Expanding the Conversation: Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
What does it mean to be both a witness and a bridge in a time of war?
In this powerful episode, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib—a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Palestinian American raised in Gaza—shares his story of survival, loss, and conviction. Speaking at the Israel at a Crossroads convening, Ahmed explores the personal and collective traumas that shape Palestinian life today, including the impact of the current war on his own family.
Refusing the binaries that dominate public discourse, Ahmed pushes for a third space—one grounded in mutual empathy, moral courage, and an unflinching commitment to truth. His vision for Gaza’s future goes beyond reconstruction; it is a call to transformation rooted in justice, dignity, and pragmatic hope.
Discussion Questions
- Trauma and Politics
Fouad Alkhatib describes the impact of personal and collective trauma in Gaza and emphasizes the importance of healing. How can trauma—both individual and communal—shape political realities? What might it mean to include healing as part of a vision for peace? - Making Space for Complexity
Throughout the episode, Fouad Alkhatib resists aligning with rigid ideological positions and instead calls for a “third space” rooted in empathy and complexity. What makes it difficult to hold space for multiple truths in today’s discourse around Israel and Palestine? - Diaspora and Responsibility
Fouad Alkhatib speaks openly about his frustration with Palestinian and Arab diaspora communities who engage in rhetoric but avoid practical action. What role should diaspora communities play in shaping the future of Gaza and Israel? What does responsible engagement look like? - Barriers to Dialogue
The episode concludes with a challenge to consider what barriers exist within the Jewish community that prevent meaningful dialogue. What assumptions or structures might limit these conversations—and how might we begin to dismantle them? - A Vision for Gaza
Fouad Alkhatib outlines a bold vision for Gaza’s future—one that prioritizes autonomy, dignity, and opportunity. Which aspects of his vision resonated most with you? What would it take to move from reconstruction to transformation?
Show Notes
Video
- Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib speaking at Israel at a Crossroads
Further Reading
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. “An Israeli Airstrike on Gaza Nearly Killed Me. But I Recognize Both Sides’ Trauma.” Haaretz (April 30, 2017)
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. “The Case for Pragmatism” The Atlantic (March 15, 2025)
Dahlia Scheindlin. “Is Prominent Hamas Critic Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib a Palestinian Prophet or a Voice in the Wind?” Haaretz (May 5, 2025)
Transcript
Ellie Gettinger
Welcome to Expanding the Conversation, a podcast series that brings the Jewish Theological Seminary to you. The series focuses on the messages that emerge from Israel at a crossroads navigating religion, democracy and justice. A Convening that took place at JTS in April 2025. I’m Ellie Gettinger, director of outreach for the Center for Lifelong Learning, and I will be curating the series, which will highlight key messages from the convening itself with insights from our panelists that were recorded separately.
In this episode, I talk with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council. He spoke in this session, “Collective Trauma as Drivers of Conflict among Israelis and Palestinians.” In this session, he addressed his personal trauma growing up in Gaza and reflected the communal trauma, citing the scope of violence his family had experienced since the war began in Gaza.
As a warning. This episode includes in stark descriptions of death and violence.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Two things real quick: First is that I am not a trained psychologist, nor am I coming at this from an official lens. I am coming at this as an average individual with speaking from a background that steeped in lived experience growing up in Gaza, having had family in Gaza that suffered immensely during this current war and lost immensely.
And number two is that I’m speaking for myself. I have never once claimed to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people or speaking for them or above them. And I would encourage you to be very wary of anybody who claims to speak for the Palestinian people, even if they have a group or they have an organization.
My unusual lived experience was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it created a kind of physical end point for the trauma. The curse is that it didn’t actually end that for my family and loved ones. And what do I mean by that? So I’m 34. I feel like I’m 64 and a 34 year old body. I came to the United States when I was 15.
I came here in 2005 as a 15-year-old exchange student with a State Department program. It was a one-year high school exchange, live with a host family, and then go back to your respective homelands and build cultural bridges. It was a post-9/11 initiative to repair some of the damage, if you will, from 9/11. But upon completing the program, I was stuck in Egypt, unable to go into Gaza when Hamas abducted Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, and that resulted in a border closure.
Hamas had already won the infamous 2006 elections. And then there was a mini war after Gilad Shalit. And then I was in Egypt and came back to the United States. Thanks to the support of allies and human rights and peace activists and applied for and received political asylum status. And the very day of my asylum interview was June 14, 2007, which is the very day that Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip and ejected the Palestinian Authority while I was in the Gaza Strip.
