Is Peace in the Middle East Closer Than We Think? (A Palestinian & An Israeli's View)

**Alastair Campbell** (0:01)
If ever there was a situation that called For The Rest Is Politics' motto of Disagree Agreeably, it is surely the Middle East. Maoz Inon is Israeli, Aziz Abu Sarah is Palestinian. They come from two sides of one of the bloodiest and seemingly most intractable issues of our time. Maoz lost his parents in the massacre of October 7, 2023 Aziz lost his brother after years of torture in Israeli jails.
If ever two men had caused to have their hearts filled with hatred for the other side, it's these two. But instead, they have come together in their pain and their grief, and they now work together for peace and reconciliation. They have built a brotherhood across the divide and are urging their peoples and their leaders to do the same.

**Rory Stewart** (0:58)
Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:01)
And with me, Alastair Campbell. I'm absolutely delighted to have an Israeli and a Palestinian who have both suffered terrible loss as a cause of this horrible conflict that's gone on for so long, but now work together and have written this wonderful book called The Future Is Peace. I want to start, if I may, guys, right at the end of your book, where you write this, some of this book, you write just Aziz and sometimes it's just Maoz, but occasionally you come and you write together. The epilogue of this book starts as follows.
Our journey comes to an end many years into the future. We are older and greyer, but our people have finally achieved the lasting peace. Instead of interminable warfare, we now live in a land of freedom and equality. There is no grasping for more as everyone has enough. There is no yearning for home for all the exiles have returned. There are no fences, no watchtowers, no checkpoints.
Everyone has the same rights, the same privileges. The battlegrounds are reverted to fields and pastures. Instead of raising memorials and monuments to the dead, we have gardens and parks and playgrounds for the living. A generation of Palestinian and Israeli children have grown up, never having known the misery of war or hunger or insecurity.
And it's incredibly moving, but it feels just so distant. It feels almost like after the stories that you've told, it feels like a kind of fantasy. And I just wonder, given what you've both been through, how do you keep that vision and that sense of hope in your hearts?

**Aziz Abu Sarah** (2:41)
Yeah, I wanted to just start saying first, thank you so much for having us.
And if you don't know where you're going, you can never get there. If you can't imagine what the future looks like, how can you bring it into existence? So what Maoz and I wanted to do in The Future Is Peace and what we are doing every day in our life is not let today dictate what the future can look like. And imagine what looks to so many people impossible. Imagine it, tell it to people, give people the ability to dream in our communities, in our world, that the future is much, much better than what today is. I'm speaking to two people who lived in the United Kingdom. And both of you worked in Northern Ireland. And you know that before the agreement in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday, also people didn't know what the future could look like. Also people could have in 1990, I bet you, people would have been in the same place Maoz and I are today, looking at the future and saying, we just can't imagine it. It's just impossible. So much death is around us. So this is what inspires us, knowing that every conflict, every war, every atrocity, everything eventually comes to an end, and there's always a better path than the one we are on.

**Maoz Inon** (4:02)
Yes, totally. First, it's really great to be with you, Rory and Alastair. We've been waiting for it for a long, long time.
I have no words to share my excitement.
What I learned and we learned together in the last three weeks been in walking together and formed and forge our brotherhood is that the most important field for humanity is the field of dreams. Like it says in the Bible, where there is no vision, people perish. So this is exactly why we titled the book The Future is Peace with a bold and courageous and brave title. And this is why we are telling everyone, if it's Israelis, Palestinians, policymakers and people in the streets and of course, journalists and media, the first step in reaching the end of the wars and lasting peace, the first step is to be courageous, brave enough to dream about it. And this is exactly the work we are doing.