Disclaimer: I didn’t intend to write this. My only agenda in visiting Israel and Palestine in September 2024 was to listen. Had the events of October 7th fully decimated any and all visions for hope? Pushed off any talk of ‘peace’ for another 100 years? Is there any Israeli vision for the future that does not involve ongoing violence and war? Or is it true that what we see playing out on front pages is ‘necessary’ and ‘the only option’...? What I heard was shocking, disorienting, and very courageous. I invite you to listen compassionately and read beneath the headlines, even as the rubble, rebuilding, and a 'tsunami of post-traumatic stress’ lay ahead yet. May God have mercy and enlarge our hearts.

“Be pro-humanity,” they said. "Please, do not choose a side." In the wake of October 7th, I heard this from Israeli Jews, both Orthodox and secular, and Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian. I heard it from career soldiers, human rights advocates, lawyers, entrepreneurs, rabbis, and pastors. I heard it from the families of hostages as they implored us—a mix of Americans, Canadians, Brits, and one delightful Aussie—to support a different course for their land. One of cycle breaking. "It’s our only hope,” they said.

Abdelrahim, an agnostic Gazan and Fulbright Scholar, had just begun his PhD at an American university when the violent breach, massacre, and subsequent bombing of Gaza began. He spent innumerable sleepless and searching hours, days, weeks trying to arrange safe passage for his wife and three kids—then seven, four, and two—to join him in the United States. In the first five months of the war, his wife had moved the kids and her parents 16 times, at best to places with 15-20 people sharing a two-bedroom apartment. She told him of many weeks where 15,000 people were sharing three bathrooms. Disease grew rampant, food scarce, information impossible. Eventually he made contact with a reliable smuggler and paid $30,000 for permits to bring his family through the Rafah crossing and, eventually, to him. His wife is now earning her master’s degree at the same university, though he has lost 50 family members to the ongoing horrors. Even with grief fresh and heavy, he says, "With my personality, I don’t even get mad—I would never resort to violence. Gazans are very resilient and resourceful—we survive. Most Gazans are peace-loving and just want to move on from this.”

Indeed, long lines of war-weary Gazans are walking across today’s front-page under titles of ‘ceasefire.’ Women and children carry the remains of their previous lives packed into tattered bags and trudge through many miles of decimation and rubble hoping to find traces of the former things. Where to begin, again. Most Gazan families became refugees in 1948, as the new state of Israel displaced indigenous communities to create a homeland for Jewish refugees—survivors of the holocaust. The world’s war has continued smoldering as a 76-year catastrophe for millions of people, including both Israelis and Palestinians.

“The idea that bombs bring quiet and walls bring security is naïve,” says Maoz Inon, an Israeli entrepreneur. Maoz’s father was known as “the best farmer in Israel,” he says, growing watermelon, wheat, and chickpeas. His mother was an artist, known for her mandalas. They were both murdered in their home at 7:50am on October 7th, 2023—his mother burned so badly she could not be identified, he says in a TED talk released in April 2024 that’s been watched more than 2 million times.

"My parents prepared us,” says Maoz, speaking mostly of the near constant catastrophes of farming, from drought to flood to extreme heat then cold. "They always told us, 'Next year will be better...’ And we are still believing that—we are chasing that dream. Hope is not something we can lose—it’s something we make.”

Maoz travels the world with this message of hope and vision for peace: Israelis and Palestinians working together to break the cycle of bloodshed that has cost nearly everyone in the land a loved one. Joining him on global stages (like TED, mentioned earlier) and to meet Pope Francis is Aziz Abu Sarah—a Palestinian, National Geographic Explorer, and co-founder of Interact International with Maoz. Aziz grew up in a small town two miles from Jerusalem in the Palestinian territories during the first intifada. He was ten years old when his older brother Tayseer died from injuries incurred through torture in an Israeli detention facility. His crime? Throwing stones at soldiers—the child’s pastime of protesting ever-present AK-47s and daily dehumanization. 

It's because of Aziz that I heard about this listening-learning, multi-narrative opportunity with Mejdi, the socially conscious tourism company he founded 15 years ago. With the war costing the region billions in lost tourism revenue, I thought perhaps this was a good time to show up in solidarity with hope and humanity and spend whatever shekels I could. “Tourism should support the local community—not exploit it,” says Maoz. So here we are.

