys and canine daughter Olive.

Moshé Machover

Moshé Machover was born in 1936 in Tel-Aviv, Palestine. As a teenager he joined the left-Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatza‘ir, from which he was expelled in 1952 for questioning its ideology. As a student, he joined the Israeli Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1962 together with a small group of party dissidents who challenged the ICP’s lack of internal democracy and its subservience to the Soviet Union.

In the same year they founded the Israeli Socialist Organization (better known by the name of its journal, Matzpen, and later renamed the Socialist Organization in Israel), an independent radical left group.

Moshé Machover is a mathematician. He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the university of Bristol, and at King’s College, London; he is emeritus professor at London University, and has been living in London since late 1968.

Apart from academic books and papers on mathematical logic and social choice (the mathematical theory of collective decision-making), he has written extensively on socialist theory, particularly as applied to Israel, the Middle East and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

With Akiva Orr he co-authored Peace, Peace where there is no Peace (1961) on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Hebrew; English translation available online) With Emmanuel Farjoun he co-authored Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy (Verso, 1983), a critical reconstruction of Marxian political economy using a stochastic approach borrowed from statistical mechanics. A collection of his essays, Israelis and Palestinians; Conflict and Resolution was published by Haymarket Books in 2012.

Hanif Khan

Hanif Khan lives in London UK and is married with two children. Hanif is a video director, lighting cameraman and editor who runs his own business in media production. He has more than 15 years experience in broadcast television, working for Sky, BBC, MTA Intl. and other broadcasters. He has directed sport events and festivals along with producing corporate video production of the highest quality using high definition (full HD).

Hanif Khan is a committed professional with considerable capacity to deliver crisp, effective editing and technical advice, whether for news programmes or magazine style show features. His broadcast work has featured location filming at major live sporting events, award ceremonies and festivals.


He works closely with MTA Intl, a 24hr TV Station run mainly by full time volunteers, which is self-funded, it is geared towards family viewing. His main work for MTA Intl. is Training and Development, however he has worked as technical coordinator, in all aspects of live and recorded production, in particular News Production.



Hanif was President of the Hounslow Chamber of Commerce in 2010. He is also a member of the Hounslow Borough Community Police Consultative Group. Hanif is involved in residents’ concerns and in securing improvements in peoples lives. This is why he was passionate about working on the film with Irris and the team on Beyond Violence and is proud to be part of such a brilliant piece of work.

Hanif enjoy’s playing Football and Badminton and enjoys yearly skiing trips

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Languages: First Language English Urdu (fluently spoken), Arabic (read)

Frances Rifkin

Bassam Aramin

Bassam Aramin

Bassam Aramin became involved in the Palestinian struggle as a boy growing up in the ancient city of Hebron. At 17, he was caught planning an attack on Israeli troops, and spent seven years in prison. In 2005, he co-founded Combatants for Peace, an organisation of former Israeli and Palestinian combatants leading a non-violent struggle against the occupation. Since then, Bassam has never picked up a weapon – not even when, two years later, his ten-year-old daughter Abir was gunned down and killed.

At the age of 12 Bassam joined a demonstration where a boy was shot by a soldier. “I watched him die in front of me. From that moment I developed a deep need for revenge and became part of a group whose mission was to get rid of the catastrophe that had come to our village. We called ourselves freedom fighters. At first we raised the Palestinian flag over electric cables and in trees; then we threw stones and empty bottles, later we found Jordanian abandoned hand grenades and decided to hurl them at Israeli jeeps -two of them exploded.  No one was hurt. In 1985, at the age of 17, I  received a seven-year prison sentence.”

On October 1, 1987, in an Israeli prison 120 prisoners – all teenage boys – were beat, naked, until they could hardly stand. Bassam was held the longest and beaten the hardest. The incident with the soldiers made Bassam realize the importance of preserving humanity – the right to laugh and the right to cry. About this time Bassam began conversations with a prison guard who had tried to protect him.  It was the start of a dialogue and a friendship. “He thought Palestinians were the settlers and didn’t understand our fight.  I carefully prepared for our talks and told him our story. We discovered many similarities and some months later the guard said he understood now that the Palestinians were not the settlers and that he understood our cause.” Seeing how this transformation happened just through talking made Bassam realize that the only way to resolve the conflict was through dialogue, not violence.

Bassam was released in 1992 just before the Oslo Accords, and there was a great feeling of hope for a two-state solution. It wasn’t until 2005 that some Palestinians ex-combatants and Israelis former soldiers, who had all come to believe in non-violence started meeting in secret. They met as true enemies who wanted to speak. The Israelis were refusing to fight, not for the sake of the Palestinian people, but for the sake of the morals of their society. The Palestinians, too were not acting to save Israeli lives, but to prevent Palestinian society from suffering more. It was only later that both sides came to feel a responsibility for each other’s people.

On January 16, 2007, Bassam's 10-year-old daughter, Abir, was shot and killed in cold blood by an Israeli soldier while standing outside her school with some classmates. The children hadn’t even been throwing stones. Bassam is the co-founder of the Palestinian-Israeli movement Combatants for Peace and since Abir’s death has been an active member of the Bereaved Parents Circle. Why Bassam continues is his efforts to move others beyond violence is best described in his own words:

“ Abir’s murder could easily have led me down the path of hatred and vengeance, but I felt compelled to return to dialogue and non-violence. After all, it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but it was one hundred former Israeli soldiers, Combatants for Peace, who built  a garden in her name at the school where she was murdered.”

