Parents Circle Families Forum (PCFF)

Activities

• Operates offices in Tel Aviv and El’ram (Palestinian Authority). “Friends of the PCFF” operates offices in the USA, UK, Germany, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland, in an effort to raise funds and promote activities.

Political Advocacy

• Activities promote a highly biased view of the conflict based on the Palestinian narrative and draw an immoral equivalence between terror victims and terrorists.
• While PCFF advocates for “reconciliation,” “dialogue,” and “knowledge of the other,” it exploits the grief of families and the language of peace to promote a highly divisive, contentious, and narrow personal agenda.
• PCFF events have become vehicles for the personal agendas of its officials. For instance, spokesperson Robi Damelin regularly travels to the United States on behalf of the organization, promoting views that place sole blame for the continuation of the conflict on Israel.
• Damelin regularly utilizes emotive language to elicit sympathy from her audience; refers to Hamas terrorism and Israeli self-defense as a “cycle of violence,” thereby presenting a distorted view of the conflict; and cites BDS initiatives as “yet another indication that Israel is fast becoming the pariah of the word, and how we are losing our moral fiber.”
• Many bereaved families in Israel have spoken out against PCFF for its demands of an acceptance of the Palestinian narrative of exclusive Israeli guilt, a corresponding rejection of the legitimacy of Israeli narratives, and the political messages that are transmitted, explicitly and implicitly, through PCFF activities.
  • The parents of a fifteen-year-old girl who was murdered in a Jerusalem terror attack on August 9, 2001, wrote a blog (July 12, 2013) stating that while the Parent’s Circle “claims to speak for five or six hundred bereaved Israeli or Palestinian members,” it “exploit[s] bereavement to raise funds and to promote specific ideological positions.” They state that PCFF is “narrowly political” and “arouses deep disquiet” within bereaved families, adding that the “flow of substantial foreign grants to this small, unrepresentative group of activists ought to be critically reviewed.”
• In December 2023, in the aftermath of the brutal Oct. 7th attacks, PCFF was a signatory on a statement claiming, “As proponents of human rights, we must fight apartheid and oppression…the widespread support among the Israeli public for the nature of the Israeli retaliation in Gaza — a retaliation which in itself resulted in a horrific extent of killing and suffering — together with the calls by prominent public figures (as well as parts of the Israeli public) for ethnic cleansing and population transfer, are cause for deep concern.”
• In August 2022, signatory on a statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to the statement, “We stand in solidarity with our fellow human rights defenders in Palestinian society. We repudiate these baseless declarations and call on the international community to pressure Israel to revoke its decision.”
• Produced a documentary titled, Two  Sided  Story, funded by the United States Agency for International Development  (USAID) and the  United States Institute for Peace (USIP), which attempts to provide a balanced view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but  instead promotes the notion, albeit subtly, that the Israeli narrative is the source of the problem and must be changed. Participants who reject the legitimacy of Israel are not challenged.
• Its documentary, “Encounter Point,” similarly blames Israel as being solely responsible for the conflict and the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis, alike. In the film, Damelin is asked how she felt after learning that her son’s killer became a Palestinian folk hero.  She responds by saying: “I’m not focusing on this, what I’m focusing on is: Why was David in the occupied territories? Why was David guarding settlers who said their safety was more important than David’s life?”
• PCFF’s “Crack in the Wall” project, which received €351,006  from the European Union, aims to “create a ‘crack’ in the proverbial and literal wall by engaging Palestinians and Israelis in dialogue and providing a platform to express themselves in their own language then translated to the other side.”  While the project was originally intended to “facilitate [] direct communication between Palestinians and Israelis,” with “discussions about entertainment, hobbies, day-to-day experiences and others,” the final product became limited to political issues due to “skepticism and disinterestedness on the Palestinian side.”
• As part of its ongoing “Dialogue Encounters” program, PCFF gives presentations to Israeli public school students, which include relatives of Palestinian terrorists who had been killed, together with bereaved families of Israelis and Palestinians. Following complaints from parents, the Israeli Ministry of Education, which is responsible for authorizing extracurricular programming, declared that relatives of terrorists could no longer participate. Legal advisor of the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, Attorney Hila Cohen, noted: “Drawing a comparison between bereaved Israeli families and Palestinian families is inconceivable, as such discussions legitimize acts of terrorism.”
• During a PCFF program at a Seattle synagogue on October 13, 2013, speaker Bassam Aramin drew a moral equivalence between the Israeli Shas political party and the Hamas terror organization.
• In October 2012, PCFF officials were listed as participating in an event organized by “Friends of Sabeel UK.” Sabeel is very active in anti-Israel political campaigns, including church divestment campaigns; supports a “one state” framework, meaning the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state; and utilizes overtly antisemitic language such as deicide imagery, as well as replacement and supercessionist theology.