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When the Abraham Accords were signed, they opened diplomatic channels across the Middle East. For Tom Vizel, the agreements were not an ending, but an invitation. Long before normalization, he had been working in regional youth education and cross-community engagement, building encounters between young people who had been taught to see one another as strangers or adversaries. The Accords, he says, “opened the door for us to bring people together without fear, something we could not have dreamed about before.”

Vizel is the founder of We Are MENA, a network of youth organizations spanning the Middle East and North Africa. It aims to connect civic organizations and institutions across borders, enabling partnerships that support a more culturally connected, economically inclusive, and sustainable regional future. Today, it links 15 grassroots youth organizations from more than 10 countries across the region.

Education as the First Bridge

Vizel’s path in education began in NOAL, one of Israel's largest youth movements, with nearly 100,000 Jewish, Arab, and Druze members, where he had spent years creating spaces where young Israelis could meet one another. Over time, he began asking a broader question. “Can we take this pedagogy that we’re doing over decades in Israel and expand it to the region?”

The answer came through partnership. In Morocco, Abdelhak El Kaoukabi of the Mimouna Association was working to reconnect young Moroccans with Jewish heritage, a history that had largely faded from public memory despite centuries of shared life, during which Jewish communities were an integral part of Morocco’s social, cultural, and economic fabric.

Through a shared Hebrew-teaching program, the two educators met and began building what would become the first youth encounters between Israeli and Moroccan organizations. “We provided a safe space for the participants to talk about their challenges, their dreams, and their future,” Abdu explains. ​

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From Dehumanization to Rehumanization

Both educators point to the same core obstacle: fear. Abdu says many young people hesitate to meet those from outside their own community, shaped by how they were raised, what they were taught, and what they were warned about. Difference, he explains, is often learned as something to avoid rather than something to understand.

He describes this as a long process of dehumanization, in which people grow up seeing others through labels instead of as individuals. The work, he says, is about reversing that process, not by forcing agreement, but by restoring the ability to see the person in front of you as human.

That is why the structure of the encounters matters. Participants do not arrive alone. They come through trusted organizations, prepared together, and supported as a group. Abdu explains that this gives young people the safety they need to cross boundaries, speak honestly, and begin the slow work of seeing one another differently.

The Fourth Circle

Vizel frames peace through what he calls four circles. The first three are familiar: diplomacy, security, and economy. “Everybody knows those,” he says. But he argues they are unstable without a fourth.

“The human element,” he says. “The civic engagement circle.”

Without it, he warns, peace remains fragile. “You can deploy security forces and inject money,” Abdu adds, “but without people’s initiative, we will have peace among elites.”

We Are MENA exists to build that fourth circle. It works not with isolated individuals, but with youth organizations across the region, allowing encounters to be repeated, scaled, and sustained.

Beyond the Handshake

Tom Vizel and Abdelhak El Kaoukabi are building a civilian foundation for peace by connecting young leaders across the Middle East and North Africa.