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The Trump administration has a top-down development plan for Gaza. We'll hear now from an Israeli and a Palestinian who are trying to build peace from the ground up within five years. That's how long it took Egypt and Israel to make peace after their war in 1973. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
AZIZ ABU SARAH: We need to make peace.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Inshallah.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: At an art school in Jaffa, a mixed neighborhood of Jews and Arabs, Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah are wrapping up their latest meeting with fellow activists.
ABU SARAH: Would you like some tea?
KELEMEN: We sit down for tea, which Inon says is how the men first met a decade ago in Jerusalem.
MAOZ INON: We had tea together one afternoon. And basically, since then, we were very good friends, but only on Facebook.
KELEMEN: October 7, 2023, changed everything. Inon's parents were killed in the Hamas-led attack that traumatized Israelis. Inon says Abu Sarah reached out to him.
INON: It's like a hand reaching out that came and saved me from falling down into the trauma, into the pain, drowning in this ocean of sorrow and agony.
KELEMEN: And it was then that Inon says he decided to focus less on his travel business and become a full-time activist to promote peace and coexistence with Palestinians.
INON: I lost my parents on October 7, but I won a brother. I won Aziz as a brother. And for me, it's not a partnership, it's not a friendship, it's a brotherhood.
KELEMEN: Aziz Abu Sarah had his own trauma. Born and raised in Jerusalem in a conservative Muslim family, his older brother, Tayseer, was arrested and beaten by Israeli troops during the first intifada and died of his injuries. Aziz Abu Sarah was only 10 at the time but says, as he grew up, he decided not to seek revenge but to work for peace. He started a socially conscious travel agency, MEJDI Tours.
ABU SARAH: Maoz and I have a very parallel life in some ways. We both worked in the same thing at the same time, just separately. And now our path has merged together during the last two years, with the goal of how are we going to make a peace agreement signed in the next five years?
KELEMEN: They know they're up against hardened positions on both sides. Israelis are still in trauma from the October 7 attack, and Palestinians are reeling from the devastating war in Gaza that followed. But Abu Sarah says in the past year, he saw hundreds of Israelis protecting Palestinians from Jewish settler violence during the olive harvest season in the West Bank, and from young right-wing Jews yelling death to Arabs on Jerusalem Day, a commemoration of Israel's 1967 takeover of East Jerusalem.
ABU SARAH: For my family, for my friends, for people in Jerusalem, suddenly, they don't just see there's a group of Jewish guys going through - young guys, radical, screaming death to Arabs. They also see the Jewish guy who's saying, no, you're not going to be able to break through to this shop.
KELEMEN: Abu Sarah says he's also noticing younger Palestinians and more women joining peace protests.
ABU SARAH: That gives me hope because that's where we're going to get the future leaders, is those younger people realizing finally that we can't wait until a politician signs the agreement. We're going to make them, and if they don't, we're going to replace them.
KELEMEN: Maoz Inon says the region can't wait for a new generation or for more people to be killed.
INON: It's too late for Tayseer, his brother. It's too late for my parents. But it's not too late for the other 14 million Israelis and Palestinians that are living in this region. We are doing everything we can to save as many lives as possible.
KELEMEN: They're not advocating for any particular diplomatic outcome but rather building up momentum for peace. The two are writing a book together and going on speaking tours. They even went to Italy this month to carry the Olympic torch ahead of the Winter Games.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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