Dear Neighbor,
Today is Jerusalem Day, commemorating the reunification of the city on June 7, 1967, during the Six-Day War. A hot wind rises from the desert. Later today the aging veterans of the battle for Jerusalem—left-wingers and right-wingers, secular and religious—will gather in quiet ceremonies around stone memorials in the streets of East Jerusalem, where the fighting occurred, and recall fallen friends and recite psalms. Elsewhere in East Jerusalem, young right-wing Jews will sing and dance through Palestinian neighborhoods, proclaiming the oneness of the city under Israeli control. Several coexistence groups appealed to the Supreme Court to reroute the march, but the court ruled for freedom of expression. I regret the ruling. Sometimes even sacred principles need to be tempered, to accommodate others’ needs and sensibilities. That challenge, after all, helps define our conflict.
My encounter with Israel began in the weeks just before the Six-Day War. It was mid-May 1967, and Israel was being threatened with destruction. Arab leaders promised to drive the Jews into the sea. I watched on TV as crowds of demonstrators in Cairo and Damascus chanted, “Death to the Jews,” and waved banners imprinted with skulls and crossbones. That was my first shock: The genocidal threat against the Jewish people hadn’t ended with the Holocaust.
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s southern shipping route to the east, and expelled UN peacekeeping troops on the border with Israel. That was my second shock. Wasn’t the purpose of peacekeeping forces to be in place for precisely a moment like this? And yet the UN complied with Nasser’s demand to remove the peacekeepers, without so much as a debate in the Security Council.
The Syrian and Jordanian armies joined together with the Egyptians, encircling Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli reservists were called up, crippling the economy of a country with barely three million citizens at the time. High school students were sent to dig mass graves in parks, preparing for thousands of civilian casualties. Overwhelmed by the threat, Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), suffered a temporary nervous breakdown. Jews around the world feared Israel’s imminent destruction.
I discovered something essential about myself in those days: I couldn’t live in a world without Israel. That realization may sound strange to you, neighbor. I was, after all, a thirteen-year-old boy in Brooklyn. Why this primal attachment, so intense that I was ready at that moment to give my life for a country I had never visited?
It was, I think, the intuitive sense that the Jewish people wouldn’t survive the destruction of Israel. Not that the Jews would suddenly vanish: Jewish communities around the world would continue to exist. But the life force, the self-confidence, the ability to dream in history, the belief in a Jewish story—all would dissipate. The longing that sustained us through adversity would be exposed as ludicrous: We had waited two thousand years for an event that turned out to be one more Jewish nightmare. We’d gathered in Zion from around the world not for redemption but for the ultimate destruction.
True, the Jews had survived previous loss of our national sovereignty. But when the Judean state was destroyed in 70 CE, we were still a people of active faith. We fashioned from the broken pieces a new pattern of Jewish life because we knew how to interpret our fate through a religious lens. Paradoxically, the belief that the Jews had been punished by God gave our ancestors the courage to persist. The same God Who punished would also one day redeem. The prison term would be served and exile would end. Today, though, we live in the aftermath of the shattering of Jewish faith, brought on in part by Western secularism and the Holocaust. Whatever faith has managed to survive our experiences in the modern world would be tested to the breaking point by the destruction of Israel. Few Jews, I suspect, would accept another narrative of Divine punishment. Even for many religious Jews, this would be one punishment too many.
On the morning of June 5, 1967, I awoke to see my father hovering over the kitchen radio. War had begun. We didn’t know it then, but the Israeli air force had preemptively struck, destroying almost the entire Egyptian air force while its planes were parked on the ground.
Israel sent a message to King Hussein of Jordan: Stay out of the fighting, and so will we. But Jordanian army units based in East Jerusalem began shelling Jewish neighborhoods in West Jerusalem. A brigade of Israeli paratroopers was dispatched to the city and, with only hours to organize, crossed the municipal no-man’s-land of minefields and barbed wire and attacked Jordanian positions. The goal was to stop the firing on West Jerusalem and to protect the Israeli enclave of Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem. There were no contingency plans for the IDF to take the Old City. Even as Israeli paratroopers surrounded the Old City’s walls, the Israeli government hesitated to give the order to invade—though the area contains the holiest Jewish sites, to which we’d been denied access ever since the Jordanians seized them in 1948.
