Jerusalem pastor Sally Azar and analyst Ashraf Al-Ajrami on daily life under occupation, peace principles, and what Europe can do now.

My guests this week are Rev. Sally Azar, political analyst and former Palestinian Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs Ashraf Al-Ajrami, and Meryem-Lyn Oral, Communications Manager from EPICON.

Rev. Sally Azar and Ashraf Al-Ajrami came to Luxembourg with the EU-funded European-Palestinian-Israeli Trilateral Dialogue Initiative (EPICON) to speak honestly about what life feels like to grow up in Israel and Palestine.
Jerusalem-born pastor Sally Azar (the first female Palestinian pastor, ordained in 2023) describes a childhood where crisis becomes routine:

"You’re always protected… to not really know what’s going on around you.”

Azar explains how separation is built into daily movement and also the mindset: “We live next to each other and not really with each other,” as people go to different schools, use different buses, and live in different neighbourhoods.

And then there are the literal walls purposely dividing people. This is not shared humanity, and people on each side of the wall do not truly know how people live on the other side.

Political analyst and former Palestinian Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs, Ashraf Al-Ajrami, traces how a child’s sense of injustice can harden.

“I felt the occupation since my childhood,” he says, describing how the idea of resistance took hold early. Ashraf spent twelve years in Israeli prisons living in inhumane conditions.

Both guests return repeatedly to the same tension: the conflict’s engines are political power, rights, and forced inequality, not religious.

Sally underlines “we’re not fighting Jews… we’re fighting an Israeli occupation,” knowing the sensitivity around confusing political critique with antisemitism. And yet, in the middle of the bleakest realities, she insists on a moral counterweight: “there’s nothing more powerful than love.”

So what, concretely, can Europe do? Al-Ajrami argues that this is not charity but self-interest:

“It is a flavour of the values of Europe,” he says, pointing to the economic and security consequences when conflict grinds on. They both urge Europe to act with one, confident voice, and to enforce human rights not hatred and separation.
Links (all at the end)

EPICON https://linktr.ee/epicon.project
Sally Azar https://www.elca.org/people/rev-sally-azar
Ashraf Al-Ajrami https://www.all4palestine.org/ModelDetails.aspx?gid=14&mid=88205&lang=en

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