Lauded throughout the world with honors and peace prizes for his work in coexistence, constantly in demand as a speaker abroad, Chacour is the author of two bestselling memoirs, Blood Brothers (1984) and We Belong to the Land (1990).

The first book, an account of his family's displacement from the Galilee town of Biram where he himself was born in 1939 in the wake of Israel's War of Independence in 1948, has been translated into 28 languages. The title comes from his belief that Jews and Arabs "are blood brothers, each claiming to be the children of one father whose name was Abraham."

Profiled in the Jerusalem Post International Edition in 2001, Chacour was asked how he saw the identity of Christian Arabs living in Israel: "From the religious point of view, we are not an import. Everything started with a young rabbi here in Galilee. This is very important. The pope of Rome comes here to kneel down as a pilgrim in the Holy Land. We are descendants of the first disciples of Jesus Christ. And they were Jews. I want our Jewish friends to understand that we are aware of our roots."

Chacour is an ordained priest in the Melkite Catholic Church, which is an Eastern Byzantine Church in communion with Rome. Located in Ibillin between Haifa and Nazareth, the Mar Elias Campus elementary, high school, technical college, and a regional teachers' center has a combined enrollment of 4,000 students, with a program for gifted Arab children and a center for religious pluralism. Currently, Chacour is working on setting up a Christian Arab university in the Galilee.