My truth, as true as it is, as powerful as it is… is also only partial. There’s another truth out there
Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger’s peace work began with a rupture in the story he had always told himself.
For decades, Rav Hanan lived in Alon Shvut, in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank. An Orthodox rabbi and teacher, he was deeply rooted in the Jewish story of the land — its history, longing, trauma, and return. But for many years, the Palestinian story unfolding all around him remained largely outside his field of vision. Palestinians were nearby, but not truly known; neighbors in geography, but strangers in daily life.
That began to change in late 2013, when Rav Hanan started meeting Palestinians face to face. He heard stories of belonging, dispossession, fear, humiliation, and loss. These encounters did not erase his Jewish identity or attachment to the land. They enlarged his understanding of it. He came to see that one people’s truth, held alone, is only a partial truth—and that the Jewish story and the Palestinian story must both be heard if there is to be any whole truth.
Today, Rav Hanan is a former settler who lives in Jerusalem and serves as Director of International Relations for Roots / Judur / Shorashim, a grassroots Palestinian-Israeli initiative for understanding, nonviolence, and transformation. Through dialogue, teaching, public speaking, and relationship-building, he invites others into the difficult work that changed his own life: meeting the people they were taught to fear, listening without erasing themselves, and making room for two peoples’ dignity in one land.