Aziz Abu Sarah, who is Palestinian, hesitated before sending a condolence message to his Israeli acquaintance, Maoz Inon. It was Oct. 8, 2023.
One day earlier, Hamas militants had fatally shot Inon’s parents, Yakovi and Bilha, and set fire to their home near the Gaza border. Abu Sarah wondered whether hearing a Palestinian voice would only magnify Inon’s pain.
But he sent it because he knew from experience it was the right thing to do.
Inon replied within a few hours. His heart was broken, he said, but his grief did not stop with his parents. He was also crying for the “children being killed in Gaza.”
Both men had lost family members to violence tied to the Israel-Hamas war. Instead of retreating further into grief and anger, they built an unlikely friendship grounded in dialogue, shared loss and a belief that coexistence remains possible even amid war.
That exchange became the beginning of a friendship neither man expected. Today, they describe it as something closer to brotherhood.
“I lost so many,” Inon said recently on KQED’s Forum. “But I won Aziz. I won Aziz as a brother.”
Abu Sarah grew up in occupied Jerusalem. One Ramadan morning, Israeli soldiers with machine guns stormed his home and took his 18-year-old brother, Tayseer, who was accused of throwing rocks. Tayseer refused to confess.
He was tortured, imprisoned and released with grave internal injuries. He died soon after.
Abu Sarah was 10.
“I was very angry. I was very bitter,” he said. “I think it felt more like if I don’t avenge his death, then I’m a terrible brother.”
Eventually, though, something changed in Abu Sarah. He’d refused to learn Hebrew in high school because it was the “language of the enemy.”
But then, realizing he couldn’t go to college or get a job without it, he began his studies. “That,” he said, “was my first introduction to Israelis who treated me like a human being.”
A teacher greeted him in Arabic. Classmates spoke to him as an equal. It did not erase his loss, but it disrupted the story he had been telling about himself.
“It’s not Israelis versus Palestinians anymore,” he said. “It’s those of us who believe in justice… and those who don’t yet.”
Inon and Abu Sarah’s friendship grew not just through conversation, but through shared travel.
Both men have backgrounds in tourism. When they began working together, they built “dual narrative” tours, led by both an Israeli and a Palestinian. People told them it would fail. Instead, their company, MEJDI Tours, became a model for citizen diplomacy.
For their new book, “The Future Is Peace,” the men took an eight-day journey across Israel and the West Bank.
For Abu Sarah, returning to his hometown of Bethany meant painful memories.
At 16, he was denied an ID card because his home fell outside newly drawn municipal boundaries. To get to school, he ran around checkpoints, risking beatings or worse.
“If soldiers see you, you get shot at,” he said.
For Inon, the journey revealed something equally unsettling: He had once been stationed just miles from that same town during his military service. At the time, he had little understanding of what life looked like on the other side of the checkpoint.
“It was my friends… my unit members,” he said, referring to soldiers enforcing the occupation.
Admitting that to Abu Sarah was difficult. Their lives had run parallel, close in geography but separated by structural inequities. It was a separation that they said extended beyond individuals.
“Sometimes I’m wondering, am I in the same location?” Abu Sarah said, describing how differently the same events are reported in Hebrew and Arabic media.
As their story unfolded, Forum listeners responded. Caller Radhika wondered whether their approach managed to convince people on either side.
Inon responded that those who believe that war will bring safety are naive. “The only way to achieve security… is through dialogue.” He pointed to a growing movement of Israelis and Palestinians working together, even as political leaders remain entrenched.
A rabbi from Sonoma County described taking one of the guests’ dual-narrative tours, finding it “challenging and eye-opening,” and said Inon and Abu Sarah’s work has shown how we can “rehumanize each other.”
Another listener, Maureen, expressed despair. “It seems like peaceful coexistence is impossible, at least in my lifetime,” she said.
Abu Sarah did not dismiss that feeling, but he pushed back on its conclusion.
“We cannot allow ourselves to put this responsibility… on the next generation,” he said.
Then came sharper critique.
One listener wrote that efforts like this risk “equalizing” histories that are not equal. “If this was Nazi Germany,” the listener asked, “and they were offering German and Jewish tours to share stories, would it be OK?”
Working with Israelis, Abu Sarah said, is not about ignoring injustice. It is about working with people who share values, including equality, dignity and a future where neither side dominates the other.
“The fact he’s Israeli doesn’t make him my enemy,” he said of Inon.
He also acknowledged the criticism from within his own community, including accusations of betrayal and “normalization.” But if people only “sit and cry and do nothing,” the situation will not change.
If their friendship has a philosophy, it is not rooted in agreement about the past but a shared commitment to a better future.
“We will not agree on everything in history,” Abu Sarah said. “But… we can definitely agree on everything in the future.”
That idea surfaced again and again: listening without forcing consensus, allowing different narratives to exist and recognizing that empathy is not betrayal.
For Inon, that recognition includes confronting his own upbringing. He was raised on a narrative of a land largely empty before Jewish settlement. Only later did he learn the scale of Palestinian presence and displacement. That realization did not erase his identity but rather complicated it.
“Without doubting my own narrative,” he said, “I would never… recognize that there is another people.”
Near the end of the program, a listener named Joyce wrote that she was “still in tears,” but felt something else, too: hope.
“I wish their voices could be heard all over the world,” she said.
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