Reverend Fahed Abu-Akel was born April 13, 1944, to Labib, a farmer and former British Army soldier, and Adla. Fahed is the seventh of eight children and grew up in a Palestinian Arab village near the modern city of Acre, Israel. Their family attended an Orthodox Christian Church.

The area that encompasses the modern state of Israel and Palestinian territories has been home to a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups since before the start of the common era. Among these were Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, and Mizrahi Jews who lived under the control of a series of empires, including the Romans, Ottomans, and, after World War I, the British.

With roots going back centuries, Abu-Akel's family witnessed a period of increased tensions between Arabs and Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine as Jewish refugees sought safety from European antisemistim and the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s. Many of these Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews embraced Zionism, the movement to create a Jewish nation in Palestine. Although the British government had responded to this tension by attempting to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine, demands for the establishment of a Jewish state after the end of World War II led the United Nations to pass a resolution to partition Palestine into two states in 1947, one for Jews and one for Arabs.

When the Arab world rejected this plan, Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, and thousands of people fled their homes. After British forces departed Palestine and the State of Israel declared its independence in 1948, the situation escalated into a full-blown war. Neighboring Arab armies joined the fight and Israeli forces launched an offensive across the territory. During this time, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes out of fear or were forced to leave by Israeli soldiers. They were subsequently prevented from returning. This displacement is remembered as the "nakba" or "catastrophe" by Palestinians around the world.

When Israeli soldiers approached their village, Abu-Akel’s mother opted to stay behind while Abu-Akel’s father took all eight children to a refugee camp near the Druze village of Yirka northeast of Acre. They returned several months later to find that Abu-Akel’s mother had survived.

After 1948, Abu-Akel, and the 150,000 Arabs like him who had stayed in Israel, were considered Israeli citizens. However, they were subject to military rule until 1966. Laws restricted their freedom of movement and controlled how they learned, worked, and organized themselves. Abu-Akel attended school with Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Druze, but the curriculum focused on Israeli and Jewish history.

When he was in high school, a teacher taught Abu-Akel about Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Abu-Akel saw parallels between the Black civil rights struggle in the United States and the struggles of Palestinians in Israel. Dr. King’s teachings and activism inspired him to follow a path into Christian ministry.

In 1966, Abu-Akel moved to the United States to attend college at Southeastern University. He then went on to graduate from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Trinity University) in Deerfield, Illinois, and Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.

In March of 1981, Reverend Fahed Abu-Akel officially became a United States citizen. As a minister and activist for peace in the Middle East, Rev. Abu-Akel encourages young people of all religions and ethnicities to approach each other with empathy and to seek justice at home and around the world.