Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib sits for a portrait at his host mother’s home in Pacifica on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023. Alkhatib left his home in Gaza in 2005 as a 15-year-old and has not been able to return. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)
“I really didn’t want to come here today,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, 33, said into his microphone before dozens of people at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center (SFJCC).
Just weeks before, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. In response, Israel began bombing Gaza, and the death toll was already mounting. Tensions in that SFJCC room were palpable.
The event was held in conjunction with American Friends of the Parent Circle, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization of over 600 families, all of whom have lost an immediate family member to the ongoing conflict. This forum was meant to be an apolitical space for shared grief and hope.
But Alkhatib was feeling more grief than hope at that moment.
Alkhatib’s uncle in Gaza had just died in the Israel-Hamas War. His cousin’s 13-year-old daughter had died earlier in the week after an Israeli airstrike hit the four-story building where Alkhatib grew up. Most of his family members survived by climbing out from under the rubble.
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But despite his personal pain, Alkhatib asked the gathered audience to set politics aside and make an effort to see the similarities between Israelis and Palestinians instead of just their differences. He mourned the Israeli victims of Hamas’ attack and the Gazan victims of Israel’s retaliation. He reprimanded people who tore down posters of the Israeli hostages and assertively condemned Hamas.
“I’m pro-humanity,” he said to roaring applause.
Growing Up in Gaza
Alkhatib spent the first years of his life living in Saudi Arabia, where his Palestinian-born parents were working in the medical field. He would visit family in Gaza several times a year but didn’t move there until he was 10. His family moved back just three months before the Second Intifada, a particularly violent time between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
But Alkhatib said there were still pockets of serenity under occupation. He recalled trips to the sea, flying kites with neighborhood kids, and wedding receptions that would flow through the night and into the morning.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib holds a photo of his brother Mohammed, sister-in-law Aya, and their four children, Fouad, Tala, Ahmed, and Maria, in his host mother’s home in Pacifica, on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023. Alkhatib is from Gaza, where his brother and his family are still living and suffering under the current bombardment. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)
“There was beauty in the midst of misery, there was happiness in the midst of violence and war,” he said.
But he had trouble getting used to the hum of war tanks and the hassle of checkpoints. Even though he was supposed to act like the occupation didn’t bother him, he couldn’t.
“I struggled with the violence and the fear as a child,” he said. “There was this unspoken social pressure to suppress any sense of fear and overreaction to the violence and to tough it out.”
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As a child, Alkhatib was startled by loud noises — he said the other children would laugh at him when he would jump or hide. He said he always felt like an old man trapped in a child’s body, more concerned with the news than playing video games. Though he came from an apolitical family, Alkhatib dreamt of being a politician or a diplomat. As a preteen, he would analyze the political and military situation with his classmates.
“People would endearingly mock me as a junior Middle East analyst,” he said.
Alkhatib loved to eavesdrop on grown-up conversations. He remembered his Uncle Riyad sharing stories about working with a group of day laborers in South Israel in the 1990s — a time when Alkhatib said it was more common for Israelis and Palestinians to work side by side.
“[Palestinian day laborers] formed these super tight bonds with Israeli communities,” Alkhatib said.
Those stories of the close, trusting relationships that Palestinians and Israelis once had lingered in Alkhatib’s mind. Even as a kid, he hated the Israeli occupation but believed using suicide bombings to oppose it — a tactic that had become common during the Second Intifada — was wrong, a sometimes unpopular opinion.
Alkhatib would debate this with his classmates and was surprised when others agreed with him.
“Several students began speaking up and saying, ‘Actually, he’s right. I think it’s wrong. And our religion, our culture, our morality should prevent us from targeting civilians and anyone who’s not carrying a weapon.’ And it was then that I realized the power of persuasion and how people want to say what they believe, but they’re timid,” Alkhatib said.
It was a life lesson that stuck with him.
One day, Alkhatib said he was walking home from the seventh grade with three friends when an Israeli airstrike landed nearby, leveling a police station. He said his friends had been a little behind him, and when Alkhatib ran back to look for them, there was a second airstrike.
“And that’s where I discovered my dead friends,” he said.
The blast, which caused permanent hearing damage to his left ear and the memory of those dead bodies, was a turning point for him.
“That was the seed that planted my serious desire to get out of the Gaza Strip,” he said. “I knew that I had no future in Gaza. I knew that I wanted something different.”
Youth exchange to the US
When he was 15, Alkhatib finally got that chance he’d hoped for. He was accepted to the highly coveted Youth Exchange and Study Program, an initiative by the U.S. State Department to repair relationships with majority Muslim countries after 9/11. The program brought high school students to study abroad in the United States for a year.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (left) and his host mother, Delia McGrath (right), stand for a portrait at McGrath’s home in Pacifica on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023. Alkhatib was stranded from Gaza in the United States as a 15-year-old in 2005 and still has family in Gaza today. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)
In 2005, four years after the explosion that killed his friends, Alkhatib moved to Pacifica, a small beach town just south of San Francisco. His host mom was Delia McGrath, a woman in her 60s.
