Building Bridges

I was glad to see the interview with Sami Awad (“Tear Down This Wall,” May 2010) advocating nonviolence as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though I am now a Christian, I was raised as a Jew and my natural sympathies would be toward Israel. However, since I have read a fair amount about the sufferings of the Palestinian people, I can no longer be on any “side” but the side of peace. One of the best things that could happen to defuse the conflict would be for each side to start reading up on the sufferings of the other—Palestinians reading about the Holocaust, and Israelis reading accounts of the current suffering of Palestinians.