The decision, reached after long debate in the Israeli cabinet, came on the morning of June 7—but not before the government sent one last appeal to King Hussein, offering to call off the paratroopers in exchange for peace talks. Hussein ignored the overture. Paratroopers then broke through the Lions’ Gate of the Old City, turned left into the area we call the Temple Mount and you call Haram el Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, and reached the Western Wall.
I don’t know if there was a Jew alive, no matter how distanced from faith, who was indifferent to the sight of exhausted Jewish paratroopers leaning their heads into the crevices of the Wall that had been the repository of the prayers of exile. The iconic image of that moment is a photograph of several paratroopers, arms around each other’s shoulders, standing at the Wall and gazing upward. Though they’d just won the greatest military victory in Jewish history, their young faces revealed not triumph but awe, like pilgrims at the end of a journey. At that moment they weren’t representing the might of a sovereign state but the hopes of an ancient people.
A few weeks after the war, my father and I flew to Israel for the first time. We simply couldn’t keep away. And there I fell in love. With the landscape, of course, the diversity of desert and mountain and coast, planet Earth seemingly condensed into a single strip. But most of all I was enchanted by the diversity of the Jews. Living in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where the range of Jewish ethnicity was basically covered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I was thrilled to encounter Jews from Morocco and Iraq and India and dozens of other countries, stretching my sense of Jewish possibility. Exile had shattered us into multiple fragments, and now the impossible was happening: however awkwardly, even traumatically, the fragments were reassembling. I fell in love with the Israelis—their courage, their hard decency. They were ready to make the best of whatever circumstances history dealt them. Like my teenage cousin, also named Yossi, who lived on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and who had grown up swimming under the guns of Syrian soldiers on the Golan Heights, and who accepted as a fact of life that he would soon become a soldier.
I wasn’t blind to the flaws in the Israeli character: the rudeness, the provincialism, the petty materialism of a poor nation. But those were mere details; my love was unconditional. That summer I resolved that, no matter what happened in my life or in the life of Israel, I would return one day as an immigrant.
But in the midst of that summer’s celebration of victory, of life itself—there you were, the mourner at the wedding. Strips of white cloth hung in surrender from Palestinian homes. Old men leading donkeys moved slowly, as if carrying great loads. Children with heads shaved against lice sold hastily carved wooden camels, soda bottles with colored swirling sand, picture postcards of Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan—mementos of your defeat. Perhaps you, neighbor, were one of those children. I tried to forget their faces, suppress pity, remind myself that we’d barely escaped annihilation. Just imagine, Israelis said to each other, what they would have done to us if they had won. In a Palestinian refugee camp in El Arish, I saw paintings by children envisioning that victory: Arab soldiers shooting ultra-Orthodox Jews, a pile of skulls with Jewish stars. Still, not even those images can erase the sullen and confused young faces I’d seen on the streets of East Jerusalem. When I close my eyes, I can see them even now.
The map of Israel changed again. Israel’s borders expanded in three stages: first, through the land purchases in the pre-state era, then in the 1948 War—and finally, in the Six-Day War. Most of the international community has accepted the first two stages as legitimate—and negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders have been based on the borders of Israel as they emerged in 1949. As far as the international community is concerned, it is the third stage of territorial acquisition that is being contested.
The first West Bank settlement—Kfar Etzion, just south of Jerusalem on the road to Hebron—was founded in September 1967, barely three months after the war. There was no parliamentary debate, no cabinet decision, no grand expansionist plan: simply a dozen young people moving to a hilltop, with the ambiguous consent of then prime minister Levi Eshkol. The reason for the lack of controversy was that the original Kfar Etzion had been destroyed in the 1948 War and those young people, who’d been born there and were evacuated as children just before it fell, were literally returning home. Kfar Etzion was one of the open wounds of the Israeli psyche: Its defenders had surrendered to Palestinian militiamen and were massacred the day before Israel’s declaration of independence. And so the first West Bank settlement restored a Jewish community that had existed in modern times. This wasn’t, at least initially, about reclaiming a biblical heritage but, for the Israeli public, about undoing a wrong within living memory.
Six months later a group of settlers moved into Hebron—Judaism’s second-holiest city, after Jerusalem. This time there was a vehement debate among Israelis—about the wisdom of inserting Jews into a major Palestinian population center. Hebron, burial place of Abraham and Sarah, is of course the basis for the Jewish biblical claim to the land. And yet Hebron, too, was a kind of modern restoration: After the 1929 massacre, its ancient Jewish community disappeared.
