Except this time it was my daughters who were in Tel Aviv, and when I got their texts saying, ‘I’m safe,’ I was the one who let out my breath, feeling guilty. because I knew that other parents would receive a different message.

Forty-four years have passed since I heard an explosion three blocks away – a “work accident” I remember hearing later, because the terrorist had wanted to leave it downtown, not explode with it in a dark corner on the outskirts of town – and it seems that not much time has passed.

I am a professional journalist. The job description says I’m expected to be level-headed and analytical. Forgive me, but here’s a hot blood test.

We, between the Mediterranean and Jordan, we are crazy. We did the same things over and over, hurting each other and getting nowhere.

Those among the Palestinians who believe that blowing up buses and shooting young people in a bar will bring them some form of liberation, or persuade us to surrender or leave, is mind-blowing. The method was tested for about 70 years and failed. Overall, seeing people randomly killed makes those around them – both family and the greater tribe – angry and stubborn.

When Palestinian news feeds refer to Tel Aviv residents fleeing an attack as “settlers” or a woman killed inside Israel by a rocket from Gaza as “colon … inside occupied Palestine”, they do public relations work for the current settlement movement in the occupied West Bank. Because Israelis – with the possible exception of a certain number able to gather in a small seminar room or the like to chant post-colonial phrases borrowed from elsewhere – do not regard pre-1967 Israel as an occupation. We are not settlers with a motherland to which we can return. The message that Tel Aviv is a settlement only convinces more Israelis that abandoning the West Bank settlements and ending the occupation will bring no calm to our lives.

I don’t like to say this, because I truly believe that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank, for the sake of the Palestinians and, selfishly, for ours.

It hurts me a lot to say it too – my neighbors will correctly tell me it’s in bad taste while the doctors are still trying to save the wounded and families mourn the dead – but the Israeli government suffers from its own hallucinations.

say, like our prime minister has, that there will be no peace agreement with the Palestinians during his tenure does not make us any safer. This induces despair among the Palestinians, and while desperation leads many to give up, it leads a small number to resort to evil and desperate means to rouse the quiet masses, such as shooting at a bar at the start of the weekend. Israeli.

Celebrating a meeting of Israeli, Moroccan, Emirati, Bahraini and Egyptian foreign ministers does not bring us closer to peace on the home front, because it only signals that the Arab states have also abandoned the Palestinians, which breeds more despair. . We know where this leads.

Nor consistently – as a matter of policy or metastasized neglect – ignore settler attacks on the Palestinians, or treat the death Palestinians at the hands of soldiers in the West Bank like noise from distant galaxies, brings us closer to peace. As I mentioned, killing people makes their neighbors and tribe stubborn, angry, and uncompromising.

For the Palestinians to truly achieve independence, the first thing to do is to organize a velvet revolution against the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza, and to create a united government capable of negotiating an end to the conflict. For the Israelis to achieve peace, we must elect a government that brings the settlers home even before peace, to show that we are serious.

I am tired of hearing my voice speak these truths, which are as obvious as the futility of terror and as constant as repeated moments of pain. We have to wake up from endless illusions. We need a simultaneous burst of sanity.