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October 7: a Palestinian-Israeli memoir seeks to break the cycle of violence
visibility comment0 event October 6, 2026 timer 08:42
The Future is Peace, by Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, offers a rare example of “resolution media”.
Satellite images show the devastation of the densely populated coastal region of the Gaza Strip. Aerial Viewer/ShutterstockSince the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed unimaginable, almost constant violence in Gaza and the West Bank. But people’s understanding of these events is not universal – each person is exposed to a particular set of narratives surrounding history, victimhood and trauma.
The vast majority of news reports, social media posts, videos, and books that have covered the events since October 7, 2023 can be defined as what I call “conflict media”, which reproduces the divisions of the conflict it describes, perpetuating it to the point where the media itself becomes a weapon in an information war.
As a scholar of the Middle East, I have rarely – though not never – encountered conflict media’s opposite, which I call “resolution media”.
The most famous works of resolution media have emerged after a conflict ends, and highlight the universal suffering of war. Wilfred Owen’s first world war poem Dulce et Decorum Est, for instance, is still widely quoted to expose “the old Lie” that it is “sweet and fitting” to die for one’s country.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has produced its own resolution media. In 2002, during the Second Intifada, Palestinian and Israeli educators Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On published school booklets that printed their peoples’ histories on facing pages, with blank space between them for students’ reflections. More recently, the 2025 Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land made history by winning an Oscar.
The 2026 book The Future Is Peace – by Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian, and Maoz Inon, an Israeli – offers another striking, pertinent example of resolution media.
As with other work in this category, the authors’ backgrounds are not just a detail. Both have lost family members to violence, but rather than using those losses to justify vengeance, they tell two stories simultaneously, without requiring one to erase the other.
Conflict and resolution
The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, one of the founders of peace and conflict studies, developed a distinction between “war journalism” and “peace journalism” in the 1970s, lamenting that the latter was all but non-existent. Decades later, this is still the case.
The media environment has changed since Galtung’s time. Journalism is now part of a much larger information ecosystem that includes social media, podcasts, documentaries, books and other forms of storytelling.
In today’s world, Galtung’s distinction can thus be broadened into “conflict media” and “resolution media”. We can understand the difference through six contrasts:
Conflict media focuses on violence involving two sides, each with its own overriding objective: winning. Resolution media asks what caused the conflict and what different actors want.
Conflict media divides the world into “us” and “them.” Resolution media allows multiple parties to speak.
Conflict media identifies “them” as the problem. Resolution media identifies the conflict itself as the problem.
Conflict media dehumanises adversaries. Resolution media humanises all parties.
Conflict media focuses on combat. Resolution media focuses on peace efforts.
Conflict media privileges “our” suffering, while overlooking, accepting or even celebrating “their” suffering. Resolution media asks its audience to recognise all suffering, particularly that of children, women and other vulnerable people.
Resolution media in action
The Future Is Peace crosses these boundaries.
Abu Sarah’s older brother died of injuries he received in an Israeli prison. Inon’s parents were killed in the Hamas attack on October 7. In August 2024, ten months into what they call “the deadliest year in close to a century of bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians”, the two set out on an eight-day journey across the land that, in their words, “binds and divides our people”.
Their book is a record of that journey, and of their conscious choice to promote resolution over conflict. We can analyse their decisions through the six contrasts established above.
The first contrast is the book’s focus on the causes of the violence rather than the violence itself. Inon refuses the easy conclusion that Palestinians alone killed his parents. The Israeli government and Hamas, he writes, “were two sides of the same coin. Both were accountable for the deaths of my parents.” No soldiers protected his parents’ home that morning, he argues, “because the government was more focused on providing security to Israeli settlements in the West Bank”. Blaming the enemy is easy. Looking inward at one’s own leaders is much harder.
The second is uplifting all voices instead of an “us vs them” narrative. The authors built their travel company on a “dual narrative” approach, in which an Israeli and a Palestinian guide interpret the same site, such as the town of Jaffa, side by side using Greek mythology. This differs from most tours which, like most news reports, offer a single narrator with a single interpretation.
The third is their focus on the war itself as the problem, as opposed to an adversary. Within days of his parents’ deaths in 2023, Inon publicly stated: “Me and my family, we seek no revenge […] We just seek peace.”
Fourth, they humanise all parties. The cacti Palestinian farmers once planted are often all that remain of villages destroyed in 1948. Inon’s grandmother fled antisemitism in Bessarabia (a region spanning present-day Moldova and Ukraine) in the 1930s, and his siblings planted an olive tree where they scattered their parents’ ashes after their deaths on October 7, 2023. The authors write, “If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.”
Fifth, they focus on peace efforts over combat. The authors describe peacebuilders like themselves as people “not invited to sit at negotiation tables”. This book is citizen diplomacy in print. It also shows how travel can be a tool of conflict management – seeing the other side in its own environment can change minds, even when a final resolution seems out of reach.
Lastly, they highlight all suffering equally. In one passage, the authors retell the Greek myth of Perseus and Medusa, set on a rock off the shore of Jaffa. The myth is, in essence, ancient conflict media, where the brave hero slays a cruel, heartless monster.
Abu Sarah and Inon’s version subverts this. To them, Medusa is “a blameless victim of violence and the hero is a bully with blood on his hands.” They write, “This is the cycle of trauma and vengeance we are living in now. It’s time we stop sacrificing our loved ones for narratives, false or true.”
That statement captures the difference between these two kinds of media. Conflict media feeds the cycle, but resolution media invites readers to step outside it. The Future Is Peace stands out as a rare work of true, focused resolution, which highlights the shared humanity at the heart of an intractable conflict.
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Ibrahim Al-Marashi no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.
Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News
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