She recounted the story of how her family had hid throughout the Holocaust, the pride they felt upon reaching Israel, the imperative of bringing the nearly dead language of Hebrew back to life. It evoked in me a sense of pride at what Israelis had accomplished over the last seventy years, but it was also hard to reconcile that sense of history, generosity, and justice with those Palestinian kids. Obama’s vision—so readily accepted by young people everywhere, including the young Israelis in the convention center—seemed to clash with the harder edges of politics, the world in which one side
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