Hassan was twenty-four years old, a logistics assistant on our humanitarian team in Gaza, delightful and happy-go-lucky, effusively enthusiastic about new AI technology tools and how they might help project and program staff.

I attended his wedding in Gaza a little over four months before he died — a joyous, gender-segregated celebration by Muslim custom, with dancing in the streets as the groom’s entourage moved from house to house among relatives and in-laws, before the whole party made its way to the wedding halls along the Ar Rashid coastal strip.

When the war began, Hassan remained in Gaza City rather than fleeing south, because his mother, Sahar — who managed the child protection team on our staff — refused to leave, and he wanted to help her. On December 7, 2023, he went out one early evening with his brother, looking for water. He was shot dead by a sniper, and his brother was wounded. Up until that day, by some fragile miracle, none of our local humanitarian staff, nor staff of any other international NGO operating in Gaza, had been killed in the first two months of the war.

Hassan’s death ended that fragile streak, and it would not be the last: within days, humanitarian staff at Caritas Jerusalem, Save the Children, Humanity & Inclusion, Mercy Corps, and others were killed as well, in some cases inside churches.

In the days just before his death, Hassan’s older sister, who worked for UNRWA, had been arrested at an Israeli checkpoint, and no one knew her whereabouts — a widespread and specific fear among Gazans moving between the north and south of the strip, who feared arbitrary detention without explanation.

His mother Sahar called in tears, asking for help locating her daughter, even as UNRWA itself was independently trying to determine the safety and whereabouts of its own staff. And then came the second blow: news of Hassan’s death, delivered by sniper fire, while he was simply trying to find water.

The institutional response to Hassan’s death carries its own lesson about the politics of grief. Local staff prepared a death notice and wanted to post it to the organization’s Gaza Facebook page and other social media. Headquarters communications leadership forbade it, citing organizational policy, despite the notice’s moderate, factual wording.

Neither I nor colleagues at the Association of International Development Agencies could understand that posture. It reflected a broader pattern in which even the naming and mourning of a humanitarian worker’s death became something to be managed, minimized, or suppressed, rather than honored.

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Hassan’s death sits within a much larger and still-growing toll on humanitarian and health workers in this war. The United Nations reported in April 2026 that more than 1,000 humanitarian workers had been killed globally over the preceding three years, nearly triple the toll of the previous three-year period, with more than 560 of those deaths occurring in Gaza and the West Bank alone — by far the highest concentration of any conflict zone worldwide, ahead of Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo combined.

UNRWA alone lost thirty-five staff members in Gaza as of late June 2026, six of them killed within a single twenty-four-hour period. At least sixteen health workers have been killed while on duty.

The toll has continued into the summer of 2026. In July, a sixty-five-year-old Palestinian aid worker named Mohammed al-Waheidi, affiliated with the Egyptian Committee in Gaza and known locally for organizing World Cup screenings for a shattered community, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the taxi he was riding in, along with two young siblings, ages ten and eight, and a thirty-year-old passer-by. Gazans turned out in large numbers to mourn him. His death, like Hassan’s, was accompanied by an official statement citing awareness of reports that uninvolved civilians were harmed.

There is a numbing quality to reading these figures sequentially. That numbing is exactly what this column, and Hassan’s story specifically, is meant to interrupt. Hassan was not a data point in an eventual UN report. He was a young man who loved technology, who danced at his own wedding four months before his death, who stayed behind to protect his mother, and who died looking for water. He was not a terrorist. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a humanitarian.

Recovering names like Hassan’s — one at a time, with full biographical dignity — is not merely a sentimental exercise. It is a moral discipline that resists the flattening effect of casualty statistics, and it is, I would argue, a spiritual obligation shared across the four faith traditions this column returns to again and again: the conviction that every life carries irreducible, sacred weight, and that naming the dead honestly is itself an act of justice.

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I had wanted to share this on Amazon/Audible but there is an obnoxious limitation there now which only allows THEIR virtual voices and AI and none other. This i…

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That warmth took specific, memorable forms. Colleagues and community members asked gentle, friendly questions about identity — whether I spoke or read Hebrew, what it meant to be Bahá’í, how an American ended up working in Gaza at all. And again and again, they emphasized, unprompted, that they did not hate or detest Israelis, even as they lived under the ever-present shadow of decades of occupation.

I remember shortly after arriving being invited by Abu Mahmud, our humble office janitor, to meet his son and family on the occasion of the impending nuptials. To get there we had to walk through back alleys in Gaza city, some barely wide enough for a car. It was touching and sincere, and an expression of genuine humility and joy in receiving and honoring a special guest. I was humbled and gratified by the experience.

I was pleased to have the chance to meet the families of staff members at iftar celebrations breaking the fast of Ramadan. IMC hosted at least one iftar dinner as did other organizations. Having the opportunity to spend time with Gazan colleagues outside of the formal work environment was such a reward, in terms of building people to people contact and getting to know each other better.

I attended weddings. I danced in the streets with grooms’ entourages moving from house to house among relatives. I was invited into homes and celebrations by people whose material circumstances were far more constrained than my own, and who nonetheless treated hospitality as a non-negotiable value rather than a luxury reserved for easier times.

My co-author and friend Mohammed writes about the mirror image of this experience: his own encounters with Jews and Israelis in interfaith spaces in the United States, which challenged inherited stereotypes he had carried from a lifetime lived almost entirely apart from direct contact with Israelis as people rather than as soldiers or aircraft. All spiritual traditions represented in our book urge their adherents to be a home for the stranger, even when conflict tries to transform the stranger into an enemy. Every act of hospitality across the line of conflict quietly refuses the narrative that some people are less than human.

This matters enormously against the backdrop of American discourse about Gaza, which frequently flattens both Israelis and Palestinians into caricature. Palestinians are reduced, in some corners of American media and politics, to an undifferentiated threat. Israelis are reduced, in other corners, to an undifferentiated oppressor. Both caricatures erase the lived texture of hospitality, curiosity, grief, humor, and moral complexity that actually characterizes daily life on the ground — texture I witnessed directly and that Mohammed witnessed from the opposite vantage point.

The contrast between lived encounter and public caricature has, if anything, sharpened in 2026. Israel’s political landscape is undergoing real internal contestation ahead of the October 27 election, contestation that rarely reaches American audiences accustomed to a monolithic narrative about Israeli politics. Recent polling has shown former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party running neck-and-neck with or ahead of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud, with one early August Channel 13 poll giving the broader opposition bloc a projected 69 seats against a governing coalition bloc holding only 51. A CIE polling summary through the end of July concluded that Netanyahu’s traditional coalition is losing, even as the fragmented opposition still lacks an assured route to power.

Perhaps most relevant to the theme of hospitality across lines of division: a new political party called A Place for Us All launched in mid-2026, co-founded by leaders of the Standing Together movement, running six candidates evenly split between Arab and Jewish Israelis and evenly split by gender. Actress Natalie Portman publicly endorsed the party in July, noting its early polling around 0.8 to 2.6 percent of the vote — below Israel’s 3.25 percent electoral threshold, but a meaningful signal nonetheless. One of the party’s founders argued the effort could galvanize young Palestinian-Israeli voters, only about 25 percent of whom currently say they plan to vote, along with Israeli women more broadly, only about 40 percent of whom have historically cast ballots.

A Place for Us All will very likely not cross the electoral threshold in October. Its significance is not primarily electoral. Its significance is that it exists at all — that Jewish and Arab Israelis chose to build something together, in the middle of the worst period of violence either community has experienced in decades, rather than retreating further into separate, hardened camps.

That is hospitality operating at the level of political imagination rather than the dinner table, but it comes from the identical impulse Mohammed and I experienced individually: the conviction that proximity to the other, chosen deliberately, is itself a form of resistance to the logic that makes atrocity possible.

None of this erases what continues to happen in Gaza. Israeli strikes have continued at a pace that made July 2026 the deadliest month of the year, and settler-related violence in the West Bank has intensified past the levels recorded in 2023.

