I recently read an op-ed by Israeli professor Fania Oz-Salzberger in which she uses an extended metaphor to defend Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Imagine, she writes, that you have been feuding with a “poor and traumatized” neighbor, someone with whom you have a “sad and complicated history.” Imagine that your neighbor keeps firing bullets into your house from his own living room which is “densely packed with women and children,” and with his own daughter in fact sitting on his lap as he shoots. You’ve tried to ignore him but now some of his bullets are hitting your child’s bedroom door. The police are unavailable. “What do you do?”

Her metaphor is meant to herd the reader relentlessly to one conclusion: Israel had no choice but to unleash the violence it visited upon Gaza this January. Hamas provoked it, and Hamas must bear full responsibility for civilian casualties inflicted by Israeli bombs, because Hamas would not stop firing through Israel’s windows and let Israelis simply live in peace in their own home.

The metaphor is accurate, so far as it goes. Hamas has indeed fired rockets into Israel and done so, surely, in the cynical hope of provoking a brutal response. Hamas undoubtedly sees political advantage in getting Israel to kill innocent civilians of every age and gender in Gaza: Israeli violence in Gaza (and elsewhere) inflames anti-Israel sentiment among Arabs, which probably “energizes Hamas’s base” among Palestinians.

So yes, the metaphor is accurate, as far as it goes, but it only goes halfway. To make it fully accurate, one must add the other half of the equation…“and suppose your house used to be your neighbor’s house. Suppose his family had been living there for a thousand years. Suppose your neighbor is traumatized and poor because after you drove him from his home, he had to move in with his poor and unemployed relatives. Suppose his house is “densely packed with women and children” because its occupants include refugees from the house you now inhabit, and his daughter is sitting on his lap because, in that densely-packed house, she has nowhere else to sit.

And suppose finally that, fearing your neighbor’s resentment, you have encircled his house with guards and guard dogs to cut him off from the outside world, even from shopping, even from having goods delivered, and certainly from visitors, because you know he’ll only use the opportunity to buy more guns and bullets to use against you. You have arranged that food and other necessities be delivered to him, you’re not a barbarian after all, but you insist that all packages be inspected by you before they go in or out. You regret these measures but must enforce them because your neighbor has made no bones about his desire to kill you.

Let’s face it: whatever your plans were, whatever you may have wanted originally, the fact is that you are now a prison warden and your neighbor is your prisoner. Of course he’s lobbing bombs over the fence. Of course he’s trying to hurt you—what did you or anyone expect? And how can the violence end if the configuration between the two of you doesn’t change? And how can that change unless the dynamics of your interaction do?

Others around the neighborhood have pleaded with the two of you to sit down and talk this problem out, but you refuse to do so unless your neighbor first agrees that the house is yours, that you were right to take it, and that no injustice has occurred. This your neighbor refuses to do, and so the impasse continues. Your neighbor’s anger keeps growing; your fear of your neighbor keeps growing; you take ever harsher measures to render your neighbor impotent so that you can be safe; and your neighbor’s anger therefore grows and grows…

Using half a metaphor to represent the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is not useful. It only reifies the notion that one side is totally at fault and that the violence will end once that side is made to confess its guilt. In Israel of course, but in the West generally, and in the United States in particular, sentiment seems pretty one-sidedly to hold that Israel is in the right, the Palestinians are in the wrong. In the Arab world of course, but in the rest of the world generally, and in the poor (or “developing”) countries especially, sentiment seems just as one-sidedly convinced that Israel is in the wrong, the Palestinians its victims.

Clearly, both sides have legitimate concerns and grievances. So long as each side is talking only to itself, it will construct an internally consistent framework within which the arguments of the other side all look like vicious, self-serving rationalizations: this is the inevitable result of trying a case agains tyourself in the court of yourself with yourself as judge and yourself as jury and yourself covering the trial. The conflict can never be adjudicated until the two sides talk with each other and construct a shared framework together.

