Why this, why now
I was born in the United States to Palestinian parents who carried their homeland in everything they did. When I was six months old, we moved to Bethlehem, the city of the nativity, they say, though for those of us who grew up there, it was simply home. A home under military occupation. A home where the weight of history pressed down on every rooftop, every checkpoint, every ordinary morning.
My grandmother’s name was Huda. In 1948, during the Nakba — the catastrophe — she lost her husband to violence. She and her 7 children were forced to flee their home. Everything she had built was taken from her in the sudden, irreversible way that history takes things when it decides to move. She had every reason to become a vessel of hatred. Every reason, and every right.
She chose something else.
“We will not seek revenge. But we will never be silent in the face of violence and injustice.”
I inherited her fire. And I inherited her paradox. I grew up also as a Christian, deeply in love with Jesus — not in a polite, Sunday-morning way, but with the kind of love that rewires you. And yet something always felt fractured between the radical, breathing, dangerous Jesus of the Gospels and the domesticated version presented to me by the institution of the Church.
So I left Christianity to find Jesus. That is the most honest way I know to say it.
I spent years building peace the way the world builds it — dialogue, negotiations, frameworks, nonviolent activism. I founded the Holy Land Trust in 1998. I believed, with everything I had, in a shared future. As we were just ready to launch HLT, the Oslo process collapsed. What I discovered, as I honestly looked at what had happened, broke my heart in a particular way: many tried the path of peace while still carrying within them the very consciousness that drives conflict, fear, hatred, power, and control. We were rearranging the empire's furniture. The house remained.
The recent and ongoing Genocide in the Gaza Strip and the Ethnic Cleansing campaigns in the West Bank, the increased segregation of Palestinian in the 1948 territories (what has become Israel), kept reinforcing the idea over and over again; absolute fear combined with absolute power, created absolute disaster. Build an ideology and indoctrinate people through it into fear and superiority, and you can commit any atrocity you want.
That realization cracked me open, and while I continued to resist, I began to ask deeper questions. This eventually became a book — The Sacred Awakening: Reclaiming Christ Consciousness — and now, it becomes a space.
I am here because the story I carry is too layered for a speech, too alive for a pamphlet, and too urgent to keep to myself. Because Gaza is burning as I write these words. Because consciousness — not just politics — is the crisis of our time. And because my grandmother’s covenant deserves to be carried forward.
When I imagine the people reading this, I see those who have sensed something missing in their faith, in their activism, in the way the world talks about peace. I see those who suspect that Jesus’ message is far more radical than they have been told. I see people of all nationalities and all faiths (and none), seekers and skeptics.
This is not a newsletter where I will deliver conclusions. It is a space where I will think out loud about consciousness and resistance, about the Sermon on the Mount and what it actually demands of us, about trauma and healing, about Palestine and the world, about what it means to become, truly become, a peacemaker.
You are welcome here regardless of your faith tradition, nationality, or political stance. What I ask is only this: that you come with the willingness to be unsettled. That is where transformation begins.