Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo.
There's no Milo here.
Who picked up my son from school?
Streaming only on Peacock.
I'm going to need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
You don't understand.
It was just the five of us.
So this was all planned.
What are you going to do?
I will do whatever it takes to get my son back.
I honestly didn't see this coming.
These nice people killing each other.
All Her Fault, a new series streaming November 6th only on Peacock.
This is a matchup everybody wants to see.
Coverage begins at 7 p.m.
Eastern with football's best party, TNF Tonight, presented by Verizon.
Not a Prime member?
Not a problem.
Simply sign up for a 30-day free trial.
It's the Raiders and Broncos, Thursday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, only on Prime Video.
Restrictions apply.
See Amazon.com slash Amazon Prime for details.
Every story you love.
Every invention that moves you.
Every idea you wished was yours.
All began as nothing.
Just a blank page with a blinking cursor.
Asking a simple question.
What do you see?
Great ideas start on Mac.
Find out more on apple.com slash mac.
In the fall of 2023, a long-lived conflict in the Middle East came to a head in the most horrific way.
Israelis and Palestinians and people around the world woke up to a new, if not unfamiliar, reality.
Maya was one of them.
When October 7th happened, you know, I have a lot of friends still in Israel.
I spent my formative adult years in Israel.
I would say that my closest friends remained there.
And so I woke up in the middle of the night to my phone exploding with text messages that The first message she saw was from a close friend.
And it said, in case you wondered, I'm okay.
And this guy is very mellow, calm.
This is not a message I would get from him normally.
So I was like, oh my God, what's going on?
And I checked the news and I was just shocked.
I couldn't believe it.
That day, journalist Maya Guarneri knew the lives of her people and her Palestinian ex-husband's people would not be the same again.
And neither would their relationship.
From the Boston Globe, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
This season we've talked a lot about whether people can change, but what about the world or history?
How does what's happening in the world change us and our relationships?
Today's story is about that.
I want to hop right in.
Meet Maya.
She's a journalist whose family straddles the lines of conflict in the Middle East.
She married a Palestinian man and she's American Israeli.
So currently I'm working on my second book, which is a memoir about my love story.
I interviewed Maya as she was finishing this book, so she had a lot on her mind about her marriage and her family.
Maya was born in the U.S.
She was an only child and grew up with her mother and stepfather.
Her mom was Jewish, which was not the most common thing to be in Gainesville Florida, where Maya grew up.
When I tell people I grew up in Gainesville Florida, people are like oh, University of Florida Gators, it's so liberal there.
And I'm like, maybe the campus is an oasis of liberalism.
But Alachua County, make no mistake, is the deep south, OK?
Maya says she encountered what she calls casual anti-Semitism regularly as a child.
I grew up with people, you know, telling me that I should convert or I'd go to hell.
I wore a chai necklace when I was a little girl.
And people would look at the symbol, the chai, and they had no idea what it was.
They'd be like, why are you wearing a dog around your neck?
For those who don't know, the chai is a Hebrew symbol.
It means life.
Maya was actively aware of the presence of historic hate groups around town, even in the families of her peers.
And I had a friend in high school whose father actually was in the KKK.
My friend himself was a lovely, very non-racist, non-antisemitic person.
But when I visited that house, when I entered that house, I had to make sure that my chai was tucked in my shirt.
The father was not going to attack me physically, but I mean there were no Jews allowed in his house.
Maybe this is why, in her late 20s, after getting degrees and having a short marriage, Maya has this idea that she'll go somewhere where she won't be the only Jewish person around.
And that place is Israel.
And pretty quickly.
She's enjoying living in a place where she is surrounded by Jewish people for the first time in her life.
It's incredibly meaningful after her Florida experience.
From the moment I arrived, even before I arrived, there was a relief.
And I want to own it and say that I was conflicted about, you know, everything.
But there was this deep sense of relief I felt there.
People knew what my holidays were and celebrated them.
You know, no one told me I was going to hell for being Jewish.
