A few months after Israeli soldiers deported the men of his village, 9-year-old Elias Chacour climbed the hills of Galilee to talk to his friend and champion, Jesus.

He imagined Jesus at the Mount of Beatitudes and contemplated what Jesus' words meant. "Do you want us to be your lips and hands and feet-as Mother prays-to bring peace again? If that's true, you can use my hands and feet. Even my tongue," Chacour remembers in his book Blood Brothers (Chosen Books).

 Chacour's prayers were answered. Not only did his father and brothers return, but over the course of Chacour's life, he has used his hands, feet, and admittedly "fiery" tongue to try to create peace.

The three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize has traveled the world to speak about the treatment of Palestinians. As archbishop of the Eastern-rite Melkite Catholic community, an Israeli citizen, and a Palestinian, his words carry weight. He says what people often don't want to hear-criticizing Israeli policies, clarifying Western misconceptions, and openly sharing his story.

His story begins in the Christian village of Biram, where his family had lived since the 16th century. Chacour traveled as far as Paris to study for the priesthood, but returned to Galilee to become a pastor.

There he recognized the lack of educational opportunities for Palestinians of all faiths and eventually started the Mar Elias Educational Institutions. The schools now give about 4,500 Muslim, Christian, and Jewish students hope for the future, teaching them to use their own hands, feet, and tongues to work for peace.

What first motivated you to dedicate your life to peace and reconciliation?
I asked myself what the alternative to hatred would be. Hatred would lead us all to a catastrophe. We would become monsters if we allowed hatred to fill our hearts. What is good for my community is life, not death. It is impossible to care for my own small Christian community without building quality relations with our neighbors-Muslims.

Muslims, I have understood from the very beginning, are my compatriots, my people, my nation. They suffered with me, and I suffered with them. We were deported together, deprived of our nationality; our land was confiscated. There's no Christian land and Muslim land; there's only Palestinian land. When the army comes to oppress us, they don't distinguish between Christians and Muslims. There are so many commonalities between Christian Arab minorities and Muslim Arab minorities inside Israel.

We cannot forget that we have been living with Islam since Muhammad. We have a popular saying, and it is our conviction: "We all believe in the one God, but our worship places are different." In religion, you cannot force anyone to believe in your faith, but you can expect them to respect you.

I also am concerned with getting to know the neighboring Jewish communities better. We need to make our reality known to our Jewish neighbors and eliminate these prejudices that a Jew is a soldier, an oppressor. And in the eyes of many Jews, Palestinians are no better than Jews are in the eyes of many Palestinians. In order to break away from these prejudices, we need to create opportunities for all of us to meet and look each other in the eyes. We can disagree, but we can disagree agreeably.

Do you feel that the school you started in Ibillin, Galilee, in which Christian, Jewish, and Muslim students meet and work together, has an impact on the larger community?
I don't fool myself. My school is a small school. What are 4,500 children in a big country, in a big Middle East? We don't have the ambition to convert anybody in Israel to our vision or to our religion, but we want to show everybody that to live together, respect diversity, and create unity is possible. We want to be a role model and, thank God, we have been very successful in doing that.

The Israeli prime minister's office and the Palestinian president's office know us, and they all wish that we might have more influence and success.

How do the students learn to get along with each other?
It's a huge adjustment, especially for the younger men and women who used to live in close-minded villages. Right away I noticed that the reaction of children who came from purely Christian villages was the same as that of children who came from Muslim-only villages. They were afraid of contacting each other. They needed to discover that they have the same aspirations, ambitions, imaginations, and feelings.

This was so clear the first time we received Jewish children in our school. I was scared because I had spent several months meeting with their parents to convince them that it would be good for them to be with us. When they arrived at the school, I sent all the students, Jewish and Palestinian, on a field trip.

When they came back in the evening, it seemed as if they forgot they were Israelis and Palestinians; Jews, Christians, and Muslims. They exchanged addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers. It was beautiful. I think we have to help students discover that young people in China are like young people in Chicago or in Nazareth or in Gaza.

It seems, at least from Western media reports, that martyrdom and extremism are attractive to Muslim young people. Is there a competition for the hearts of your young people?
Are you sure of that? We need to be careful not to fall into that trap of propaganda and of brainwashing. Islam does not accept or tolerate suicide bombers. A suicide bomber commits three crimes at the same time: a crime against God, a crime against himself, a crime against society. Both Christians and Muslims say that.

We must not tolerate suicide bombers, but we also need to go deeper and ask why there are suicide bombers. Are our Palestinian children born to love dying? Children 50 years ago never committed suicide, even though fanatical Islam existed then, too.

Suicide bombers come from the West Bank or Gaza, the occupied territories. They have been under occupation for more than 59 years, first under Jordan and Egypt, and then under Israel. Added to their deprivation and marginalization are the daily humiliations at checkpoints. I won't tell you the details about what happens there. In order to respect myself, I prefer to wash our dirty laundry together back in Israel.

But when these young people see their mother humiliated, their father beaten in front of them, they consider dying an achievement. It's putting an end to their humiliation. That has nothing to do with religion.

If the reply to suicide bombers, as I have told the Israeli prime minister, is to demolish their homes, to uproot their olive trees, to hunt their parents on the streets from a helicopter, this creates more suicide bombers.

The only reply should be to regenerate hope and meaning in the hearts of young people so they do not give up on life in order to stop the humiliation.

How do you regenerate hope for young Palestinian people?
First, we have to end the occupation. There are no two ways about it. Second, we have to let them circulate freely, at least in between their towns. Gaza, Hebron, Jericho have become huge prisons where people are not allowed to get out or in without passing through a military checkpoint.

We also have to give them an opportunity to have an education. The Gaza Strip is a tragedy, a shame on the face of humanity. One and a half million refugees are there because they have been deprived of their land, their homes. They were deported, kicked out, cleansed ethnically. They are left in that piece of desert with no freedom. For 59 years the only thing they can do freely is make children. And they make many children-smart, most beautiful children, but with no hope, no future.

I always have said to the students, "When you see me, give me a smile of hope. You are loved; you are expected to love us. You are expected to work together for a better future. Give me a smile of hope." We need to put smiles of hope on the faces of the children of Gaza and the West Bank. They need to know that they can laugh and that they are loved. Then no one would commit suicide. We are born to live, not to die.