Reflections from a first journey through Israel and Palestine
On normalisation, fear, encounter and the difficult work of sustaining hope
Panos Massouris
CEO, Rozana Australia

Author’s note

This commentary records the impressions of a first visit to Israel and Palestine. It is not offered as a comprehensive account of either society, nor as a definitive analysis of a conflict whose histories, losses and political realities cannot be contained in one journey. I write as a visitor, an Australian of Greek heritage, and the CEO of Rozana Australia. My observations are necessarily partial, shaped by the people I met, the places I was able to enter and the work I was there to witness.

The experiences of Israelis and Palestinians are not interchangeable, and acknowledging suffering in one community must never require erasing the suffering of another. Where I describe fear, restriction, grief or resilience, I do so as I encountered them, not to flatten differences in power or circumstance, but to resist the idea that empathy must be rationed. Quotations are drawn from contemporaneous field notes and are anonymised.

At the gate

I began writing these reflections as I was about to board my flight home. By then, the warnings I had lightly dismissed before departure had become personal. Colleagues had carefully prepared me for possible questioning: how to describe the purpose of my visit, whom I was meeting, and what might happen if an answer or a name triggered further scrutiny. I had laughed and reassured them that I would be fine.

On arrival, at five in the morning on a Saturday, I passed through the airport in minutes. My first instinct was relief. My second was surprise at the sight of soldiers who appeared barely out of their teens carrying weapons almost as large as they were. The question arrived before any conclusion did: what does the constant visibility of weapons teach the people who carry them, and what does it teach everyone around them? Does it produce safety, or does it continually rehearse danger?

The first person to welcome me complicated every simple story I might have brought with me. My driver was an Arab man who had lost both parents as a child and had been raised with care by a Greek Orthodox archbishop. He greeted me in Greek with unmistakable delight, stopped to buy us bread and yoghurt for breakfast, and laughed with me as dawn broke over the road to Jerusalem. In one small meal, identities that are too often treated as sealed categories sat easily beside one another. Hospitality came before politics. It would become one of the journey’s most consistent lessons.

Jerusalem: beauty under pressure

Jerusalem resists possession by any single description. Its stone carries centuries of devotion, conquest, memory and claim. Walking through the quarters of the Old City, moving between markets and places sacred to Christians, Muslims and Jews, I felt its beauty before I could organise its meanings. Local shopkeepers offered stories; strangers offered food; rooftops provided views denied at street level. Even for someone who does not arrive as a pilgrim, the city exerts a spiritual gravity.

A colleague asked what I thought of one particular street. I answered that it felt strangely familiar, almost like home. He smiled. We had entered the Greek Orthodox quarter. Around the corner were Greek schools, signs and families whose presence made the recognition suddenly obvious. It was a small, warm reminder that belonging can announce itself before the intellect catches up.

Yet Jerusalem also made me intensely conscious of being read by others. I felt scanned and categorised from a distance—by my appearance, jewellery, haircut and presumed identity. Whether every look carried the meaning I assigned to it is impossible to know; that uncertainty is itself important. In an atmosphere saturated by vigilance, strangers can become symbols before they become people. The city’s richness and diversity were undeniable, but so was its tension. Beauty and apprehension occupied the same streets.

At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the well-known immovable ladder above an entrance has remained in place for generations because the communities responsible for the church cannot alter shared areas without agreement. It is often treated as an emblem of stalemate. To me, it also suggested something more demanding: coexistence is not the absence of disagreement. Sometimes it is the discipline of remaining in relationship when no party can simply impose its will. The ladder stays because history is unresolved. The church remains because shared stewardship, however imperfect, continues.

Crossing into another rhythm

That evening, we travelled to Bethlehem and crossed my first checkpoint into the West Bank. The physical environment changed quickly: pavements thinned or disappeared, rubbish accumulated beside the road, and damaged vehicles sat where public infrastructure seemed to recede. Yet the emotional register also changed. Children played in the streets. People appeared less guarded and more present with one another. In a local bar, surrounded by graffiti carrying grief, resistance and memory, I confronted two truths at once: material hardship can be visible, and communal life can remain vivid.

Later, on the road to Ramallah, colleagues explained Areas A, B and C, settlements, military protection and the unpredictability of checkpoints. I could follow the explanation intellectually, but comprehension did not make the system feel coherent. Routes, permissions and number plates shaped who could move, how easily, and with what degree of uncertainty. At one point I reached for my passport as we approached a checkpoint and was told to stop; the movement itself could attract attention.

Traffic slowed. I watched local drivers talk on the phone, read, smoke, drink coffee and wait with remarkable calm. I admired their patience—and then became troubled by my admiration. Resilience is a human achievement, but it can also be the name outsiders give to what people have been forced to endure repeatedly. What looks like calm may be adaptation. What looks like normality may be a survival strategy. The danger is not only that restriction becomes routine; it is that those observing it begin to treat the routine as acceptable.

