An Israeli-Palestinian Peace Encounter
The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land by Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon; Crown, 240 pp., $30
At a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee, standing beside his Israeli co-author Maoz Inon, Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah describes a transformative visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in West Jerusalem. “I had steeled myself not to feel anything,” he recalls, “yet as I moved through the exhibits, taking in the photographs, artifacts and stories, I found myself identifying with their stories.”
Most striking about Abu Sarah’s sensitive account is that moments before, he’d just described how in 1948, two miles from Yad Vashem, Zionist paramilitary forces massacred more than 100 Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin. The slaughter accelerated the mass displacement of 750,000 Palestinians known as the Nakba.
Abu Sarah’s testimony encapsulates both the guiding courage that his and Inon’s new book, The Future Is Peace, models and the book’s tragically flawed premise: that humanely witnessing the parallel trauma of the “other,” story by personal story, seeds the promise of a just future. The authors rightfully insist that to fulfill their book’s boldly optimistic title demands “dreamers and visionaries at the vanguard.” But if such work is to advance collective justice, it must name and mobilize against the decades-long Israeli oppression that has descended into genocide.
Inon and Abu Sarah weave reciprocity into the fabric of The Future Is Peace. The book chronicles the development of their personal relationship after the October 7 attacks, when together they begin leading peacebuilding tours across the land. They view these trips more as cross-cultural workshops than sightseeing journeys. “It is an industry of diplomacy and dialogue,” they explain in the introduction.
The authors take turns narrating an eight-day tour across the Holy Land. Less than a year after October 7, they wind their way from the Negev through Jaffa, Tel Aviv, West and East Jerusalem, Nazareth, the Galilee, Bethlehem in the West Bank, and the nearby Aida Camp, one of 58 refugee camps in greater Palestine. (Gaza is not included, without explanation, but presumably because of security issues).
Along the way, amid tales of their encounters with everyday Palestinians and Israelis, the authors share family stories as living embodiments of the political history that has ripped this land apart. Abu Sarah recounts Israeli soldiers torturing and murdering his brother in 1990 during the First Intifada. Inon recounts Hamas murdering his parents on October 7.
They also become oral history archivists, retelling the countless testimonies they’ve collected during their years as tour guides who promote reciprocal storytelling between Israelis and Palestinians. Abu Sarah tells the story of a Palestinian man in the West Bank who finally snapped after enduring a year’s-worth of daily humiliation at the hands of an Israeli checkpoint guard: He killed the guard after seeing his mother endure similar degradation. We learn about Combatants for Peace, the Israeli Defense Force veteran-activists who nonviolently oppose the Israeli military. A Palestinian citizen of Israel from Jaffa describes feeling marginalized even when working with conscientious Israeli peace groups. An American settler in East Jerusalem shows only a wisp of guilt at living in a home seized from a Palestinian family.
Through their alternating narratives, Abu Sarah and Inon provide different but compatible analyses of dire political conditions. Their joint introduction cites a human rights organization that uses the term genocide to describe the ongoing war against the Palestinian people. Together the authors summarize the language chasm separating Israelis and Palestinians into irreconcilable realities—one person sees an apartheid wall, the other a security fence. The Nakba becomes the War of Independence, the West Bank a biblically promised Judea.
But Abu Sarah and Inon don’t explicitly warn against drawing false equivalencies, particularly the danger of treating Palestinian terrorism and Israeli warfare evenhandedly. While they explore the devastation of collective trauma on both sides, referencing the Nakba 25 times and the Holocaust 21, they do not jointly emphasize that only the Nakba’s ethnic cleansing continues. Abu Sarah pointedly contends that “for the people living in Gaza, every day is October 7.” Inon emphasizes more the universal suffering of “every person in this ancient and holy land between the banks of the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
The deepest healing occurs, they assert, when survivors forswear the lure of vengeance and set aside their own pain such that they might come to understand that of their supposed adversaries. When Inon lost his parents in the October 7 Hamas attack, he publicly stated on behalf of his family that they sought equality, not revenge. “We did not want our tragedy and pain to be hijacked to justify another war,” he explains. Abu Sarah called Inon in sorrow on October 8, although at that point the two men barely knew each other, having met only once. The gesture initiated their professional collaboration, beginning with sharing their stories at a TED conference and later launching their tourism venture.
In recounting his visit to Yad Vashem, Abu Sarah writes that one reason Palestinians tend not to acknowledge the Holocaust is the fear that doing so would implicitly excuse the Nakba, while many Israelis fear that acknowledging the Nakba would absolve Hamas of its terrorism. How does one side recognize the other’s pain without appearing to legitimize retaliation? “Peace work doesn’t necessarily produce peace of mind,” Abu Sarah reflects. “In fact, it often creates a mind at war with itself.” Inon writes that “you risk the loneliness that comes when you no longer fully belong on either side.”
The self-reckoning Inon and Abu Sarah undertake has inspired many others, but I also believe the authors overestimate its ability to achieve peace in Israel and Palestine. “The only way forward,” they assert, “is to tear down the walls of hatred and ignorance between us.” But successful revolutionary change, whether peaceful or bloody, doesn’t necessarily require interpersonal or internal healing. After decades of failed negotiations and agreements, especially the 1993 Oslo Accords the authors keenly critique, the military, political, economic and demographic apartheid system has so violently deepened that achieving true justice in Palestine—the Israeli state now completely in control of the West Bank and Gaza—will require revolutionary transformation far beyond whatever reconciliation-inspiring individual leaders might realize.
The authors’ message would resonate even more deeply for me if, in their co-written portions, they’d placed peace work within the context of the obvious power disparities between Israel and Palestine. One way might have been to show how Israelis could support Palestinians as highly advantaged allies rather than just as human witnesses. On an everyday individual level, Israeli allies can challenge family, friends, and colleagues who make self-justifying Zionist arguments or use denigrating anti-Palestinian language. Publicly, allies can participate in protest and solidarity work to end the occupation, implement the right of return, and prosecute war crimes. Abu Sarah hints only once at this aggressive kind of partnership when he refers to “co-resistance.”
The Future Is Peace is not primarily directed at an American readership, but peace advocates in the United States might apply the book’s compassionate message to deepen their work. As a Jewish anti-Zionist, it pains me that I rarely encounter recognition of Jewish suffering at Palestine solidarity events. At the same time, Jewish activists might consider the burden many Palestine activists feel in being asked to acknowledge this pain when theirs has so often been dismissed. Inon and Abu Sarah demonstrate to ideological activists in the United States and beyond how to remain open-hearted without sacrificing resolute political conviction.
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