Elias Chacour (Arabic: الياس شقور, Hebrew: אליאס שקור; born 29 November 1939) is a Palestinian Arab-Israeli who served as the Archbishop of Akko, Haifa, Nazareth and All Galilee of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church from 2006 to 2014.

"[1] Elias Michael Chacour was born in the village of Kafr Bir'im in the Upper Galilee, Mandatory Palestine to a Palestinian Christian family of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

Returning to Israel in 1965, he was ordained a priest by Archbishop George Selim Hakim of Akko, Haifa, Nazareth and all Galilee, who became Patriarch Maximos V two years later.

Elias, seeing the lack of educational opportunities for Arab youth beyond the 8th grade, created a school open to all local children regardless of religious affiliation.

He was consecrated a bishop in the church of Saint Elias in Ibillin and his enthronement in the Haifa Cathedral was broadcast by the Melkite Ecumenical television station "Noursat" which originates in Beirut, Lebanon.

In recognition of his humanitarian efforts he has received honors including the World Methodist Peace Award, the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, the Peacemakers in Action Award from the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, and the Niwano Peace Prize (Japan) as well as honorary doctorates from five universities including Duke and Emory.

But stop interpreting that friendship as an automatic antipathy against me, the Palestinian who is paying the bill for what others have done against my beloved Jewish brothers and sisters in the Holocaust and Auschwitz and elsewhere.

At sixty-five years of age my ambition was to dedicate the rest of my life to prayer, reading and writing, but like Paul on the way to Damascus the Lord seems to tell me that he is the one in control.

Blood Brothers covers his childhood growing up in the town of Biram, his development into a young man, and his early years as a priest in Ibillin.