Palestine and Israel: Understanding Encounters

By Max L. Carter. Barclay Press, 2025. 320 pages. $30/paperback.

North Carolina Quaker Max Carter once quipped, “It is an ‘in joke’ among those familiar with the complexities of Middle East politics that those who spend a week in Palestine–Israel return to write a book.”

In Carter’s case, however, he has lived, worked, and traveled in Palestine–Israel for decades and has written three important books on the topic. The first was Palestine and Israel: A Personal Encounter, which covers his two years of teaching at Ramallah Friends School in the early 1970s and his observations while leading many service learning trips to the Holy Land every year from the early 1990s through 2005. His next book, coauthored with two cousins, Annice Carter’s Life of Quaker Service, includes a focus on his great-aunt’s work as an educator at Ramallah Friends School under the British Mandate in the 1920s and ’30s.

Carter’s latest book, Palestine and Israel: Understanding Encounters, offers detailed reflections on the annual service learning trips that he and his wife, Jane Carter, co-led from 2006 through 2019: for Guilford College students in January and for Friends United Meeting (FUM) every summer. As a participant in the FUM service learning trip in 2023, I was eager to read Carter’s reflections on these earlier trips where participants traveled, as we did, throughout the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israel and spoke with politicians, peace and human rights activists, religious leaders, business people, kibbutzim, journalists, educators, students, former combatants, and everyday Palestinian families.

Like his other books, this one is well-written and insightful—and sometimes even funny. While there is some variation in details between the different groups that Max and Jane have taken to Palestine–Israel, there is a lot of similarity in the itineraries that are recounted in chronological order. Yet the book does not feel overly repetitive because each of the people visited is speaking at a different point in time and about the historic challenges faced at a particular moment.

This allows for a lot of historical perspective to be shared in the form of a colorful travelogue by an experienced and astute observer. The oppressive and deteriorating human rights conditions over time are very evident. So is the evolving thought of different actors on how the people of Palestine–Israel might achieve peace, justice, equality, and self-determination for all, breaking from the U.S.-backed, single-state, apartheid system that has been in place for decades.

I found the historic background embedded in Carter’s travelogues to be especially helpful in understanding the horrific violent attack on southern Israel by the military wing of Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the much more massive and ongoing assault against the 2.2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza by the State of Israel ever since—and now increasingly in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The book makes clear that this two-year-old explosion of mass violence in Palestine–Israel has roots that predate October 7. It also suggests that our goal as peacemakers cannot be to return to the oppressive, but less obviously violent, status quo of October 6.

Importantly, Carter describes his many encounters with ordinary Palestinians and Israelis who are seeking a different future, peace and justice activists who envision a new reality where all Palestinians and Israelis can live together in equality and security and with full human rights for all. These people are the seeds of long-term hope for the region, and they break the standard tropes and stereotypes of Israelis and Palestinians all too common in the U.S. media for decades. Yet, as many of these same peace and human rights activists explained to Carter’s delegations, they cannot achieve their visionary goals on their own.

According to these activists, such a profound transformation will require those of us outside of Palestine–Israel to also engage in discernment and political education; humanitarian assistance; lobbying and advocating for a just peace; and various forms of nonviolent resistance, particularly nonviolent boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns, as was done to end apartheid in South Africa. These global campaigns, they say, need to be directed against corporations that profit from Israel’s military occupation and apartheid policies against Palestinians, as well as Western governments like the United States that enable these extreme violations of basic human rights and international law through diplomatic cover at the UN, massive offensive military weapons aid, and promoting false or incomplete narratives about the region.

All these urgent requests from people of good will living in Palestine–Israel come through loud and clear in the pages of Carter’s new book. The effect is both sobering and challenging. It is simply not enough to leave all this to the professional staff of Friends Committee on National Legislation or American Friends Service Committee. I thank Max Carter for reminding us of our own moral responsibilities as faith-based peace and justice activists.

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Steve Chase is a member of Friends Meeting of Washington (D.C.) and involved with the Quaker Affinity Group of the Apartheid-Free Communities initiative. He is also the author of the Pendle Hill pamphlet Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions? A Quaker Zionist Rethinks Palestinian Rights, and he is the interviewee in the QuakerSpeak video entitled “Moving Closer to a Beloved Community: A Quaker Rethinks Israel–Palestine.”