Hospitality is not a substitute for accountability, ceasefire enforcement, or justice. But hospitality is the precondition for imagining that accountability, ceasefire, and justice remain possible outcomes rather than permanently foreclosed ones. Every wedding I attended in Gaza, every question asked with genuine curiosity rather than suspicion, every interfaith room Mohammed entered in the United States, kept that possibility alive in a small but real way.

Fall 2026 Peace Week: Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in a Fragmented World

Fall 2026 Peace Week will be held September 21 through September 25

As societies around the globe confront deepening polarization, protracted violence, democratic backsliding, forced displacement, climate-related insecurity, and rapid technological transformation, the pursuit of peace faces unprecedented challenges. Traditional assumptions about conflict resolution and peacebuilding are being tested by increasingly fragmented political, social, and informational landscapes in which trust is eroding, identities become more salient, and institutions struggle to address complex and interconnected crises.

The Fall 2026 Peace Week will bring together scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and community leaders to explore innovative approaches to peacemaking and peacebuilding. Through discussions on dialogue across divides, democratic resilience, environmental peacebuilding, community engagement, and conflict transformation, participants will examine how individuals, communities, and institutions can foster trust, inclusion, and cooperation in the face of growing uncertainty. In a world increasingly marked by fragmentation and uncertainty, Peace Week will facilitate rethinking of the capacities, partnerships, and institutions needed to create more just, resilient, and peaceful societies.

Here is the general link for full information:

Carter School Peace Week

I will lead two panels during that week, on Wednesday September 23 and Thursday September 24. Please feel free to consider joining us online for the discussions. All times are EST.

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Wednesday, September 23: Leadership, Communities, and Peacebuilding Practice

3:00 PM- 4:15 PM: The Year of Living Dangerously - the Destruction of American Soft Power

Format: Virtual

What are the tangible effects of the elimination of foreign aid, the demolition of key humanitarian institutions central to peace building, conflict resolution and global order and the pillage of global institutions? This talk will offer reflections and analysis of the impact on support for peacebuilding efforts, institutions of the abandonment of the mission of USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the U.S. Agency for Global Media and others.

Speakers:

• Alonzo Wind, Affiliate Faculty Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution; President Elect Rotary Club Global Washington; Retired Senior Foreign Service Officer

• Marc Gopin, Director, Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution

• Sara C. Sullivan, Ph.D. Principal Koko Consulting, Gaborone Botswana, Podcast Speaker and Author. Strategic Communications Expert, former Senior Strategic Communications Advisor Public Health Institute.

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Thursday, September 24: Innovation and Global Perspectives

12:00 PM – 1:15 PM: Humanitarian Peacebuilding in Complex Environments: Lessons from the Field

Format: Virtual

A presentation and discussion drawn from field experience on the ground, distinguishing between peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, peacebuilding, and conflict transformation. Examining core principles and ethical challenges in contexts like Gaza, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among others, and reconciling the delivery of humanitarian assistance with public advocacy.

Speakers:

• A. J. Alonzo Wind, Affiliate Faculty; President Elect Rotary Club Global Washington, retired Senior Foreign Service Officer.

• Ana Manuela Mot, former Rotary Foundation Peace Fellow; World Bank

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There are of course many other presentations worth joining, led by academics, practitioners, students and in some cases protagonists. I recommend all of them; feel free to check out the full listing. Particularly I’d like to also suggest two others:

On Wednesday September 23, some friends and colleagues will offer, with the support of Rotary Club Global Washington

10:30 AM – 11:45 AM: Rotary Peace Fellowships and Beyond: Catalyzing Peacebuilding

Format: Virtual

Since the program began in 2002, the Rotary Peace Centers have trained more than 1,800 fellows who now work in over 140 countries. Peace Fellow Alumni from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America will share their Peace Fellowship experience and the life and career path that it has enabled. These career paths have included founding community health services in Kenya for women impacted by domestic and other forms of violence; service as senior advisor to the Fund for Peace and numerous UN organizations, and serving as a frontline field level peace worker for the UN International Office of Migration, and securing a position at a multilateral development bank. Panelists will discuss the elements of the Peace Fellowship that were most important. They will also explore the kinds of additional support and resources that could better enable Peace Fellows and other students of peace and conflict resolution to launch into meaningful peacebuilding careers after completing their studies. One such resource is the Carter School Global Peacebuilders Action Network which can help Peace Fellowship Alumni and other peace program graduates connect with other peacebuilders globally as well as with opportunities for meaningful careers, funding for projects, and a vast collection of Peace building case studies and tools.

Moderator: Mari Clark, President Rotary Club of Washington Global, Chair Rotary District 7620 Peace Committee, and Faculty Affiliate, Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Panelists:

• Kathleen Doherty, Peace Fellow Alumnus President of the Board of the Rotary Peace Fellowship Alumni Association

• Pushpi Weerakoon, Peace Fellow Alumnus recipient of the Rotary International Alumni Service Above Self Award, cochair, Peace Committee, Rotary Club of Washington Global

• Carlos Guiza, Peace Fellow Alumnus, Rotary Club of Washington Global

• Ignatius Emeka Onyekwere, Peace Fellow AlumnusSenior Advisor on Resilience, Fragility and Human Security Initiatives at the Fund for Peace, Washington, DC, but based in Abuja Nigeria

• Jeff Helsing, Executive Director of the Better Evidence Project, Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

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This one is on Friday September 25, organized by some friends of mine who are students at the Carter School who have created a group, The Roundtable Consortium.

3:00 PM – 4:15 PM: Rethinking Peacebuilding: Power, Coloniality, and Global Perspectives

Format: Virtual

This roundtable asks whether contemporary peacebuilding, despite its language of justice and reconciliation, can reproduce the very structures of domination it seeks to overcome. In a fragmented world shaped by polarization, displacement, authoritarianism, climate insecurity, and digital surveillance, peacebuilding often operates through unequal relationships of expertise, funding, governance, and knowledge. The session brings decolonial critiques into conversation with questions of power, technology, and local agency, asking how peacebuilding can avoid becoming a tool of hierarchy, extraction, and control. Rather than rejecting peacebuilding, the discussion explores what forms of peace are possible when communities insist on plural knowledge, democratic accountability, and justice.

Facilitators:

• Silvestre Acedillo, Founder of the Consortium, Host of Roundtable

• Sadie Lockhart, Co-Facilitator

• Jamie Sackett, Co-Facilitator

Speakers:

• Dr. Severine Autesserre, School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University

• Dr. Jonathan Rudy (www.peacebuildingglobal.com)

• Dr. Oliver Richmond (School of International Relations, University of Manchester)

• Dr. Sangeeta Mahapatra, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)

• Dr. Meera Sabaratnam, Author of “Decolonizing Intervention”, Associate Professor, Oxford University

• Adam Day, UN University Centre for Policy Research

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This one is in person, on Friday September 25 as the final presentation, also with Rotary support:

4:45 PM – 6:00 PM: The Sound of Peace: Creativity, Culture, and the Human Spirit in a Fragmented World

Format: In-Person (Mason Square), Vernon Smith Hall

An Interactive Experience with Diego Carneiro

As Peace Week comes to a close, internationally acclaimed conductor, cellist, and Rotary Peace Fellow Diego Carneiro invites participants into a unique and immersive experience that explores the transformative power of music, storytelling, creativity, and human connection in building peace.

Blending personal stories, live cello performance, audience participation, and meaningful dialogue, this interactive session examines how the arts can transcend cultural, political, and social divides, creating spaces for empathy, healing, and shared understanding. Rather than a traditional presentation, participants will become part of a reflective journey that celebrates our common humanity and the role each of us plays in fostering peace.

Join us for an inspiring conclusion to Peace Week that is designed not only to be thought-provoking, but deeply memorable—leaving participants with renewed hope, meaningful connections, and a lasting reminder that peace is experienced as much through the human spirit as it is through words.

