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"Did you love Israel?"

I turned and faced my questioner: a beaming, proud Israeli woman just ahead of me in the customs line at London Heathrow Airport. Looking at her face I could see she wasn't going to take anything less than "I loved it" in return. Contemplating my answer, I couldn't help but notice how fresh she looked despite four hours of security questions from El Al Airlines in Tel Aviv, a 1 1/2 hours delay on the tarmac and 5 1/2 hours of flying, only to be currently standing in another long line awaiting more security questions and another flight. Had we just come from the same place? I had just come from one of the more challenging experiences of my life and she was looking as if Israel was the fountain of youth everyone was looking for.

But I couldn't deny her question. "Intense," was my reply. Despite her obvious leading, I appreciated her question. I had gotten used to this direct interaction and I found myself delving deeper. “Why so many walls?” I asked. I was thinking of the Old City Walls, the Wailing Wall and the Separation Walls: the ancient, the sacred and the new.

I began searching her face for what I knew lay beneath the smiling surface. She has a story. Everyone in Israel does. She has an opinion about the conflict. She's divided. She's experienced a loss, pain, anger—an identity crisis. I pleaded silently: “Reveal it to me. Show me where it's taken you and what you have to teach the rest of the world. Feel pity on me, for this was my first visit. Empathize with me, for war isn’t easy. Understand that check points, gunfire and barbed wire are not part of my normal daily existence. Dare to look into my eyes and see what I have witnessed in your country, where I have judged out of ignorance and truth alike. Remind me of a larger purpose and of our underlying unity.”

"Did you love Israel?"

Her question was still lingering in my mind. What was the experience we just had? And what does it have to do with the other parts of our lives? Torn between remaining in the experience and leaving it for some perspective, I slowly began to understand the gleam in her eye. Yes, I did love it. Yes, the holy land is worth fighting for.

As each of the people we interviewed shared, there is tremendous possibility in Israel, and we were reminded that although the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is unique to the holy land, the whole world is affected by it, and the struggle universal. All the peaceworkers we spent time with pointed to the value in our unique individual, communal, national, and religious identities and at the same time, stressed the need to remember we are all part of the same human identity. In other words, there is diversity of life, but unity of spirit, the unifying thread the source of all our differences.

Again I recall Sami Awad’s words that we are standing on a groundless ground of nothingness. “We need to take our individual identities and respect them, understand them and learn from them, but we are free to create a future that has a sense of independency from the past. We can create a future with a new global identity that encompasses everyone.”  And Rabbi Froman’s word’s also apply: “If we can figure out Jerusalem, it can be a bridge for all humanity."

Left with more questions than answers, I have a feeling we have been more deeply affected than we know. We were welcomed with open arms into homes and treated with immense generosity and trust. We symbolically found common ground over coffee and shared meals, and we bore witness to tremendous courage and hope. I shall miss the muezzin’s call to prayer, the hummus and figs, and the golden light over the ancient terraced hillsides and much more. I will even miss the very real reminder of life and death at most every moment. But there is also an impression left by the complete and utter desecration we witnessed as well. Here I am reminded that we have been taught the following teaching: when everything is dying, there is tremendous potential for something new to be born and the light that emerges can be like a torch for all the world.

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We have just added a series of new clips from our recent interviews with Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari, co-founder of Jerusalem Peacemakers and the head of the Naqshabandi Sufi order in Jerusalem Rodef Shalom Eliyahu McLean, a fellow founder of Jerusalem Peacemakers and Sami Awad, founder and executive director of Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian nonprofit organization. In these interviews, filmed this summer in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, all three community leaders speak to the challenges and opportunities facing their conflicted region, and offer approaches to peace that can be applied universally.