At the time of publishing, 79 souls are still held hostage in tunnels and back rooms. Their spouses, kids, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, colleagues, and synagogue/mosque/church communities have been holding both breath and megaphone for more than a year—thrust into advocacy, desperate for a deal and not one more body bag. For the hostages known to be killed, denial of a decent burial keeps their family’s closure hostage with them. Life can’t go on and yet it does. Days pass and the terror continues.

Posters of the hostages are plastered to every flat surface and bound round light posts and tree trunks with yellow tape and ribbon. Udi Goren—our Jewish Israeli guide—knows the details of each one: alive or dead, taken alone or with family. His cousin, Tal—whom I meet as a handsome, smiling poster—is among the murdered and not yet returned. "We have been reliving October 7th every day since,” says Udi.

On Saturday evenings at the end of shabbat, thousands gather at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv to grieve and advocate. The laminated faces of loved ones hover throughout the crowd—their photos from brighter days the only smiles. Yellow flags snap in the heavy breeze while a man at the microphone leads in mournful song.

With us is Ameer Hashlamon—our Muslim Palestinian guide and a volunteer medic with United Hatzalah. He was one of the first paramedics on the scene. He and hundreds of others were dispatched within seconds of the first call—packing into and onto any medical-equipped vehicle they could access. Ambulances and ambucycles (Hatzalah’s fleet of customized motorcycles), cars, trucks, everything and anything with wheels was loaded with life-saving kits and rushed south. One Palestinian Hatzalah medic responded to a call for a gunshot wound, only to be taken hostage by Hamas fighters who used him as a human shield.

Treating traumatic injuries nonstop for days, Ameer saved hundreds of lives. “It’s always 50/50 when we get a call,” he says. “Will I treat an Arab or a Jew? We all heal each other—whomever is in front of us.”

We all heal each other, he said, which reminds me of the story Alon-Lee told us about the aid trucks.

Alon-Lee is an Israeli human rights activist and co-leader of Standing Together, the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel. As news of sabotaged aid and mass starvation passed through WhatsApp chats, Standing Together organized a humanitarian guard of 1,100 Israelis who—for months—split every day into two shifts, locking arms around the trucks sent into Gaza to protect them from militant Jewish settlers who repeatedly came to slash the tires and set the aid on fire. Picture it: Israeli volunteers standing as human shields around aid for Gazans. A nonviolent protest of MLK and Mandela moxie, yet it hardly made headlines.

It’s like with the olive trees. In 2023, violent Israeli settlers torched more than 10,000 olive trees, desecrating one of the Seven Species of the Land of Israel and undermining economic livelihood in West Bank towns. The impact was enormous, particularly for the hundred thousand farmers whose livelihoods depend on the olive harvest. It was also highly symbolic. “Attacking olive trees is really a statement about wanting all Palestinians off the land,” says Rabbi Anton Goodman, an Orthodox Jew. “It's a statement of ethnic cleansing, hitting the Palestinian communities where it hurts them the most.”

For this reason, every year during the olive harvest from mid-October to end of November, Rabbis for Human Rights organizes solidarity visits to accompany the Palestinian farmers as they work their fields—offering presence and witness as protection in the face of settler assaults and soldier harassment. “For Israeli settlers to burn an olive tree on the land of Israel is quite remarkable. They are so blinkered that they can't see the damage they're doing to their souls and to the soul of the land itself,” says Rabbi Goodman.

Emboldened by the far-right extremists appointed to cabinet positions in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government in recent years, settler violence has increased rapidly. “This is a clear campaign of targeted violence and intimidation that is happening to certain communities in certain ways,” says Rabbi Goodman. “This being done in the name of Judaism is not just an Israeli problem, it's not just a security problem. This is a global Jewish concern that everyone needs to get involved in.”

How does one contribute from afar and actively hope for peace, given this backdrop of escalating violence? Planting trees. So far Rabbis for Human Rights has helped Palestinian farmers plant more than 4,500 olive trees with the help of Israeli and international donors wanting to put down new roots of solidarity and a common future. Or, you could buy bottles and cases of their artisanal olive oil through Canaan Palestine, which works with 2,000 farm families of the Palestine Fair Trade Association—"buying everything they can produce in good years and bad.” 

