Making hope, demanding peace

Where do you see hope?”

It’s a question that Maoz Inon, Israeli peace activist, learned to answer from a Palestinian peace activist, who said “I don’t see hope. I make hope. It’s something I create.”

And since then, Inon said, he makes hope too – along with his family, individuals and organizations. It’s a task he gave himself even before the murder of his parents by Hamas last October. And it’s enabled him to forgive. “I reduce and erase all the anger within me,” he told participants in a February webinar, “and I’m just concentrating on building the future. So many Israelis and Palestinians share the same future – one based on equality, justice, reconciliation, security. We need to use our political imaginations to dream and believe in a better future.”

Christian Courier (CC) recently co-sponsored two online events related to the Israel-Hamas war called “Peace and Possibility.” Inon was the first speaker; the second two were friends Raja Khouri and Jeff Wilkinson, co-authors of a book called The Wall Between: What Israelis and Palestinians don’t want to know about each other. The conversations, which were hosted by Will Braun of Canadian Mennonite and Danielle Klotz of Anabaptist World, can still be found on CC’s website. All three speakers were powerful witnesses for the possibility of peace in a time of terrible conflict.

The story told by Maoz Inon starts in Israel, close to the border with Gaza – which was relatively open early on in his life. He spent part of his childhood on a kibbutz, the same community where his parents Bilha, 75, and Yakovi, 78, were active members until their deaths.

Violence and trauma

It was 7:30 in the morning on October 7, 2023, when Maoz Inon checked his WhatApp messages in Binyamina, Northwestern Israel. “My dad wrote that there are many sirens and shooting,” he said, so he and Maoz’s mother went into their house’s safe room. “It sounds crazy,” Maoz admitted, “but it’s normal. We get this message every few months.” There are frequent security issues at the border, so he carried on with his day and began making coffee. While it boiled, he checked the news and saw updates on the invasion of Hamas. He called his dad at 7:40 and said, “send my love to Mom, be safe, I’ll talk to you soon.” Five minutes later, when Maoz called again, there was no answer.

Later that day, the news came that his parents’ house had been burned to the ground and two corpses had been found inside. Over 1,200 other Israelis were killed on the same day. The cruelty of the invasion shocked Israel’s conscience, as well as the conscience of Israel’s supporters around the world. Graphic images of the violence revived traumatic memories of the Holocaust and awareness of the danger to Israel’s existence that until then hadn’t seemed to be a serious threat to the nation. The number of victims in terms of percentage of population was far higher than the 9/11 attacks in the United States, so that many Israelis were personally connected to someone who had lost a family member or a close friend.

“The attack by Hamas on Israel was horrific,” Canadians Khouri and Wilkinson wrote in the Globe and Mail on October 19, three weeks after their book was released. “We the writers, one Jewish and one Palestinian, say this in unison. The tragedy currently unfolding in Gaza,” they continued, “is devastating. The targeting of civilians anywhere is immoral.”

Raja Khouri is a Palestinian-Canadian with a distinguished background in human rights work. His parents were among the 750,000 Palestinians who fled during the war of 1948, never allowed to return to their homes, which were appropriated by Israel. Khouri’s family ended up in Lebanon, where he was born. Jeffrey Wilkinson is an American Jew who has spent most of his life in Canada. His mother was a Holocaust survivor from Germany; his father an Irish Catholic atheist. He has a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto and is a composer and music educator as well as a facilitator. His experience in trauma and fear was a powerful theme during the second “Peace and Possibility” event.

It was Wilkinson’s research that brought him to Khouri. They discovered that there was a lot they did not know about each other’s background, and subsequently embarked on a journey of learning: The Wall Between: What Israelis and Palestinians don’t want to know about each other is the outcome. “Our recent book,” they said, “[…] explains how the narratives of Jews and Palestinians in the diaspora are shaped by identity, trauma and victimhood, and how they are manipulated by interest groups for their own agendas, leading to the politicized nature of the discourse in Canada and the United States.” They encourage listening and learning from other people as an important first step on the long road to peace.

The most necessary move for intellectual honesty, the two authors stress, is to want to know the story of the other; and before that, to “want to want.” This is not easy. It requires recognizing that the term Zionism is deeply loaded with conflicting meanings: of colonialism for some, of self-determination and liberation for others. (Zionism was never only one thing; it’s a multilayered movement). Khouri admits to still wincing every time Israel is mentioned, because of what it took from his people.

Neighbours

Since October 7, Maoz said he’s learned many lessons – most of them from Palestinians offering support. A hundred Israeli-Palestinians came to the memorial ceremony for his parents. And of the 120 Parliament members in Israel, Maoz said, the only ones who called to offer condolences were Palestinians.

Maoz Inon first started working with Palestinians in the old city of Nazareth. During a hiking holiday in South America, he and his wife discovered the benefits that responsible tourism can bring to indigenous cultures and tourists alike, and they decided to take up the same project in their home country.

Yakovi Inon, Maoz’s father, was a farmer – in a land where farming is very difficult because of the scarcity of water. “The land is for trees, for plants, for flowers,” he used to say, “not for graves.” Bilha Inon was an artist who used recycled material to make art before that method became fashionable. After the Inon family’s terrible loss, Maoz’s message is one of forgiveness. He forgives Hamas, he said, and the current Israeli government. “Don’t be right,” he recommended, because that means choosing a side. The remedy for hurt is to find meaning in it; peace is the best cure.

Neither Khouri, Wilkinson nor Inon talked about God. Religion, in fact, played only a very marginal part in their discussions, which I found striking. What message could faith bring to the table? How could religion be brought in for the good of all involved?

In the conflict between Israel and Palestine, there is both urgency and the need for slow longer-term work, as Khouri and Wilkinson explained. Their book, and these webinars, are part of the process of the slow work of building understanding and trust. It is my hope that the series “Peace and Possibility” will continue with not one but several Palestinian speakers, men and women, Muslim and Christian, from East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as Gaza.

But there is also the urgency of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The attack of October 7 was immoral and criminal, not because resistance against occupation is illegal but because of the indiscriminate way the attack was carried out, which is against international law. But that attack is in the past. At the time of writing the Palestinians of Gaza, many displaced in the war of 1948 or their descendants, are facing starvation: the UN reports that a third of children under 2 in Gaza are malnourished as the Israeli armed forces keep hitting aid convoys. It is an urgent, human-made disaster. But still the moral truth about the war in Gaza remains muted in our deeply conflicted and divided societies. How can it be that even in free societies like the U.S. and Canada there is no more open and constructive conversation possible? How many solitudes are we really living in North America?

We can learn from the testimonies of Khouri, Wilkinson and Inon. “Are you willing to consider that your assumptions might be incorrect?” Khouri asked. “What if there’s a fundamental flaw in the narrative I’ve consumed?”

“Without the ability to humanize each other,” he wrote with Wilkinson, “there is no way out of the status quo, no escaping further violence and pain, no forward movement and no room to seek solutions together.” If we choose to continue this conversation here in Canada, engaging our own histories of conquest, colonialism and migration, we can create hope and possibilities even where we are today.