You know, I grew up with the very, very ubiquitously taught sense of collective trauma when it comes to the Nakba, when it comes to the sense of displacement, when it comes to the idea that we are displaced, dispossessed people that have been wronged by the Arabs, by the Ottomans, then by the Brits, then by the Arabs and Muslims, then by the Israelis, then by our own leadership.
And there was a crossroads, if you will, with the Palestinian Authority. I experienced the tail end of Oslo in the nineties where we ditched the Egyptian travel documents. Gaza had a short-lived airport that I flew into in ‘99 and in 2000 we had an ID card. So there was like collective trauma was gradually giving way to a sense of collective sovereignty.
We were sovereign, we were here, we had IDs. We had slight control of our destiny, of our territories. And then unfortunately, in Camp David in 2000, things didn’t work out too well. When Arafat walked away from that. The second intifada, the militarization of the second intifada, then that was the first experience, I would say for me viscerally for me of direct physiological trauma.
There were multiple horrendous experience. But one particular near-death experience that planted the seed for me to leave the Gaza Strip was in 2001. It was actually two months after 9/11 at the age of 11. In 2001, when I was going home from school with some friends and happened to pass by in a building that was hit by an air strike.
And I’ve actually written about this in Haaretz and Times of Israel that actually mattered to me to be able to talk about it to in Israeli Jewish audience the selection of Haaretz as a vehicle to publicly talk about that experience as part of the pursuit of healing was very deliberate. And so so it killed two of my friends and rendered me largely deaf in my left ear.
That’s why I tend to yell. I can’t hear myself. And the concussive blast from the wave caused me a TBI on my left side. And it was then that I really was determined to get out of Gaza. And I turned to English as a tool to try and maximize my opportunities to leave the coastal enclave. And thankfully, four years later, I was able to depart.
So again, that was a physical endpoint to my own trauma. But my family, I have two brothers, two sisters. My father who passed away five years ago. He was an UNRWA director. He was a doctor. The Jabalya refugee camp up north. My oldest brother is currently in Gaza. He runs a British medical NGO. My baby sister left Gaza in 2016.
She’s in Jerusalem. She’s a cancer researcher and I have a sister in the UAE and my middle brother, he was a doctor for UNRWA. He ran the beach camp and he left and went over to Germany like one year before October 7th. I mean, they experienced the collapse of Gaza basically under Hamas’s rise with all the wars, with the blockade, with all the restrictions, with the poverty, with the horrendous degradation of the quality of life, the worsening of not just the conditions, but basically the stalemate that hit the Palestinian national project as a whole and all the associated trauma that became ten x, what it was when I lived there.
So these competing tracks where I worked on myself when I came here, my U.S. host mother was a former Catholic nun turned Buddhist atheist guru. She was very San Francisco. She was the oldest of 14 from Louisville, Kentucky. But it was it was wonderful for me in this. I mean, I was I grew up in a very devout Muslim family.
You know, I’m spiritual about Islam, but I’m not I’m certainly not very ritualistic in my commitment to Islam. And so I learned meditation. I learned that Buddhism is actually a philosophy and that you don’t. So that helped me in addition to therapy, in addition to Zoloft, in addition to everything else in addressing my trauma as my family’s trauma was worsening.
Ellie Gettinger
In listening to your talk, you know, it’s clear that you’re coming. You have this perspective. You understand the trauma of the Palestinian people, of your family. You’ve been there, and at the same time, you have this kind of sense of there middle grounds to be had. This is you know, and I’m not saying that they’re not other people with this perspective, but it seems like in this moment of super divided life that there’s not much in the world of the middle. So where do you find spaces of comfort and how do you build more middle grounds?
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
You’re very perceptive to ask that because that is basically my raison d’être right now is to and that’s the beauty. And the challenge of it is to create that space. It ultimately doesn’t exist precisely because it’s sexy to be on either end of the spectrum. Within one’s camp, within a particular issue, within the pro-Palestine camp, unfortunately, there is enforced conform any and forced cohesion when it comes to issues around the war, around Hamas and opposition to Hamas’s terrorism. October 7th, the practices of the organization right now, the decisions not to accept earlier conditions for the cease fire, for the end of the war, for the release of the hostages. I have tried regularly to operate within a lot of these traditional off the shelf pro-Palestine spaces, if you will.