“We have a network of rabbis who are trying to bring human rights into the Jewish identity discourse in Israel, trying to bring these kind of values that we hold—the sanctity of life, equality, justice, of making every effort to go in the direction of peace—at least into the Israeli consciousness, against this rising tide of extremism that has taken hold of the senior offices in government and is firmly rooted within Israeli society,” says Rabbi Goodman.

Jesus’ beatitudes, an interpretation of Torah taught in the presence of olive trees on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, still challenge empires and paradigms of power two thousand years later: Blessed are the poor in spirit—theirs in the kingdom of heaven; Blessed are those who mourn—they will be comforted; Blessed are the meek—they’ll inherit the land… though it sure doesn’t seem that way.

“We have to wonder, ‘Did Jesus know what he was talking about?’” jokes Reverend Munther Isaac. “It seems like the meek and the poor often get crushed.” This he says from his home in Bethlehem where he is Academic Dean of Bethlehem Bible College and Pastor of Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church. “If you look at the number of Palestinians who have been killed in the last year—even before October 7th, 2023—we've never witnessed this number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank. This has created an overall sense of fear and despair.”

The fear and despair have, of course, been exacerbated by increased checkpoints, no tourism, and no access to Jerusalem. In fact, this is the first time in history Bethlehem and Jerusalem are separated from one another, he points out. “All it takes is for Israel to close two checkpoints and Bethlehem will become another Gaza in terms of full isolation from the world,” says Rev. Isaac. “This is how much control Israel has over our towns and villages.”

“You have to understand this is a major turning point in Jewish theology and values,” says Rabbi Goodman, “because the sanctity of human life is a base tenet of Judaism. It overrides every other commandment—saving a life pushes off every other mitzvah. Now to see the country being run in a way that basically says the blood of our dead enemies is worth more to us than the blood of our children alive. I mean, that's a shattering concept.”

As Maoz and Aziz continue to visit college campuses working to combat anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate, students often ask, ‘So you can lose people in your family and not be angry?’ “That’s a mistake,” Aziz says. “We are angry. I am very angry. Every time I read the newspaper, I'm angry. Every time I talk to one of my friends in Gaza, I am angry. But the thing is, we do not let anger drown us in hate and wanting vengeance. Instead, I think of anger like a nuclear power. It can lead to destruction, and it can make light. My hope is that we continue to use anger as a way to bring people together, to ask ourselves, ‘What can I do to make things better?’”

Rev. Isaac says there is one teaching topic in particular that draws the quickest disagreement: nonviolence. “When I talk about this concept with young people, I tell them, ‘Let's consider the alternative.’” And then he tells a story: “Let’s say you are in a fight, what do you do if someone hits you? They say, ‘Probably I will hit back.’ I say, ‘What if he hits you strong?’ They say, ‘I'll hit back, but I'll bring my cousin with me or my brother and friends.’ I say, ‘Exactly. And then how will the other side react? They'll bring their family. How does it end—a whole tribe?’ It’s never eye for an eye—it’s 10,000 eyes for an eye. This is the tribal nature of our region. And that's when the light comes on.”

Every day this question of ‘Who will break the cycle?’ is echoed and lamented thousands of times by family members who have lost loved ones to the conflict. For more than 25 years, bereaved families ‘on both sides’ have knotted themselves together, risking reconciliation and charting the path of nonviolence even through unspeakable, ongoing grief. The Parents Circle-Families Forum is a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization founded in 1995 by Mr. Yitzhak Frankenthal, the father of a 19-year-old Israeli soldier kidnapped and killed by Hamas.

“Is there any worse and better illustration than what has happened over the last year?” says Rabbi Goodman. “One of the strongest armies in the world has not managed to return the hostages or to wipe out ‘the enemy’—whatever that means.”

When layered and laced together, our guides and teachers—Ameer and Udi, Maoz and Aziz, Rabbi Goodman and Reverend Isaac—convey an emergent truth: The only way to build a shared society is to know the other side’s narrative. In each of the 70 countries he has worked in, Aziz says the causes of the conflicts are the same: “It's lack of recognition, not willing to understand each other’s historical narrative and not having a shared vision for our future.”

