“I was born in France, but I was born to an Israeli couple that was studying in France. So I’m an Israeli by birth. I came to Israel when I was 2 years old, so I grew up in Israel as an Israeli. I don’t know any other culture or language as a mother tongue.”

“I grew up in Haifa, which is an Israeli city by the sea and is also a Jewish-Arab city, with mosques and churches and synagogues all together. That’s probably also shaped my perception.”

“Being an Israeli, you understand at a very young age that the surroundings want to kill you, basically. I saw my first terrorist attack when I was 12 years old, in the central bus station in Tel Aviv, where a terrorist started stabbing people arbitrarily. A few months afterwards, the Gulf War erupted, and suddenly we were under fire from Iraq, a country we had no border with and no beef with.”

“Those missiles were not accurately targeting military bases or government facilities. They were just falling on our heads, and we had to go to the shelters in the school and in our private apartment. I remember asking myself why I had to go to a shelter as a pupil. Basically, I was fired upon because I existed. This is something that shapes perception.”

“As a child I wanted to be a fireman. I think every four-year-old secretly wants to be a fireman. When we are a bit older, we have personal and professional aspirations. Mine was to be the spokesperson or the prime minister’s spokesperson, and that dream was realized when I was 22.”

“Once we become parents, we have new dreams, not about personal recognition or respect, but about shaping the future of our children in a way that they can be safe in this world.”

“Being a soldier is not easy. You are very young, and suddenly, from the comfort of your parents taking care of you, you have to act as an adult and adhere to everything you are ordered to. I was serving as a liaison to the Palestinian police in the Jericho squadron. So I had a unique role in the IDF, coordinating between the Israeli army and the Palestinian police, and that gave me a perspective pretty different from the rest of the world.”

“When you become a soldier, you have responsibilities, and those responsibilities are life and death. You can be the judge between life and death, basically. So that, of course, changes things.”

“To some extent it began before my military service. Even as a teenager I was involved in Israeli politics. I was an activist in youth movements, including a Jewish-Arab youth movement and the Peace Now youth movement. After my military service, I became spokesperson for a Knesset member who shaped my political and personal identity from a very early age.”

“Then elections erupted suddenly, and I was asked to serve as a spokesperson of the election campaign of the prime minister. That led to 25 years of serving in almost every possible professional role as a strategic consultant in Israeli politics.”

“Sure. As a professional media and strategy consultant, I worked with probably hundreds of clients. I was hired to deliver their messages to the public, and their messages were not always my personal views. I never worked with clients who were 100 percent opposite to the way I see the world, but obviously I was also required to defend views I didn’t support.”

“I think this is a very good intellectual activity, to really understand another point of view even if you don’t accept it. Fortunately, today I’m at a point in my life where I’m not serving as a professional spokesperson, and I can speak my own views.”

“I think October 7. I was not surprised by October 7, because just four days before it I wrote publicly that the regional war was coming. But not being surprised doesn’t make you immune. I live 30 kilometers from the Gaza border. I don’t think anyone can understand the experience of locking your doors and waiting with a deodorant spray can and a lighter next to the door, asking yourself how you will be able to defend your family, with thousands of rockets flying everywhere.”

“To me it proved a very significant point. Usually the Western perspective, or the leaders’ perspective, on the conflict is how we can change the surface: the border will be here, maybe a bigger border with taller fences and more soldiers, maybe the settlements will go from here to there. It’s always about engineering the map, and that doesn’t work. The political solution was to have a border of billions of dollars with all the armory and weaponry you can imagine, but hatred was stronger than that.”

“That led me to understand that attempts to resolve the conflict by engineering the surface are futile, and we must go to the next phase, which is engineering the conscience of the people, so that they know that there are differences by nature and they shouldn’t fight because of differences in their identity.”

“I’m at peace with the decisions I made with my life. Of course we always learn from our mistakes and say, maybe I could have earned more money, maybe I could have been a bit thinner today. But I never deliberately harmed a soul on this earth. If I did, I apologized. I hope to leave the world after me a better place than I received it.”

“I always had a thing for books. I was reading two or three books per day since I was a child, and I started writing early, around 13, mostly articles about political and professional issues, but not a book. Then my father, may he rest in peace, got cancer, and I was exposed to a very different reality: people with cancer, and also the medical cannabis community in Israel.”

“It led me to a group of people who are very special, who risk their personal freedom and their reputation to help patients who couldn’t get the medication they needed from the system because of bad regulation, red tape and stigma. I was inspired by people who are willing to risk their freedom for a complete stranger because he is suffering. I wrote my first book, Cannabis Wars, about the true story of the medical cannabis underground in Israel. It was a very personal journey, because it started with my father, who eventually passed away. Surprisingly, I received the gold medal of the Global Book Awards for it, the first work of an unknown Israeli author.”

“From then I started working on my main literary work, which is based on the idea of a shared Abrahamic identity and is created or co-authored with intellectuals from the Middle East, to create a real cultural bridge.”

“The Abrahamic movement. To me it’s still unbelievable. I see it as a snowball traveling the world today. People ask me how many people are in this movement, and I tell them I really don’t know. People are opening branches that I don’t even have an idea of. This is an indication that when something is needed, it’s bigger than the reach of one person. If you’ve done something right that is needed in this world, prepare to lose control, because it’s not up to you, and I’m prepared to lose control.”

“I didn’t ever want to be in control. I just wanted to have a new vision for the Middle East, a vision that everyone can feel a part of. This is one of my biggest lessons from life: the way you experience life depends on whether other people can find themselves in your vision.”

“It’s bigger than me. Think about how you can bring peace to this world. Think about how you can secure the future of your children. It’s not about having more money. Money is just paper with pictures of people on it. If you want to secure a future of acceptance and tolerance, you can leave your children money, but some radical with guns will take it away from them.”

“Create the change that the world needs tomorrow. Bring it today. If you know that you’re leaving a better world after you than the one you received when you arrived, then you will have a fulfilling life.”