I consider myself pro-Palestine, and to me, being pro-Palestine is something that should entail a lot more than just being anti-Israel. I want us to be defined by what we stand for, what we’re for more than what we’re against.
On the other hand, with the pro-Israel spaces, there is definitely an interest in a lot of my anti Hamas messaging. It was definitely an interest in a Palestinian who is self engaging in self-critique. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of the current government as it relates to the war, when it comes to speaking about the casualties in Gaza and how even if you want to weaken Hamas, the current strategy isn’t going to cut it. This is not working.
This is wrong with what happened with my family that quickly turns into, well, now you’re just you’ve outlived your usefulness and we don’t have any space for you here. And quite frankly, I have no interest in operating in a quote unquote, purely pro-Israel space. So I’ve been really invested in creating something in the middle, a third way, if you will, a third space that can be inviting of folks from both camps, the pros from both sides who want to see the humanity of both Palestinians and Israelis, who want to build a new discourse that is steeped in and mutual empathy and kindness, who want to acknowledge the reality of multiple truths beyond maximalism, beyond overly simplistic narratives, black and white reductionist views that really don’t help either people
Ellie Gettinger
Returning to his talk. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib talked about what he was noticing in Gaza before October 7th.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
And unfortunately, I was volunteering, helping young people in Gaza learn English, helping young people try to develop computer skills, try to develop something to avoid radicalization. And I saw what was happening in Gaza.
I saw people turning to what little options they had. And it was sad and it was heartbreaking. Fast forward to October 7, and unfortunately, as soon as the disaster started unfolding, I immediately knew that Gaza as we knew it would cease to exist and that my family, like millions of people in the Gaza Strip, would pay a heavy price for Hamas’s suicidal nihilism.
I had been tracking different developments in the lead up to October 7th that made me concerned about Hamas trying to sabotage the prospects of Saudi Israeli normalization, about the fact that Hamas was actually their popularity was in the toilet and their popularity. There were mass protests against them. In July and August of 2023. The unemployment was 70% for youth, 8 hours of electricity a day, horrendous suffering.
And still, Gaza was a beautiful place that meant so much to its people that did not need to be destroyed at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I was horrified by not just Hamas’s actions, but by the traumatizing of the communities all around Gaza. The kibbutzim, that like the stories that you hear of folks in in Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Nahal Oz and all those areas helping out the Gazans with cancer patients and whatever.
That’s not some Ha’aretz propaganda that was actually like my dad, who UNRWA did nothing for him when he was sick and he was getting treatment entirely for free at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and folks from Kibbutz Be’eri were helping him out for free, entirely, selflessly. And Kibbutz, Be’eri was one of the worst hit by Hamas’s violent, horrendous attack.
And so for me, it was there was just so much hurt in terms of trauma. One of the things that I wanted to do that was different is that I wanted to connect with survivors and their families and families of hostages as a way to build bridges, to say, I’m terribly sorry for what happened to your loved one, to be that one Gazan voice, that certainly, while it’s not my responsibility per say, I did feel a sense of a broader collective responsibility, even as I was furious at the fact that the war, just as I had predicted, ended up killing dozens of my immediate and extended family members, my childhood homes.
But two of them were destroyed in Gaza City up north. My brother that I told you about is in Gaza right now. I took my mom and his wife and four children out on October 13th. Our family home was destroyed and my brother was in the house when it was hit and he and his wife and four children pushed their way out of the rubble.
My uncle Riad was my dad’s youngest brother was was killed and he spoke perfect Hebrew. He used to work in Israel. My 12-year-old niece was killed. Farah, She was survived by her twin identical twin. who was badly disabled. My cousin is from my uncles, my first cousin, my uncle, my dad’s niece. She was thrown out of the building, a concrete slab fell on her, crushed her, and turned her into a quadriplegic. And she survived that. And then on December 14th, 2023, a massive Israeli airstrike in Rafah before the invasion of Rafah, killed 29 of my mom’s family.
My second home wiped out, all of my aunts and uncles and that home destroyed that house. The New York Times, Amnesty International, Foreign Policy. All the investigations and high profile pieces. And asked the IDF asked the Israeli military, I gave them coordinates. I gave them times. I gave them like everything said, just did you know why was this hit? And the Israeli military had no answers whatsoever, despite the fact that I had been ferociously anti-Hamas through and through and remain so to this very day.
