Maoz Inon: ‘Hamas killed my parents. I respond by working for peace'

On the first anniversary of the massacre in his kibbutz in Neti HaAsara, the testimony of an Israeli businessman among the protagonists of the movement calling for the relaunch of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. ‘We can forgive each other for what we did in the past and even for what is happening today, but we will not be able to forgive each other if we do not work to build a future together’.

On the anniversary of the Hamas massacres that opened the dramatic war that seems to be spreading more and more in the Middle East, today the Churches around the world are living the day of prayer and fasting invoked by Pope Francis, making their own an invitation that came from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. We associate ourselves with this commitment by relaunching a significant testimony: that of Maoz Inon, an Israeli who paid for the madness of the massacres of 7 October 2023 on his own skin; but chose not to take the path of revenge as a response.

In May, Maoz - together with his Palestinian friend Aziz Abu Sarah, whose loved ones have also been affected by this long conflict - met Pope Francis in Verona, uniting in a single embrace whose image has gone around the world. We publish below large excerpts of his story, which together with others is contained in the book ‘Gli irriducibili della pace’, just published by Edizioni Terra Santa, in which the Italian journalist Chiara Zappa presents ‘the stories of those who do not give up on the war in Israel and Palestine’.

‘That morning, while I was still in bed, I checked the messages on my mobile phone. In the family chat, Dad had written that the alarm siren had sounded in their farming community of Netiv HaAsara and that he and Mum had taken refuge in the safe room. I didn't worry too much because, strange as it may seem, it is quite normal there'. Maoz Inon knows this well: as a young boy, he too lived in that moshav in the north-east of the Negev, the closest Israeli village to the Gaza Strip, barely a hundred metres from the Palestinian town of Beit Lahiya. It was quiet then, but in the past two decades rocket attacks from beyond the massive concrete wall separating the two sides have been frequent.

‘I went downstairs to make coffee,’ Maoz recalls, ‘and meanwhile I turned on the TV and heard about the Hamas invasion of several Israeli communities on the border. I called dad - it was about 7.30 - and he told me that they could hear sirens and gunshots from the shelter. I told him to be quiet, to say goodbye to Mum and that I would talk to you soon. We hung up. Soon after, checking updates on a Palestinian Instagram page, I saw the fences around Gaza being pulled down by militia trucks and recognised some places I knew very well. So, I phoned Dad again, but this time there was no answer. At five o'clock in the afternoon, my brother-in-law finally managed to talk to the moshav‘s security officer: my parents’ house had been reduced to ashes by a rocket, a close shot, and two charred corpses had been found inside.

Twenty people, out of 900 residents, were killed on Saturday 7 October 2023 in Netiv HaAsara. Some Hamas militiamen paraglided across the separation wall on which, on the Israeli side, a collective mosaic entitled ‘Path to Peace’ had been set up. Among the dead were Yakovi and Bilha Inon, 78 and 76 years old respectively. ‘The fire made my mother's body impossible to officially identify,’ Maoz manages to say. ‘That day I lost so many of my childhood friends, their parents, their children... I felt myself sinking in an ocean of suffering and pain. I was broken.’

Maoz Inon, 49 years old with light eyes and a hint of a grey beard, now lives with his wife and their three children - two boys and a girl - in Binyamina, south of Haifa, but was born and raised on Kibbutz Nir Am, near Sderot, before moving to Netiv HaAsara when he was 14. At the age of eighteen, the recruitment postcard for military service arrived. ‘I had to leave for three years, the hardest time of my life. I came out very tried. In the meantime, however, the young man had met the girl who would later become his wife. ‘She was a ray of sunshine in that dark time. With her, immediately after my discharge, I went on a backpacking trip around the world. For a year we travelled between New Zealand, Australia and Nepal. On our return, we settled in Tel Aviv and after a few years decided to start a family. Before that, however, we wanted to take another trip, this time to get to know our homeland better'. The couple opted for the Israel National Trail, a forty-day trek that connects the country from the north, near Lebanon, to the Red Sea.

‘For the first time, we really realised the enormous historical and faith heritage preserved by this land. We passed through Jewish and Arab communities, towns and villages, and began to dream of a network of hostels along this route to make the Holy Land more accessible to young hikers. But when we were in our thirties, we realised that we did not have a single Palestinian friend and knew almost nothing about the culture of our neighbours... So we said to ourselves: let us open a hostel in a Palestinian community, and break down the wall of ignorance and fear that, just like physical walls, surrounds us. Let us build a bridge through tourism'.

In 2005, for the first time in his life, Maoz set foot in Nazareth, Israel's largest Arab city, where Palestinians make up 70 per cent of the 77,000 inhabitants. In the maze of those narrow streets, the aspiring entrepreneur came across a jewel: a 19th-century mansion with marble floors, tiled ceilings and courtyards surmounted by arches, which was falling into disrepair. It was a thunderbolt. He contacted the owners, the Azar family, and with no little insistence convinced them to embark on a project that seemed crazy: ‘A mixed partnership, to breathe new life into the ancient heart of Nazareth. Despite the suspicions of many Arab neighbours, who did not trust an unknown Jew, a few months later the Fauzi Azar Inn, the first guest house in the old city, opened its doors. And it was a success'.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since that first adventure. With the same mixture of passion and flair for opportunity, in recent years the former young dreamer has created a series of initiatives, all centred on the idea of sustainable tourism - also from an economic point of view - and capable of connecting different communities: from the Jesus Trail, a 65-kilometre walk from Nazareth to Capernaum along the places of Jesus' life, to the chain of “Abraham's Hostels” that, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, from Nazareth to Eilat, offer their guests tours with the possibility of accessing a plural narrative of history and the present. And, among the countless Palestinian partners and collaborators met over two decades, many turned into true friends for Maoz. All of them were present, wracked with grief, at the wake organised for Bilha and Yakovi Inon after the Hamas carnage.

‘My father was an agronomist and was a farmer. A difficult job. I remember that one year his crop was lost to famine, the next year it was destroyed by floods, another time there was a pest invasion. And each time, at the end of these devastating seasons, father would say to me: ‘Maoz, next year I will prepare the soil again and cultivate my field again, because next year it will be better’’.

Bilha, on the other hand, was an artist: ‘In her later years, she had started to paint mandalas. He had produced countless of them, but the only one he had given me bore this inscription: ‘We can realise all our dreams if we have the courage to chase them’. I have pursued and realised many dreams in my life: the next one is peace between Israelis and Palestinians'. A few nights after the death of his parents, in his sleep made restless by grief, Maoz saw himself: ‘I was crying, and a big crowd, the whole of humanity, was crying with me. Tears ran down our cheeks and onto our bodies, wounded by the war. And they healed them. And then they would descend again, down to the ground, taking away the blood and making the earth beautiful and shining again. There, a path opened up: it was the path of peace. I woke up trembling, and realised that that was the path I had to follow, not revenge but reconciliation.

I started meeting people committed to dialogue, Palestinians, Israelis, international activists, and I am learning fundamental things. The first is that hope is an action, it is not something that arises on its own but has to be created. How? This is the second lesson: it has to be done together, with other realities with which to develop a shared vision of the future. Because we can forgive each other for what we have done in the past and even for what is happening in the present, but we will not be able to forgive each other if we do not work to build a future in which we can meet’.