If We Can Walk Together
Radio feature for BBC Radio 4's Illuminated
What does it take to choose peace when you have every reason not to?
Aziz Abu Sarah is a Palestinian who grew up under Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem. He was first shot at when he was seven years old, and in 1991, when he was ten, his older brother Tayseer died after being arrested and beaten while in Israeli military custody.
Maoz Inon is an Israeli who grew up in a community just 200 metres from the Gaza border. On 7 October 2023, his parents and many of his childhood friends died in the Hamas attacks.
Everything about their histories suggests Aziz and Maoz could never become friends. Yet, despite experiencing profound personal loss on opposite sides of one of the world’s most enduring conflicts, they have turned away from hatred and towards each other in a shared mission of peacemaking. A single text message to a stranger in a moment of raw human empathy, sparked an enduring friendship that would overcome seemingly insurmountable differences.
If We Can Walk Together follows their remarkable stories, from pivotal childhood experiences to moments of political awakening, and the shared choice of individual agency over historical divides.
Moving, inspiring and radically hopeful, their story offers a rare perspective on a conflict often portrayed as intractable. In bearing witness to what human connection can overcome, it invites us to imagine a future shaped not by division, but by our capacity to choose peace.
This programme was first broadcast on Radio 4 on Sunday 21st June 2026
If We Can Walk Together on Pick of The Week
If We Can Walk Together was featured on BBC Radio 4’s prestigious Pick of the Week. Presented by legendary journalist Julian Worricker, the programme also reflected on a political decision made a decade ago that has shaped debate at Westminster and beyond ever since. Elsewhere, it explored niche broadcasts, from one serving the handful of Britons stationed in Antarctica to another with a global following centred on digestive systems, saxophones and who knows what else. It rounded off with classic I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue comedy from Henning Wehn.
Review in the Observer
Radio 4’s Illuminated strand delivered something very beautiful this week. If We Can Walk Together presents two friends, Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, who only disagree on a few major things: football, horses, music, Dr Who. One by one, they share their life stories. Palestinian Aziz recalls moving to East Jerusalem as a child in the 1980s, and not knowing what to do when the Israeli military carried out one of its regular raids on his school. Maoz, an Israeli, speaks about his mother and father. I won’t spoil either story. Told in their own words, they convey the realities of life under Israeli occupation and after the Hamas attack with staggering simplicity.
Aziz and Maoz also discuss friends who no longer speak to them, the many groups and events celebrating diversity and inclusion that have disappeared since October 2023, and why they both continue to work together for peace. One line from Maoz has stayed with me all week: “If Aziz and I can overcome our fear, our trauma, our pain and loss, and choose to walk together, so can you.”
If We Can Walk Together features original music by Pat Moran
Pat is a composer/multi-instrumentalist/music director/educator. Originally from the United States, in 2015 he moved to Bristol in the UK. His primary instruments are guitars and basses but he also regularly plays mandolin, keyboards, trombone, banjo, drums/percussion and occasionally cornet. To hear more of Pat’s music head to www.patmoran.co.uk