And I was like oh, this is like what it means to be inside a community that accepts you, that understands you.
And that was very powerful for me.
As much as my politics run against the grain of the Israeli consensus, that feeling of belonging was very powerful.
Maya knows Israel has a complicated history that she wants to interrogate, but her plan is to do some good.
I went to Israel to volunteer.
The idea was that I would stay for 10 months.
And the volunteer program was oriented around social justice, around the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, which means world repair.
I had different options when I was signing up for the volunteer program.
I had chosen to volunteer in Jaffa helping Palestinian students actually at a Palestinian school in Jaffa with their English.
This becomes complicated, though.
She loves being in Israel.
She loves the unique Jewish culture there.
She's also watching people who aren't Israeli suffer, Palestinian people and others.
When I arrived to South Tel Aviv, the volunteer program made it mandatory that we visit all the different volunteer sites.
And in that process, I saw what was called a black market kindergarten in South Tel Aviv.
And it was a daycare that a woman was running in her home.
It was unlicensed.
It was horrific.
And these daycares were for migrant workers, really, and African asylum seekers.
And I was just shocked by what I saw and heartbroken.
And it's like I forgot about Jaffa and I forgot about, you know, teaching English to anyone.
And I was like, I'm going to volunteer in these daycares.
It's this experience that puts her on a career path.
I ended up making friends with a local woman who was a journalist.
And I mentioned to her the daycares.
And she said, oh, wow, that's an amazing story.
Can you write a pitch about that?
I said, what's a pitch?
And she said, oh, it's just a summary of the story.
I had no idea what anything was.
So she gave me her editor's email address, and I sent this pitch.
And he wanted me to write a kind of first person about volunteering in the kindergarten.
And then it snowballed from there.
Pretty soon, Maya's working all over the region.
I'd been working as a journalist for about four years at that time.
I'd been freelancing and I'd been making ends meet quite well as a freelancer for a number of years.
But then the Arab Spring had hit in early 2011, and work had dried up.
By 2011, Maya's identity is invested in living and working in Israel as a journalist.
And she finds this so meaningful.
But at this point, there is not enough work for writers like her.
There is no money.
But just as she's wondering if she should give everything up, she gets a writing gig, something for the Boston Review.
It's a story about the Palestinian bid for an upgrade at the United Nations.
The Boston Review isn't going to pay her for this story, but she figures.
The assignment is at least a way to stay in the game.
Just in case it's confusing, the Boston Review has no affiliation with the Boston Globe.
It's a quarterly American publication focused on politics and history analysis.
And so I went out to cover the story for the Boston Review and I went out there, you know, without my Arabic was quite rough, rough to non-existent.
You know, I would say that I was fluent in Hebrew at that time, but you can't walk around Ramallah interviewing people in Hebrew.
She crashes in Ramallah at a friend's house for the story.
His name is Joseph, and he's this American-Israeli journalist who'd left the States years prior.
They go out for drinks with friends at a local bar the night before her assignment.
It was around midnight and I'm standing there and it hit me.
I said, I need a translator.
I mean, because plenty of people in Ramallah speak English, right?
But for the sort of reporting I wanted to do, I wanted to go deeper.
I wanted to hear what you know people on the street thought about the bid for an upgrade at the UN, and not just the English speakers.
Joseph points to one of his friends who's in an outdoor garden space at this bar.
Magical twinkling lights outside.
It's a group of activists, expats, journalists.
The whole thing is quite a scene.
And he looked around and he said, oh, that guy over there, Muhammad, he's a fixer.
And I said, oh, okay, you know, and he led me around the circle and introduced us.
A fixer, basically an interpreter and a person who can help navigate the logistics of a story.
Maya's first impression of Muhammad is that he's calm and quiet, the foil to her outspoken and fiery personality.
She's instantly attracted to him.
But they immediately test each other's patience.
Mohamed and I pretty much had our first argument in that moment.
I told Mohamed, well, I'm out here doing this story and I need someone to help me translate.