The first two settlements, then, were reconstructions of Jewish communities destroyed in the twentieth century. That helps explain why many Israelis failed to perceive those initial settlements as the beginning of a mass movement. The settlers, of course, well understood the long-term implications of their acts. Perhaps you did, too.
Immediately after the Six-Day War, the Arab League, representing the entire Arab world, reaffirmed its emphatic rejection of Israel’s existence, and that, too, helped legitimize settlements for many Israelis. One of the leaders of the settlement movement, the late professor of Jewish philosophy Yosef Ben-Shlomo, began his political involvement by signing a public letter opposing the reestablishment of the Jewish community of Hebron. But, he later explained, when he realized that the Arab world wasn’t prepared to accept Israel’s legitimacy in any borders, he came to believe that a land-for-peace agreement was naive.
Palestinian terrorism reinforced the message to Israelis that there was no chance for compromise. Yasser Arafat’s men blew up a school bus, seized high school students as hostages, massacred pilgrims at Israel’s international airport, slaughtered families in their homes, smashed the head of a child against a rock, murdered bound members of the Israeli Olympic team. Israelis experienced those attacks as small pre-enactments of the genocidal aim of the Palestinian national movement, proof that compromise was impossible.
Still, through the early 1970s, the Labor Party, then Israel’s undisputed party of governance, kept settlement building in the West Bank to a minimum. Labor was committed to reaching an agreement to return territory to Jordan, which claimed to speak for the Palestinian cause. When settlement groups squatted in the territories, the Labor-led government dispatched the army to break up their encampments.
Labor’s ability to control the settlement movement began to unravel on a precise date—November 10, 1975. That’s when the UN, voting 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions, declared Zionism a form of racism—the only national movement ever singled out for such opprobrium. The bloc of Muslim states, together with the Communist world, meant that any anti-Israel resolution was assured of passage.
In response, thousands of young Israelis gathered around an abandoned Ottoman railway station in Samaria, in the northern West Bank, pitched tents in the winter mud, and posted a sign: zionism avenue. A freshman Knesset member named Ehud Olmert told a journalist: This is the real Zionist answer to the UN. (In 2008, as prime minister of Israel, Olmert would offer your leaders a state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza.) The Labor government, which had always reacted to similar protests by ordering the army to remove squatters, now hesitated. Public opinion shifted toward the settlers—thanks to the UN vote. Rather than evict the squatters, the government offered a compromise, and a group of settlers moved into an army base.
Of course, there were other more important factors, besides the UN resolution, that eventually led to the empowerment of the settlement movement—especially the 1977 electoral victory of the right-wing Likud. But the Israeli public’s response to the UN resolution tells us something essential about the Israeli character: When we feel unfairly stigmatized, we toughen our position. The greatest beneficiary of attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel is the hard Right.
But the opposite is no less true: When Israel’s legitimacy is respected, Israelis tend to take risks for peace. That’s what happened in 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt came to Jerusalem and declared his acceptance of Israel. In response, the Israeli public supported a total withdrawal from the Sinai desert, which Israel had occupied in the Six-Day War, including uprooting all its settlements. Then, in the early 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, the UN voted to repeal the Zionism-racism resolution, and dozens of countries established diplomatic relations with Israel. The change in Israel’s status was one reason why the Israeli government felt confident to initiate the Oslo peace process, and why a majority of Israelis at least initially supported it.
For many Israelis in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the arguments for settling the territories seemed overwhelming. After all, we had returned to the historic heart of our homeland through a war of self-defense against attempted destruction. A withdrawal from the West Bank would reduce the Jewish state to vulnerable borders that had repeatedly tempted Arab states to attack us. The Arab rejection of Israel’s legitimacy increased the likelihood that sooner or later our neighbors would try again, regardless of whatever piece of paper their leaders signed. And what people, in our place, would have resisted reclaiming land it regarded as its own for thousands of years?
Yet the counterargument was no less compelling. There were voices warning against settling “the territories,” as many ambivalent Israelis called them, even in the heady summer of 1967. The young Amos Oz, later to become one of Israel’s leading novelists, wrote a powerful essay that summer warning that there is no such thing as a benign occupation or “liberated territories.” Only people, wrote Oz, can be liberated, not land.
