Maoz Inon and the Incredible Power of Hope

Next year, I will, once again, sow wheat,

for the coming year will be better ~ Yakovi Inon

No Revenge

On the morning of February 20, 2024, nineteen of us from Silicon Valley, calling ourselves the South Bay Solidarity Mission to Israel, walked to the Abraham Hostel at 21 Levontin Street in Tel Aviv, and descended the stairs from the lobby to a basement meeting room. There we met Maoz Inon, one of the bravest and most inspiring people I’ve ever met.

Maoz started his story with tragedy. On October 7, 2023, his parents, Yakov and Bilha Inon, were murdered in their home, a wooden house in Netiv HaAsara, along with 18 of their neighbors (out of a total population of about 900 people). Yakov was 78. Bilha was just shy of her 76^th birthday. According to Maoz’s brother Magen’s account, “My siblings and I received a short message from my parents saying that they could hear gunshots. They said they were safe inside the house and had locked the doors. This was the last time we heard from them.”

Maoz told us that his first reaction was that “nothing can prepare you” for the crushing reality of such a devastating loss. But as he reflected on his own life, his parents’ lives, and their legacy, he said that his thinking transformed, and that he realized that “all my life was just a preparation” for this moment.

Netiv HaAsara (Hebrew: נְתִיב הָעֲשָׂרָה, which means "Path of the Ten") is a moshav (cooperative agricultural community) in southern Israel, close to the northern border of Gaza. After the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, Netiv HaAsara became the closest Israeli community to Gaza, only 400 meters away from the northernmost Gazan city of Beit Lahia (Arabic: بيت لاهيا, which means "House of Lahia").

During their time of mourning, Maoz and his four siblings collectively decided—in the aftermath of their very personal tragedy—to send a universal message to the world: no revenge. Maoz said they’ve experienced an amazing outpouring of solidarity in response to their pacifist stance.

Maoz lives with his wife and family in a community of 16,000 in the north of Israel, about 140 kilometers and 2 hours’ drive from the idyllic farming community where he and his siblings grew up. His parents were part of two different groups of Zionist pioneers, Yakov from the Gordonia Youth Movement (Kibbutz Nir Am) and Bilha from HaShomer HaTzair (Kibbutz Ruhama).

Living into The Legacies of Yakov and Bilha

Yakov was a highly respected agronomist, and most of today’s leading agronomy professors in Israel were his students and studied in his fields. The inheritance that Maoz takes from his father is three primary things: communication, innovation, and a deep love of learning. Yakov, known fondly as Yakovi, always focused on learning from challenges and persisted in believing, even after every disappointment, “next year is going to be better.” Maoz said these beliefs became part of his own “operating system” — that “every cell” in his body knows, even after all the tragedies, that the future is going to be better.

Bilha was an artist who produced her own art—often from garbage and other found or reused items—and taught others about art making and creativity. She was always very proud of the art produced by her own kids, and she taught art classes to all ages. She once painted a mandala and gave it to Maoz—and here Maoz stopped to impart a piece of wisdom to us moms in the room (and one that I know all too well from my own experience):

Moms: sons do not read their mom’s gifts.
~ Maoz Inon

On the 7^th of October, 2023, Maoz finally read the mandala his mom had given him, and it sang out her legacy:

All our dreams can be fulfilled
if we have the courage to chase them 
~ Bilha Inon

Show respect to others - and it will be returned to you in kind

Maoz has traveled the world, backpacking trails across Israel (“Shvil Israel”), North America (John Muir’s famous Pacific Crest Trail) and South America as well. It was in a small guest house in an indigenous community in Ecuador that Maoz saw how tourism, done well, can benefit the traveler while empowering the local community. He came home and was inspired to create the Fauzi Azar guesthouse in the Arab community of Nazareth, the largest city in the north of Israel. His hospitality business, established in the abandoned Azar mansion in Nazareth’s old city, initially aroused a lot of suspicion from locals, and Maoz decided to build trust by doing three things — not displaying any Israeli flags, not installing any cameras, and leaving the main door to the guesthouse always open. 

Since the establishment of the Fauzi Azar guesthouse, more than 50 shops have cropped up in Nazareth’s Old City and begun thriving, and others are looking for properties to establish more guesthouses and hostels in Nazareth. From the very beginning, Maoz was advised by a member of the Azar family to show respect to local citizens, and he’d see that it would get returned in kind. In fact, Maoz has been so embraced by the local Nazarene community that he held one day of shiva (mourning) for his parents in Nazareth, and hundreds came, very emotional, to show their support for him and his family in the wake of their unspeakable tragedy.

We Are Very Close to Peace

I forgive the past and I forgive the present, but I won’t forgive anyone for ruining our future.
Hope is not just a feeling, it’s something you need to make and create.
~ Hamze Hawawde

At this point in our visit, Maoz turned to sharing some of his own thoughts and wisdom with us. He said that worldwide, we are facing three global crises: (1) economic, (2) environmental, and (3) socio-political. He quoted Hamze Hawawde by saying that hope is an action—like love. He called on all of us to amplify voices of peace and reconciliation, and to pour all the energy we have into creating hope and a better future for all of us to live side by side.

Maoz then asked for my journal so he could sketch his vision for us (see image). He said we are all family, we started out together, and now we’ve been living a parallel existence — we’ve been apart,  but we are traveling the parallel paths, perhaps in conflict, but still side by side. He said that today, after October 7th, it may seem like we are even farther apart than ever, making things seem hopeless, but it’s possible for us to come back together again. Maoz reminded all of us in the room to go back and look at examples from history, such as the Anwar Sadat story in making peace with Israel over the Sinai Peninsula, and we will see the rhythms of peace making and hope building. Maoz believes with every cell of his being that we are only four to six years away from our destination of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

After Maoz finished sketching, he gave me back the journal with a humongous hug and invited all of us to climb back up out of the basement and take the stairs all the way up to the roof of the Abraham hostel (the building used to be an old Bezeq telephone exchange and post office). We entered a lovely rooftop garden, which in the spirit of Yakovi also served as an ecological experiment to understand the benefits of having a “living roof” on the top of an urban building.

I wrote down two quotes that Maoz said toward the end of our time together that really stuck with me:

“It was difficult for me to listen to you and so I listened twice.”
-and-
“I don’t agree with you, but I’m proud of you.”

Sometimes, in the midst of my grieving for October 7, it’s hard for me to embrace Maoz’s incredible optimism, but that morning I felt inspired to try. Maoz, I’m going to listen to your words and to your story again and again and try to let them settle into my cells like a legacy. It is still difficult for me to really feel that optimism in the midst of the crushing loss, so I’m going to listen, and keep listening, as many times as it takes.

We can’t fix what happened to grandma and grandpa,
but we can fix the world for our kids.
~ Magen Inon

For those interested in learning more, Maoz Inon will be speaking next week, on March 17^th, at an online event co-hosted by Ha’Aretz and the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA:

Israel After October 7 | Mar. 17, 2024 | Online | 9 AM (PST), 12 PM (EST), 6 PM (Israel)

Register here

Click here for more info and to see names/titles of speakers