“She would take me to school,” Alkhatib said. “She would make me breakfast. She helped me get on my feet. I call her my U.S. mom.”
McGrath was a retired social worker and a Buddhist. During Alkhatib’s exchange program, she taught him about the power of meditation and forgiveness.
“To me, as a child coming from a war zone like Gaza, it was a very unusual concept,” Alkhatib said. “This idea that somehow you’re going to be angry and you’re going to express it, but you’re going to work methodically through a set of approaches and beliefs to turn that anger around and to work through it.”
Meditating with McGrath, Alkhatib said, helped him process his trauma and gave him space to transform his pain into something more positive.
During that year, they also began attending the Living Room Dialogue, a Jewish Palestinian group based in San Mateo. It was the first time Alkhatib had ever had face-to-face conversations with Jews or Israelis — that type of interaction was socially criminalized back in Gaza.
“I quickly realized that Israelis, in a different way, can also experience pain, suffering, hardships, the impact of horror and terrorism and violence,” he said.
That intuition Alkhatib had as a child in Gaza crystallized; Palestinians and Israelis had more in common than he’d thought. He came to believe in the possibility of building mutual empathy.
“I mean, the whole idea of this group wasn’t that we sing Kumbaya together and we all believe the same thing,” Alkhatib said. “But if we could, at minimum, respect each other’s humanity, respect each other’s unique individuality, and respect our specific experiences that led us to believe what we believe, we can still disagree politically while being friends.”
Alkhatib was going through a metamorphosis. And back home, Gaza was also changing.
“I knew that it would be a disaster for our people and certainly for Gaza,” Alkhatib said. “And that it sealed my fate in terms of never being able to go back.”
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is seen in a peace sign-shaped mirror at his host mother’s home in Pacifica, Calif., on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023. Alkhatib is from Gaza and has called for a “pro-humanity” approach to the current conflict. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)
Alkhatib said Hamas hated the cultural exchange program he participated in through the U.S. State Department.
“They thought that we were being trained as spies and we were being brainwashed,” he said.
So, with McGrath’s help, Alkhatib applied for political asylum.
At 24 years old, Alkhatib was naturalized as a U.S. citizen and settled into watching developments in the Middle East from afar. He had a diverse friend group and continued to deepen his relationship with Jews and Israelis. But he often found himself out of step with people he thought he would have most in common with.
“I had a hard time being around other Arab American and Palestinian American and Muslim American communities and individuals for a variety of reasons,” Alkhatib explained. “Like, people wanting to out-Palestinian me.”
According to Alkhatib, many activists had never lived in Gaza. Though they cared about the politics, they had lived their whole lives in the diaspora — looking from the outside into the conflict. Alkhatib was an insider with lived experience, but he felt they didn’t care what he had to say.
“Or they felt that I went too far in promoting peace and coexistence at the expense of describing what was really happening on the ground and that I was merely being tokenized and letting people take advantage of me,” Alkhatib said. “Maybe some of those criticisms were accurate, but at the end of the day, I never wanted my actions to be guided by others’ projections onto me.”
Over the years, Alkhatib forged his own type of advocacy, publishing think pieces in Jewish and Israeli publications to share his traumatic childhood in Gaza and appealing for coexistence. He tried to establish a humanitarian airport in the Gaza Strip. Alkhatib explained that he is constantly trying to build bridges.
But Alkhatib said that being in the middle, this no man’s land, bursting in shades of gray, can be a lonely place. Especially now, since the latest Israel-Hamas War started on Oct. 7, 2023.
Maintaining the message despite great personal loss
The newest resurgence of violence between Israel and Hamas has brought with it deep divides in communities around the country. Friends aren’t speaking to one another, families have difficulty discussing the news at holiday gatherings. Alkhatib doesn’t believe that “picking a side” is helpful right now.
“You know, pro-Israel or anti-Palestinian; anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian; I’m not pro-this, and I’m not anti-that,” he said.
He condemns hardliners on the Israeli right and wants a future for Gaza without Hamas. He is calling for a cease-fire and demanding all the Israeli hostages be released. Alkhatib believes these stances can coexist — Palestinian and Jewish pain don’t have to compete, he said.
“Human life is one of the most valuable things in this universe,” Alkhatib said. “Whether it be an Israeli or a Palestinian life, we can build allyship even around the loss of life.”
Alkhatib is worried about his family in Gaza. Some of them have died, and others are living on the street with nowhere to return home. He believes more of his family members were killed in an airstrike earlier this week in Southern Gaza. But despite it all, Alkhatib’s commitment to peace is unwavering.
“I don’t think it’s helpful to further inflame tensions because I need to keep nurturing this side of me that is compassionate and this commitment to love and to not hate,” Alkhatib said. “And at the same time, I understand why people are upset. I really do. And if somebody’s gonna be upset, it is me. I am frustrated. I am angry. I am worried. I am anxious, but I’m not hateful.”
