Aziz Abu Sarah is Palestinian. Maoz Inon is Israeli. Both their families have been bereaved by the endless conflict between their two communities. With their book "The Future is Peace" published in April, the two authors aim to rally international public opinion behind their project to put an end to the cycle of violence and find a path to reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. FRANCE 24 met them for an in-depth interview.
The book opens with a chilling story. On October 7, 2023, "the earth opened up beneath us and swallowed us whole. Our parents, Yakovi and Bilha Inon, were dead".
In the days that followed, their children – Maoz Inon and his siblings – made it publicly known that they were not seeking revenge.
Yakovi and Bilha Inon, aged 75 and 78 respectively, had lived for decades in the village of Netiv HaAsara, less than 500 metres from the separation wall with the Gaza Strip, and were burned alive by Hamas militants.
"We did not want our tragedy and pain to be hijacked to justify another war, a war that would bring both Israelis and Palestinians to the edge of chaos," writes Inon in "The Future is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land", a book co-authored with Aziz Abu Sarah.
In 1989, during the First Intifada, Tayseer Abu Sarah, a young Palestinian from East Jerusalem, threw stones at Israeli soldiers. He was arrested and held for nearly a year in an Israeli prison. He died a few months after his release as a result of the torture inflicted during his detention.
His younger brother Aziz Abu Sarah was 10 years old at the time. A tourism entrepreneur, he had met Inon at a professional event. The day after October 7, he sent him a brief message on Facebook: “Maoz, I’m so sorry to hear about your parents.”
“His words were more than a message of condolence; they shone a light into the darkness,” writes Inon. United by the loss of their loved ones and a shared vision of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, a duo of peacemakers that was anything but naive was born.
In an in-depth interview, FRANCE 24 delved into the meaning behind their commitment.
FRANCE 24: How does one overcome the segregation between Israelis and Palestinians?
Maoz Inon: I grew up in a kibbutz, one kilometre and a half from Gaza, and served for three years in the IDF. By the time I turned 30, I didn’t have even one Palestinian friend. I didn't know the differences between Eid al-Adha, Eid al-Fitr or Ramadan. I realized that I was living within walls, a mental and physical wall of ignorance. And when there is ignorance, there is fear. When there is fear, there is hate. And when there is hate, we, mankind, can do horrible things to one another.
I later chose to work in tourism because I love traveling. In 2005, I opened the first guesthouse ever in the old city of Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city within Israel. What I learned doing this is that the first step in reaching a shared future and a shared society is knowing the other side’s narrative by looking to the other in the eye, listening to their pain, acknowledging also their loss and their suffering.
“If you must divide us, let it be as those who believe in peace and equality and those who don’t … yet.” – “The Future is Peace"
Aziz Abu Sarah: I think we live in a very segregated reality. Over the past 30 years, it has become much harder for Israelis and Palestinians to meet. Israelis are afraid to even go to Nazareth. I have friends in Jaffa who say they don't want to go to Tel Aviv anymore although it's a five-minute walk. I grew up in East Jerusalem and I never went to West Jerusalem. The only Israeli people I knew then were soldiers and settlers.
What changed for me is studying Hebrew in an Ulpan [ a school for the intensive study of Hebrew designed for immigrants to Israel]. That's the first time I met an Israeli who was treating me like a human being, like a normal person, like an equal, and recognised my story, talked about it, and recognised what it means to be a Palestinian.
I realised Israelis and Palestinians have a lot of similarities. The whole concept of “if you're a Jew, you must hate Arabs and if you are an Arab, you must hate Jews” is such a stupid idea, it's tribalism. Maoz and I have more in common than me and somebody in Hamas or Maoz and somebody like Ben-Gvir.
Is it harder to be a Palestinian peace activist than an Israeli peace activist?
Aziz Abu Sarah: If you're from the West Bank to even go to do peace work in Israel, you are limited. Nobody hears about you and there are Palestinian peace activists who are working every day. And also, Palestinians sometimes doubt you. They ask “What did you achieve as a peacemaker? You are talking to Israelis and then we see new settlements, we see the army arresting more people, we see the destruction of Gaza. So what are you doing? Are you just making the occupation more beautiful?”
I think it's a mistake to think that way because we can't end occupation without working with Israelis. What we do is not accepting the reality. What we need is challenging the status quo together with more Israelis coming to the West Bank to strengthen Palestinian peacemakers.
There is a lot of trauma to being a peacemaker, it can be dangerous. There are people who won't like what you do as a peacemaker. When I tried to run for office for Jerusalem mayor, both the Israeli government and the Palestinian government attacked me and it was dangerous. And it's not only in Israel and Palestine, it's everywhere. I worked in Afghanistan, I worked in Syria and I know people who were killed there for being peacemakers.
“We understand that in the face of suffering and grief, when so many lives have been lost and families shattered, talking about peace can feel too vulnerable – dangerous, even. When each side believes that the other is a threat to its existence, talk of peace can feel like a betrayal of one’s people.” – Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, “The Future is Peace”
Maoz Inon: Opening a guest house in an Arab city to bring communities together made me doubt and question my own narrative, the Zionist narrative, the Jewish Israeli narrative. And I was very lucky and fortunate that my family followed me. My parents always used to tell me, “follow your heart”.