Israel, however, will not talk to Palestinians unless they first agree that “Israel has a right to exist.” This has been Israel’s irreducible precondition for talks, the absolute barrier to talks, and it’s a conversation stopper, because it seems so blunt and simple, so bottom line: a person who refuses to agree with this proposition must be a monster with whom no discussion is possible, because no one can negotiate away their own survival. This, I think is how the matter is generally viewed in the West and the reason why the Palestinians are broadly held to have no case.

Let me however submit a shocking proposal: Israel should drop this precondition. Why? And how can it possibly?

Consider five points.

First, Israel’s precondition has no relationship to Israel’s continued existence. If you agree to talk to someone who wants you dead, it doesn’t mean you’ve agreed to die. Talking to such a person doesn’t mean you’re in greater danger than you would be if the two of you continue to stalk each other around the neighborhood, each of you with knives sharpened and guns loaded, popping off every time you see a shadow. In fact, you’re probably in less danger once the talks begin.

In truth, Israel’s continued existence doesn’t depend on what the Palestinians or anyone else think about Israel’s “right to exist.” It depends, rather, on Israel’s social cohesion, its economic resources, its military strength, and its support from allies such as the United States. None of these factors would be altered one iota by Israelis sitting down to talk with Palestinians of any stripe, even ones who think Israel should not exist.

Second, the proposition itself deserves a closer look: Israel has a right to exist. What right is actually being asserted here? On the radio, recently, I heard lawyer Alan Dershowitz deliver a sentence containing two phrases uttered in series exactly as if they were equivalent: the Palestinians, he said, must accept “the right of Israel to exist, the right of the Jewish people to exist.”

The right of Israel to exist.

The right of the Jewish people to exist.

Those are two different things. One is a nation-state, the other a category of human being. Many categories of people have a right to exist without having, by virtue of that fact alone, a right to a nation-state. Gypsies, homosexuals, and Zen Buddhists, for example, all have a right to exist, but does that automatically mean that each group has a right to a nation-state of its own? Of course not! (And personally, I don’t think nation-states have this sort of right; only people do. Nation-states are contractual social entities forged by the common consent, ideally, of all parties concerned. Asserting that one particular group’s nation-state has a right to exist–in an area where a number of competing groups happen to live–is asserting the rights of one group of people over the rights of another.)

What Israel does have is a need to exist. Israel is necessary because Jews have been persecuted all over the world for centuries and have been vulnerable to such persecution on account of having been a landless minority everywhere they have lived, with no territory of their own in which to find refuge. And while many groups have suffered persecution, no other, not even the Armenians, have been subjected to such a massive and categorical genocidal attack as the Jews sustained in Europe in the nienteenth and twentieth centuries. Israel needs to exist because without it the right of Jewish people (and thus of each Jewish person) will forever be threatened.

But a need is not quite the same thing as a right. If someone is chasing me down the street with an ax, I’m going to grab any place of refuge I can find. If your door is open, I’m squirting through there and throwing the bolt after myself if I can, and if you try to throw me out, if you assert your right as owner of the house to let in or keep out whom you wish, I’m probably going to fight you, and if it comes down to one of us ending up on the street, I’m going to do my level best to make sure it’s you, because my first priority is survival and I’ll sort out the rights and wrongs of it later: I need your house because without it I’m dead. And yet—in the final analysis— still—my need for your house doesn’t actually give me a right to your house.

Israel’s need to exist is wholly defensible because it refers only to material facts and to Israel itself, independently of all other considerations. Israel’s right to exist is a murkier proposition because it’s not just about Israel but also about the Palestinians, and because ultimately it asserts an opinion which inherently cannot be proven true or false. Making a vociferous issue of Israel’s right to exist only obscures the more unassailable argument about Israel’s need to exist.