Normalisation, in this sense, is not reconciliation. It is the gradual conversion of the intolerable into the expected: a checkpoint calculated into a commute, a weapon absorbed into the landscape, a child learning which questions not to ask, a colleague planning an airport journey around the possibility that their identity may delay someone else. Human beings adapt because they must. Institutions should not mistake that adaptation for consent.

When encounter interrupts fear

The most hopeful moments of the visit came from structured, repeated contact around practical work. In Jerusalem, I met Palestinian and Jewish women training together to become ambulance drivers. Their seating, humour and body language did not suggest two groups performing cooperation for visitors. They behaved as a cohort. They hugged, called one another sisters, and spoke about what the training had changed in their homes and communities.

Several women described becoming informal sources of guidance for neighbours and relatives. A technical course had become something larger: a platform for confidence, family leadership and community agency. Trust had not been manufactured by asking participants to agree about history. It had grown through presence, shared purpose and the accumulation of ordinary acts—learning together, solving problems together, and returning to the room.

Fear was not absent from their stories. It was one reason some had joined. One Jewish participant described a deeply religious upbringing in which fear of Arabs had become constricting. She chose to move towards what she feared: learning Arabic, forming friendships, immersing herself in another culture and teaching Hebrew. Crucially, she did not describe abandoning her own identity. Encounter enlarged it. Her story challenged a common but damaging assumption—that understanding the other requires becoming less oneself.

This matters because fear thrives on distance. It converts a person into a category and a category into a threat. Contact alone is not a cure; poorly designed encounters can entrench inequality or become ceremonial. But sustained engagement, with a credible purpose and skilled support, can create the conditions in which people risk curiosity. The first act of courage is sometimes not agreement. It is staying in the room long enough to hear what a word, a memory or a wound means to someone else.

From delegation to durable change

A reunion with participants from a Rozana leadership delegation sharpened another lesson. The journey itself had been meaningful, they said, but without follow-up its value could dissipate. Relationships need infrastructure. Trust built during an intensive program can be overwhelmed by institutional pressures, political shocks and the return to segregated routines. Participants wanted continued meetings, practical support and help addressing challenges inside their organisations.

This is where the language of ‘bringing people together’ becomes insufficient. A powerful meeting is not an outcome; it is an opening. Durable change requires ongoing facilitation, professional networks, leadership development, opportunities to collaborate and mechanisms that allow trust to survive disagreement. The work after the encounter is less visible and less emotionally dramatic. It is also where credibility is won or lost.

The people I met were not simply participants in a program. They were, community leaders: people who would carry what they had learned back into their own institutions, their own families, their own arguments with people who had not been in the room.

In hospitals in the West Bank, I heard urgent requests for capacity building: fellowships, visiting professionals, training and sustained institutional partnership. The pressure on the health system was apparent in shortages of staff, supplies and specialist capability. In Hebron, teams supporting women and families worked with energy that exceeded their resources. At a developing hospital, completed floors waited for equipment before becoming operational. The needs were immense, but so was the pride of local leaders who had built, organised and persisted.

These encounters resisted the comforting idea that an external organisation arrives with answers. Effective partnership begins by recognising local expertise and listening to what institutions say they need. Rozana’s role is not to replace that leadership. It is to connect it: to mobilise humanitarian support where required, strengthen clinical and organisational capacity, and build relationships across boundaries that would otherwise remain fortified.

Leadership changes the distance

Visits to hospitals in Haifa and Tel Aviv showed the difference leadership can make inside mixed workplaces. Where department heads actively established norms of respect and cooperation, staff had a shorter distance to travel towards trust. One paediatric leader expressed the principle with arresting clarity:

The sentence is powerful because it creates a shared professional identity without pretending that wider conflict disappears at the hospital door. Leadership does not erase difference. It defines how difference will be held while people carry out work on which lives depend. When that ethic is modelled consistently, and reinforced by team leaders rather than resting on one exceptional individual, it becomes culture rather than gesture.

Another hospital leader reflected on facilitated dialogue in which participants discussed the emotional weight of terms such as ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Zionist’. Even within their own groups, disagreement was substantial. That was not failure. It revealed that neither community is a single voice and that multiple truths can coexist without becoming identical. A safe space is not one without discomfort; it is one strong enough to hold discomfort without humiliation, withdrawal or violence.

Public memory and the architecture of fear

In Tel Aviv, railway stations and public spaces carried photographs and stickers commemorating people killed or taken hostage on 7 October. At Hostages Square, installations sought to make captivity imaginable to the public. I approached them with respect for the anguish they represented. Giving the dead and missing a face and a name refuses abstraction. It insists that loss is personal.