The success of the settlement movement is a result of the convergence of Israel’s security fears with the call of history. I, too, felt that pull after moving to Israel in the early 1980s, when many of the settlements were founded. Rationally, I understood that Amos Oz was right, that this would likely turn out to be a disaster not only for your side but also for mine. And yet, as a reporter covering the settlements, I involuntarily thrilled to the sight of new white houses rising against the white hills, the courage of young Israelis defying the world to stake our claim—the very spirit, I felt, that had helped us survive as a people. A friend invited me to the ceremony of the founding of his settlement, on the site of biblical Tekoa, near Bethlehem, on the edge of a desert valley. A banner proclaimed the words of the prophet Amos, “the man of Tekoa,” as the Bible calls him: “I will restore my people, Israel; they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them. And I will plant them on their land, nevermore to be uprooted from the land I have given them, says the Lord your God.” At that moment, the fulfillment of those words recorded some 2,500 years ago and being played out before me tempered my misgivings.
Nowhere in this land did I feel more like a returning son than when I went on pilgrimage to Hebron. I love Tel Aviv, its informal vitality, its ability to continually redefine itself, but by the standards of Jewish history and of the Middle East, Tel Aviv is a baby city, barely a century old. In Hebron, though, I felt embraced by all who came before me, all who prayed in the multiple accents of exile to the God of Abraham and Sarah.
I write about “returning” to Hebron, but in fact we never voluntarily left. The Jewish imprint on Hebron wasn’t only biblical—it continued through the centuries of exile. The evidence left behind is in the medieval Jewish cemetery, in the sixteenth-century Avraham Avinu (Our Father Abraham) Synagogue, destroyed after the 1929 pogrom and turned into an animal pen, and in the indentations where mezuzahs were ripped from the doorposts.
How could Jews not live in Hebron? Emotionally I agreed with the settlers: If we didn’t belong here, we didn’t belong anywhere.
Ironically, it was in Hebron that my romance with the settlement movement ended. On an autumn night in 1984, I went to report on a Jewish celebration that was happening in the streets of Hebron. It was the night after Simchat Torah, the festival when Jews dance with Torah scrolls to mark the completion of the annual cycle of biblical readings in the synagogue. Some Jews prolong the dancing for one more night, which is what the settlers were doing then. It is a beautiful custom, merging reverence with joy. But it was not beautiful that night in Hebron. To accommodate the celebration, the army had shut the streets and placed Palestinian residents under curfew. I saw Jews raising Torah scrolls, which contain the injunction to remember that we were strangers in Egypt and so we must treat the stranger fairly, dancing in the streets emptied of their Palestinian neighbors. The insistence on empathy with the stranger appears with greater frequency in the Torah than any other verse—including commandments to observe the Sabbath and keep kosher.
That curfew became for me a metaphor for the fatal flaw of the settlement movement: the sin of not seeing, of becoming so enraptured with one’s own story, the justice and poetry of one’s national epic, that you can’t acknowledge the consequences to another people of fulfilling the whole of your own people’s dreams.
I believe deeply in our historical and religious claim to Hebron—to all of the land of Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For me, that land isn’t “occupied territory” but Judea and Samaria, which is how Jews have called it since biblical times. Jews in Judea are not aliens. But like many Israelis, I am ready to partition the land—if convinced the trade-off will be peace, and not greater terror. For those of us who support a two-state solution, ensuring the security of Israel—and not implementing historical claims—is the most important measure for deciding the fate of the territories. For me there is only one legitimate reason for deferring partition of the land we share: if it would place Israel in mortal danger.
In 1989, at the height of the first intifada, I was drafted into the IDF. My unit was eventually sent into the Gaza refugee camps, and that’s where I learned the meaning of occupation. By day we would enter the camps—shantytowns of corrugated roofs held down with blocks, sewage running in ditches—to demonstrate a presence, as the army put it. By night we would search homes for terror suspects—or for those who hadn’t paid, say, their water bills. We weren’t soldiers as much as policemen, enforcing an occupation that seemed to me increasingly untenable.
Late one night we knocked on a door beside a wall covered with anti-Israel graffiti. A groggy middle-aged man answered. Paint over the graffiti, we ordered. We shined the light of our jeep on the wall and silently watched as he and his sons painted over the offensive words.
A grenade was thrown at soldiers near an outdoor market. Though it didn’t explode, the order was given: Shut down the stalls. We politely asked vendors to close. Most of us were older recruits, and we were abashed before these men, fathers like us who only wanted to feed their families. Sensing our reluctance, the vendors ignored us. An officer appeared. Wordlessly he approached a stand selling lemons and emptied the contents on the ground. The market cleared.
