As we look forward to Israel’s sixtieth anniversary—or, as some might put it, the sixtieth anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the catastrophe that displaced some three-quarters of a million people—the prospects for achieving peace in the region have never seemed grimmer. The much-vaunted “peace process” has long since lost any shred of credibility. The idea of “two states for two peoples,” which has won acceptance from so many people around the world, seems unworkable—at least if you look dispassionately at variables like water, land, energy, and agriculture. The human catastrophe of Gaza is beyond description.

A lifelong antiwar activist, I joined the Middle East peace movement in the year 2000, at the moment that it began focusing on the role of the U.S. government in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This work has challenged me to look deeply into myself, into Judaism, into history like nothing else ever has. In return, it’s given me the privilege of meeting and learning from incredible people, Israelis, Palestinians, Arab Americans, and American Jews.

I look at both Israel and Palestine with great love, but I can only look at them from my vantage point in the United States. However close I get, I am, and will always be, a friend, a foreigner, a visitor, a citizen of empire. So that’s the only “place” I can speak from: where I am, and who I am.

When I think about the peace movement I’m part of, the thing that worries me the most is that in all these years, we have yet to understand how to pierce the blanketing of empire. The suffering and the hopes of Israelis and Palestinians, our friends and relatives, their broader communities, is immediate and concrete. When it comes to our own country, though, we may have an analysis, but I’m not sure any of us understand how to locate our imperial homeland in a close-up language of peace. We follow the news, the commentaries, the Internet feeds from Israel, from Palestine, from the global media—but our own government remains invisible, untouchable.

If we can’t make the lethal logic of U.S. pressures real for ourselves on a simple human level, how can we make it real for anyone else? Meanwhile, the human toll of the conflict keeps deepening, as the possibility of a livable life keeps getting farther and farther away. The impact is starkest, of course, for Palestinians, but is undeniably harmful for Israelis, as they lose their children, their peace of mind, and their moral center.

How and when will we call the U.S. government to account? Every so often the word comes around to call our representatives, but I don’t know anyone who believes that those phone calls by themselves can ever change the balance of forces in Congress or the State Department. Where is the strategy that will actually make a difference?

The costs here are not minor. How many people died in 2006, because Condoleezza Rice thought it was “too soon” for a ceasefire in the disastrous military confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah? How many have died in Gaza because of U.S. efforts to promote a Palestinian civil war (as reported in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair magazine)? How many Israelis have died needlessly because of these depraved war games?

Israel has reached its sixtieth anniversary as a nation-state—but Israelis are farther, not closer, to peace and a livable life. Palestinians, our brothers and sisters and cousins, are farther yet. Meanwhile, we citizens of empire are spinning our wheels because we are afraid to look directly at the rigged game that is spinning us around.