Israel has no choice but to fight....

There is no interest on the other side for a 2-state solution...

I joined the growing number of Israelis reaching out to the other side. In 1999, shortly before the outbreak of the second intifada, I went on a year-long pilgrimage into mosques and monasteries, seeking, as a religious Jew, a common devotional language with my Muslim and Christian neighbors.

I didn't expect Palestinians to reciprocate. It's always easier, after all, for the victor to be more nuanced than the defeated. Still, I discovered that even as many Israelis were trying to understand the Palestinian narrative, Palestinian society was teaching its children that the Jewish narrative was a lie.

There was no ancient Jewish presence in the land of Israel, no Temple on the Temple Mount, no Holocaust. One leading Palestinian moderate told me that the Jews weren't a people, only a religion, and that after the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, the Jews would resume their status as a religious minority.

He was hardly alone: The notion that the Jews aren't a people and have no right to a state is endemic throughout Palestinian society, in fact throughout the Arab world.

The Israeli left won the debate over the need to end the occupation, but lost the debate over the viability of peace.

Most Israelis today want a two-state solution, but few believe it will end the conflict. Even many who oppose settlement-building no longer believe that settlements are the obstacle to peace.

Instead, we've become convinced that the real obstacle remains the existence of a Jewish state in any borders.

Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process, Israel has been caught in one ongoing war. Though the enemy repeatedly shifts, from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran, the common aim is jihad, and its target is civilian Israel.

The curse of Jewish history - the inability to take mere existence for granted - has returned to a country whose founding was intended to resolve that uncertainty.

We feel the impingement of siege. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, when Tel Aviv was hit by Scud missiles from Iraq, residents fled north to the Galilee. In 2006, when the Galilee was hit by Katyushas from Hezbollah, residents fled south to Tel Aviv. Now, the entire country is within missile range. Next time, there will be nowhere to run.