Session Format

• Interactive conversation

• Live cello performance

• Storytelling

• Audience participation

• Reflection and dialogue

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I think you will find this twice-yearly event a worthy use of your time, both the virtual as well as in person sessions.

My co-author Mohammed and I hosted a dialogue during April peace week. We will share the video link of this with my premium subscribers.

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I want to start there rather than with the news, because so much of the current shouting match between ‘Zionists’ and ‘anti-Zionists’ assumes the word Zionism has always meant one fixed thing, and that anyone questioning it now must be attacking Jews rather than examining an ideology that has, by its own most serious historians’ accounts, changed. It hasn’t always meant one thing. It doesn’t mean one thing now. And that gap, between the Zionism I was taught and the Zionism now governing Israel and its colonies across the occupied Palestinian territories, is where we find such ferocity of fallacious attacks of “antisemitism” against progressives and anyone who speaks out in favor of the human rights and civil rights of the Palestinian people.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born historian who served four years in the IDF, who studies genocide for a living at Brown University, and whose parents were ‘passionate Zionists’ who fought in the 1948 war, put it starkly in his book Israel: What Went Wrong? He argues that Zionism has always contained two competing impulses: the liberation of a persecuted minority, and a settler-colonial, ethno-nationalist project. Bartov’s own trajectory, from IDF infantry commander in Gaza and the West Bank to a scholar who now says he ‘can no longer support’ what Zionism has become, is not a betrayal of the movement he grew up inside. It’s an argument that a movement can betray its own founding document, the one that promised, in Israel’s own 1948 Declaration of Independence, ‘complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.’

Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian now teaching at Exeter, has spent decades pressing a harder version of this same argument, one that Bartov’s newer critique now echoes from inside Zionism’s own former ranks. In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe argued that the expulsion of roughly 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was not an unfortunate byproduct of war but the execution of a plan, Plan Dalet, drawn up in advance by the Zionist leadership.

Pappe’s framing is more categorical than Bartov’s or Beinart’s, and I don’t think the American Jewish community needs to adopt every conclusion he draws to take seriously his central provocation: that the founding of the state involved deliberate, organized displacement, and that generations of Israeli and diaspora education described this instead as a spontaneous Arab flight. Bartov, writing decades later and from a very different starting point, arrives at an overlapping conclusion about what came after 1948, even if he resists some of Pappe’s language about intent from the outset.

This is also, in a different key, the argument at the center of Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Beinart, an Orthodox-observant American Jewish journalist who has spent decades inside mainstream Jewish institutional life, argues that those institutions have organized themselves around a narrative of perpetual Jewish victimhood so complete that it has become incapable of registering Palestinian suffering as suffering.

He does not say this to excuse the horror of October 7. He says it because, in his words, seeing a Jewish state as ‘forever abused, never the abuser’ denies that state’s capacity for evil, and evil, he argues, is exactly what has followed. Beinart has moved further than most American Jewish commentators, toward a vision and expectation for a single, shared state in Palestine with equal citizenship for everyone between the river and the sea, but the diagnosis that precedes that prescription is one this community should internalize regardless of where each of us lands on the ultimate political arrangement.

So what is post-Zionism, precisely, and how is it different from anti-Zionism? The term has a real intellectual history: it described Israeli and diaspora scholars in the 1990s, Pappe among the most prominent, who argued that Zionism’s founding mission, establishing a Jewish state, had been achieved by 1948, and that the ideology’s ongoing work was therefore finished, its ethnonationalist logic no longer necessary to justify a state that already existed. Post-Zionism in that original sense was not a rejection of Israel’s right to exist. It was an argument that Israel could now be evaluated as a normal state, subject to normal democratic and human rights standards, rather than perpetually exempted from scrutiny as a fragile project still fighting for survival.

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That is close to where I have landed, decades after those tree-planting fundraisers. I am not anti-Zionist in the sense of wishing Israel out of existence, however catastrophic its founding was for others, and what Noa Baum has called A Land Twice Promised. However better informed I have become of the history and plight of the Palestinian people, together with my personal experience living within the occupied Palestinian territories. I want to be direct about that, because too much of the current discourse assumes there are only two boxes: defend the current Israeli government’s policies unconditionally, or oppose Israel’s existence entirely.

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, an unflinching history written by a Palestinian-American scholar whose own family lived through every stage of the conflict, argues that the struggle was never a fair fight between two national movements but a colonial campaign against an indigenous population, backed first by Britain and then by the United States. I don’t accept every element of that framing uncritically, but I take very seriously the underlying challenge, shared by Khalidi and Pappe from different vantage points: any honest reckoning with this conflict has to include the possibility that the founding of Israel involved real dispossession of a real people, and that acknowledging this is not the same as calling for Israel’s destruction. Acknowledging these truths are essential even while recognizing the pernicious history of blind leadership, corruption and miscalculations which unfortunately was fed and encouraged among Arabs including many – although not all – Palestinians.

Francesca Albanese’s account of settler colonialism, drawn from her conversations with the Israeli historian and activist Eyal Weizmann in her book When the World Sleeps, helped me see this more clearly than any single term had before. Settler colonialism, she writes, ‘operates through a dual dynamic: construction and destruction. On the one hand, outposts, infrastructure, colonies are built; on the other hand, the conditions that make life possible for the colonized population are systematically destroyed.’ That framework is not, on its face, a claim about Jewish identity or Jewish safety. It is a claim about a specific pattern of land policy, one that Pappe has spent a career documenting from 1948 forward and that Albanese, working within the UN human rights architecture decades later, describes as still operating today in the West Bank.

Here is where the accusation of antisemitism gets weaponized in a way that actually undermines the fight against real antisemitism. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism, adopted by dozens of governments and institutions, includes as an example ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’ Critics, including a 2016 British parliamentary committee, have pushed back hard on this exact provision, insisting that criticizing the Israeli government, even sharply, without additional evidence of antisemitic intent, is not itself antisemitic. Scholars like Moshe Behar have gone further, arguing that the IHRA definition carelessly conflates Jewish identity with the Israeli state and with Zionism itself, a conflation that was originally a Zionist rhetorical move before it got adopted uncritically by many of Zionism’s critics too.

I raise this because our community exists within that conflation—and because we reject it. As Jews and interfaith allies, we take the history of antisemitism with the utmost seriousness. We also believe that a Palestinian child in Al Khalil/Hebron or Gaza City has the same claim to dignity, safety, and self-determination as a Jewish child in Tel Aviv. Holding both commitments at once should not require us to accept either camp’s definition of loyalty or betrayal.

Jimmy Carter, no one’s idea of a radical, used the word apartheid in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and was pilloried for it by mainstream American Jewish organizations at the time.

Nearly two decades later, that framing has moved from the margins into reports by Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and into the findings of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, whose book documents in granular, first-person detail what she calls a system in which political fragmentation, unequal access to land, restricted movement, and a discriminatory legal system combine into apartheid. I’ll take up that specific term, and why it triggers such fury when applied to Israel, in the next column.

The Zionism captured and remade by the far-right ideologues in the Israeli government, by those allies who espouse a sort of Christian apocalyptic Zionism and by the settler movement reshaping the West Bank in its image, is a heinous atrocity. That its actual roots were in fact born from extremism decades earlier is a painful and troubling legacy. Arguing that every Arab state neighbor has had a legacy of authoritarian or militaristic government can not be used to justify the subjugation and decimation of the Palestinian people. Naming that gap honestly, without pretending it doesn’t exist and without concluding that Israel therefore has no right to exist, is the challenge of our day. It’s harder than picking a side. I think it’s also more honest.

Here on Amazon - ebook on sale

My co-author Mohammed’s reflection on faith under siege began with an image worth sitting with. Imagine Ramadan in Gaza with nothing to break the fast with, no table because the house is gone, and no kitchen because it was destroyed in an airstrike months before. And yet families still gather what little they have, share it with neighbors, recite the Qur’an, and protect dignity with humor. Faith in Gaza, he writes, is not theoretical — it is survival with grace. I recount this aspect multiple times within presentations I have been making with different Rotary Clubs in the area.

