The Olympic flame is traveling to Italy with the usual message. It is intended to spread anticipation for the Winter Games in the Italian Alps and Milan, which begin on February 6th. And the message of peace that the International Olympic Committee likes to attach to its games, even if in this specific case it is quite monosyllabic. Regarding the massacres in Iran, in which those in power in the Islamic Republic killed thousands, possibly tens of thousands of demonstrators, including several athletes, and injured many more, there was not a word of regret or sympathy for the victims, even after repeated inquiries from the FAZ. The focus was on the participation of Iranian athletes in the games, it was also said this week from Lausanne.
Last Sunday, however, two men carried the Olympic flame through Verona together who do not see themselves as amateur actors in a commercial: Maoz Inon, Israeli, and Aziz Abu Sarah, Palestinian.
Maoz Inon lost his parents in the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th. The fact that he is now carrying the Olympic flame with a Palestinian does not make him a hero in his home country. On the contrary. Anyone who, like Inon, speaks of “forgiveness” and a “common future” is labeled as an idealist at best and called a “traitor” at worst. “I hear that I have lost my mind with my parents,” says Maoz Inon. Every day he is exposed to aggressive rhetoric that brands any form of reflection on partnership as a threat to national security.
Association of more than seventy organizations
Aziz Abu Sarah’s everyday life is even more at risk. In the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, the word “normalization,” Tatbi’a in Arabic, means political end. Because he shares a stage with an Israeli, Aziz Abu Sarah risks exclusion from the Palestinian community. “I am accused of legitimizing the occupation every time I perform with Maoz,” says Abu Sarah. For him, “breaking out of the bubble” means challenging the Palestinian consensus that Israel simply means the scope of a soldier’s gun or the concrete of an army checkpoint.
Abu Sarah and Inon are part of the “It’s time” association, which brings together more than seventy organizations committed to peace and understanding. Civil society engagement that is active because those who get involved no longer believe in a diplomatic miracle. In some ways, their work is the opposite of what the Olympics means: it’s not about the moment, but about long-term support. Legal assistance for families in the West Bank, joint economic projects between Israelis and Palestinians and the long, painful construction of a civil society foundation that supports even when the relevant politicians rely on confrontation.
“Light a new fire”
At the heart of the commitment is the Fazi Azhar House. The name is an amalgam, Fazi was Abu Sarah’s brother, Azhar Inon’s mother. It is designed as a laboratory for “political imagination,” a space in which young Israelis and Palestinians learn to break away from the victim and hostility narratives that fuel the conflict.
Nevertheless, Inon and Abu Sarah have no illusions. The Olympic circus gives them protection, impregnating international visibility in Israel and Palestine these days. This makes it more difficult for the respective governments to silence them and to marginalize their communities.
“We are not dreamers, we are the last realists left,” says Maoz Inon. “What our political leaders are currently offering us as a future is an endless series of funerals. I wasn’t interested in sporting glory, I was thinking that unless we finally find a new political language, the next generation will only learn the language of the cemetery. Their flame,” he says, looking at the torch he held with Abu Sarah, “helps us to light a new fire. One that burns the old stories before they burn us all.”
Translated from English by Christoph Becker.