Then there’s a third (though not wholly unrelated) point. When European Zionists first decided that a Jewish nation state was necessary, Palestine was 97% Arab. When the smoke cleared a hundred years later, what had been Palestine was the Jewish state: a majority of its inhabitants were Jewish transplants from Europe, and over 750,000 of the land’s original inhabitants, all of them Arabs, were living outside the borders of the new country, in refugee camps. Clearly something bad happened in the interim. The mere demographic facts leave no doubt about it. Clearly, the creation of Israel displaced an entire nation of people who had been living in this place for a thousand years and more. The persecutions, massacres, and horrors that made Israel necessary for Jews were not committed by the Palestinians. Whatever the arguments for Israel might be, therefore, they don’t signify that the Palestinians deserved their fate. In short, the Palestinians do have a grievance.

The bald assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” constitutes a refusal to let this grievance be aired, a denial that something bad happened here, an insistance that the-bad-thing never be spoken of—and that can’t be healthy. We know of individuals that when childhood trauma is repressed,d enied, shrouded in silence, it only manifests in as disturbance later life. Surely what is true of individuals is true in some sense of historical phenomena as well. This is one reason why denials of the Holocaust outrage (most of) us; but in a large sense the displacement of the Palestinians was part of the same event as the Holocaust; it was an echo of the greater horror. Something dark did happen in connection with the birth of Israel. Denying it won’t make it unhappen. Refusing to speak of it will not remove the shadow of it from anybody’s conscience. It will only make the thing fester and go on fueling a Palestinian rage that is relit each day by the circumstances in which the Palestinians find themselves, circumstances that Israel cannot help contributing to because of the vicious cycle into which it is locked and which could be broken only by negotiations. To my mind, Israel must let the-bad-thing come up for discussion. It should not be afraid of that discussion. “A bad thing happened” does not necessarily mean “Bad people did it.” The creation of Israel was morally complex. Allowing Israeli/Palestinian talks to begin without preconditions only means that the pain of both groups of people will be on the same stage at the same time, rather than each tragedy playing on its own stage to a separate audience. Unless both tragedies can be acknowledged together, neither people will ever be able to acknowledge the sorrows of other. It’s not only that Israel will survive a discussion of Israel’s right to exist; in the end (I think) the Israeli conscience will also survive such a discussion. What the Israeli conscience won’t survive are acts yet undreamt of, but into which Israel may finally be led, if talks never begin.

And there is one final reason why Israel should drop its precondition for talking with the Palestinians. Inescapably, the birth of Israel aborted the birth of Palestine. The assertion that “Israel has the right to exist” is the assertion that “Palestine does not have the right to exist.” In saying this, I take no position on which trumps which, nor do I admit that any nation-state has “a right to exist.” I note only that the two statements are equivalent. To say the one is to say the other.

In which case, substitute the second expression for the first in Israel’s precondition, and the problem becomes obvious: to Arab ears, Israel is saying: We will not talk to Palestinian leaders unless they first agree that Palestine has no right to exist. Well, any Palestinian leader who takes that position soon stops being a Palestinian leader. When Fatah was pushed to this position, it lost Gaza. If Israeli, American, and world pressure force Hamas to relinquish its embrace of Palestinian sovereignty, Hamas’s grip on Palestinian loyalty will simply weaken and another group will take its place. Several bide their time in the wings; none of them, to my knowledge, are “more moderate” than Hamas.

In the same radio interview I cited earlier, Alan Dershowitz explained why Israel cannot deal with Hamas at any level: “You can’t talk to people who are trying to kill you,” he said. But isn’t every war between people who are trying to kill each other? If Dershowitz’s principle were valid, no war could be ended by negotiation. In fact, Dershowitz has it exactly wrong. If someone is trying to kill you, that’s exactly the person with whom you must speak. It’s pointless to find someone else who thinks you ought to be left alone and forge an agreement with him!

In short, israel gains nothing from forcing Hamas (or Fatah, or any set of Palestinian leaders) to change its declared position on Israel. It only breaks those leaders off from the rest of their people. Progress can come only by changing what the Palestinians in general want and will die for, and that can happen only if conditions and prospects change for this people as a whole.

