This coming weekend is Labor Day Weekend in the United States, and many readers have noted that on long weekends, it’s hard to keep up (and they don’t like falling behind 🙂). So from this Friday through next Monday, we’ll be on a brief hiatus for Labor Day, and will resume on Tuesday.
I introduce today’s podcast conversation with a family story that goes back some 27 years. I share the story with sadness, because it’s a reminder of how much we’ve lost.
Our family (my wife, myself and three kids) arrived in Israel—for what we thought would be a sabbatical year, but which ended up being aliyah—in the summer of 1998. Shortly thereafter, my wife and I had each found a shul that we liked. We’d found different shuls, but we were both quite content.
One Shabbat morning fairly early on in our stay, I got home from shul and told my wife, “The minyan is hosting some people from Gaza who’re going to come and spend a Shabbat with the community. They needed volunteers to host a family, so I volunteered us.”
My wife looked at me, somewhat stupefied, and asked, “For which meal?”
“Not for a meal,” I responded. “They’re going to stay with us.”
That, let us just say, is one of those marital moments we both remember precisely the same way.
I will tone this down a bit for those with tender souls, but here’s essentially what she said, in that very quiet, subdued voice that all spouses have that is infinitely worse than yelling. “There’s no f*ing way we’re doing that,” she said. “We’re renting this apartment, we barely know the neighbors; we have no right to invite a Gazan family to stay over in this building when we ourselves are essentially guests. Get us off the list.”
“Well, that’s going to be very awkward,” I protested, both because it was going to be awkward, and because I actually thought it would make for a fascinating weekend.
“You’ll get over it.”
Well, God works in wondrous ways, and a day later, before I’d summoned up the courage to get us un-volunteered, we got an email from the minyan saying that the weekend with our Gazan guests had been cancelled. This was 1998, long before Hamas took over, but still … the Gazans who had planned to participate had been told they’d be executed if they went to meet with Jews.
So, thanks to Hamas (or whoever), I didn’t have to un-volunteer us.
All families have their iconic stories, and this is one of ours. “Remember that time when we first got here, and Abba was convinced there would be peace and he invited a Gazan family to stay with us?” (at which point everyone bursts out laughing about Abba-the-idiot). I mention that story here because I thought about it for the first time in a long time when today’s guest first told me about his recently published book, about the possibility of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
This time, though, the memory of that story didn’t make me laugh—it made me terribly sad. For now, even if it were possible, who would want a Gazan family to stay with them? Who has it in us to even talk to any of them? I say that not with pride or anger, but with shame. But still, who in their right mind thinks that anything better than low-scale-war-for-eternity is even remotely possible? Who reads books about peace? And who writes them?
It turns out that very thoughtful people write books about the possibility of peace, even the need for peace, even today. And, it struck me, it is precisely the fact that peace now seems like such a fairy tale, so utterly unrealistic, that it’s so far removed from any conversations that any of us ever have, that we owe it to ourselves and to this land to hear those who have managed to hold on to hope much better than many of us have.
My conversation with Ittay Flescher kept me thinking for quite some time after we were done. I hope that it might do the same for some of our listeners, too.
Ittay Flescher is the Education Director at Kids4Peace Jerusalem, an interfaith movement for Israelis and Palestinians and he is also the Jerusalem Correspondent for The Jewish Independent from Australia. In 2025, he published his first book with HarperCollins titled ‘The Holy and the Broken: A cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared.’
As an insightful analyst of Israeli politics, he has been published or featured on podcasts with Haaretz, The Age, ABC Religion and Ethics, Jerusalem Post, Fathom and many other publications and newspapers. Before moving to Jerusalem in 2018, he was a high school educator in Melbourne for 15 years, teaching Australian History, Jewish Studies and Religion and Society.
Married with two children, he loves his family, religion, country, and all the people around him deeply, especially when they inspire and challenge him to reflect on his actions and be a better human.
The Holy and the Broken is available for purchase on Amazon and in hundreds of bookshops worldwide. Ittay Flescher will be in Johannesburg for a book launch on August 14. For details of his upcoming US tour and more information for action readers of the book can take to build peace, visit ittay.au
The link above will take you to a brief excerpt of our conversation; the full conversation, along with a transcript for those who prefer to read, is being made available to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
