Muhammad Durausha is Arab and Israeli, a Muslim-Palestinian citizen of the Jewish state.

Like 20% of Israel's population, he is, as he puts it, a child of both identities.

He brings an unexpected way of seeing inside the Israeli-Palestinian present and future.

I was with my family a couple of years ago in Sharma Sheikh in Egypt, and I was arguing

with the cashier because we were a family, and I was arguing for this county in Arabic.

And after we got in, the director of marketing came to me and he says, I know you're Israeli,

but you speak Arabic.

How come the guy has a master's degree in marketing from Cairo University?

And he did not know that in 1948, some of the Palestinian people stayed home.

So the Arab world doesn't know of our existence in many cases, and many Israelis don't know,

let alone the Western world.

I'm Krista Tippet, on Being, stay with us.

Besides, there are even two peoples.

This was one of the most striking experiences for me of traveling to Jerusalem and the West

Bank earlier this year.

Muhammad Duraush's very identity defies the narrative of conflict so familiar from this

land.

He is a Muslim citizen of the Jewish state, Arab and Israeli, like 20% of the total population

of Israel.

And he opens an unexpected way of seeing inside the present and the future.

In the past, I used to think about my dual identity as a Palestinian and Israeli as a burden.

I think of it today more as an asset, as a power, as a skill that only we have.

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