The Diaspora
Yousef Bashir carries his father's nonviolence from a Gaza farm to Washington
The DiasporaGraphic: Times of Palestine
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Yousef Bashir grew up on ten green acres in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the Gaza Strip, with a father who taught him that the gun was never the answer. He was fifteen when an Israeli soldier's bullet entered his spine in his own front yard.
More than two decades later, he is still carrying his father's lesson, now from Washington, and now for a Gaza that has been through a war his family never imagined.
His story, told in his memoir The Words of My Father: Love and Pain in Palestine and in years of interviews on American public radio and television, is one of the most remarkable journeys of a Palestinian generation: from a house occupied by soldiers to the halls of the US Congress, without ever letting go of the words he learned at home.
A house with soldiers on the roof#
The Bashir farm sat beside the Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom and the army post that guarded it. When the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, soldiers ordered the family to leave. Khalil Bashir, a respected school headmaster and a lifelong advocate of nonviolence, refused.
The soldiers stayed anyway. They took over the top two floors of the house and confined three generations of the family to the ground floor for about five years. In interviews about the book, Bashir has described having to ask permission to use the bathroom, with a soldier standing close by.
His father's answer was patience. Khalil Bashir kept speaking to the soldiers and kept teaching his children that the men upstairs were human beings, too, and that nonviolence was itself a form of resistance.
February 18, 2004#
On February 18, 2004, Yousef stood outside the house with his father, seeing off three United Nations workers who had come to visit the family. A soldier shot him in the back. The bullet lodged near his spine and left him paralysed from the waist down.
He was transferred to a hospital in Israel, where Israeli doctors treated him and, over the following year, helped him to stand and then to walk again. Bashir has told interviewers, including Foreign Policy's podcast in 2019, that being shot by Israelis and healed by Israelis confirmed what his father had been teaching him all along.
From a camp in Maine to Capitol Hill#
In 2005 he travelled to the Seeds of Peace summer camp in Maine, which brings together young Palestinians and Israelis. He settled in the United States in 2006, earned a bachelor's degree at Northeastern University in Boston and a master's degree in peace, conflict and coexistence at Brandeis University.
He then went to work in Washington. He interned on Capitol Hill, served with the Palestinian diplomatic delegation to the United States, and spoke wherever a room would listen about a peace built on dignity for both peoples. HarperCollins published The Words of My Father in 2018, and Christiane Amanpour brought him onto her programme to talk about it.
Gaza, again#
The war that began in October 2023 tested everything he had built his life on. His mother and his brother still live in Gaza and stayed through the bombardment, NPR reported in December 2025, even as tanks and artillery fired on their house.
Bashir, now a father of two living in Washington, told NPR that the losses Palestinians have carried over these years tested his father's words "like never before."
"But they did not fade away."
Yousef Bashir, speaking to NPR, December 2025
He has turned that conviction into work. He became an adviser to the president of Anera, the American aid organisation that has worked in Palestine for decades, and founded the Saif Foundation, a Washington-based charity that raises money for food, water, clothing and other help for families in Gaza.
The words that stayed#
The bullet did what bullets do. What it did not do, by his own telling, is change the boy his father raised. Yousef Bashir still speaks of his late father as a teacher whose lessons are not finished: stay on the land, refuse to hate, and keep talking to the people on the other side of the door.
For a generation of Palestinians in the diaspora trying to hold Gaza's grief and their own hope in the same hands, his life reads less like a memoir than an instruction.