A chubby teenage Palestinian boy, accused of stone throwing, was brought, blindfolded, into our tent camp. A group of soldiers from the Border Police unit gathered around. One said to him in Arabic, Repeat after me: One order of hummus, one order of fava beans, I love the Border Police. The young man dutifully repeated the rhymed Arabic ditty. There was laughter.
That last story haunts me most of all. It is, seemingly, insignificant. The prisoner wasn’t physically abused; his captors, young soldiers under enormous strain, shared a joke. But that incident embodies for me the corruption of occupation. When my son was about to be drafted into the army I told him: There are times when as a soldier you may have to kill. But you are never permitted, under any circumstances, to humiliate another human being. That is a core Jewish principle.
Along with many Israelis of my generation, I emerged from the first intifada convinced that Israel must end the occupation—not just for your sake but for ours. Free ourselves from the occupation, which mocked all we held precious about ourselves as a people. Justice, mercy, empathy: These were the foundations of Jewish life for millennia. “Justice, justice, shall you pursue,” the Torah commands us, emphasizing the word “justice.” “Merciful children of merciful parents,” we traditionally called our fellow Jews.
Occupation penetrates the soul. When I first got to Gaza, the army slang offended me. Soldiers referred to one camp as “Amsterdam” because of the open sewage canals; they called the sand lot that passed for the central square of another camp “Dizengoff,” a central square in Tel Aviv. After a few weeks, I, too, adopted the slang mocking Gaza’s misery.
Perhaps, neighbor, you are asking yourself: Why is this Israeli telling me about the meaning of occupation? I am sharing with you my experience as occupier because I believe that if our two societies are someday to coexist as equal neighbors, we need to begin talking about this prolonged ordeal that has bound us together in pathological entwinement.
I learned something else in Gaza: The dream of Palestine wasn’t only to be free of Israeli occupation but to be free of Israel’s existence entirely. Graffiti promised death to the Jews. The most persistent image on Gaza’s walls was of knives and swords plunging into a map of Israel, dripping blood.
One of my close friends in the unit was Shimon from Ethiopia. I’ve already told you about Shimon, who limped because a Sudanese soldier had crushed his bare foot. Shimon felt none of my ambivalence in Gaza: He was there to defend his family and his country from Gaza’s dream of Israel’s disappearance. They want to destroy us, he said to me, they want to return us to the refugee camp in Sudan. Shimon was not going to allow Gaza to undo the fulfillment of his people’s dream.
I veered between moral and existential fears. Both seemed to me reasonable—essential—Jewish responses to Gaza, to our Palestinian dilemma. Jewish history, I believed, spoke to my generation with two nonnegotiable commandments. The first was to remember that we’d been strangers in the land of Egypt and the message was: Be compassionate. The second commandment was to remember that we live in a world in which genocide is possible, and that message was: Be alert. When your enemy says he intends to destroy you, believe him.
What makes my dilemma so excruciating is that those two nonnegotiable commandments of Jewish history converge on our conflict: The stranger whom we are occupying is the enemy who intends to dispossess us. And so how do I relate to you, neighbor: as victim or as would-be victimizer?
In 1992 Yitzhak Rabin, head of the Labor Party, was elected prime minister. Rabin had run on the campaign slogan “Take Tel Aviv out of Gaza and Gaza out of Tel Aviv.” In other words, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Rabin deeply moved me. The commander of the IDF in the Six-Day War was returning as an elder statesman to extricate us from the dilemmas he had bequeathed to us as a young man.
The night Rabin was elected, I wept with relief. Finally: Here was our chance to end the occupation. A year later, when Rabin shook Arafat’s hand at the White House and began the Oslo peace process, I agonized: Was this a breakthrough to peace or had we just committed one of the greatest mistakes in our history? Arafat had devoted his life to the destruction of Israel, to undermining our legitimacy. No one in this generation had more Jewish blood on his hands. But if Rabin was ready to gamble on Arafat the peacemaker, then so was I.
Yet Arafat and the leaders of what became the Palestinian Authority gradually convinced Israelis that their diplomacy was in fact war by other means. Arafat created his own diplomatic language: To CNN he spoke about the peace of the brave, while exhorting his people to holy war. Meanwhile, Hamas intensified terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Israeli intelligence warned Rabin that Arafat was secretly encouraging Hamas and had created a division of labor: Hamas would continue the violence while Arafat won territory through negotiations.
