From the beginning... And God will say: Let There be Peace. And there will be peace. Inshallah

Energy of Peace from the Furnace of Grief

In Tel Aviv, in the spring of 2026, thousands of peace activists gathered, people who know that the time has come. Every day of the year, they and we live in a kind of lonely isolation. At this gathering, the third of many more to come, we are the majority. The true vision of this place, and the fate of our two wretched nations, rests entirely on our shoulders. Only our belief and the strength within us will bring about the revolution of peace. It will not come from above.

A significant portion of that strength flows from the fate and the faith of two people: Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, determined peacemakers and co-CEOs of InterAct International, an organization dedicated to building peace in the Middle East. They have traversed the full range of human experience, from despair to hope, and from grief to action. Now they have set it all down on paper. Their book is essential reading for anyone who still believes in the possibility of good.

True peace literature, the kind that is not written from a thoughtful academic distance or through the memoirs of retreating diplomats but from an open wound, arrives in the world only rarely. “The Future Is Peace” by Maoz and Aziz is one of those rare books. Not because it reveals facts we did not know, but because it changes how we arrange those facts in our consciousness. And that kind of reframing is almost always the hardest thing to do.

The book’s central argument appears in its opening pages, and it will strike many readers as deliberately provocative: the peacemakers are not the naïve ones. Naivety belongs to the belief that violence will solve what violence itself produces. A hundred years of conflict, dozens of wars, thousands of tons of explosives, tens of thousands killed and millions wounded, and each time the same promise: give us just one more round, one more escalation, one more targeted killing, and victory is nearly within reach. Abu Sarah and Inon refuse to accept this as the definition of realism. True realism, they argue, does not accept violence as a fact of nature from which there is no escape. It recognizes violence as a failed policy, and the stubborn insistence on it not as a mark of maturity but as a failure of imagination. “What is truly naïve,” they write, “is imagining that fear and multigenerational trauma will lead to security.” That sentence is not a call to idealism. It is an empirical observation.

But this argument, as powerful as it is, is not the book’s deepest move. That happens in the structure the book builds and then, by its very existence, breaks. Nearly every conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begins by assuming a division between collectives. Jews versus Palestinians, Israelis against Arabs. Identities that dictate positions almost automatically. Maoz and Aziz refuse to play along with this lethal typecasting, and that refusal is precisely what makes them so moving, inspiring, and capable of moving crowds. Their book offers an entirely different division: not between peoples but between principles, not identity against identity but worldview against worldview. Lovers of peace versus lovers of war. On one side, human beings, Jewish and Palestinian alike, who believe that another way of living is possible. On the other side, human beings, Jewish and Palestinian alike, defined by their hatred, religious extremism, and conviction that only force speaks. The dividing line runs not between peoples but through them. And so, the nature of the conflict itself changes: this is not a war between Israelis and Palestinians, but a struggle over what to do with the energy of grief. Whether to let it continue destroying everything, or to harness it for a repair that is enormous and necessary.

Inon and Abu Sarah arrive at this choice from radically different places, and the book does not smooth over that difference but places it at the center. Inon grew up in the Gaza Envelope communities, between Kibbutz Nir Am and Netiv HaAsara, in a place where the border is not a geographic idea but a daily presence. On the morning of October 7, 2023, he woke to a WhatsApp message from his father: “Morning. Sitting in the safe room. Not sure what is happening.” There was one phone call, almost routine, and then silence. His parents were killed in their home, which was burned to the ground. His father’s body was identified only after fourteen days. Of his mother, nothing remained. And within this reality, almost immediately, his choice was made. A one no-one could have expected of him. Maoz, the bereaved and broken son, declared that he was not seeking revenge. That he wept for his parents but also for everyone who would die on the other side in the escalation that would follow. Not because he denied the pain, but because he refused to let it define his being.

Aziz arrives from an experience no less heavy in its grief, only older. When he was ten years old, his elder brother Tayseer was arrested in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers. They dragged him from his bed in pajamas and barefoot. He was held in detention for nearly ten months, tortured, and released broken in body. A few weeks after his release, he vomited blood, was rushed to surgery, and died. Killed by torture. “I felt like I was all alone. No one was going to replace Tayseer, and no one was going to stand up for me. “ The energy born from that loss was at first entirely rage. For several years, it also led him toward activity shaped by pain and fury. The path away from it was not a revelation but a process. When he learned Hebrew for purely practical reasons and met for the first time an Israeli who was not a soldier at a checkpoint, something shifted. Not because the pain was healed, but because one actual, specific human being had undermined the category of the enemy.

These two stories are not symmetrical, and it is worth saying so plainly. They are not the same thing, not equivalent, and they do not cancel each other out. The loss of parents on October 7 and the loss of a brother under an official policy of torture are different catastrophes that grew from different histories, and the book honors that difference. What connects the two figures is not a competition of suffering but the choice made after it: not to let the molten lava of grief flow in the direction of destruction. That choice, writes Abu Sarah, is not the cancellation of pain. “Anger is like nuclear energy. You can use it to create light, or to sow destruction. You can allow your pain to twist you into bitterness, or it can become fuel for empathy and human connection.” The nuclear metaphor is not incidental. Nuclear destruction is the spread of the bomb. Nuclear energy in peaceful use is that same energy harnessed for benefit. Both tracks are possible. The question is who controls whom: the bomb the human being, or the human being the energy.