Neither Maoz or Udi had a Palestinian friend until they were 30 years old. Ameer, having grown up in East Jerusalem, admits the same—not a single Jewish Israeli friend until well into adulthood. This they lament, knowing now that separation breeds fear of the other.

Very slowly this is changing, however, and is critical to the foundation of a future unmarred by constant violence and conflict. Nadine, for example, is “a ‘48 Arab Israeli,” she tells us—meaning her family (all Arab Muslim citizens of Israel) have lived in the land since before the 1948 UN declaration making Israel a state. “Those who stayed through the Nakba (translated catastrophe) were the poor—those with no other option,” she says. While discrimination and racial intimidation remain a daily reality, her parents raised their kids for hope. Speaking about generational change, she says her grandmother has no Jewish friends and hardly leaves the house—and brings ALL her documents with her when she does—for fear she won’t be allowed to return to it. A generation later, Nadine’s mother taught herself Hebrew, while Nadine herself has a few close Jewish friends.

But while personal friendships and purposeful proximity signal a hopeful direction to be sure, healing land and culture after 100 years of conflict and trauma will require education and commitment to one skill in particular: listening. With case studies from South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda (among others), active listening is core curriculum in most every conflict resolution pathway and degree program on the planet.

Even this trip began with a listening workshop. Before any words were spoken, any stories shared, we had to practice opening ourselves to hear and to see with compassion the story of someone very unlike ourselves: “I am an Israeli refugee living peacefully in a kibbutz near Gaza… engaged in dialogue with many Gazans who sought peace, but our trust has been shattered. Witnessing the atrocities they committed has made it impossible to maintain faith in their intentions.” … “I am a Gaza resident, born and raised in this enclave, never having ventured beyond its borders… every few years enduring devastating rounds of warfare under the oppressive regime of Hamas which tightly controls and suppresses us, leaving us feeling utterly trapped.” … “I am a proud reservist, an Israeli soldier, and believe that violence is necessary. Israel’s safety and security will only be possible when all the extremists are killed. Force is the only thing they’ll respond to.”

The session was led by Elad Vazana—a beautiful Israeli soul with his own stories of trauma and loss, which he shared with a powerful grace. Listening, he explains, is about creating space in you for the story of another. Without reducing or judging, it’s the simple (not easy) openness to a broader spectrum of truth than any one of us can contain on our own. When we can finally open ourselves to this—as the Parents Circle does—relationships with ‘the other’ become possible. Through them we begin to break down our attachments to the tropes we’ve been told, fracturing the stereotypes we maintain out of ignorance and fear. It’s a scary, powerful, freeing proposition and process. It’s a path toward hope.

“When people have no hope, they will do terrible things. Hopelessness is most dangerous,” says Elad. “There is a tsunami of post-traumatic stress coming.”

Shortly after the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” was heavily popularized and engrained in the imagination of the Jewish diaspora. Of course, it was harrowing to the millions already living in the land who were suddenly rendered invisible and unwelcome, like Nadine’s family, who heard this as a slogan of erasure. People have lived on this land for many thousands of years as power has passed from empire to empire through war after war and king after king. That this slogan was so widely and easily repeated over the past century speaks to the endemic acceptance of the dehumanization of indigenous peoples of every tribe.

After twenty years working as an Israeli human rights lawyer and director of the government’s Department for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Limor Yehuda said she started to wonder if her work was a dead-end. It was around that time in 2012 that she heard of a creative-pragmatic, somewhat new idea—“a workable solution to this mess that we are seeing here.” She has since devoted herself to that vision, co-founding the Israeli-Palestinian movement ‘A Land for All: Two States, One Homeland,’ alongside Palestinian legal scholar, Omar Dejani.

Limor’s research of ethno-national conflicts and peace processes, like those of Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 and titled, Collective Equality—“a new theoretical basis for the law of peace.”

“The occupation—all the time—is violence,” she explains. “Although not all the time there are soldiers that are killing someone, but the violence is there all the time. So, what is peace? Peace is the opposite of that.” Essentially when all people have their basic human rights guaranteed and when the various sides of the conflict agree that violence is no longer the way, they'll deal with each other.

