These words from the Mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, haunt me. My ancestors came to America generations ago, so I cannot imagine what it feels like to be here, to love America, and to pay taxes to kill my own relatives. One Dearborn resident’s family has buried more than eighty relatives in Gaza since October.

Mayor Hammoud feels betrayed by a president he genuinely respected and admired. Biden “calls for our votes once more while at the same time selling the very bombs that Benjamin Netanyahu’s military is dropping on our family and friends.”

Dearborn’s residents rallied to support Ukraine last year, proudly displaying blue-and-yellow flags, but when they fly Palestinian flags now, they receive threats.

Two days after the mayor’s article appeared in the New York Times, Yara M. Asi, assistant professor at the University of Central Florida’s School of Global Health Management and Informatics, wrote about “hope” in Gaza. A physician working there for Doctors Without Borders texted that he is certain he and his associates will die, “Hopefully soon enough to stop the suffering that we are living through every single second.”

Asi notes that our understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder grew out of the experience of Vietnam War veterans. But she wonders what will come of children for whom no “post” exists. Since 1948, trauma has been a way of life for many Palestinians. In a recent survey, one hundred percent of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank showed signs of trauma, the result of “land confiscation, detention, home demolition, loss of loved ones and fear of losing one’s life.”

Unending trauma “changes the personality,” says psychiatrist Samah Jabr of the Palestinian Ministry of Health, “it changes the belief system, and it doesn’t look like PTSD.”

Every day the horrors continue, healing becomes more difficult. We know it will be generational. Thank goodness calls for a cease fire continue, but “what is the good of working to recover from such trauma,” Asi asks, “if people are nearly certain they will experience it again? Everyone above the age of 10 in Gaza already has, several times.”

One example: in 2014 Guardian reporter Peter Beaumont entered a Gaza home that an Israeli tank shell had struck. Sixty people from three families sheltered there. “Salem Antez, 29, approached with a purple plastic bag and opened it, its contents terrible. ‘This is my son,’ he said and nothing else, tears tracking down his face.” Nine years later, Guardian reporter Nesrine Malik reports watching a social media video in which “a man in Gaza is holding two plastic bags that carry the body parts of a child, presumably his.”

While the world’s eyes are on Gaza, life throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem continues in its rhythm of daily humiliations. In a recent interview with Makdisi Street, Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes a recent incident in her neighborhood, the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem. A shopkeeper she knows stopped her recently and needed to talk. He could not bear to tell his family that he was recently accosted by three Israeli settlers as he was opening his shop one morning. As this elderly friend wept, he described how they threw him onto the ground and urinated on his beard.

Where is hope? Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian was recently with children terrified by all the death around them. But she asked a mother to bake for them and a father to tell them stories, and she reminded them that they are alive. “I speak because it’s life, it’s love … there is so much love in Palestine with all the hardships … love is a practice of freedom … I believe in our strength and our power and our togetherness and our hugging and kissing and thinking together.” Love and joy as resistance.

Palestinians also keep hope alive through the arts. As Israel threatens to erase their culture by destroying libraries and killing playwrights, poets, and musicians, many artists resist. They stage plays, recite poetry, and sing. They project defiant joy. Watch three artists speak out in a recent interview with al-Jazeerah English journalist Anelise Borges.

Speaking truth can be a first step toward hope. At Christmas, Pope Francis encouraged resistance to all war: “To say ‘yes’ to the Prince of Peace, then, means saying ‘no’ to war — and doing so with courage — saying no to every war, to the very mindset of war, an aimless voyage, a defeat without victors, an inexcusable folly.” I find so much courage in the Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Israel and the West Bank who nonviolently resist the status quo of occupation. Sabeel is a beautiful Christian example. And I admire the group Standing Together, which I wrote about here.

And here in the United States, the Tri-Faith Initiative in Omaha recently sponsored a panel and potluck with Galilean Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives of the Spirit of Galilee, an association working towards the advancement of pluralism, mutual understanding and cooperation between various denominations, religions and cultures of the Galilee. “We are invested,” they write, “in building a shared society here in the Galilee, as a model for the entire country, the region, and the world.”

Not many years ago, the name Srebrenica meant despair. It was the site of a massacre during an ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by the Bosnian Serb Army against Muslims. Yet today, the Esme Sultanija Mosque in the town of Jajce, Bosnia-Herzegovina, rises from the ashes of its 1992 destruction. Croat Catholic nuns meet regularly with their Muslim neighbors to promote dialogue and cooperation. Sometimes interfaith dialogue may be academic, theological. But “Everyday conversations among people of different faiths who are friends,” notes historian John Borelli of Georgetown, “are the bedrock for interfaith dialogue.” The nuns’ house hosts social events, including poetry readings, prayer meetings, or more formal sessions for dialogue.

For many Americans, it is normal to live in a majority white Christian community. Our individualism, our sparse knowledge of other traditions, and maybe our heritage of segregation allow us to accept this as not only normal, but ideal. For most of the world, this is not the case. So the nuns in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who had grown up in Catholic-Orthodox-Muslim communities feel they can rebuild on that foundation thirty years after the ravages of ethnic violence. Dialogue is “not strange to me, Sr. Blanka Jeličić told the National Catholic Reporter, “I see God’s creation in each person. If someone needs help, I will help them. It doesn’t matter what faith tradition a person belongs to.” Her work is not world-shaking. One example: raising money for a Muslim family to buy a washing machine. But Jesus trusted in small gestures with roots deep in the healing core of love.

May the seedlings of Hope taking root in Bosnia-Herzegovina allow us to envision healing and new life in a devastated Gaza, a traumatized West Bank, and an Israel shattered both by the horror unleashed by Hamas and by Israel’s own scorched-earth reaction.

Author’s note: The Pope urges us to know what we spend on arms. In fiscal year 2022, the United States spent $877 billion on defense , more than the next ten countries combined. According to the New York Times, the United States gives $3 billion in assistance to the Israeli military annually.

Photo by Rami Gzon on Unsplash.