Description
A book written from inside a war has to decide what kind of object it wants to be: a record, an argument, or a consolation. The Future Is Peace declines to choose, and that refusal is both its nerve and its strain.
Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian whose older brother died of injuries inflicted in an Israeli prison, and Maoz Inon, an Israeli whose parents were killed on October 7, build their book as an eight-day journey across the land they share, one chapter per place, the narration handed back and forth between them. Memoir, travelogue, and peace platform run together in a single channel. The premise underneath all three is that travel does the work negotiation has failed to do: that you cannot easily hate a person whose checkpoint you have stood in, whose grandmother’s grave you have set a stone on. Around this, the authors assemble a political vision built as a sequence rather than a fixed settlement: dream, amplify, build legitimacy, shift policy, create the will to choose peace.
Aziz, eighteen, rides a bus deeper into West Jerusalem than he has ever gone, to visit Yad Vashem, braced to feel nothing, and walks out, by his own account, changed. Years later, his father stands up at a meeting of bereaved families and asks, in front of a room of Israelis, whether the Holocaust really happened. Instead of the rupture you brace for, a survivor invites him to the museum, and seventy other Palestinians raise their hands to come along. That sequence is the strongest thing in the book, and it works because it is a scene. Nothing in the book’s more declarative passages earns its hope the way that afternoon does.
What the book asserts, by contrast, it asserts too hard. Its load-bearing line is that “the future of humanity is peace; the only uncertainty is how many more innocent people will suffer before we get there.” This is offered as knowledge, on the evidence of South Africa, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland. But those cases support possible, not inevitable, and the quiet slide between the two words is where the argument loosens. The authors elsewhere say only that peace is possible, a claim the book does substantiate. The inevitability is ornament, and it is the kind that picks its examples: the conflicts that reconciled, never the ones that hardened in place.
There is a deeper tension, and to their credit, the authors seed it themselves without quite naming it. They insist they are not exceptional, that the people who forgave in Rwanda “were ordinary people, just like us.” Yet the book’s whole emotional charge depends on how rare these two men are. Aziz notes that he was among a small minority of Palestinians who condemned the October 7 attacks in those first days; Maoz, one of a handful of Jewish Israelis who refused the language of vengeance while sitting shiva for his parents. And the most piercing voices in these pages are precisely the ones who cannot do what the authors did. Batya, who lost a daughter and two grandsons, tells them flatly that “something in me has broken.” Abed, in Jaffa, says he hopes they are right and he is wrong. The book loves these people, quotes them exactly, and walks on. It never reckons with them. A more searching book would have stayed inside Batya’s sentence, would have asked what a peace movement owes the people whose capacity for it has already been destroyed. That this goes unaddressed is my real quarrel with the book: it treats reconciliation as a choice equally open to everyone, while its own reporting shows that it is not.
The water figures alone would carry the point on asymmetry: settlers using triple the daily water of their Palestinian neighbors, a near-total conviction rate in military courts, demolition orders, a settler population that doubles every thirty years. The book is unflinching here, and Aziz even names the imbalance inside the peace movement itself, Israeli partners holding the budgets, foreign donors preferring Israeli-led organizations. I have a drawer somewhere with the key to an apartment I left years ago; it opens nothing, and I have never managed to throw it out, which is the smallest possible end of what the book means when it lingers on Palestinian families holding the keys to demolished houses. But feeling the ache is not the same as resolving the politics, and the prescriptive language keeps drifting back toward a both-sides voluntarism, “peace is a choice,” that the analysis has already complicated. Choosing peace is not the same act from each side, and the authors know this better than their slogans do.
The book ends with an imagined future in which the dead step off a train: Tayseer, the Inon parents, embracing the brother and sons who outlived them. It is the riskiest page here, and how a reader receives it will largely decide how they receive the whole. Taken uncharitably, it swaps a consoling fantasy for the questions left open three chapters earlier. Taken as the authors intend, and they quote Kafka, that believing in what does not yet exist is how it comes to exist, it is honest about being a vision and not a forecast. Both readings sit together and refuse to separate. What stays, at the end, is not the train and not the five-step plan, but Batya at the foot of the monument, saying something in her had broken, and two men who had to keep walking because the book they were writing could not afford to stop there with her.
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