And I was quite professional about it all.
I wasn't, you know, hello, how are you?
I think I was just straight into the business.
And I said, how much do you charge?
And he said, well, how much are they paying you?
And I was like, well, you know, that's neither here nor there.
You know, unwilling to admit that they were paying me nothing.
I'll pay your price regardless.
And he's like, are they, you know, are they paying you at all?
Are you doing this for free?
And I was like, well, you know.
And he said, well, if you work for free, I work for free, which was nice, right?
And no, but I insisted, no, I'm going to pay.
You know, I'm going to pay like anyone else.
And so we went back and forth.
Finally, I gave up.
I said, fine, I'm not going to pay.
So it was a chivalry argument, which is, you know.
From the get-go.
So the chivalrous Muhammad translates for Maya the next day.
They see each other again at an event months later, very briefly.
It's a full year later when they actually work together again.
So, you know, fast forward to fall of 2012.
I had gotten a job with Bard College teaching at Al-Quds University, which is in East Jerusalem.
Work had picked back up.
I was freelancing again for Al Jazeera English.
I was working on a story that I needed to go out to the West Bank for.
I needed a translator.
I was studying Arabic at that time actually, but my Arabic still wasn't quite good enough to do what I needed to do for this story.
So I reached out to Mohamed and I said, you know, are you willing to work with me for this story?
And it's for Al Jazeera English and I'm getting paid and this time I can pay you.
And he was like, yeah, sure, let's do it.
The story they were going to cover was a familiar one.
It was about Palestinian families that had been separated between the West Bank and Gaza.
And in the most setting of circumstances, I mean, the story sticks with both of us to this day.
There were a number of men and women, both who and there still probably are who had been born in Gaza right.
But were living in the West Bank.
And their ID cards had them, you know, as someone who had been born in Gaza.
Maybe their residency had not been updated yet.
Right.
And so they were living in the West Bank and they had been stopped at checkpoints.
You know, as Palestinians are going through oftentimes, internal checkpoints, not checkpoints that separate the Palestinians from Israeli areas, but checkpoints that stand inside of Palestinian areas and separate them, one Palestinian area from another.
So oftentimes these people were going through internal checkpoints.
A soldier happened to check IDs and they found IDs that said Gaza and not the West Bank.
So these people, many of whom were parents, had been picked up right and just arbitrarily sent to Gaza, you know, without getting to say goodbye to their families, in some cases.
And there was one story, a mother we interviewed by phone who was in Gaza.
She had been picked up from a checkpoint and deported immediately from the West Bank to Gaza, without time to say goodbye to her young children.
And one of the things that she shared with me, that stuck with me, that still sticks with me all these years, particularly now that I'm a mother, is every night in the West Bank when she was putting her children to sleep, she used to do this thing that she would measure their bodies with her hands and kind of make a joke.
Oh, how much have you grown today?
Let's see, mama will measure you with her hands.
And that was one of the things she talked about, you know, being in Gaza that she was unable to do.
I just, the tears were just streaming.
The story for Al Jazeera would not be the last of that sort that Maya covered in the region, but perhaps it was one of the most difficult.
It was a day of emotionally charged reporting, And while Maya was dealing with her own reactions to the heartbreaking stories, she couldn't help but notice something else.
I remember Muhammad's reactions, his empathy, his sadness, and I was quite moved.
Muhammad's reaction to the story, it makes Maya feel closer to him.
After we left that interview and we went out, we were on the edge of campus there waiting for a service back to the center of Ramallah.
It's so silly.
I'm still so embarrassed.
But like, it was like, you know, the golden hour, right?
And the light was coming and the light hit him a certain way.
And we just had this experience with this interview.
And it was like the moment that Cupid shot the arrow.
It like knocked the breath out of me.
Muhammad has these beautiful hazel eyes.
They call them asal, which means honey in Arabic.
So he has these like really kind of gorgeous eyes and the sun, you know, hit the eyes and they were.
It was just like oh,
Sounds like love, right?
