Admit it. You’re sick of this. Anyone who cares in the least about the future of the Holy Land, and of a Jewish state, would have to be. Sixty years of war, grief, mutual terror, opera-strength myth, heartfelt dishonesty, the funerals of innocents, the maiming of conscience, the death of faith.

Israel at sixty. Palestine at square one.

It’s only natural to want to wash your hands of all this. It’s only human to be repelled by the rightwing U.S. Jewish leaders who presume to speak in your name, warning Israel against even thinking about any compromise with the Palestinians over Jerusalem.

It’s only Jewish to be appalled by the commandeering of Orthodox Judaism by radical rightists who have elevated the acts of settlement, brute force military action, and rejecting negotiation and truce, to the level of sacrament.

It’s only moral to be disgusted by the acts of self-styled Islamic fundamentalists, who have enshrined the armed struggle, suicide bombings, the random killing of innocents, and the principle of a violent end to the Jewish state.

It’s only reasonable to say to both sides, “Not in my name,” and to look elsewhere to invest your spiritual energy, your good will, your resources of charity and activism and enthusiasm.

It’s more than understandable to reach the conclusion that tribalism is the root of the Holy Land ’s evils. Surely, tribalism has more than earned its bad name.

It makes perfect sense, at this point, to just get off the bus.

Except that your people need you. The people of your tribe. The Jew who still believes in compassion and compromise, in empathy for the disenfranchised, in two states for two peoples, in the possibility of settling entrenched conflicts without resorting to overwhelming force or misguided military adventure.

With peace talks a matter of all talk and no peace, with no good solutions on the horizon, with Palestinians continuing to fire rockets at Israel, with Israel continuing air and ground raids in the territories, this is the time when your tribe needs you the most. It is, in fact, time for a new tribalism. It ’s time for a redefinition of who speaks for the Jews, and what their message is. To leave the field to hardliners is criminal.

There are those who are working with all they have, in Israel and abroad, to reverse the inertia that plagues us, to search for alternatives to Olmert, Barak, Netanyahu, and other guardians of paralysis. Seek them out. Join them.

This, I believe, is the basis of a new tribalism that can foster reconciliation:

Don’t take sides. Take steps.

For the good of your side, consider the rights and needs of the other. For the good of both, recognize the pain of both sides, their tortured histories, their ties to the land, their feelings for shared holy places.

The new tribalism does not need a single campfire, but can reach everywhere and everyone through the truly miraculous, and, at least for the moment, still liberated media of the new electronic forms of communication.

Even in this era, there is hope. But there may not be much time. There are Palestinian hardliners who now argue that the optimal course of action is to let the occupation take its course, to let it take its corrupting, costly, demoralizing, divisive toll on Israel —in short, to let the occupation itself destroy the Jewish state, and pave the way for a Palestine from the river to the sea.

They are betting that the old tribal leaders of our people will lead the Jews directly into that sea. They may be right … unless our tribe is infused by new visions, new openness, and a new, proud sense of what we are, not based on xenophobia and exclusion, but on the willingness to consider a future shared with members of another tribe, people who have had their fill of wrongheaded chiefs and tenets of their own.