Of course it would be great if Palestinian leaders could meet Israel halfway and take the steps needed to resolve the conflict in this region, but their hands are tied by domestic political considerations because Palestine’s right-to-exist is a burning issue for their constituency right now: it is actively being denied in the West Bank, with the continual expansion of Jewish settlements and the barbed-wired encirclement of numerous isolated Palestinian enclaves, and in Gaza, with a blockade that transforms the entire home territory of a million-plus people into an enormous prison camp.

Only Israeli, therefore, can take the needed steps. It has no choice but to relinquish Palestinian territory, deal with Palestinian Arabs as a sovereign people with all the same human rights and entitlement to dignity and self-rule as Israeli Jews, end the blockade of Gaza, end Israeli control of airspace over Palestinian territory, shut down all Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and negotiate with whoever the Palestinians say represents them, no matter what those Palestinians say they believe.

The immediate result of Israeli concessions on these points might well be that some hostile Arab gangs cross the border and kill some Jews. It’s easy to say: well, that’s the price of moving forward (and there will be a price no matter what), but it’s a price no Israeli government can pay, because if it did it would not remain the Israeli government. It would be ousted and new leaders would come to the fore, leaders willing to kill Arabs. Which means that Israeli leaders cannot take the steps needed to resolve the conflict and move toward peace in this territory. Their hands are tied in exactly the same way as those of their Palestinian counterparts. They are boxed in by domestic political considerations because they confront a sea of angry Arabs who want them gone from the region. By making life dangerous for Israel’s Jews, Palestinian Arabs strip Israeli leaders of the room to do what must be done to move toward peace and feed the forces that make life dismal for the very people they lead. In short, the problem of Israel/Palestine cannot be solved by Israelis and it cannot be solved by the Palestinians. It can only be solved by a massive, neutral outside power.

The United States is massive enough and powerful enough. It just isn’t neutral enough. In President Obama’s first statement about Gaza after his inauguration, he laudably pronounced diplomacy the cornerstone of America’s Middle East policy. He went on to state U.S. support for Israel’s right to self-defense, declaring quite properly that no responsible government can simply sit back and allow the bombardment of its citizens.

This would have been the moment to follow up with a strong “on-the-other-hand” statement. For example, Obama might have said, “On the other hand, no people can be expected to live stripped of self-determination and dignity, under the total domination of its most dedicated enemy, and dependent on that enemy for everything from food and water to medicine and employment. The United States will therefore support, without restriction or precondition, the creation of a sovereign state of Palestine.”

But instead, Obama merely stated U.S. support for humanitarian aid to Gaza: food, water, and medicine would be delivered. That’s no more than what we feel obliged, in the name of human decency, to give criminals in prison.

And I know why Obama did not make a stronger statement. His hands were tied by domestic political considerations. Following up a strong statement of support for Israel with an equally strong statement of support for Palestinians would have been reported by the media as a tilt toward the Arabs. There would have been a furor. It would have weakened the president’s ability to do anything useful in the Middle East and might even have endangered his domestic agenda.

Yes, American leaders find themselves in the same position as both Palestinian and Israeli leaders: unable to take the steps needed to move toward real peace in the Middle East. And that’s on us: the American electorate. We’re the ones tying our leaders’ hands.

In order for the United States to play a truly neutral role in the Middle East, we American voters have to understand what’s at stake there and what “neutral” looks like. We have to allow and indeed demand that our government take what will certainly look like a pro-Palestinian stance at first. It will look that way simply because, in this country, we are so unaccustomed to hearing even the most minimal acknowledgment of legitimate Arab grievances.

But we at least are where the buck stops: we have no downstream constituency to placate. We are free to look at the facts of the conflict and embrace whatever position makes sense. If we do, we will liberate our leaders to do the same and thus to finally take the steps needed to resolve the crisis of Israel/Palestine. The road to peace in the Middle East starts with the American voter. It can only start with us. It must start with us.