At the same time, I wondered what happens when a society’s public space becomes continuously organised around trauma. Memorials can honour, mobilise and comfort. They can also keep fear at the surface of everyday life. The answer is not to remove grief from view or prescribe how a traumatised community should mourn. It is to ask whether public memory is helping people metabolise pain—or repeatedly returning them to the moment of threat. The same question followed me through stations, security checks and streets where firearms were ordinary: when does protection create safety, and when does its constant performance deepen the expectation of danger?

A security guard inspecting my bag asked whether I had a gun. When I said no, he smiled and asked, ‘Why not?’ I replied, ‘Because I’m from Australia.’ The exchange was funny for a second, but its humour depended on two very different assumptions about normal life. What was absurd to me was ordinary enough to become a joke to him.

The warning becomes real

On the journey to the airport, a colleague had hesitated before offering me a lift. A checkpoint near the terminal could lead to extended questioning, especially when a driver or passenger had an Arabic or foreign-sounding name. That someone should have to calculate whether their identity might cause another person to miss a flight captured the quiet reach of the system better than any diagram could.

We were stopped briefly. A very young soldier questioned us while another held a weapon towards approaching vehicles. At the terminal, my Greek name prompted further questions and I was taken to a small room for close to thirty minutes. Armed personnel stood behind me. Eventually I was released with a coded sticker on my passport. At the final screening, that code directed me away from the fast-moving line.

My bag was emptied. Each item was examined, my notebook was checked page by page, and my belongings were pushed across the bench in a manner I experienced as aggressive and belittling. Looking around, I noticed that many of those waiting for the same process appeared to be Arab. I cannot know every reason for each person’s selection, and I do not claim that my brief experience is equivalent to the repeated experiences of others. I can say what it did to me: I felt profiled, dehumanised and suddenly aware of how much tension I had absorbed during the week.

Then came the most uncomfortable feeling of all—relief that I was leaving. I wanted to return to my own normality. The guilt followed immediately, because what I could exit was daily life for millions of people, including colleagues whose composure I had admired. My eyes filled with tears not because I had finally understood the region, but because I understood more clearly how little a visitor is required to carry. I could board a plane. Others would wake the next morning and calculate the checkpoint again.

I left with no neat balance sheet of pain. Israeli grief and fear were visible and real, sharpened by the trauma of 7 October and the continuing absence felt by families and communities. Palestinian restriction, dispossession, economic pressure and unequal freedom of movement were also visible and real, embedded in the practical conditions of daily life. Respectful reflection should not collapse these realities into sameness. Nor should it demand that recognising one requires denial of the other.

I also left wary of the word ‘resilience’. It can honour courage, but it can flatter the observer and excuse the conditions that make courage necessary. The people I met were not inspiring because they endured suffering gracefully. They were inspiring because, within severe constraints, they continued to lead, care, teach, heal and form relationships that the surrounding conflict tells them are impossible.

That is why Rozana’s work matters. Its programs do not offer a sentimental claim that health alone can resolve a political conflict. They demonstrate something more modest and more credible: people can build trust through consequential work; institutions can create environments in which cooperation becomes normal; and leaders can carry those practices into hospitals, homes and communities. Hope becomes tangible when it is organised—through a training cohort, a fellowship, a facilitated dialogue, a hospital partnership or a professional network that continues after the delegation has gone home.

Organised contact is not a bureaucratic nicety. The alternative to it is not neutral; it is drift back toward distance, and distance is where fear does its quiet work.

There is much more to do. The setbacks are profound, resources are inadequate, and no organisation should confuse individual stories of connection with structural justice. Yet the presence of allies across communities matters. So does the generosity that has sustained Rozana for more than a decade, including significant support from Jewish communities in the diaspora for work that serves and connects Palestinians and Israelis. After 7 October and everything that followed, retreat into separate certainties may feel safer. It will not build a shared future.

My first journey left me feeling both visibly judged and unexpectedly at home; frightened by systems and strengthened by people; saddened by what has been normalised and hopeful about what can still be changed. These are not contradictions to be solved. They are truths to be held responsibly.

The region’s history is extraordinary, its beauty undeniable and its politics overwhelming. But what makes the work worth continuing is neither stone nor symbol. It is the people: those who cross a room to meet someone they were taught to fear; those who keep a hospital functioning; those who learn a language, drive an ambulance, train a colleague or refuse to let grief become the only inheritance passed forward.

The lesson does not stay in this region. Wherever people are kept at a distance from one another long enough, fear will do the work that acquaintance would have prevented.

Hope, then, is not optimism. It is practice. It is the decision to create another encounter, sustain another partnership and keep building the conditions in which people can see one another fully. The journey showed me that it can be done. It also showed me how much work lies ahead.