This is where mercy and evasion must be carefully distinguished. Evasion says: do not look too closely at suffering, because it is too painful or too politically inconvenient. Mercy says the opposite: look directly at suffering, refuse to let it harden you into cruelty, and refuse equally to let it numb you into indifference. Mohammed captures this precisely when he writes that choosing not to hate every Israeli because of what has happened to his people is itself a form of jihad — not weakness, but strength that extremists fear.

The Islamic concept of sabr, patience, is frequently misunderstood in Western discourse as passivity or quiet acceptance of oppression. Mohammed insists it means something else entirely: disciplined endurance while working toward what is right. The greatest struggle, as Islamic scholars teach, is the struggle against the ego, against hatred, vengeance, and despair — an inner battlefield most people are fighting every day, whether or not they recognize the language for it.

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Christianity’s contribution to this same discipline is the practice of bearing witness without flinching. It demands standing at the foot of suffering, accompanying the afflicted even when rescue is not possible. That is a difficult teaching to apply honestly any place and any time but especially in the occupied Palestinian territories and particularly Gaza in 2025 and 2026, when so much of what needs to be witnessed is not a single dramatic catastrophe but a slow, grinding accumulation of deprivation that rarely makes headlines on any single day.

Consider what steadfastness and refusal of hatred actually require of observers right now. Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that July 2026 was the deadliest month of the year, with 152 people killed, and that the cumulative toll since the October 2025 ceasefire had reached 1,250 fatalities and more than 4,100 injuries by early August. Meanwhile, OCHA has documented more than 1,380 settler-related incidents across the West Bank since the start of 2026, an average of 6.6 incidents per day. These are not statistics from an active declared war; they are statistics from a period officially described, however imperfectly, as a ceasefire.

That gap between the word ceasefire and the lived reality it is meant to describe is precisely where mercy without evasion becomes necessary. It would be evasive to celebrate the existence of a ceasefire agreement without naming what continues to happen beneath it. It would also be evasive, in the opposite direction, to let despair over the ceasefire’s failures curdle into contempt for the difficult, incremental diplomatic work of trying to end the war entirely. Mercy, understood as sabr rather than passivity, asks for something harder: continued moral attention and continued advocacy, without either premature celebration or complete despair.

The humanitarian data underscores why this distinction matters practically, not just theologically. The most recent Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report, which has been often cited in the past month as a UNICEF report that “contradicts” or “disproves” claims of hunger in Gaza, does in fact show a relative improvement in food security compared to earlier assessments, but Gaza’s Minister of Social Development and international experts in the field are careful to stress that this does not indicate the humanitarian crisis has ended. More than 1.4 million Palestinians continue to experience acute levels of food insecurity, more than 212,000 remain in Emergency-level conditions, and 74,200 children require treatment for acute malnutrition. Any reduction in aid delivery, officials warned, would rapidly reverse these limited gains. Mercy without evasion means refusing to treat modest improvement as resolution, and refusing to let modest improvement excuse continued restriction.

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This is ultimately what our book means by refusing hatred without refusing justice. Mohammed’s discipline of choosing not to hate every Israeli does not require him to stop demanding accountability for what has happened to his people and his family. Compassion and accountability are not opposites. They are, in the vocabulary shared across our four faiths, two names for the same underlying commitment: that no one’s suffering may be treated as acceptable collateral, and no one’s grief may be used to excuse indifference to another’s.

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As Dr. David Hasan writes in one of our book’s forewords, the framework of the book highlights a deeper truth about our world. Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the Baháʼí Faith all share moral teachings rooted in compassion, justice, humility, and the sanctity of human life. These traditions have historically shaped civilizations and cultures across continents. Yet they also contain within them the spiritual foundations for dialogue and reconciliation. When approached with openness and sincerity, faith traditions can serve not as barriers but as bridges helping people recognize their shared humanity even amid profound disagreement.

The need for this kind of dialogue is greater today than at any point in recent memory. The world is entering a period of immense global challenge. Climate change, scarcity of water and resources, growing economic inequality, and rising geopolitical tensions threaten to intensify conflict in many regions. Military instability and political polarization increasingly shape international discourse. At the same time, social media and modern information systems often amplify division while diminishing opportunities for thoughtful engagement.

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These faith traditions are not identical, and the book does not pretend otherwise. But at their deepest level they converge around the sacredness of human life, the imperative of justice, the practice of mercy, and the duty to bear witness. When extremists weaponize God, scripture, or communal fear to justify massacre and dehumanization, they betray faith itself — from both sides.

In the Bahá’í writings, justice is described as the foundation for global unity and the advancement of civilization. It requires seeing the world independently, free from imitation and prejudice, and acting with fairness and equity toward all. Crucially, the Bahá’í teachings distinguish justice as a social and divine principle from revenge or mere retribution, emphasizing fairness, order, and loving-kindness rather than payback. That distinction alone would transform much of the current discourse about Gaza and Israel if it were taken seriously by decision-makers on every side.

Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, wrote in the late 1800s:

“The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behoveth thee to be. Verily, justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.”

— Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words

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Judaism essentially offers its own uncompromising vocabulary for the sanctity of life. The principle of pikuach nefesh — the obligation to save life — overrides almost every other commandment. Tikkun olam, the call to heal the world. You violate the Sabbath to save a life. You eat forbidden food to survive. Life is sacred and permits no exceptions and tolerates no excuses. Yet these spiritual values and core principles have been frequently set aside by a chorus caught up in “Whataboutism.”

Watching the destruction of every hospital in Gaza, tracking the GPS coordinates of humanitarian sites and begging the Israeli military to deconflict them, it became impossible to reconcile what is being witnessed with anything recognizable as Jewish teaching. As the writer Peter Beinart has argued, being Jewish after the devastation of Gaza requires a reckoning — not with enemies, but with ourselves.

Islam contributes the teaching of mercy — Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful — words that open virtually every surah of the Qur’an. Mercy, in this framing, is not weakness. It is, as Mohammed describes it, the most stubborn form of resistance one can encounter. What extremist armed groups have done in the name of Islam is explicitly not Islam, and the tradition itself insists on holding mercy and justice together: mercy without justice becomes sentiment, and justice without mercy becomes cruelty.

I witnessed that mercy in the Gazan families who shared what little they had during Ramadan, in the women community leaders who pushed against conservative norms to protect the vulnerable, in the health workers who continued to show up at clinics even when they knew those clinics might be bombed. Mercy is not weakness. Mercy, as I saw it practiced in Gaza, was a stubborn form of resistance. Sadly, totalitarian terror from extremists is what makes the television news and dominates the global conversations.

Christianity, encountered through the ancient churches of Jerusalem’s Old City and Gaza, and through the extraordinary work of organizations like Caritas Jerusalem and the International Orthodox Christian Charities, contributes the discipline of bearing witness. Christianity, at its truest, demands that one stand at the foot of the cross, refuse to turn away from suffering, and accompany the afflicted even when one cannot save them. The Christian communities of Gaza and the Holy Land have practiced this discipline for centuries, and their witness — now under siege from Israeli extremists as much as from general devastation — testifies to what endurance rooted in love actually looks like.

Tragically, many in the United States including within the evangelical Christian communities seem unaware of the conscious and seemingly intentional destruction of Christian communities and Christian life. In Gaza but also within the Land of Israel, notably in and around Jerusalem. When I was there, I saw examples of and heard stories of the harassing and threats against Christian prelates, attacks by extremists against Christian religious properties and cemeteries and sacrilegious acts. While little of this was directly pushed by governmental authorities, nor was it condemned and punished. Only in recent days has the U.S. Ambassador to Israel spoken out forcefully against some specific excesses by Israeli settler communities on the West Bank against Palestinians, be they Christian or Muslim, after ignoring much of that for years.

Why does spiritual language still matter when humanitarian systems are visibly collapsing around it? Because humanitarian systems run on funding, access, and political will — all three of which are failing in Gaza. It seems like there is enormous political and social media energy exerted by certain factions that attempt to mis-read and mis-represent reports by UNICEF and other aid agencies about hunger and need in Gaza and Palestine as a whole.

