About a week into my recent visit to Israel, Irealized that I had taken you with me on this trip. You have gotten under my skin with the urgency of youroutrage and your increasingly unanswerable questions. I realize that I have you at the table with me as I questionmy Israeli friends, take the pulse of the place and listen, listen,listen. With each passing day, myheart sinks as I hear one Israeli leftist after another say that they do not expect political change to comeany time soon. I feel your impatientreaction resonate inside me. I ask your questions.

"How can we permit the occupation to go on?" I ask.Isn't it easier for us, the party with more structural power and privilege, totolerate delay? Isn't it easierfor us to say, "We've been living with conflict for a long time, and we know wewill continue to; we have to live our lives"? What of the Palestinians whose movement is restricted, forwhom it takes hours to traverse short distances, who daily face the indignity ofbeing ruled by immature Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints? What would Palestinians be saying ifthey were sitting here at our comfortable tables in our middle-class apartmentsand upscale cafes?

I see in their eyes the accusation of naivete. You Americans, you just don'tunderstand what it is to live in the Middle East. You don't understand that it's unwise to trust these people. How could we tolerate living next door to an Islamist state, rainingrockets on our homes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as they did on Sderot? If you only lived here, you wouldunderstand. . . .

I try to take mental notes of things I want you tounderstand:

·Israelis do notfeel privileged or powerful.They feel victimized by suicide bombing, continual violent threats fromHamas leaders, and Iran's nuclear ambitions. They feel chronically frightened by our minority status herein the Middle East, terrified of the rising strength of extremist Islamistideologies.

·The people I amtalking to are, for the most part, leftists: they support Israeli human rights organizations and sendtheir children to Arab-Israeli schools.They are the kindest and most generous people you would ever want toknow. And they arefrightened. They desperately wantto believe the sincerity of the other side, but they see too much evidence tothe contrary.

·They are Jews,and they carry the memory of Jewish suffering in their bones. They raise their children, care foraging parents, plan to remodel their apartments, all under the shadow ofexistential threat. They rememberexactly where they and their children were when the last suicide bomber struck. Any day, they feel it could be 1939again.

·They aresuspicious of the world's criticism of the policies of their governments. "The UN opposes what we do? We could not count on the world in thepast, and we're not sure we can today.The hateful virulence of their criticism of us proves there is little wecould ever do to satisfy them.That's precisely why we need a state of our own, here in our homeland,to shelter us when we can trust no one but one another."

·After decadesof conflict, they have learned to survive in a war zone, acclimating somehow tocontinuous cycles of war and quiet.Another military operation?"We have become accustomed to these cycles. We know how to shield ourselves from the threats, how todistance ourselves from our precarious place in this region. Otherwise we could not get up eachmorning and live our lives."

·It hurts morethan we can say that you accept the Palestinian narrative without question, neverraising the hard questions about Palestinian violence with anywhere near thevehemence that animates your attacks on us. Why don't you care what moves us, hurts us, terrifiesus? Why do you express so littleinterest in understanding our story, our losses, our love of this land and ourfear for our children? Don't yousee that things only look so simple to you because you ache for only one sideof this tragic and complex conflict?

I long to bring you here with me, to share mealswith the people I love, to watch them nurture their children and pamper theirguests, to absorb the anguish they feel about the mistakes their own governmenthas made. Beneath and beyond thearguments and unanswered questions, you would surely feel their goodness. And that might change everything.