Touched by Grace

I had blogged before about Mosab Hassan Yousef right after his interview with CNN when his book, Son of Hamas, first came out. I was struck by what he said: that the only way to peace in the Middle East is to follow the Christian teaching, “love your enemies.” Having lived with terrorists as a Hamas insider and later as an informant for Israel’s intelligence agency, he has been part of a Middle East conflict that has seemed to elude any attempt at peaceful resolutions.

So I read his book, curious about what he has to say. Who could be a better source of insight about all that is wrong in the Middle East than Mosab himself who has lived his life through it all! What he offers, as I read through, is not a political treatise for conflict-resolution. Nor is it a guideline for political settlements that is usually invoked at peace negotiations. His is simply a witnessing to a moral truth, his moment of grace: to love your enemies is to be free, and goes about proving it. Even Christians have difficulty understanding this paradox: it is in overcoming one’s hatred and pride that one becomes free.

As a student of politics, I, of course, would like that this abstract, moral truth be translated into concrete policy prescriptions, into some kind of a set of guidelines that takes into account hard facts on the ground. I think, though, that Mosab is telling us that all these will come about only after we recognize and embrace this moral truth. If Jews and Palestinians will sit down together, with each other’s best interest at heart, he asks, can’t peace be far behind?

The Bible study Mosab attended in West Jerusalem included a Jewish man named Amnon who later on was imprisoned during the entire time that Mosab himself was in prison for refusing to serve in the Israeli military. Mosab has this to say:

He was there because he refused to work with the Israelis; I was there because I had agreed to work with them. I was trying to protect the Jews; he was trying to protect Palestinians.

I didn’t believe that everybody in Israel and the occupied territories needed to become a Christian in order to end the bloodshed. But I thought that if we just had a thousand Amnons on one side and a thousand Mosabs on the other, it could make a big difference. And if we had more . . . who knows?