If we are talking about individuals, then yes, it is. I will tell you a story that happened to me. I know a boy from Zikhron Ya'akov who is in the tenth grade. He came to me and told me that he wanted to start an Arab/Israeli youth group in Faradis. I never turn down any ideas for meetings, so I set up a date for him to come visit me. A day before he was supposed to come, he called me and said that his father had forbidden him from going into an Arab village. I tried to talk to his father but it was impossible to get him to listen to me. We eventually agreed that he and his wife would come with their son to protect the boy. So I invited him. As we say in Arabic, "You bring the cookies and I bring the coffee." On the day that they were supposed to come, the father called me up and told me that they were not coming, but that after a long debate they had come up with the idea that I should go to their place. It wasn't about me having to move around. I don't have a problem with that. I can get out and go to Zikhron Ya'akov, which is only a minute away.
I told him that if he didn't feel like sending his son, he didn't have to and I hung up. That man reconsidered and called me back two days later and he told me that he would send his son, alone. I took his son for a walk in Faradis so that he would get a sense of the people himself. I noticed that he was watching the people, expecting to be killed any minute. I felt his fear. I saw it in his eyes when he looked at people. I wanted to give him a chance to see that these are normal people who don’t care to ask who you are and what you are doing here. I wanted to break the stereotype about being stoned when you go to an Arab village. Then he came to my home. What does a tenth grader talk about-- football, games drawing... life. He doesn't know anything about politics or violence or why my father and his are fighting, or why they forbid kids from playing with each other because one is a Jew and one is an Arab. If you talk to someone that was an extremist in his own beliefs, you can feel that he starts to change his understanding. They call this “ants' work.” I can't change the whole universe at once, but I can change a small group. If one person comes to work with me, he will be like my messenger. When he talks with his family he can tell them, for example, that not all Arabs are the same, they are not all terrorists. He will believe in our cause and he will defend it, he will support me. At the same time I will be planting hope. What is hope for me? It is changing this situation to a better one, for a Palestinian state to be established, to have rights and to live in peace so that our Palestinian brothers will not suffer any more.