I was at a crossroads trauma-wise and decided that, you know, trauma-wise and when it comes to my commitment to peace, my commitment to healing and reconciliation, and that’s no kumbaya, this is hard work. This takes a daily commitment to this ethos to not give up and to lead by example, because you have an entire population in the Gaza Strip right now that are completely, horrendously traumatized at every conceivable level.
If just 1% of this population was incited to seek revenge, we are screwed. There will never be peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Our work is cut out for us in terms of how are we going to sustainably absorb some of those energies, work with some of the grievances. Forget we’re talking about historical traumas and the Nakba. I mean, numerically speaking, over 2 million people were displaced internally in this in a way that far surpasses the numbers of the Nakba.
Ten years ago, I tried to build an internationally-run Israeli approved airfield in Gaza to facilitate the freedom of movement in and out of Gaza. Because part of my series of change for Gaza and how do you de-radicalize is Gaza’s always been isolated, always stuck between, has like an unhealthy codependency on Israel and Egypt to get in and out.
But anyway, what that experience did was I developed an army of volunteers and informants and allies and people on the ground. And what they’re telling me right now is the amount, the abuse that the children are experiencing, both physical in terms of beatings, the sexual abuse that the children, the displaced children are experiencing, the children who are regularly separated from their family members and have to sell, beg, go fetch food, go fetch water, etc., Again, in a war zone with no adult supervision, completely vulnerable to exploitation.
Number two, Secretary Blinken came to the Atlantic Council, where I work on his second to last day and gave that speech where he infamously said, Have we assessed that Hamas has been able to recruit as many fighters as it has lost during the war? Now, you look at a lot of the images. Those fighters look like a bunch of children.
I literally looked at dozens and dozens of hours, but there’s this trauma, this untreated trauma in a society that has historically been very reluctant to dealing with mental health and been told, you don’t need no Zoloft or pill or therapy, just say a couple of prayers. So we have our work cut out for us in understanding this from a clinical point of view and then feeding that understanding into a comprehensive political plan for addressing the Gaza in the day after.
What’s interesting is that there is an entire dynamic in the diaspora that I understand why our folks are having a hard time in the land. There’s a war, there’s suffering, there are hostages. I am willing to understand why it’s difficult, even though I understand that there are actually conversations still happening. The thing that’s frustrating for me is that those of us who have let’s just call it diaspora slash Western privilege and safety here and are creating all of these unnecessary barriers to having these conversations such that we can build up these resources for our respective peoples.
That’s the part that really gets me, especially on the Palestinian side and the number of times I’ve been in conversations where I have attempted to create said spaces. Let me just speak on the Palestinian side. I’ve had U.S. officials in Washington. That’s where I live, where like I want to be briefed by Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans and Muslim Americans.
I want to hear the raw story of what’s happening in Gaza. And I want and this was more true with the last administration. No offense to fans of the current administration. That’s fine. You know, I’m I’m nonpartisan I’m bipartisan. But he was like, I can’t have people yell at me every time. I would try to have folks brief me.
They would yell at me. Second of all, every other word would be genocide, this Zionist, that. And third of all, like the only policy recommendation that existed was cut off all funding to Israel. And he’s like, that’s not a tenable policy recommendation. He’s like, Tell me, allocate this funding for one, two, three, four, five for this medical clinic.
And yours truly was a key player in pushing for the establishment of the food drops and the maritime corridor. And I had some of the most ferocious attacks against me as a Zionist sellout traitor or whatever because of that work. But what folks didn’t understand is that there was a much bigger play here, which is that Gaza’s airspace went from being, sorry I’m deviating I’m going to come back to this, I promise. There was that the airspace over Gaza went from being under the exclusive control of the Israeli airspace for over 24 years to all of a sudden we had the air forces of ten different countries operating freely over Gaza, I mean, in full coordination with Israel. But I humbly was able to prove that if you coordinate with Israel, all the relevant security matters, Gaza’s airspace and Gaza’s territorial waters can be open for business.
So that’s what I’m desperately trying to get the folks in the diaspora to do with a whole host of other issues, including but not limited to mental health issues, the think tank world. Do you know that most wealthy Arab and Palestinian Americans don’t have a clue what a lot of think tanks do in Washington? They complain about AIPAC, they complain about the ADL, they complain, complain, complain.
