I hate admitting this, but if you look back at the last few decades in Israel/Palestine, the extremists are winning. From the Jewish fanatic who murdered Rabin, to the Hamas suicide bombers blowing up buses to stop the peace process, to Jewish thugs rioting in the West Bank, to the Hamas murderers of October 7th, and now the Israeli ministers clamoring for more blood—they are all winning. The moderates on all sides are being squeezed and isolated, and the road to peace has never felt narrower or more lonely. But we simply can't give up. What they want—all these apocalyptic haters reflecting and amplifying each other and clinging together like desperate leeches—is to blow up this whole place. To cause a conflagration form which there is no return. Any word or action that helps them is bad. Any step that turns us away from that precipice is good.

Two questions I'd love never to hear again: "The Arabs have 20 countries. Why can't the Palestinians go there?" For the same reason that most Chileans want to stay in Chile and not move to Mexico or Argentina. It's the place they love, most of them were born there, and they have as much of a right to live there as anyone else. And the parallel question: "Why can't the Jews go back to Europe?" First, most Israelis today are descended from Jews that came from Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and other North African and Middle Eastern countries. And second, same answer: most were born there and have as much of a right to live there as anyone else. Few things are more deluded, damaging, or dangerous than talking of "another Nakba," or dreaming that "they will leave like the French left Algeria." No. Neither will happen. We are fated to somehow share this place no matter what.