Meet Sulaiman Khatib

I keep one leg in reality and one leg in the dream. That’s how I manage to move on

Sulaiman “Souli” Khatib’s peace work began in a place built to contain him. 

He grew up in Hizma, northeast of Jerusalem, in a Palestinian community deeply rooted in the land. He has described a childhood connected to orchards, mountains, sheep, olives, figs, and family land — a life of belonging shaped, from early on, by the pressures and humiliations of occupation. 

As a boy, Souli entered the struggle around him in the only ways he could see. At 14, after attacking Israeli soldiers, he was arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to many years in Israeli prison. What could have become only a story of bitterness became, over time, something more complex. 

Prison was brutal. It was also where Souli began to transform. He studied, learned Hebrew and English, and encountered histories he had not been taught to carry — including the Jewish story of fear, trauma, and survival. He read about Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, and began to understand nonviolence not as weakness, but as a form of power. For Souli, nonviolence became a way to resist occupation while refusing to let occupation decide the shape of his soul. 

After his release, Souli became one of the Palestinian co-founders of Combatants for Peace, a joint Palestinian-Israeli movement of former fighters who chose to lay down their weapons and work together through nonviolent action. Alongside Israeli former combatants, including Chen Alon, he helped build a movement rooted in a difficult and necessary truth: that liberation cannot be built by denying the humanity of the other, and reconciliation cannot be honest if it ignores the asymmetry between occupier and occupied. 

Souli’s book, In This Place Together: A Palestinian’s Journey to Collective Liberation, carries this vision into narrative form. It tells not only the story of one person’s transformation, but also the larger possibility of collective liberation — freedom, dignity, and security for Palestinians, and a future in which Israelis are freed from fear, domination, and endless war. 

For B8 of Hope, Souli’s story reflects the power of people who refuse to be defined only by what has been done to them or by what they once did. His work shows that nonviolence is not passivity. It is discipline, imagination, courage, and a demand that both peoples become more human by choosing another way.