And I’m like, okay, I’m at the Atlantic Council. Let’s set up a program at the Wilson Center, at this, at that, and come up with policy recommendations. Start designing programs, start designing specific things that help Gaza, that help the youth, that de-radicalize our youth, that do one, two, three, four. So that’s the thing that frustrates me the most.
Ellie Gettinger
In our conversation, we talked more about frustrations and anxieties in the current political landscape.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
There are going to be multiple parties in Gaza and potentially in the current Israeli government that might want to keep some form of a low intensity war going on in perpetuity. And that would be a disaster because it would keep not just that the suffering ongoing, but it would keep all the associated incitement abroad, all the hate, all the anti-Semitism, all the crazy protest.
All the strain on Israel’s economy, all the strain on the Palestinian economy, all the checkpoints, all the risks for terrorism, all the settler violence in the West Bank, all of that would be bolstered and enabled by the sustainment of the war in Gaza. And it is my hope that inshallah, that does not happen.
Ellie Gettinger
What does a lasting peace or cohabitation look like for people of Gaza? And what does that feel like in terms of your sense of Israeli security? You have a sense that you have a vision of what you want to see. I want your vision?
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Certainly. First of all, I’m totally fine to acknowledge that there may very well be a need for separation between the two people and like where relevant and possible and necessary, they’ll be cooperation and needs to be cooperation as it relates to security where necessary.
There will also be separation between the two. Like I don’t think we should seek forced cohabitation between the two beyond just Gaza, no longer forming any kind of a threat to its Israeli neighbors after this horrendous experience in the Gaza Strip, after the horror, the suffering, the hunger. No one in Gaza, including even remnants of Hamas, are going to be thinking about war or conflict any time soon for a long, long, long time.
My interest, however, isn’t just in reconstructing Gaza, which is necessary. I want to transform Gaza. I want to reconstitute Gaza. Gaza has been reconstructed three or four times already over the last 20 years. This is not a good use of resources to rebuild it, only for Hamas to be lingering somewhere in the background and unilaterally be able to effectuate the decision to launch a war or to launch conflict.
What I want to see Gaza transformed into is a semi-autonomous zone that is part of the umbrella of a future Palestinian state. And what I mean by semi-autonomous is that I don’t know that the future of Gaza is going to entail a government in Ramallah. Gaza is geographically separated from the West Bank and it needs to be politically and administratively separated, even though they should ultimately be connected one way or another.
And they should be a part of like some kind of a federal system. But I want Gaza to become the pride and joy of the Palestinian people. I want Gaza to benefit from its location overlooking the Mediterranean to be a kind of an opening for the Palestinian people to the rest of the world. I want Gaza to benefit from the small gas field that it has to supply itself and potentially the West Bank with gas for a power generation plant.
I want Gaza to have connectivity with the outside world through an artificial peninsula. This is a project that I’m working on to take all the rubble from throughout the Gaza Strip and dump it off the coast, off the central coast, and build a small airstrip and a small seaport there. Open Gaza up to the outside world to break its codependency on Israel and Egypt.
Of course, there will be coordination and and collaboration with Israel and Egypt. I want Gaza to be semi-autonomous and completely capable of standing on its own without the aid dependency that Hamas has created on the United Nations and the NGO industrial complex. And without the need for handouts from the international community. I want to put Gaza’s most precious asset, which are its people, its younger people.
I want to put them to work. I want to put them to something productive and constructive. That’s my vision for Gaza.
Ellie Gettinger
Thank you so much for your time. One of the themes that Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib returned to is the difficulty of finding space for productive conversations. He addressed the baggage that prevents discourse on the Palestinian side. It’s important for us to consider what are the barriers that the Jewish community has constructed that limits dialogue.
Thank you for listening. This audio was recorded at the JTS Convening, Israel at a Crossroads. I hope you will expand this conversation, sharing your concerns and questions, and maybe this podcast with friends and family members. If you want to see complete footage of this session or of any of the sessions of the meeting, Israel at a Crossroads.
You can find a link on our website jtsa.edu/podcasts. Look for the “Expanding the Conversation” icon. Each episode includes discussion questions for individuals or groups to consider and links to our speakers, organizations and publications. If you would like to attend a Convening, you can find information about our upcoming programs at jtsa.edu/convenings
I’m Ellie Gettinger, director of Outreach for JTS. This podcast was produced by me with technical support from Chris Hickey, director of New Media. This is a production of the Jewish Theological Seminary. No part of this podcast may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The views expressed here in may not be those of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