A Land for All centers on a two-state solution (different than the traditional/familiar one from the 1990s!) for the simple fact that there are two main people groups—around 7 million of each of them—that strive for national self-determination and both see the same exact land as their homeland, 'From the river to the sea,' they chant passionately. “But instead of thinking about the border as a rigid border, like a wall, we're thinking about an open border—and open not only for one side, but for both. We're talking about an open land with freedom of movement and Jerusalem being one open capital city of both states. Of course, you probably will say, ‘How can that happen when we are facing the current realities? Aren't you dreaming?’” she says. “So yes, first of all, we do need to dream—not a little bit, a lot—in order to extricate ourselves from our current realities.”

But she continues to exposit a scenario where “unlike the idea of a homogenic nation state, we don't need to transfer any of the people. If we are talking about peace, everybody can live actually anywhere. But it goes deeper here because Israelis and Palestinians are the sons and daughters of this entire land—we're not foreigners.”

“I've mentioned trust is a key thing here. And we do not have trust,” she acknowledges. “We need to build trust. How this trust can be built? And what kind of trust do we need? To start, what we are thinking about is trust in institutions, and trust that we can live here.”

It's well-known that in many cities like Akko, Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, Palestinians and Israelis have lived side by side cooperatively for generations. But still, in terms of broad changes or creative policy, Limor is not naïve to the timeline and says as much: “Again, we are in a real world. We need to be realistic about that,” Limor says. “It's a long process, but we also need to be clear about what are the conditions for sustainable peace.”

“We need more people to be echoing these messages, especially into the Jewish community, especially into communities of faith,” says Rabbi Goodman. “And we need to get better speakers around your tables in the United States or wherever you are.”

“People look at us and think we are divided because you’re Israeli and I’m Palestinian, Muslims and Jews,” says Aziz. “But if you must divide us, people should divide us as those of us who believe in justice, peace, and equality, and those who don’t—yet. And our work here is to invite everyone, to invite you, to join us into our work, into bringing everyone together to take a stand that says, ‘We are not enemies.’”

The Church of the Nativity is the oldest church in the Holy Land—commissioned by the Romans, rebuilt by the Byzantines, preserved by the Persians, renovated by the Crusaders, and now managed by the monks. On a typical day tourists and Christian pilgrims queue for many hours to enter, only to be rather briskly moved through one of the most significant landmarks in Christian history—the place of Jesus’ birth. A 14-point star marks the spot, surrounded by oil lamps in the nave below the sanctuary. It's usually cramped, crowded, and loud—filled with camera flashes and selfie-sticks whipping past. Quite the opposite of the awe, reverence, and transcendent holiness one might expect or come seeking.

But this time the nave was empty. Silent. I sat on the cold, worn marble step an arms-length from that storied manger where he lay. And it washed over me like the gentlest overwhelm—a hope and ache for the world, for all humanity from first breath to last. God with us, bundled in flesh and lying there. A Jewish baby boy, a refugee his first night, fleeing Herod’s murderous seething. A baby—born into a world of rage and wailing; himself the embodiment and fulfillment of all law and prophecy, the hope of healing and renewal of all things.

A baby. There’s nothing more universally celebrated, accessible, and relatable—from ancient times to today. Nothing rivals the sense of profound rightness than the innocence of an infant. Nothing softens hard-hearts and unifies like the whimper of new life. This, the divine counter to worldly paradigms of power—subversive from the start. Introduced first to the shepherds in the field—their lowly position wandering alongside their herds—and to the seekers—wise men from the East bringing gifts fit for a king. This story, told through the mosaics in the main sanctuary, is what led the Persians to leave this church standing when they came to destroy it in the early 7th century, recognizing themselves in the wise men.

What a curious way to start a story about God’s self—a Jewish family fleeing persecution and on their way to Egypt meet dirty shepherds introduced by an angel and wise men led by a star. Like most Jews of Jesus’ day eagerly awaiting a messiah, I might’ve imagined a heavenly army and chariots of fire—something more like a Caesar—not a baby, in a feeding trough, on his way to Egypt under cover of night.

And yet, sitting in holy silence as tears warmed my cheeks, I couldn’t help but think—of course, it had to be a baby. The only thing weak and perfect enough to dismantle power as we know it, as we want it.

I sat with that for an hour in that little manger nave… present to the birth of hope, asking for help, for all.