My life as an adolescent revolved around my involvement in the socialist-Zionist youth movement. For a Jewish kid growing up in London, the young state of Israel was not just a place but a sign to which was attached the passionate —even ecstatic—energies of Jewish youth living, as we saw it, in “exile.” The central cultural and political symbol of Israel we believed was the kibbutz—a place that embodied our highest hopes for a world of social justice, democratic community, and the transformation of what it meant to be a Jew. Here was the place where Jews had cast off the weakness and vulnerability of exilic existence with all of its fears and shame, becoming instead the tough, brash and confident citizens of their own state. Here was a place where timid and bookish Jews with their shtetl mentality had been transformed into workers who gloried in their physical vitality and their power to build and defend a Jewish homeland.

By the time I had arrived at college I had already glimpsed the simplistic and cartoonish nature of my movement-contrived images. The Six Day War had just been won, amplifying on one level the powerful capacities of a Jewish state to defend itself, yet already spawning questions about land, annexation and the rights of Palestinians that would preoccupy us for the next forty years. However nothing quite prepared me for my first real engagement with Palestinian and Arab students at my British university. Here for the first time I was to encounter a narrative about Israel that collided with both my vision and my historical understanding. Far from my Zionist view of a state created to safeguard the remnant of a people brutalized by history and engaged in a brave and imaginative effort to create a just oasis in the sand was the Arab view of a European settler state imposed by the very colonial powers that had exploited and oppressed the indigenous people of this region. It was not simply the counternarrative that shocked me but the sheer ferocity of hate with which the Israeli enterprise was viewed. Here there was no sympathy for the Nazi murders of one third of my people. There was no recognition of the ancient historic attachment to this land that permeated my prayers and religious texts. Nor was there appreciation for the socialist aspirations of the kibbutz and the other egalitarian institutions that formed such a central part of the culture and economy in Israel, at least up till that time. Instead what I found was rage —rage at the humiliation of the Arab peoples and their impotence in the face of superior technology and skills, at the dispossession of a people ’s homes and their land, at the denial of national and human rights, and at the one-sidedness of the Western media. In this narrative the Jews were not the victims of history but one more incarnation of colonial arrogance, disregard and oppression.

In my subsequent years as an educator concerned with issues of moral behavior and social change I have found myself returning again and again to this collision of worldviews. In my discussions of peace education I often speak of a “hermeneutics of conflict” in which, as the saying goes, my enemy is someone whose story I have not heard. The issue in conflicts like that of Israel/Palestine is, as I explain to my students, not about who is right and who is wrong. We are not looking for an enlightenment version of the Truth about what has taken place so much as trying to excavate each side ’s view of reality and history. We must discover the “truth” of each side’s suffering and fear. And these truths cannot be separated from the pain and anguish of deep emotion that frames and distills the very meaning of truth itself. It is in this realm of multiple and colliding truths that the struggle for peace and reconciliation is to be found. Yet as we hear the sound of renewed gunfire and exploding bombs in that bloody and suffering region, we know that the mutual wisdom of peacemaking has still not supplanted the knowledge of one-sided certainty.