Bassam is 44 years old, has 6 children and works in public relations for the Palestine National Archives in Ramallah for the Palestinian Authority.

Graham Lucas

Graham Lucas is a co-founder of Utopia Arts, and is a video editor & film director and producer.

 In the 1980’s Graham was a co-founder of Spot On Productions which produced TV documentaries and educational, training and music videos.

 In the community sector Graham directed and produced, “There’s Something About Me I Like!” a video musical about bullying in a large comprehensive school.

A creative factotum: theatre, video, lighting and sound technician. An all rounder with scriptwriter, theatre producer, stage director and event manager as strings to his bow. Graham is now Utopia Art's project coordinator.

Irris Singer

Irris Singer is a feminist psychotherapist working within an Attachment and Relational orientation in the interface between psychoanalysis and politics. A training therapist, supervisor, teacher, feminist and human rights activist, Irris Singer lives between Israel and London. She has worked professionally in both countries, co-founding the feminist Counselling Centre for Women Israel, and as acting Clinical Director at the Institute for Psychoanalysis and Social Studies UK.

Irris’s particular interest is in difference and how that gets played out between individuals and groups. Irris draws on her own experience of difference between her immigrant Jewish family’s heritage and the English communities where they lived. Early on she realised that her difference could provoke either hostility or idealisation even at school. Later she experienced a similar dynamic between class and people’s colour in the UK, and later still in Israel between Jews of different ethnicities, colour and class, and more acutely between Jews and Arabs.

Irris struggled to understand what was behind those responses. With the help of students and participants in her experiential workshops on difference, Irris has come to understand the internal process of projections and introjections that either dehumanise or idealise. Irris and the Moving Beyond Violence team have focused on the protagonists’ reversal of that process as they withdraw their projections and step out of denial of collective dehumanising narratives and behaviours.

Irris and the team (check us out) look forward to your contribution on the movingbeyondviolence.org website. We hope that together we can find ways to contribute in our work settings and communities to reduce the cycle of fear and violence that so often accompanies difference.

Riva Joffe

Riva Joffe is South African, from a political exile family that moved to London in the 1940s. She became involved in the anti-Apartheid movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and later the women’s movement. Currently she works for Palestinian rights, as a Jewish-heritage, anti-Zionist who has renounced her so-called ‘Right of Return’.

Her earlier careers included palaeontology research, writing a book, Conservation, and teaching Biology. She adopted two children, and after studying for an MSc in human nutrition, worked in public health and taught in medical schools. Later she became a training consultant and a mediator, specialising in personal development and in diversity and equalities.

She trained as a psychotherapist some 25 years ago and now works overtly politically, mostly with people who have experience of discrimination and is also active in bringing the psychotherapy profession into line with demands of Equalities legislation.

Martin Land

Martin Land is a theoretical physicist living in Jerusalem. He is president of the International Association for Relativistic Dynamics and teaches computer science at Hadassah College and the Open University of Israel. A delegate to the college teachers union, he has been active in peace movements, civil rights, feminism and LGBT since the late 1960s. He is co-author of Time and Human Language Now, in addition to articles in relativistic physics, computer networking, and critical theory.

Recent work includes a critique of race-religion-nation as categories in social theory, and a study of resistance to theory in contemporary political and academic discourse. He is married to feminist psychotherapist Janet Baumgold, whom he gratefully acknowledges as a primary source of insight in relational psychology.

Joseph Schwartz

Joseph Schwartz is an attachment-based psychotherapist practising in London. A member of the Bowlby Centre in London, he is co-editor of Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs and author of Cassandra's Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and America. He has also published numerous papers in professional journals.

 A former physicist, he is also the author of Einstein for Beginners, Partial Progress, and The Creative Moment. He was a civil rights worker in Mississippi from 1964 to 1965, a shop steward in the college teachers’ union in New York and a minor officer in the National Union of Journalists in London. He was active in Science for the People in the US and the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the UK. He is married to Rachel Wingfield Schwartz.

Itamar Shappira

Itamar Shappira is Israeli, 33 years of age and lives in (West) Jerusalem. He is a former IDF soldier. Itamar is the Israeli protagonist of the film Moving Beyond Violence.

As an activist, Itamar co-founded and worked with ‘Combatants for Peace’ from 2005 to 2008. He was its Israeli coordinator for a year. He also represented the organisation ‘Breaking the Silence’ abroad, in a number of European countries. Drawing from his own experience of participation in the military and from hundreds of testimonies given by other soldiers, he gave talks about the practices of control and terror of the Israeli Army in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

He works as a tour guide, specialising in Jerusalem, focusing on cultural-religious-ethnic tension and collaboration, narratives of religion and politics and collective identities, both in history and in the present. He works both privately and through a unique Israeli-Palestinian alternative tourism company. In the past he worked for over three years at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem until he was fired for ‘mixing the Holocaust with politics’ (god forbid...) and today gives alternative Holocaust-remembrance tours at Yad Vashem (privately of course).

He puts his time and energy in a number of different activities: he plays flamenco guitar, performing with Flamenco singers, dancers, and percussionists, and occasionally collaborates with musicians from different traditions, including Arabic, Indian and jazz.

Today he is an independent activist, not attached to any particular NGO and he continues to look for a better way to contribute.