Yousef Bashir remembers the blue sky that day. As he lay in the back seat of the car, an Israeli soldier’s bullet lodged in his back, he stared up and out of the window at the sky, wondering whether it would be his last time seeing it.

By that time in 2004, Bashir’s family’s home in the Gaza Strip had been occupied for four years by Israeli soldiers, who had converted it into a military post. The Palestinian Muslim family could have moved, like so many of their neighbors did, but Bashir’s father refused. If he left, they would probably never get their house back. So they stayed, confined to a small area of their home and unable to venture upstairs and required to ask permission to use their own kitchen and bathroom.

For Bashir’s father, this small act of peaceful defiance was a lesson to his children that the Israelis and Palestinians could coexist. No matter how uncomfortable or unfair it seemed, Bashir’s father preached tolerance. Even when his 15-year-old son was shot, an injury that would require 16 months of rehabilitation and leave him forever with piercing pain from the bullet still inside him, Bashir’s father taught love...READ MORE