Musalaha, meaning “reconciliation” in Arabic, is a faith-based organization that teaches, trains, and facilitates reconciliation between diverse ethnic, religious, and social groups, drawing on biblical principles and indigenous practices to pursue joint liberation and redemption through nonviolent co-resistance. You can find out more about the work of Musalaha here https://musalaha.org/

This is a quite moving report from one of their interns. 

In one week, I will have completed two years of interning with Musalaha. I find this interesting timing, because the theme for the present forward is fatigue, allowing for some space to reflect.

It has been over three weeks since the ceasefire was declared between the US, Israel and Iran. It feels strange to even write that, because it does not feel like a ceasefire. I mistake the sound of motorbikes for sirens, a garbage truck for an explosion, and my sleep feels anything but normal, and that doesn’t even take into account the actual ceasefire violations.

And yet, I find myself thinking that it has been just over 200 days since the ceasefire was declared in Gaza, and how Gazans are processing their “ceasefire.”

I often hear that we should not compare suffering. I agree. But that doesn’t mean I can stop thinking like this. How are the people in Khan Younis? Jabalia? Gaza City? Al-Mawasi? The list goes on… Are they thirsty? Are they hungry? It keeps me up at night.

It really does feel like our world is groaning, and we’re tired. I’m tired.

In such an environment, the work of reconciliation can feel a bit like building sandcastles. Just when everything feels like it is coming together, the tide rolls in and you’re back to square one.

The tides of this moment are not simply a lack of sleep, but structural economic, political, societal, historical, and more. And with this, we can be tempted into moral and compassion fatigue, where the loss of life drifts from names to statistics.

The exhaustion that so many experience is not accidental but produced. It emerges from a structure designed to manage, fragment, and wear down a population over time. I also find that this fatigue is temporal in nature; it is, in many ways, the colonization of time itself. Life becomes organized around waiting; waiting at checkpoints, waiting for permits, waiting for ceasefires.

Time is no longer something that can be freely inhabited or planned. Instead, it is controlled and delayed. The future becomes uncertain, and over time, this creates a deep form of exhaustion, not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually.

This can lead, if we allow it, to a slow but steady exhaustion, and if we’re not careful, even despair.

Such exhaustion can have us, or at least me, crying out, “Where are you, God?” You came and reconciled humanity to yourself, and we’re here as ambassadors of reconciliation, trying to do this reconciliation work, but where are you?

And the thing is… if we’re willing to listen, I see God. Not in the noise, not in the headlines, not in declarations of ceasefires that do not feel like peace, but in the quiet, costly, and often unseen acts of Musalaha.

I have observed our team model resilience. Yes, I have been here for two years now, but I am stepping into what is a lifelong lived reality for the Musalaha staff. And what I have learned from our team, is that when violence is suffocating, when darkness is all-consuming, the best way to cling to our humanity is by insisting on seeing it in the Other. Musalaha has shown me, in the truest sense of the word, what it means to be an ambassador of reconciliation, even when we’re tired.

For example, last week, someone very dear to our team was physically assaulted at a checkpoint while traveling between Bethlehem and Ramallah. That same weekend, one of our Israeli-Palestinian groups met to continue the reconciliation process.

How do you move from Thursday; having someone you love assaulted, and then, on Friday, choose to sit across from the “other” and begin again? There is no easy answer to that. It is not natural. It is not simple. It is not even, at times, desirable. And yet, it happens.

That courage, that endurance, that willingness to extend a hand when every instinct might say to withdraw, in that, I see God at work. In the relentless pursuit of not letting go of the humanity of the Other. In the refusal to allow violence to have the final word.

So yes, we are tired. Deeply tired. But this is not a fatigue that leads to surrender. It is a fatigue that reveals what we truly believe. Because to continue in reconciliation when exhausted is to declare, with our lives, that the humanity of the Other still matters, that peace is still worth pursuing, and that God has not abandoned this work.

We continue not because we are strong, but because we must. Because the alternative is unthinkable. Because we have been entrusted with a message and a ministry of reconciliation, and even in our weariness, that calling remains.

And so, in the midst of fatigue, we do not stop. We slow down. We grieve. We lament. But we do not let go. Because even here, especially here, God is still at work.

J. Musalaha Intern