When the material infrastructure of mercy breaks down this severely, moral infrastructure — the shared conviction, across traditions, that human life is sacred and cannot be sacrificed for political convenience — becomes one of the few resources that cannot be blockaded, taxed, or denied entry at a checkpoint. And yet both have been largely attacked and violated over the course of the last 30 months.

This is not an argument for religious sentimentality in place of policy. It is an argument that policy divorced from any moral floor eventually permits precisely the outcomes we have witnessed: hospitals reduced to rubble, aid convoys blocked or delayed, and children malnourished not by accident but by the cumulative effect of deliberate restriction. Justice, understood across these four traditions, refuses to treat any of that as an acceptable cost of doing business, regardless of which side benefits from the delay.

Both Palestinians and Israelis deserve justice. That sentence is easy to write and extraordinarily difficult to live by, because it requires holding accountable the corrupt leaders and religious extremists on both sides who have disrupted and blocked true justice for the people living there, even as they painted wholly false and manipulative narratives about what justice and truth actually require. Naming that corruption honestly, on both sides, is itself an act of faith rather than a betrayal of it.

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Every statistic about displacement conceals a specific person who had to leave a specific home, a specific street, a specific set of relationships that cannot simply be rebuilt elsewhere. Mohammed Arafat’s story is one such life, and it deserves to be told in full rather than folded into the abstraction of a number.

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Mohammed spent more than twenty-three years of his life in Gaza, growing up under blockade and surviving war after war, trying, as he puts it, to make a life out of pieces. In 2018 he moved to Chile to teach English, and there he found the largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East, a diaspora within a diaspora, carrying Gaza’s memory to the far side of the world. While in Chile, he visited the Bahá’í House of Worship in Santiago. Its stillness, its architecture, and its message of unity stayed with him and planted what he later described as a quiet seed.

Mohammed came to the United States through a peacebuilding program, and for the first time in his life he met Israeli civilians and Jewish people not as soldiers at a checkpoint or jets in the sky, but as human beings sitting across from him and sharing their own stories. That single sentence carries enormous weight. It means that for more than two decades, the only Israeli presence in his life had been military and aerial — a presence defined by power, distance, and threat. Encounter, in the fullest human sense, was something he had to travel across the world to find.

Today Mohammed lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area, but part of his heart remains in Gaza. Writing our book together became, in his words, a way to share the human side of Gaza — pain, strength, love, humor, resilience, and more than people imagine.That last phrase matters. People do imagine Gaza. They imagine rubble, siege, and war. What they rarely imagine is humor, or resilience defined not as endurance of suffering but as active insistence on joy.

This story matters for reasons beyond memoir, as we talked about recently in a joint presentation/conversation during April Peace Week for the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Mohammed’s displacement — first internal, within a blockaded strip of land, and then external, across Chile and eventually to the United States — mirrors a broader pattern affecting Palestinian families that current reporting continues to document. Even amid a nominal ceasefire, families in Gaza remain almost entirely displaced: 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.1 million people are currently displaced within the territory itself, according to UNICEF’s mid-2026 update, exposed to ongoing health and environmental risks with nowhere permanent to return. Add to that the separate, often invisible trauma of diaspora Palestinians — people who left before or during the war and now carry the guilt, worry, and helplessness of watching catastrophe unfold from a distance.

Mohammed has written about this directly. In the book’s chapter on why the poems matter, he explains that some poems are written for his niece and her family, others for family members evacuated to Egypt during the war, and others for those who remain in Gaza — for the unbearable guilt and worry felt by those of us who have left. That guilt is its own form of displacement: geographic safety purchased at the cost of psychological exile from the people one loves most.

Family separation of this kind has become one of the defining and least-discussed harms of the war. It is easy for outside observers to track deaths, injuries, and displacement figures. It is much harder to track the diaspora members lying awake at night because a phone call did not go through, or a WhatsApp message went unanswered for six hours during an internet blackout. Mohammed’s story gives that invisible suffering a name and a face.

There is also something quietly radical in the direction of Mohammed’s journey. He did not travel toward hardened certainty about Israelis; he traveled toward encounter. He chose, repeatedly, to place himself in rooms with people whose national narrative had cast his community as a threat, and to let those people become individuals rather than symbols. That choice is not naive. It is, in a real sense, an act of courage — arguably a harder form of courage than anger, because anger asks nothing of you beyond feeling it, while genuine encounter asks you to risk being changed.

This is precisely why Mohammed’s collaboration and friendship with an American Jewish Bahá’í humanitarian is not an oddity or a marketing hook. Indeed, we often call each other with the delightful Arabic endearment of “habibi.”

It is the logical extension of a pattern that began in Santiago, continued through a peacebuilding program in the United States, and now finds its fullest expression in a book written page by page, in alternating voices, by two people who came into each other’s orbit specifically because of the devastating situation in Gaza and their shared humanitarian advocacy in 2024.

The current news cycle offers a grim backdrop against which to read this journey. July 2026 was reported as the deadliest month in Gaza so far this year, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Numbers like these are precisely what Mohammed’s storytelling resists — not by denying them, but by insisting that behind every one of them is a Hassan, a niece, a mother, a brother who went out one evening to find water.

Mohammed’s journey from Gaza to Chile to the United States, and from silence to testimony, is also a journey many readers of this column will recognize in miniature: the slow, uneven, often uncomfortable movement from abstraction toward relationship. That movement is the entire premise of this column, and Mohammed’s story is where it begins.

“Each line is a witness to survival, each stanza a plea to remember the humanity that persists even in the darkest circumstances.” — Mohammed Arafat

Poetry occupies a strange, necessary place in a book that also contains humanitarian reporting, policy analysis, and interfaith theology. It does something none of those other forms can do: it slows the reader down enough to feel, rather than merely process, what has happened.

Mohammed writes that the poems in our book were written in moments of quiet reflection, in the small spaces where grief, hope, and memory intersect. Some are for his niece and her family. Others are for family members evacuated to Egypt during the war. Others still are for those who remain in Gaza, and for the guilt carried by those, like him, who left. Writing them, he says, is both a refuge and a responsibility. Each line is a witness to survival, and each stanza is a plea to remember the humanity that persists even in the darkest circumstances.

Reading them in full does something a paraphrase cannot: it lets Mohammed’s own voice, in his own words, carry the weight this column can only gesture toward.

For those who want to continue to stay tuned to Mohammed’s story, you can sign up for his poetry and newsletter here:

Mohammed’s Newsletter

Grandfather’s Farm

This was Mohammed’s first poem, written after his grandfather died of a heart attack following the bombing of his family’s ancestral farm. It captures, in plain language, a devotion that outlasted even loss.

“Grandfather’s Farm” (written 2012)

Every day,

he walked to the farm

like it was a mosque

like it was a prayer

he needed to repeat.

The olive trees knew him

by the sound of his shoes

and the way he touched

their old, bent arms.

He drank tea there,

fed the cat and the chickens

talked to the soil

as if it could talk back.

One day,

my grandmother said,

“If you love those trees more than me,

I will pack my bags.”

He smiled,

and went anyway.

— Mohammed Arafat

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Not My War, But Still Mine

Written after reading a war poem by a poet who had never seen Gaza, this piece captures how inherited grief crosses borders and generations, arriving in the words of strangers who somehow already knew.

In Between

Mohammed wrote this poem reflecting on the political barriers, like the U.S. no-contact policy toward Gaza’s governing authority, that separate ordinary people from the help they need, leaving both the givers and the needy suspended in unanswered silence.

“In Between”

So much is built

to keep us apart

a word,

a look,

a simple breath.

The road gets longer,

and children wait

for the things

that never come.

The ones who hold the answers

are silent.

The ones who need them

keep waiting.

And in that quiet space

between asking and hearing,

life moves on,

unnoticed,

unanswered.

