The Future Is Peace: Finding common ground in the Israel-Palestine journey

An Israeli and a Palestinian journey through Israel and the West Bank, crafting a powerful, humane book that makes you believe a path beyond revenge must exist

THE FUTURE IS PEACE: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land

by Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon

Published by Crown

225 pages  $30

  In Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles’ play “Philoctetes,” the chorus pleads for faith in the possibility of political miracles: “Hope for a great sea change/On the far side of revenge.” After the grotesque cruelty of the Hamas attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s staggeringly brutal retaliatory slaughter of Gazans, the far side of revenge feels so distant as to be indiscernible.

 

So much so that a title like The Future Is Peace seems, on the surface, to risk banality. With West Asia engulfed in a fresh conflict that foreshadows ever greater instability, the future appears to be endless war. The achievement of Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon’s short but immensely poignant account of a shared journey across Israel and the West Bank is that it remains true to the horror while refusing to be defeated by it.

 

 

Inon is an Israeli peace activist who created a network of hostels and guesthouses for travellers to the Holy Land. On the morning of October 7, he was still in bed when he saw a message on his phone from his father. “Sitting in the safe room,” it read. “Not sure what’s going on.” In the massacre that day at Netiv HaAsara, the closest Jewish community to the Gaza Strip, both of Inon’s parents were killed: “Our father’s body was so badly burned, it would take 14 days to identify his remains among the ashes and rubble of our childhood home. Of our mother, nothing remained.”

 

One night soon after, Inon received a simple text from Abu Sarah, a Palestinian activist and tour operator whom he had met just once before: “Maoz, I’m so sorry to hear about your parents.” Abu Sarah’s sorrow drew from a deep well of personal suffering. When he was nine, his beloved elder brother Tayseer was arrested by the Israeli military and accused of throwing rocks at soldiers. According to Abu Sarah, the interrogators “beat and tortured him” and Tayseer later died from “untreated trauma to his internal organs.”

 

Even as Israel was ramping up its devastation of Gaza, Inon and Abu Sarah formed a public partnership in which they called for an end to all violence. They were literally embraced by Pope Francis in Verona in May 2024 and their friendship was hailed a year later by his successor, Pope Leo, as “a testimony and sign of hope.”

 

Such blessings, however well deserved, can be shortcuts to unearned consolation. Their campaigning, after all, has had very little effect. According to a study published in The Lancet  on February 18, over 42,000 children, women and older people have so far died violently in Israel’s war on Gaza.

 

What these two men have to offer in the face of systematic dehumanisation is not full mutual understanding — they acknowledge early on in their book that they will never agree on a “single narrative of history” to describe present conditions. They strive, rather, for mutual recognition. As Heaney knew from his native Northern Ireland, intimate conflicts are sustained by a belief in the exclusive nature of suffering.

 

As they travel, over the course of eight days, from Inon’s parents’ burned-out home, through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and on to the Sea of Galilee, the sharing of personal experiences of suffering gives a common shape to their successively related chapters.

 

Abu Sarah writes: “Many Palestinians fear that acknowledging the horror of the Holocaust is tantamount to excusing the Nakba and the occupation of our land. They have a fear of acknowledging any Jewish pain at all, regardless of whether it was caused by Nazis or by Palestinians. It’s the same for Jewish Israelis who don’t know the history of the Nakba. They fear that if they acknowledge Palestinians’ suffering, it will absolve Hamas of its horrific deeds. But this mindset keeps us trapped in endless violence.”

 

Release from that trap seems a long way off, and The Future Is Peace  does not really attempt to map the much larger and more dangerous journey towards a just and durable settlement. While they are on the road, Inon’s son is about to be conscripted into the Israeli Army. Another generation in Israel is being prepared for war, and who can doubt that boys are being primed for the same future in the ruins of Gaza?

 

Abu Sarah and Inon have the courage to insist that human beings can and must listen to one another’s stories and recognise their own suffering within them. Their moving and fortifying book does not show us the way to the far side of revenge, but it does convince us that it must exist.

---

The reviewer is the author of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland and the advising editor of The New York Review of Books.