For many Israelis, the turning point was Arafat’s 1994 speech in a Johannesburg mosque. Though the speech was off-limits to the media, a journalist smuggled in a tape recorder. Arafat reassured his critics in the Arab world that he really had no intention of making peace, that the only reason he entered into peace talks was that the Palestinians were too weak for now to seriously threaten Israel and that the Oslo process was nothing more than a cease-fire, to be broken at the appropriate time. The transcript of that talk made headlines in Israel. Arafat’s defenders tried to reassure Israelis: He’s just playing to the crowd. But the cumulative impact of Arafat’s rhetoric reinforced the deepest Israeli fears of being deceived, of lowering our guard.
Like most Israelis, I came to believe we’d been played for fools. A two-state solution had never been Arafat’s intention—except as prelude to a one-state solution, the end of the Jewish people’s dream of sovereignty. For Israel there would be no peace, only territorial withdrawals accompanied by terrorism. The Israeli Right was vindicated: More Israeli concessions led to more terror.
In supporting the Oslo process, I had violated one of the commanding voices of Jewish history, the warning against naïveté. I had confused war for peace, one big Palestine for two smaller states.
Rather than view our conflict as a tragedy being played out between two legitimate national movements—as many Israelis have come to see it—the uncontested official narrative on the Palestinian side defines the conflict as colonialists versus natives. And the fate of the colonialist, as modern history has proven and justice demands, is to ultimately be expelled from the lands he has stolen. Tel Aviv no less than Gaza.
The Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua has called our conflict a struggle between “right and right.” Where is the Palestinian A. B. Yehoshua to echo that tragic insight? In the Israeli media, thousands of op-eds have appeared over the years demanding that Israelis face the reality of a competing narrative. I understand that it’s far easier for the victor to show nuance than the vanquished. Still, in all the years I’ve been following Palestinian media, I don’t recall a single op-ed or editorial in any publication, regardless of its political affiliation, advocating a reassessment of the Jewish narrative. Not one article among the daily media assault denying and ridiculing and denouncing my being.
And so most Israelis, even many on the left, have concluded that, no matter what concessions Israel offers, the conflict will persist. The goal of the Palestinian national movement, Israelis are convinced, isn’t just to undo the consequences of 1967—occupation and settlements—but the consequences of 1948—the existence of Israel. For those of us who believe in a two-state solution, that is a devastating realization.
Our conflict is defined by asymmetries. Israel is the most powerful nation in the Middle East, the Palestinians the least powerful. Yet we are alone in the region, while you are part of a vast Arab and Muslim hinterland. Those are the obvious asymmetries. Less obvious are the political differences on each side. Among Israelis, supporters of a two-state solution regard partition as the end of the conflict. But from years of conversation with Palestinians I learned that even supporters of two states often see that as a temporary solution resulting from Palestinian powerlessness, to be replaced with one state—with the Jews as a minority, if existing at all—once Palestinian refugees return and Israel begins to unravel. And where Israeli moderates tend to see Palestinian sovereignty as a necessary act of justice, many Palestinian moderates see Israeli sovereignty as an unavoidable injustice.
I can think of no national movement that has rejected more offers of statehood—going back to the 1930s—than the Palestinian national movement. And given its perception of Zionism and Israel, that’s understandable. If Palestinians believe that Israel is the embodiment of evil and so must be destroyed—and there is no other reasonable conclusion to draw from the messages conveyed by Palestinian media and mosques and educational system—then genuine compromise becomes impossible.
If you were in my place, neighbor, what would you do? Would you take the chance and withdraw to narrow borders and trust a rival national movement that denied your right to exist? Would you risk your ability to defend yourself, perhaps your existence, to empower him? And would you do so while the region around you was burning?
Having concluded that every concession I offer will be turned against me, I remain in limbo, affirming a two-state solution while clinging to the status quo. And yet I cannot accept our current state of seemingly endless conflict as the definitive verdict on our relationship.
We are trapped, you and I, in a seemingly hopeless cycle. Not a “cycle of violence”—a lazy formulation that tells us nothing about why our conflict exists, let alone how to end it. Instead, we’re trapped in what may be called a “cycle of denial.” Your side denies my people’s legitimacy, my right to self-determination, and my side prevents your people from achieving national sovereignty. The cycle of denial defines our shared existence, an impossible intimacy of violence, suppression, rage, despair.
That is the cycle we can only break together.