— Mohammed Arafat

Poem — For America

Written after Mohammed’s arrival in the United States through a peacebuilding program, this poem addresses America directly, asking it to hold both gratitude and grief, both welcome and witness, at the same time.

“Poem — For America”

I come from far,

with broken tongue,

but still I try to speak.

I see your sky,

so wide, so open,

and I feel maybe

I can breathe.

I love your streets,

your music,

your way of smiling to strangers.

But I also ask,

please listen,

for I carry voices

from another land.

America,

I write you poems,

because I believe

you can hold us both,

me, and Gaza too.

— Mohammed Arafat

Five Poems of Displacement: The Distance, Sondos, Evacuated, Between Worlds, and Hope

These five short poems were written more recently, addressing the specific, named people in Mohammed’s life affected by the war: a niece named Sondos injured in an attack, family members evacuated to Egypt, and the daily ache of watching loved ones suffer from thousands of miles away.

“The Distance”

I touch my phone

hear your voice,

feel the air between us.

I cannot hold you,

cannot stop the night from falling.

I carry Gaza in my chest,

and the miles burn.

— Mohammed Arafat

“Sondos”

Your knee, a prison of blood and silence.

I see you in my dreams,

your pain sharper than any bomb,

yet you laugh,

even in the shadows.

I am here,

but I am not enough.

— Mohammed Arafat

“Evacuated”

You left for Egypt,

but I cannot leave my guilt.

Mother’s hands shake,

Father’s eyes heavy as walls.

I pray through the phone lines

that safety will stitch your hearts back whole.

— Mohammed Arafat

“Between Worlds”

Here, streets hum with life I do not know.

There, rubble sings lullabies of loss.

I walk with ghosts in my pockets,

names whispered like prayers:

home, family, Sondos.

I try to speak,

to turn silence into sound.

— Mohammed Arafat

“Hope”

Some days, it is only a flicker

a friend’s smile, a stranger’s hand.

I clutch it like water in my palm,

fragile, fleeting,

yet enough

to keep the story alive.

— Mohammed Arafat

Mohammed’s poems refuse to let the war remain abstract. A niece has a name: Sondos. A guilt has a specific shape: those who left, praying through phone lines for those who could not. A hope has a specific size: small enough to fit in a palm, and yet, he insists, enough.

Reading these poems in full, rather than only reading about them, changes what a reader carries away from this column. It is one thing to be told that grief and hope coexist in a displaced person’s inner life. It is another to sit with the actual lines Mohammed wrote in the space where those emotions met on the page. That is what poetry is for, and it is why this column now shares his words directly, in full, with his blessing and mine.

For those who want to continue to stay tuned to Mohammed’s story, you can sign up for his poetry and newsletter here:

Mohammed's Newsletter

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This is not a merely academic matter. When people are dying, words shape not only understanding but permission. They influence what publics tolerate, what leaders justify, what journalists foreground, what courts examine, and what citizens can bear to look at directly.

One of the arguments Mohammed and I make in our book is that many Palestinians reject the language commonly used in Western media because it implies symmetry where there is profound asymmetry. “The conflict in Gaza” sounds almost geological, as if violence simply erupts between two parties of comparable power. “The war between Israel and Hamas” is more precise, but it can still shrink the horizon so much that blockade, occupation, statelessness, settlement expansion, and generations of dispossession recede from view. Language narrows memory. Once memory is narrowed, conscience can be managed.

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At the same time, language can also be stretched into slogans that stop thought rather than deepen it. That happens across ideological camps. Some invoke “self-defense” as though the phrase itself relieved them of the need to examine proportionality, civilian protection, starvation, siege, or long-term domination. Others invoke words like “resistance” with too little attention to what happens when violence against civilians is moralized or explained away. The result is not clarity but tribal liturgy.

This is why naming Gaza honestly requires both precision and humility. Precision, because euphemism is dangerous. Humility, because no word should become an excuse not to keep looking.

Consider the term “ceasefire.” It ought to imply protection, restraint, and measurable relief. But in June 2026, UNICEF described Gaza’s ceasefire as a “cruel and deadly illusion,” noting that 265 Palestinian children had reportedly been killed since the October 2025 ceasefire announcement, roughly one child a day. If children continue to be killed at that rate during what policymakers call a ceasefire, then the word itself begins to function as moral camouflage. It reassures distant observers while the underlying machinery of suffering continues.

Or consider the phrase “humanitarian access.” It sounds technical, bureaucratic, perhaps even neutral. Yet UNICEF’s July 2026 reporting states that only 280 of 633 UNICEF aid trucks from Egypt were able to offload during May and June. That number is not just an operational statistic. It is a measure of how language about “constraints” or “access issues” often conceals the reality of prevented medicine, delayed fuel, unsafe water, and families made to survive without basics that are nonnegotiable elsewhere.

The words “displacement” and “shelter assistance” can similarly flatten human experience. But when 1.9 million of 2.1 million people are displaced, as UNICEF reported this month, displacement is not a secondary humanitarian feature of war. It is the condition structuring daily life. And when OCHA says shelter assistance fell by 37 percent from May to June because of funding shortfalls, that is not merely a gap in programming. It means more families under dangerous heat, damaged materials, and accumulating disease risk.

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Then there are the legal terms. Genocide is the one that generates the fiercest contest. Some deploy it too quickly; others reject it so reflexively that they never engage the evidence. International law has its own standards and procedures, and it matters to say that courts, commissions, and investigators—not columnists alone—must weigh such claims. But it is equally important not to hide behind procedural patience when mass civilian suffering is obvious. The International Court of Justice in 2024 found that Palestinians in Gaza had a plausible right to protection from genocide and ordered provisional measures. That was not a final ruling on the merits, but it was also not a symbolic footnote. It signaled that the risk to civilian life and the obligations of protection were grave enough to demand urgent legal intervention.

Since then, the debate has only intensified. UN reporting in 2026 has included stark warnings about atrocity crimes and the catastrophic harm being inflicted on Palestinian children. That does not settle every legal question. But it should unsettle every reader who thinks moral clarity must wait until legal unanimity arrives.

There is another linguistic distortion that deserves attention: the tendency to talk about Gaza as though it were detachable from the region around it. Yet the region is precisely what keeps remaking Gaza’s predicament. The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran this year diverted political focus, deepened instability, and complicated already fragile ceasefire and reconstruction dynamics. When regional war expands, Gaza does not pause. It becomes more vulnerable to neglect, bargaining, and strategic deprioritization. In that sense, Gaza is not only a place. It is a measure of what regional power politics permits to remain unresolved.

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I’ve started reading in the past few days this recent book by Francesa Albanese. She is the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, a position I did not previously know is entirely voluntary and unsalaried. There is another cover, which is more attractive and may draw attention from others who might not be drawn to the one above.

She uses powerful language, some of which certainly is direct and confrontational. She talks openly about genocide as well as apartheid. I’m sure many advocates for Israel and Zionist policies are apoplectic about those terms, and there are many reports about their efforts to stifle this book.

Israeli politics also shapes words and names. The 2026 election campaign is emerging as a referendum not only on Netanyahu, but on the country’s direction after October 7, on the handling of the war, and on whether any political space remains for a shared future. The rise of Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar, the Bennett-Lapid alliance Together, and the launch of A Place for Us All all suggest that the electorate is searching for alternatives, though not necessarily the same kind of alternative. Standing Together’s associated political offshoot is particularly interesting because it rejects the binary assumption that security must be pursued against equality, or that Jewish-Arab partnership is electorally naïve. Even if it remains small, it introduces another vocabulary into Israeli politics: shared society, anti-war civic partnership, and the insistence that equality is not a concession but a democratic necessity.

Why does that matter for naming Gaza? Because politics creates the boundaries of public speech. If Israeli public life widens even slightly to include more voices committed to equality, accountability, and coexistence, then terms like occupation, dehumanization, and collective punishment may become a little harder to dismiss as enemy propaganda. Conversely, if politics remains trapped in militarized language alone, then euphemism will continue to do the work of moral anesthesia.