But in this case, it's fraught.
Maya explains what happens next when we come back.
The holidays sneak up fast, but it's not too early to get your shopping done and actually have fun with it.
Uncommon Goods makes holiday shopping stress-free and joyful, with thousands of one-of-a-kind gifts you can't find anywhere else.
They're exactly what the name sounds like.
Unique products that feel personal.
Uncommon Goods has actually been a go-to for me, especially for friends who need something crafty and special.
I bought one friend a succulent clay craft kit to work on while he was recovering from a surgery, and I bought another friend a DIY Dream Library bookend kit to build when she had to be housebound for a bit.
Uncommon Goods really has something for everyone.
Parents, kids, teens, foodies, sports fans, gardeners, bookworms, you name it.
Shopping there feels like less of a chore and more of a treasure hunt.
And I love that when you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting small businesses and independent artists.
So shop early, have fun, and cross some names off your list today.
To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com slash loveletters.
That's uncommongoods.com slash loveletters for 15% off.
Don't miss out on this limited time offer.
Uncommon Goods.
We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
When cool, creamy ranch meets tangy, bold buffalo, the whole is greater than the sum of its sauce.
Say howdy, partner, to new Buffalo Ranch Sauce.
Only at McDonald's.
For a limited time.
At participating McDonald's.
We're back.
So Maya meets Muhammad, who translates for her and helps her on stories in the West Bank.
They have a strong connection.
But Maya is trying to resist it.
The problem is that she doesn't see how this will work with their very different backgrounds.
Mohammed grew up in Amman in Jordan because his father had been a member of the PLO.
The PLO, also known as the Palestine Liberation Organization.
When Mohammed was born in 1979, the PLO was still considered a terrorist organization by the U.S.
But to others in much of the Arab world, its members were considered freedom fighters.
Back to Mohammed's roots and where his family sits and lives in all of this conflict.
His father had been deported from the West Bank by the Israelis.
I guess he was engaged to his mother, to Mohammed's mother, and was deported.
And then Mohammed's mother followed him to Jordan.
Mohammed is the eldest of five.
When his parents found out they were having their first kid, their first thought was ID cards.
If Mohammed was born in Jordan, he wouldn't get a Palestinian ID card.
So his mother went back to the West Bank alone pregnant, returning to the village.
Both she and her husband were from the village of Sayyir.
And she gave birth there in Sayyir at her... husband's family home.
And so that way, Mohammed was able to be registered as a Palestinian resident of the West Bank and was able to get his ID, because Palestinians are always thinking about being able to return, being able to stay, being able to hold their own property, being able to pass that property on.
Bringing it back to the love story.
Obviously, Maya and Mohammed come from very different backgrounds, with a warring history.
I'd felt this attraction between us in September of 2011.
To be honest, I was quite fearful of this attraction on so many different levels.
I mean, one of them was like do I really want to fall in love with someone who lives on the other side of the wall?
You know, in the West Bank who's Palestinian?
And like, it wasn't about him being Palestinian.
It was about all the problems that would come with trying to have that sort of a relationship.
They're both reluctant to get involved, but they keep working together.
And then, early in 2013, they work on another story.
After we finished our reporting we went to have a bite to eat and he kind of took the bull by the horns.
And he said look, you know, there are all these awkward pauses between us because we like each other.
And I played coy, and I was like, I don't really know what you're talking about, you know.
And he was like, you know, let's try this out, you know, let's try it out.
And he said, but I'm not optimistic it's going to work.
And, you know, a big part of it had to do with his family.
They start dating.
The logistics are not easy.
Over time, Mohammed visits Maya in multiple places where she finds housing, all of which require him going through checkpoints.
The vibe of these checkpoints is not safe for Mohammed.
Anything can happen.
There's this threat of being detained for no reason.
It's not easy on him.
But at the same time, they're falling in love.
And after a while, they really want to take next steps.
So by December of 2013, we'd been dating for almost a year, which in that culture is like an eternity, you know.
