Two men trying to lead the Middle East to peace

The hardest thing is not listening to their stories, which are harrowing. Maoz Inon, a 50-year-old Israeli, speaks first. His farmer parents Bilha and Yakovi burned to death in their home in the village of Netiv HaAsara on the northern border of the Gaza Strip. They were two of 20 residents of Netiv HaAsara murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Aziz Abu Sarah, a 45-year-old Palestinian, follows. During the first Intifada, when Aziz was 10, his elder brother Tayseer was arrested by the Israeli Defence Force for throwing stones. He was held in an Israeli prison for a year and died from internal injuries inflicted during torture in custody.

“Hope is an action. It’s not something you find, something you can lose.”

Both men tell their stories—as they have done hundreds of times since the October 7 massacre, including to the Pope and on a TED Talk now watched by millions—with a calm dignity and the bond of shared suffering.

The hardest part is not hearing their words. The hardest part is silencing your inner voice as it insists, even as they speak, that their call for resistance—not against those who threaten their communities, but against the victims’ instinct for vengeance—is futile. That two men on bar stools in a north London office, addressing an audience of UK creatives, cannot possibly hope to halt the infinite conveyor belt of catastrophe that is the Middle East. That to believe otherwise is… irrational.

And yet, history is littered with proof to the contrary.

Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama, and ignited a movement that dismantled generations of institutional racism. Mahatma Gandhi led the Salt March in 1930, triggering a revolution that ended British colonial rule in India. A handful of women in Hollywood spoke out against their abuser, and their testimonies blossomed into the global #MeToo movement.

Inon and Abu Sarah’s simple act—sitting together, advocating for dialogue, rejecting the cycles of violence—is its own form of radicalism.

Both men are angry, but anger can go one of two ways, they say. “It’s like nuclear power. It can cause destruction, or it can create light.”

They do not only challenge the extremists in power, Hamas and Netanyahu. They challenge the ultra-partisans on social media whose cries of genocide and war crimes fuel their YouTube revenue more than any solution. They challenge a news media inclined to sidestep the topic because this particular topic is deemed intractable and bad for business. And they challenge all of us who consider peace hopeless.

“Hope is an action. It’s not something you find, something you can lose. It’s something you make,” Inon says, echoing the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: In order to live, we must invent hope by force.

Their appeal is for a concerted grassroots refusal to accept the endless cycle of violence, even if – especially if – it seems justified and inevitable.

Rosa Parks sat down. Gandhi walked. Women spoke out.

In a small office in north London—named, appropriately enough, Phoenix Court—an Israeli and a Palestinian ask: How will anything ever rise from the ashes of Gaza, if not through the forceful action of hope?