I return often to something simple: language should help us see human beings more clearly, not less. If a term makes it easier to ignore dead children, distrust all testimony from one side, or erase decades of context, it is probably failing morally even if it succeeds politically. If a term helps restore history, agency, and asymmetry without erasing anyone’s humanity, it may be closer to truth.

That does not mean every reader must use the same vocabulary. Honest people will continue to disagree over terms. But some standards should hold. Do not use words that trivialize suffering. Do not use legal caution as a substitute for compassion. Do not use October 7 to erase what followed. Do not use Palestinian suffering to erase Israeli fear and grief. Do not use balance as an excuse for vagueness. And do not let familiar phrases do your moral thinking for you.

In the end, naming Gaza correctly is not about winning an argument over semantics. It is about whether we are willing to describe reality without shrinking it to fit our comfort. A child killed during a “ceasefire” exposes the inadequacy of the word. A family displaced again under “access restrictions” exposes the inadequacy of the phrase. A society denied equal freedom for generations exposes the inadequacy of talking as though all this began only yesterday.

Words matter because they can open the door to justice or close it. They can thicken moral awareness or thin it out. They can honor the dead or bury them a second time inside euphemism.

So we must keep asking, every time we speak or write about Gaza: does this language reveal, or does it hide? Does it restore history, or erase it? Does it protect human dignity, or does it turn dignity into collateral grammar?

That is not the whole work of conscience. But it is where conscience often begins.

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That is why I want to begin here: with the Gaza I knew before the latest abyss, the Gaza of work and family and wit and hospitality, the Gaza that still lived under blockade and recurring violence but that also insisted on being more than its confinement.

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When I worked in Gaza with International Medical Corps in 2022 and 2023, I did not meet abstractions. I met colleagues. They were logisticians, nurses, administrators, drivers, translators, young professionals, team leaders, budget wranglers, troubleshooters, and dreamers. They worried about deadlines, generators, fuel, procurement, salaries, and whether plans would survive the week. They argued over details in meetings and laughed after them. They invited one another to weddings. They worried about their parents. They swapped stories. They teased. They endured. The most important truth about them was not that they were trapped, though many were. It was that they were alive in the fullest human sense.

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That is part of what photographs from those years still give back to me. A staff gathering is not only a staff gathering. It is evidence of a social world. A wedding dance is not only a wedding dance. It is evidence of joy refusing surrender. A walk, a shared meal, a family visit, a group outing, a child in someone’s arms—these are not sentimental details. They are proof that what is being destroyed in Gaza is not just infrastructure. It is a whole ecology of relationship.

I remember one of the recurrent surprises of my time there: the warmth with which so many Gazans received me. I am an American. I have a Jewish background. I am also a Bahá’í. These facts did not disappear in Gaza. They often prompted questions, curiosity, sometimes very direct conversation. Did I know Hebrew? What did I think of Israel? Why was I there? Did I understand what life in Gaza was actually like? Time and again, what I encountered was not a simple script of hatred, but a willingness to engage me as a person. Many emphasized that they did not hate Israelis as such. They hated what had been done to them. They hated dispossession, humiliation, fear, blockade, and the recurring destruction visited upon their lives. But the human space for conversation remained larger than many outsiders would imagine.

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That memory matters now because the dominant images of Gaza do not leave much room for hospitality. When a place is reduced to rubble in the global imagination, its people can be reduced to victims only, or else to threats only. Both are forms of dehumanization. To remember hospitality in Gaza is to remember that people under siege still offered coffee, stories, jokes, and welcome. It is to remember that even in a wounded land, people practiced dignity.

There were moments of beauty too. Gaza’s shoreline. The evening light. The ordinary bustle of city neighborhoods. The visible ambitions of young people who wanted careers, education, mobility, and some measure of normal life. I think of staff members who loved technology, who dreamed of further study, who built friendships across departments, who managed projects with remarkable competence under conditions most international institutions would find impossible. These lives were not “before history.” They were history. They were the social fabric later shredded.

And that shredding has been immense. UNICEF’s mid-year 2026 update reported that nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. It found that essential services remain critically limited, with healthcare, water, sanitation, nutrition, protection, and education all under severe strain.

When we remember Gaza only as ruin, we unintentionally help complete that dismantling. The rubble remains visible, but the life that preceded it becomes harder to imagine, and therefore easier to dismiss. This is one reason why memory is not a distraction from justice. It is part of justice. To insist that Gaza contained ordinary joy is not to romanticize suffering. It is to identify what has been taken.

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I think often about weddings in Gaza. To attend one is to understand something about communal resilience. People celebrate not because life is easy, but because refusing celebration would concede too much to fear. Weddings are public, embodied acts of continuity. They say: despite blockade, despite war, despite every humiliation, we still belong to one another, and life still asks to be blessed. Some of the most painful images I carry now are linked to remembering that a young man dancing in the street one year may be dead the next, or displaced, or searching for family under rubble, or standing in a line for water instead of standing under lights with friends.

This is not unique to weddings. Offices, schools, clinics, apartment buildings, mosques, churches, and family homes all contain the sediment of ordinary life. A destroyed building is not just a military image. It is a map of interrupted conversations, birthdays, prayers, arguments, repairs, children’s routines, and grandmotherly instructions. The world often speaks of “civilian infrastructure” as though infrastructure were somehow separate from intimacy. It is not. A water network is about children drinking. A clinic is about a mother not losing her child from treatable illness. A school is about the future not being permanently maimed.

The wider region makes this remembering more urgent, not less. As conflict with Iran reshaped regional attention in 2026, Gaza risked becoming background noise to a broader strategic drama. But for the people living there, there is no background. There is only the daily work of survival. The international tendency to move on, to treat one crisis as superseded by the next, is one more injury layered atop the first.

At the same time, Israeli politics is moving toward elections in which war, October 7, the fate of Netanyahu, and the country’s broader direction are all central issues. That matters because elections shape policy, and policy shapes whether Gazans continue to be seen primarily through the language of force. The launch of the Arab-Jewish party A Place for Us All by leaders linked to Standing Together is one small but significant sign that some Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel are still trying to build a politics that begins with shared humanity. Whether or not the party crosses the electoral threshold, its existence is a rebuke to the idea that the future must belong only to hardened blocs and absolutist narratives.

Still, none of this political movement should distract us from the simple moral point: before the ruins, there was life. A textured, complicated, loving, ambitious, often frustrated, frequently funny life. A life lived under pressure, but still unmistakably life. If we want justice for Gaza, we must recover that fuller memory. Otherwise, we risk defending a people while still failing to imagine them.

The Gaza I remember does not cancel the Gaza of today. It makes today more legible. It tells us what has been lost, what remains worth defending, and why rebuilding cannot mean only pouring concrete over devastation. Rebuilding must also mean recovering social trust, education, medical systems, livelihoods, movement, and the possibility of ordinary joy.

Rubble tells one truth. Memory tells another. To hold both is not sentimentality. It is witness.

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For some time, I have written to friends, colleagues, and readers only when urgency overtook routine. An irregular newsletter can carry real feeling, but it cannot build the kind of durable public conversation that this moment demands. That is why I am beginning a weekly column. I do not want simply to send out occasional updates whenever another catastrophe, another speech, another broken ceasefire, or another moral emergency pushes me to the keyboard. I want to create a dependable place where witness, reflection, and dialogue can continue week after week.

This column grows out of my new book, One Conversation, Two Identities, Four Faiths, which I wrote with my co-author and friend Mohammed Arafat. But I do not want the column to function merely as a vehicle to market the book.

The book is one expression of a larger obligation. That obligation is to keep human beings from disappearing into abstractions. It is to resist the way headlines turn lives into statistics, ideologies, and talking points. And it is to insist that we look more carefully at Gaza, at Israel, at the people of the region, and at ourselves. How did I get there?

