After the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s, many Israelis of my generation became convinced that the Israeli Left had been correct all along in warning that the occupation was a disaster—for us as well as you. The price for implementing our historic claim to all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, we realized, was too high. We could not remain a democratic state with ethical Jewish values if we became a permanent occupier of your people, nor did we want to. I didn’t return home to deny another people its own sense of home.