The book is structured as a physical journey of eight days that the two undertook in September 2024, eleven months after October 7. Each writes in turn about his experiences at each stop, and at the close of every chapter they write together a text that grows from the shared journey. This literary choice is not accidental. It is a demonstration of the principle itself: two people who do not agree on everything, who do not pretend their narratives are identical, and who nonetheless exhaust everything that can be said together, without surrendering in the slightest their loyalty and empathy to the truth of their own community. Inon writes about Zionism as a movement that saved lives. Abu Sarah writes about the Nakba as a national catastrophe. Both things are true, both are painful, and both can be held simultaneously only if one breaks the optic of “who is right.” The old frameworks are binary: only one of them can be correct. Within the framework they offer, both can be right at the same time and still choose a dignified, shared life.

Each stop of the journey functions as a double mirror, reflecting both the history and the choices that can be made within it. In Jaffa, they stand before the ruins of the Ottoman train station that once connected the largest Arab city in the land to the rest of the world, and they meet a Palestinian tour guide whose grandfather refused for decades to speak about 1948 and wept when someone pressed him. “Let us talk about earlier times,” someone suggested, and he responded: “You must wipe 1948 from your mind. Forgetting is a blessing from God. But I don’t forget, and I consider this a curse.” Inon hears the story and does not respond defensively. He listens. And is quietly, silently sorrowful.

In the Old City of Jerusalem comes a moment the book has been moving toward without the reader noticing. Abu Sarah recounts his visit to Yad Vashem at eighteen, when he still suspected the Holocaust was a political instrument. He entered the children’s hall, saw the faces and names of a million and a half murdered children, and could not stop his tears. “I forgot that they were Jews, forgot they were my so-called enemies. I saw children.” The significance of that moment is not that everything was resolved. It is that identity, when it precedes the direct human response, can block reactions that would otherwise have been entirely natural. When Inon hears that story, he understands that this is precisely what he had asked of the world regarding October 7: not to forget, not to grant cheap forgiveness, but to see children before seeing tribal affiliations and being struck blind by a failure of humanity.

In the West Bank, the frame becomes more physical and more palpable. Abu Sarah describes how, at sixteen, his family received an order to leave their home in al-Eizariya, which had been separated from Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries as a result of the Oslo Accords, despite being less than two kilometers from its center. The road to school passed through checkpoints that were sometimes closed, and when he tried to go around them, soldiers fired warning shots in his direction. Inon, sitting beside him in the tour vehicle, discovered during that same conversation that in those exact days he had been serving in a nearby Israeli military base. They look at each other and say nothing. Not because there is nothing to say, but because what there is to say is larger than words can carry in a moment like that.

In the Galilee, the journey arrives at a moment that holds both possibilities together. They meet an Israeli couple that has grown olives on land that was once a Palestinian village. Abu Sarah asks calmly, without edge: “When you came here and bought the land, did you know there had been an Arab village here?” Micha answers honestly. And then Rachel tells them that Ali, a Palestinian worker who had worked with them for twenty years, had become a full partner in every decision. “What was, was. Here is where we are now, and we have to build our relationships.” This is not a solution. It is not a denial of histories. It is a choice for life. A choice made in the present, within conditions that are far from ideal, in relation to an actual human being and not to absolute categories that have made life here so extreme and so nearly impossible.

The book does not conceal that the other direction, the direction of destruction, is the one toward which most members of both peoples are currently traveling. Aziz writes about Palestinian leadership that speaks of nonviolence yet does not march in protest, and about the terrible vacuum that Hamas fills. Inon says directly: “The Israeli government and Hamas are two sides of the same coin. Both are responsible for the death of my parents.” These are not claims of false symmetry. They are an honest recognition that the failure is not ethnic but political, moral, and civic. That leadership which feeds violence grows on both sides, just as leadership that refuses it must grow on both sides. When Inon was asked about the “total victory” his government’s leader promises, Abu Sarah answered with a smile: “Maoz, you simply do not understand what total victory is. That is your problem.” The humor here is not decoration. It is part of the argument: those who are capable of laughing together at the absurdity of the situation have already broken through something important.

Pope Francis, who met them at the Verona stadium in May 2024 and embraced them before the eyes of thirteen thousand people cheering and weeping, said to the crowd: “In the face of the suffering of these two brothers, the suffering of these two nations, I have no words. They have had the courage to embrace each other. Let us pray for peace, and for these two brothers to bring the will to work for peace to their people.” The words “I have no words” are precisely the right words. Not because there is nothing to say, but because before any political formulation, before any plan, there stands something prior to language. Two human beings who chose to channel their energy in a different direction.

The book ends at the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Maoz suggests to Aziz that they walk on the water. And his friend, yes, by the book’s end they are friends, answers: “I do not know if I can walk on the water, but I can walk in the water.” They remove their shoes and enter that symbolic lake. This moment is not a cheap metaphor, nor is it a Hollywood-style closing paragraph. It is a precise statement: there is no promise of victory here, and there is no innocence about the long road that remains. There is only the refusal to accept reality as it is as the final boundary of the possible. And the small, actual step taken into the cold water, in the knowledge that even if you cannot walk on it, you can at least walk in it. That there is no national obligation to drown in the lakes of blood that have already claimed so many unnecessary lives.

A Marginal Note

Al-Aziz in Arabic is one of the names of Allah. One of its meanings is the person of courage, the strong one, the one who possesses power.

Maoz in Hebrew is the man of fortitude, of strength and security. And through the generations, God was the Maoz. As in the hymn “Maoz Tsur Yeshuati,” Rock of Ages, my salvation.

Two men, with the same name, the same life experience, and the same vision. Perhaps it is not coincidental, for it is their calling: to bring all of us the true strength. “The Lord and Allah will give their peoples strength. The Lord and Allah will bless their peoples with peace.”