And so we were talking about that we wanted to get married.
He was quite apprehensive about introducing me to his parents.
And he kind of kept postponing and postponing.
I increasingly felt like, OK, I've pretty much moved out to the West Bank for this guy.
And it's not always comfortable to live out here, as an American Israeli, you know, or particularly as an Israeli.
It's definitely not comfortable for Palestinians.
And I don't want to say that my discomfort was greater than theirs.
I had a lot of privilege. more or less moved freely.
But however, yeah, it was like, well, what are we doing here?
So in January, he said, okay, I'm going to take you home to meet my parents.
We're going to get engaged and get married.
And then finally, we had a date set that I was supposed to actually go to his parents' house for lunch after teaching one day.
I was going to ride straight from Abu Dis to Ramallah and go to his parents' house and they would host me.
And the day before the big meeting, I
I called him and I said, well, you know, are we still on for tomorrow?
And he said yes at first.
And then he said, actually, no.
And I said, oh, OK, what happened?
And he said, well, my father started asking me questions.
Mohammed is the eldest son.
That's an important thing to be if you're Palestinian.
His father wanted to know more about this potential future daughter-in-law.
But Muhammad knew he had to introduce the idea of him marrying a secular Jewish American, Israeli very gently.
His strategy was like I'm not going to tell them a lot about her because I know they're going to love her if they meet her.
So his idea was like, I'm going to bring her home.
They're going to fall in love with her.
And then later, I'm going to be like, surprise, mom and dad, she's a Jew, right?
So he felt that if they fell in love with me first, they would accept the fact that I was Jewish.
But he felt if it was the other way around, if the Judaism came first, they wouldn't accept me period.
But then, in preparation for this visit, his father asks him a very specific question.
He said something like, well, what's her religion?
And Muhammad said oh, she's American.
As though, you know, Americans can't possibly have a religion.
And his father was like okay, maybe she's secular, but certainly at some point her people had some sort of religion.
And Muhammad said, well, her mother is Jewish.
And his father had called off the meeting.
I mean, his father had said, oh, there's no way.
I'm not meeting her.
Absolutely not.
It's just a no.
And so, you know, Mohammed told me the meeting's off.
I was devastated, devastated.
It's so melodramatic, but I think I literally like collapsed on the floor, you know, and dropped the phone out of my hand.
And that was it.
The meeting was off.
But Maya and Mohammed still want this to work.
So they regroup with a new plan.
His mother was not completely opposed.
So then we started thinking OK, we're going to work on the mother issue and get her to buy into me, and then she's going to work on the father.
That was the thinking.
I want to be very clear here.
For Muhammad's parents.
It wasn't just that Maya was Jewish, but that she chose, as an American Jewish person, to move to Israel and get Israeli citizenship.
That's what they don't like.
To them, Israel is the place that keeps them from moving freely on land that is their home.
That's why it doesn't work for his mom either.
I had taken citizenship.
That was a no-go for her.
That was a red line.
By the way, Maya and Mohammed aren't living together at this point for many reasons.
We couldn't do that in open defiance of his father.
There's also the economic issue.
The economy is horrible in the West Bank.
It's really, really hard for even educated Palestinians to make ends meet.
It's around this time that Mohammed visits the US to see one of his brothers who lives in South Florida.
What he finds during this visit... is a place that seems easy.
You just do whatever you want to do because it's Florida.
It was maybe in late March or early April, and he said to me, you know, this place is amazing.
He said, I drive, there are no checkpoints.
You can just drive for miles and you never see a soldier.
And, you know, I run quite a bit.
And in the West Bank, sometimes it's not easy to run as a woman in Palestinian areas.
And that was part of Mohammed's pitch to me.
He said, you know, you can run here in South Florida.
No one's going to hassle you.
So he said, you know, what do you say?
Why don't we go to the States?
Maya had just signed a two-year contract to teach writing with Bard College.
She had finally built the life she had dreamed of.
But Mohammed was adamant.
He said, I'm going, you know, with or without you.