I joined Peace Corps as a public health volunteer right out of college. You can see me here in my first assignment village office, where I attempted to learn about the culture in coastal Ecuador and how to offer an understandable and attractive message in public health and nutrition. I had a battery-operated filmstrip projector which was rudimentary but allowed me to project images for the youth and villagers writ large. Every once in a while, I could borrow from the Peace Corps office in Quito a rugged movie projector and a selection of Disney produced animated movies with health messages that was quite the novelty for my Ecuadorian counterparts and neighbors. In truth I learned probably far more than I was able to teach, and it was an eye-opening and transformative experience in so many ways.

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Peace Corps service unexpectedly opened the door for me to develop a vocation for community development on a far grander scale, and soon I was managing regional and country programs and finding a calling in international service. This included a wide range of different nonprofit organizations where I worked in a variety of countries mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean for over fifteen years.

Eventually an old mentor of mine convinced me to join USAID as a career Foreign Service Officer, initially in public health but quickly rising to take on more senior mission management responsibilities. I worked in a number of countries including five more years in Nicaragua in Central America, Angola and Nigeria in Africa, two tours in Iraq (including one experience with a sniper who tried to target me in Tikrit), a temporary duty stint in Kandahar Afghanistan (which also almost killed me), and then wrapping up in South Africa between the bilateral mission and the regional Southern Africa one.

I retired from the Senior Foreign Service at the U.S. Agency for International Development in early 2019. I wasn’t thrilled with doing so, but I had worked at USAID for over 20 years and I found myself stuck in an uncomfortable place and thankless situation back in Washington DC.

I wrote my first book in 2020, recounting how much Peace Corps had meant to me and how I built a lifelong commitment to global service during my first 13 years living in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. This book had been a project I had wanted to undertake for a long time, and I finally was able to overcome procrastination and apply myself to it during COVID. It was successful for a time, and I would go on to record the audiobook myself and produce a Spanish translation for the Latin American audience.

I was receptive to doing new things however and was ready and primed when International Medical Corps contacted me and expressed interest in my taking on the role of Mission Director in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a focus on Gaza.

I spent two years leading medical and humanitarian work in Gaza. I won’t go into detail here what I did; we’ll save that for other posts. But being present in Gaza was an unforgettable experience in both joyous and tragic ways. The most tragic of course being the effects of the savage attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians in cooperative communities on the border in southern Israel, and then the massive and unrelenting Israeli retaliation. A retaliation which without measure or limits, which in so many ways has contributed to the literal decimation of the Palestinians in Gaza, the destruction of many tens of thousands of civilians including infants, children, the elderly and the handicapped. I told the story as a humanitarian witness in a new book which you may have also seen.

After my resignation from International Medical Corps and my return to the United States, I dedicated myself to humanitarian advocacy efforts. I spoke at many different venues and looked for ways I could contribute to peacebuilding efforts. This ultimately led me to get to know Mohammed Arafat and become friends with the Palestinian poet residing in Washington DC, and learning his own story.

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Mohammed grew up in Gaza, survived blockade after blockade, and still carries the weight of family, memory, and grief across every ocean he has crossed. We come from different traditions, different histories, and different emotional inheritances. But we befriended and decided to dedicate ourselves to trying to reframe for an American audience relatively unfamiliar with the full history and nuances of Israel and Palestine. We produced another book as a conversation and consultation between friends, trying to make sense of the horrors of the world and offering our thoughts on how universal values exist between all the Abrahamic religions that should provide a foundation for peacebuilding and understanding.

Publishing this book taught me something that this column must also try to teach: conversation is not a luxury for easier times. It is one of the few disciplines that can keep conscience alive when cruelty becomes normalized.

The need for that discipline is painfully clear in mid-2026. UNICEF reported in July that humanitarian conditions in Gaza remain dire, with 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.1 million people displaced and most children living under the combined pressure of access restrictions, damaged infrastructure, heat, disease risk, and collapsing services. The same UNICEF update said that 82 percent of families are water insecure, that up to 70 percent cannot access even six liters of water per person per day, and that nearly 90 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. OCHA reported in July that the number of families receiving shelter assistance in Gaza fell by 37 percent from May to June because of funding shortfalls. Even the word “ceasefire” has become morally slippery; in June, UNICEF warned that since the October 2025 ceasefire announcement, 265 Palestinian children had reportedly been killed in Gaza, an average of one child per day.

Those facts matter because they remind us that the suffering in Gaza is not a closed chapter, not even in those moments when the region’s attention is pulled elsewhere. In 2026, the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran shifted headlines and strategic calculations across the Middle East, while several reports noted that Gaza receded from center stage as policymakers and media focused on the broader regional confrontation. But a crisis does not become less catastrophic because cameras pivot away. If anything, it can become easier for the world to tolerate what it no longer sees.

At the same time, Israel is entering a consequential election season. The Knesset has moved toward dissolution and national elections are slated for October 27, 2026. Polling and reporting suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu faces a more fragmented and competitive field than he has in some time, including Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party, the Bennett-Lapid alliance called Together, and a newly launched Arab-Jewish party, A Place for Us All, founded by leaders associated with Standing Together. The emergence of A Place for Us All is notable not because it is guaranteed success, but because it reflects a stubborn refusal by some Israeli and Palestinian citizens of Israel to surrender the idea of shared civic life. It is one more reminder that there are still people in the region trying to build another language and another politics, even while war, occupation, trauma, and polarization reward the opposite.

That, too, is why this column must exist. Public discussion of Gaza and Israel is often imprisoned between slogans. One side says security and forgets justice. Another says resistance and sometimes forgets what violence does to actual human beings. People invoke history selectively, grief selectively, law selectively, even God selectively. One of the moral aims of this column will be to make selective mourning harder. Another will be to make selective memory less convenient.

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I do not claim neutrality, if by neutrality one means emotional detachment or equal indifference to unequal power. But I do claim a commitment to honesty. I grieve Israeli civilians murdered on October 7. I grieve Palestinian civilians killed before and after it. I reject the idea that the horror of October 7 justifies the devastation that followed in Gaza, just as I reject the idea that the suffering of Palestinians somehow erases the suffering of Israelis. Moral adulthood requires that we hold more than one truth at once without flattening either one.

This is where the interfaith dimension of the project matters. The four faiths in our book—Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the Bahá’í Faith—are not there as decorative symbols of pluralism. They are there because each contains a moral vocabulary that can challenge dehumanization. Judaism offers the uncompromising sanctity of life. Islam insists on mercy joined to justice. Christianity calls believers to remain at the foot of suffering rather than turn away. The Bahá’í teachings speak of humanity as one family and make prejudice a betrayal of spiritual truth. None of these traditions, taken seriously, permits us to grow comfortable with mass civilian suffering.

Some weeks this column will begin with a story from Gaza as I knew it. Some weeks it will begin with one of Mohammed’s reflections or poems. Some weeks it will respond directly to current events: the condition of children in Gaza, the future of the West Bank, the rhetoric of Israeli elections, the narrowing space for dissent, the international community’s failures, or the dangerous aftershocks of regional war. But every column will be guided by the same conviction: silence is not harmless. Distance is not innocence. Witness is not performative if it is rooted in relationships, memory, humility, and responsibility.

There is also a practical reason for this new beginning. For years I have sent out newsletters very irregularly to a readership that has been mostly patient and generous. I am grateful for that. But I believe the material now calls for a more coherent form. A weekly Substack column can bring together readers from the book, humanitarian colleagues, faith communities, conflict-resolution circles, and those simply looking for a more serious conversation than what social media permits. I hope it can become a place not only to speak, but to listen.

So this is the beginning. Not a rebrand for its own sake, and not merely a publishing experiment. It is a way of saying that the conversation in our book must not end with the book. It is a way of refusing disappearance—of people, of memory, of conscience. And it is an invitation to readers: enter the conversation, not as spectators to someone else’s tragedy, but as human beings willing to ask what justice, mercy, and witness require of us now.

If this column succeeds, it will not be because it offers perfect answers. It will be because it helps us resist the worst temptation of this era: to let catastrophe become ordinary, and to let ordinary people vanish inside it.

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