A Powerful Witness Through Unlikely Friendship
A Feature Review of
The Future is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land
Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon
Hardcover: Crown, 2026
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]
Reviewed by John W. Morehead
There are few places in the world where hope seems more fragile than the Holy Land. The attacks of October 7, 2023, the ensuing war in Gaza, the deepening mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians, and the competing narratives surrounding justice and security have convinced many that reconciliation is no longer realistic. Against this backdrop, The Future Is Peace offers a remarkably hopeful counterpoint—not because its authors deny the depth of the conflict, but because they have experienced its tragedies firsthand.
Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian peacebuilder whose brother was killed during the First Intifada, and Maoz Inon, an Israeli entrepreneur whose parents were murdered in the Hamas attacks of October 7, are unlikely companions. They first met nearly a decade ago over tea in Jerusalem through their mutual work in travel and tourism, believing that travel could become a bridge across social divides. Their professional acquaintance deepened after October 7, when Aziz reached out to Maoz with a simple message of condolence. That gesture of compassion led to a three-day meeting in Geneva where the two men shared their grief, wrestled honestly with their pain, and consciously chose reconciliation over revenge. This book is the story of that friendship and an invitation for readers to imagine a different future.
Travel functions as both the literal and the literary framework of the book. The authors journey together through Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Nazareth, and Galilee, weaving together the histories, memories, and competing narratives that make each place simultaneously beautiful and contested. Yet the geographical journey mirrors a deeper pilgrimage. As they describe it, this is a story of “mutual loss and pain, along with the shared vision of peace” (2). Their travels embody a conviction that “nothing is more powerful or transformative than the experience of stepping out of one’s comfort zone to meet the ‘other’ and truly listening to their story” (3). This commitment to what they call a “dual-narrative approach” becomes the organizing principle of the book.
The authors never underestimate the forces working against such encounters. They write that “we are divided by fear and anger, by extremism and tribalism” (2), realities that have been reinforced across generations. They observe that peace becomes elusive “when each side believes that the other is a threat to its existence” (2). These are not merely political disagreements but existential fears. Throughout the book they return repeatedly to the corrosive effects of mistrust and to the conviction that genuine peace begins with recovering the capacity to encounter one another as human beings rather than enemies.
Readers familiar with the work of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy (FRD) will recognize significant points of convergence. For more than two decades FRD has argued that lasting peace does not require the elimination of deep differences but the cultivation of trust amid them. Likewise, Aziz and Maoz do not imagine a future without disagreement. Instead, they envision relationships capable of bearing disagreement without collapsing into violence. Their perspective is captured well through their quotation of Pope Francis: “What would a society, a family, or a group of friends be like without tension or conflict? Do you know what it would be? It would be a cemetery: Because only in dead things are there no tensions and no conflicts. When there is life, there is tension, and there is conflict.” It is a striking reminder that peace should not be confused with the absence of tension. Rather, the challenge is learning to inhabit tension without allowing it to become destructive.
The authors are equally honest about the social costs of pursuing this path. Peacebuilders often become objects of suspicion within their own communities, viewed as naïve at best and traitorous at worst. They describe how those who seek reconciliation are frequently accused of undermining their own people or legitimizing the enemy (77). Their concept of “co-resistance,” another element that overlaps with FRD’s approach, captures this delicate balancing act: resisting injustice together without abandoning one’s own community or convictions. This is one of the book’s strongest contributions. Rather than advocating a shallow neutrality, Aziz and Maoz demonstrate that authentic peacemaking often demands greater courage than continued hostility.
What makes the book compelling is precisely what it does not attempt to be. It is not a history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor a policy proposal for resolving it. Aziz and Maoz are not writing as historians, political scientists, military strategists, or scholars of religion. They write as two people whose lives have been shattered by violence and who have become convinced that cycles of revenge cannot secure a future for either of their peoples. Their emphasis therefore falls on grief, trauma, humanization, forgiveness, grassroots initiatives, and the transformative potential of relationships. Their argument is, in essence, that ordinary people must begin creating the relationships that politics has repeatedly failed to produce.
Yet this admirable focus also points toward the book’s principal limitation. One can hardly ask how Israelis and Palestinians might become trustworthy neighbors without eventually confronting a more difficult question: what competing visions of political, religious, and moral order are shaping this conflict? The Future Is Peace clearly acknowledges the brutality of Hamas and the personal devastation its violence has inflicted, particularly through Maoz’s own story. It also offers some critique of broader political leadership on both sides. But it devotes comparatively little sustained attention to Hamas as a theopolitical movement or other challenges such as Israeli Zionist movements, Palestinian Islamist currents beyond Hamas, secular nationalist traditions, and Christian theological interpretations that shape attitudes toward the conflict.
This observation is not a criticism of what the authors set out to accomplish. Their project is intentionally moral and relational rather than ideological. They are addressing a missing dimension of peacebuilding by insisting that relationships matter as much as political agreements. They would likely argue, with considerable justification, that governments, military strategies, and ideological debates have dominated the conversation for decades while relationships have continued to deteriorate. Their response is to begin where trust has collapsed most profoundly: between ordinary people.
Even so, the reverse observation also deserves consideration. Durable peace requires more than transformed relationships. It also requires sustained engagement with the rival theological, political, and historical visions that shape those relationships. Hamas represents more than a terrorist organization; it embodies a comprehensive vision of political and religious legitimacy that cannot simply be dissolved through empathy or friendship. Likewise, elements within Israeli Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, secular political ideologies, and even Christian theological interpretations of the land deserve careful examination as competing visions of justice, sovereignty, and the common good. If these deeper commitments remain unaddressed, peace risks becoming primarily psychological rather than also ideological.
This challenge extends well beyond Israel and Palestine. Many contemporary reconciliation efforts understandably prioritize relationship-building while avoiding deep theological or philosophical contestation for fear that it will fracture fragile trust. Yet in conflicts rooted in ultimate commitments—about God, nation, land, identity, and justice—those commitments cannot remain permanently bracketed. The task is not simply learning to understand one another but learning how to contest profoundly incompatible convictions without resorting to domination or violence.
In this respect, The Future Is Peace raises an important question that it does not fully answer, though perhaps no single book could. How do societies sustain trust when the differences at stake cannot be reconciled? Aziz and Maoz convincingly show that friendship across enemy lines is possible and that reconciliation begins with courageous acts of compassion. They demonstrate that fear and dehumanization need not determine the future. But lasting peace will require not only transformed relationships but also trustworthy ways of engaging rival visions of justice, security, sovereignty, and sacred obligation.
That observation should not diminish the achievement of this remarkable book. Rather, it highlights its greatest contribution. Aziz and Maoz remind readers that no political settlement can endure without people willing to risk trust across deep divides. At a time when public discourse increasingly assumes that those on the other side are existential threats, their friendship offers a powerful witness that another way is possible. If The Future Is Peace leaves readers asking how such trust might also be sustained amid irreconcilable differences, then perhaps it has accomplished something even more valuable: it has moved the conversation from whether peace is possible to what kind of peace will ultimately endure.
John W. Morehead
John W. Morehead is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, and the Director of its Evangelical Chapter (Multifaith Matters). He is the co-editor and contributor to A Charitable Orthopathy: Christian Perspectives on Emotions in Multifaith Engagement (Wipf & Stock, 2020). You may contact him at johnwmorehead [ at ] msn.com .
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