I'm going.
I'm done with the West Bank, at least for now.
He said, do you want to come with me?
I quit it all.
And, you know, that was it.
I said, OK, I'll go.
I should say, Maya doesn't quit everything to join him immediately.
She drags her feet a little bit.
And then that summer, in 2014, a six-week air war breaks out in Gaza.
Maya spends that summer there alone.
Mohammed is already in Florida.
That was a really intense summer.
Obviously very upsetting, very upsetting what Israel was doing to Gaza at the time.
And there was heartbreak on all sides.
You know, there were Israelis who died that summer as well.
And then I left in August of 2014 and moved to South Florida.
After Maya moves to the States, they get married.
It's a small wedding in West Palm Beach.
They sign Muslim and Jewish wedding contracts.
A Jewish cantor sings the seven blessings.
Muhammad's brother is there, and he reads something from the Quran.
It's romantic and lovely.
But Maya knows Muhammad's parents are not on board.
I don't think that he told them right away that we got married, which was upsetting to me.
I had a sense.
Yeah, it kind of took some needling to get it out of him that you know the marriage had kind of been a secret.
In Florida, they live in a small apartment.
They have a couch they got from Goodwill for 50 bucks.
They build a new kind of life.
Maya finds out she's pregnant in 2015.
After she does, she flies back to Israel alone to update some reporting on a book she's been working on.
The book is called The Unchosen, and it's about asylum seekers and migrant workers in Israel, many of whom are from Africa and Asia.
This is a big trip for Maya for a lot of reasons.
I was quite big, you know, heavily pregnant, I would say, and I was running around the country reporting.
And Mohammed, while I was there, one of his brothers came in from the West Bank to meet me.
This was a brother who was working on the father and trying to get the father to come around.
The brother came in from the West Bank to meet me, came to Tel Aviv.
He said, I'm going to help you guys fix this.
This other brother of Mohammed's who lives in the West Bank.
He respects Maya's journalism very much.
He loves that.
She's a Jewish-American-Israeli journalist who's focused so much of her work on the experience of Palestinian people.
He starts telling his dad about what she writes.
He reads his dad Maya's stories, translating them for him.
Muhammad's dad also likes what she writes.
Two days before I went back to Florida, Muhammad called me.
He said, I have good news.
I said, what?
He said, my father wants to meet you.
So...
I went out to the West Bank alone to the family home to meet his parents.
And his father, you know, sat me down on the couch.
I kind of avoided him.
I was quite nervous.
I didn't really want to sit with him and have a big conversation.
So I'd kind of followed Muhammad's mother into the kitchen, was trying to help out in the kitchen.
And then everyone was like, Maya, come.
You have to sit and talk with Muhammad's father.
So I sat down with him on the couch and he apologized.
He said, you know, I'm sorry. for what happened.
And he said, you know, now you are like a daughter to me, you know, just like my own daughter.
That was quite a moving moment.
I asked Maya to summarize what changed.
I think it was the realization that his grandchild, his granddaughter, I mean the first grandbaby, was coming.
The understanding that I was not just a Jew and not just an Israeli, you know.
They were family, with intense complications, but still family.
Sadly, Maya would never get to explore this change fully, as her father-in-law died shortly after that trip.
In the U.S., after years, what happens to Maya and Mohammed is kind of typical.
They have two kids.
Marriage is hard.
They've overcome these massive differences.
But day-to-day life and parenting?
Things start to fray.
Maya feels kind of alone in the relationship.
Muhammad is a great man with a big heart.
He's a very compassionate man and he's calm and he's patient and very quiet.
And I think those were the qualities that attracted me to him.
But to live with someone who is very quiet and not often willing to engage a lot was very difficult for me.
Alongside the normal stressors of kids careers finances, there's a lack of communication that becomes too much for Maya.
There was a period it was like 10 words a day, and it felt to me like suffocation, you know?
They divorce in December of 2022.
Nothing political at all.