People in Nazareth praised me for coming, even though at the beginning there were many suspicions. There were rumours that I'm a Mossad agent, that I'm a Shin Bet, that I'm a settler, an occupier. But when they saw everyone could come in and out of the guesthouse with no security cameras, no Israeli flag, it became very natural for us to be in Nazareth.
We must not believe that someone else will solve the conflict, that someone else will bring peace and justice for the fire to stay away. We cannot believe anymore that bombs will bring quiet, that war will bring security. If we stay in our comfort zone, the fire will catch us and it caught me on October 7.
In the wake of October 7 and the war in Gaza, how do you contemplate a reality other than one of endless conflict?
Aziz Abu Sarah: The reality is terrible. That's exactly why you need to have an alternative vision to the current reality. We can't let despair take over us. 15, 20, 30 years ago, Hamas, Ben-Gvir or Smotrich were at the margins, nobody cared about them. Today they run the countries because they had a vision and they got international support as wealthy people from all over the world supported them.
A poll showed over 70 percent of Israelis and over 80 percent of Palestinians want regional peace. So we're not a minority. We need to get people out of their despair, and we need to give them a clear roadmap. Settlers and Hamas can’t keep running our life from A to Z.
For example, during the olive harvest, settlers attack Palestinian farmers. We can complain about it, we can cry about it but if we stay home, it doesn't help anybody. We have to show up. Maybe this year we will be a few hundred [pacifists], but maybe in one or two years we can have 10,000 or 20,000 people to show up so the settlers will not attack us. They can't attack 20,000 people. This is how you change reality.
"Aziz and I (…), we work on conflict resolution by changing the reality on the ground, to show that peace is possible." – Maoz Inon
Maoz Inon: We don't have the privilege to give up. My father was a farmer and for 58 years he was sowing wheat in the fields of the Negev, in the Israeli desert. When he faced droughts, floods, insect invasions or wildfire he used to say, “next year, I'm going to sow again, because next year will be a better year”.
We are telling the readers and ourselves that the next season will be better. That's the law of nature, it's not wishful thinking. It's not naive. It's too late for Taiseer, Aziz’s brother, and for my parents. But it's not too late for the 14 million people living in the land nowadays. Together we'll prove once again that the future is peace.
You want to bring together people of good will, wherever they may be, to put pressure on political leaders on both sides?
Maoz Inon: Europe, and America have invested so much in the war in the Middle East. The United States this year gave more than $20 billion in weapons to Israel and has cut to zero any funding for peacemaking. Europe gives so little it's almost a joke.
We believe peace can be the unification force of the Jewish diaspora, of Muslims in Europe and Palestinians in the diaspora. We should not choose a side but take a stand with peacemakers. We should stand with justice and reconciliation.
The Palestinian-Israeli peace movement is committed to do the work on the ground. We should not follow politicians that thrive over polarization and fear. What we are saying to our Muslim friends and Jewish friends is to come together to create a new reality, not only in Israel and Palestine, but also in Europe and in the US.
Promoting a vision to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Maoz and Aziz’s meeting, following the 7 October massacre and the outbreak of war in Gaza in 2023, marked the start of a journey that took them to the stage of a TED talk in April 2024, to a moving embrace with Pope Francis in May 2024, and to the influential American satirical programme ‘The Daily Show’ to mark the release of their book.
Aziz Abu Sarah: Last month there were anti-Semitic attacks in the UK and in America. There were also anti-Muslim protests in the UK, and three killed two days ago in a San Diego mosque. We are endangering our peoples everywhere in the world.
In Israel, if a new coalition [comes into office after the October election], it still needs to be pressured. The idea that the problem is only Netanyahu is a big mistake. The problem is a state policy, just like Sinwar was killed but it didn't change Hamas. And I worry that Europe thinks, “oh, if these guys [the opposition] come, then we don't need to put any pressure”.
‘For nearly a century, we have been sacrificing our own people in the name of a great lie: the next war will be the one that finally brings us security and freedom.’ – Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon
Maoz Inon: All politicians in Israel, besides Arab politicians and maybe one or two Jewish politicians, only envision an ongoing war. This is the only future they can see because they lack any political imagination.
So why wait for the election? We must have international pressure now to force Israelis and Palestinians to start a dialogue. They haven't done it for two decades. Europe and France have a huge leverage over Israeli politics because Europe is the main and number one economic partner of Israel.
We are in an emergency. We cannot wait because people are losing their lives now. In Gaza, Israel already took over 60 percent of the land and they want to take more in the West Bank by ethnic cleansing.
Acknowledgements: Anne Vaudoyer, Stéphane Bernstein, Assiya Hamza, Marc Daou, Pierre-Ludovic Viollat, Anthony Ravera, Taise Parente, Aurélie Constant, Fabrice Picq.
This article was adapted from the original in French by Simon Feisthauer Fournet
