By Jen Marlowe and Sami Al Jundi
As a teenager, Sami Al Jundi had one ambition: overthrowing Israeli occupation. With two friends he formed a militant cell and began building a bomb to use against the Israeli police. But their plans were derailed when the bomb exploded prematurely, killing one of his friends. Al Jundi was sentenced to ten years in prison.
The Hour of Sunlight describes Al Jundi’s extraordinary metamorphosis from a militant to a passionate advocate of nonviolence and peaceful reconciliation. Born to a family of Palestinian refugees in the Old City of Jerusalem, Al Jundi was only five years old when Israeli soldiers took over his home after the 1967 war. His parents refused to relocate to a massive refugee camp, beginning life again as refugees in another part of the Old City. In moving detail Sami describes how these and other realities (and indignities) of his early years caused his radicalization.
Following his arrest, Al Jundi was bound and tortured for weeks by the Israeli General Security Service before beginning his ten-year prison sentence. Ironically it was in an Israeli jail that his personal transformation began: Al Jundi was welcomed into a highly organized, democratic community of political prisoners who required that members of their cell read, engage in political discourse on topics ranging from global revolutions to Russian literature.
In the prison library Al Jundi found a book on Mahatma Gandhi. He was struck by one story in particular—a Hindu man who had murdered a Muslim baby came to Gandhi seeking repentance. Gandhi told him that there was one way that he could find peace again; he must raise a Muslim orphan for twenty years. It took two decades to build a life, Al Jundi reflected, but only seconds to destroy one.
Al Jundi left prison still determined to fight for his people’s rights—but with a very different notion of how to undertake that struggle. He discovered the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, and later became supervisor of an Israeli-Palestinian coexistence center in Jerusalem. He kept his faith in reconciliation alive through the most difficult times, remaining determined to inspire a new generation to follow the path of peace and nonviolence.
The Hour of Sunlight, co-authored by Jen Marlowe, Al Jundi’s former colleague and author of Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival, offers a perspective that is sorely missing from the mainstream media’s portrayal of Palestinians. Marked by honesty, humor, pain, and, ultimately, compassion for all Palestinians and Israelis, The Hour of Sunlight charts an inspiring journey of perseverance and personal transformation. In so doing it illuminates the Palestinian experience through the story of one man's impassioned struggle for Middle East peace.