Just the kind of, you know, issues that can come up, I think, in any marriage, but that were really amplified, I think, by the fact that you know I had made big sacrifices to follow him to South Florida, a place where I had no one.
The pressures that had come for him as, being an immigrant, you know his mother tongue is not English, just different issues.
Right, that can happen.
And then, within a year, it's October 7th 2023, the day of a Hamas-led attack in Israel that kills about 1200 people.
Hostages are taken.
A new war begins.
Maya was in the Seattle area researching a possible story.
She starts getting texts about an attack in Israel.
She checks in with Muhammad, who was with the kids in Florida.
They'd been nesting, by the way.
That's when the kids stay in one house and the divorced parents go back and forth, one swooping in and the other leaving.
So Maya comes home, And it's clear from that moment, Muhammad will stay put right in the house.
They'll all nest together because even though they're exes, they need each other right now.
Usually he would leave either that day or the following morning and go back to his brothers.
But in those days, we didn't even talk about it.
There was no talk about him leaving.
I think because we were both so upset that we found a lot of solace in each other's presence at that time.
They watched the news together, avoided the news.
Together They connected about a reality.
They understood that they felt some Americans just couldn't.
I would say, immediately after October 7th.
A lot of the issues that had, you know, led me to filing for divorce kind of dropped out of my mind.
We were getting along pretty well after October 7th on the whole, in part because we were upset.
We were horrified.
We were shocked about everything happening, in part because we were both opposed to any sort of violence, you know, against Israelis Palestinians, anyone right?
Just humans.
So in the months following October 7th we got on pretty well and our own personal issues kind of just kind of seemed to just drop away.
I mean, look, it made some of our you know, petty personal issues, I mean, seemed just like that.
They began to seem a bit petty, right?
I don't know how to phrase it.
It almost felt more important than ever for us to be under the same roof.
It felt like a statement that despite what was happening there, we were still united.
Muhammad stayed with Maya in that house for an entire year.
In October of 2024, he moved back to his brothers nearby in South Florida.
Maya says she remembered after some time that they did get divorced for some important practical reasons.
There may be a romantic future together, but it's also possible they'll stay divorced.
They support each other, and they want to boost each other up as they both find happiness.
She says of their relationship, there is a tremendous amount of love.
When I last spoke to Maya about this just a few weeks ago, she said the divorce is finalized, but it's not finalized emotionally.
One of the things Maya says she grieves is that she always thought they'd go back to the area where they met to live, work and be with their kids.
Now that doesn't seem possible, at least not anytime soon.
I wanted to tell this story because it's many months later and I'm reading that Gaza's health ministry reports that over 50000 Palestinian people have been killed.
And every headline seems worse.
But on a very small level.
It's interesting to me that when the world changed in 2023 and there was violence yet again, Maya and Muhammad, two people who love each other, came together for support.
The reason they trust each other is because, from the start, there's been empathy across the relationship.
It was empathy through writing that helped endear Muhammad's dad to Maya.
It was empathy for Maya's personal experience that allowed Mohammed to get to know and love her.
Since the beginning, the two of them have been asking, how can we be good to each other?
And excuse my naivete, but that kind of attitude is maybe how change happens.
Maya's upcoming book is called Crossing the Line, an Israeli-Palestinian love story.
It comes out in September, but you can pre-order it now.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe.
Our producer is Christina Hanatu.
Our executive producer is Kristen Nelson.
This episode was also produced by Jasmine Aguilera.
Uzair Ahmed does our audio mixing and mastering.
Maddie Mortel is our audience engagement manager.
Special thanks to Nancy Barnes and Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send any of your questions about dating divorce marriage singlehood friendship, whatever to loveletters at bostoncom.
And if you like the show, please leave us a review.
I guess I'm a big believer in grace and showing people grace and having compassion, and to never fully closing the door on anyone or anything.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
We have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
Fascinating.
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
Uh, Lemu, is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
Cut the camera.
They see us.
Only pay for what you need at libertymutual.com.
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
Savings vary.
Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
