A century ago, on Mt. Scopus, in Jerusalem, Albert Einstein gave the first lecture at the future Hebrew University, a ninety-minute inquest into cosmic mysteries: the meaning of time, the properties of light. In June, 2014, Sayed Kashua, a novelist, columnist, television writer, and perhaps the most visible representative of Palestinian life in Israel, trudged to the same spot with a more earthbound goal. A reluctant public speaker, he was there to deliver a commencement address to the graduating class. His subject was life between languages, familiar ground for an author who identifies himself as Palestinian but writes solely in Hebrew. Though he was given only fifteen minutes, the invitation was unprecedented—the first time the university had brought in an Arab to speak at graduation.

Kashua, who is forty, with thick, once black hair and a brooding gaze, slouched a little behind the lectern. He grew up in Tira, an Arab village in central Israel, in a family of fruit farmers who had lived in the same house since the days of the British Mandate. In the past decade, he has become the kind of writer whose column, in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, “people hang on their fridge,” as a colleague put it. In 2007, a sitcom he wrote, titled “Arab Labor” (a Sabra idiom for second-rate work), had its début, introducing an Arab family to Israeli audiences for the first time. It made him a celebrity not just on the comfortable left but, as one television executive told me, among “taxi-drivers and supporters of Beitar,” a Jerusalem soccer club whose right-wing fans have been known to chant “I hate all Arabs.”

Standing before the students and their families, Kashua decided to say a few words about the political climate. These were agitated days. A week earlier, three Israeli teen-agers had been kidnapped while hitching a ride in a settlement south of Jerusalem. Kashua recounted how his son told him about it, garbling the news reports and the results of that summer’s World Cup soccer tournament. In a recent game, the Netherlands had grabbed five goals; now, his son said, “Palestine grabbed three.” His line drew nervous laughs, and Kashua quickly reassured the crowd: “It’s my fervent hope . . . the boys will be back home, safe and sound.” But he confessed to feeling “a stabbing in the chest,” and asked, “Does the hope that they will return home imply some sort of declaration that the settlements can be considered legitimate?”

The next day, Ynet, the most widely read news site in Israel, ran a story about Kashua’s speech. It quoted one graduate saying that Kashua had complained that his children “bothered him” with news of the kidnapping “while he tried to watch the World Cup.” Another student said, “Kashua used the technique of joke-telling but injected his speech with radical statements.”

Political debate in Israel is vigorous, if not always elegant, often summoning the old Hebrew phrase that describes “a dialogue between deaf people.” But it has been dampened in recent years by a series of government-sponsored bills: one demanding that non-Jewish Israelis take loyalty oaths; another authorizing the finance ministry to withhold funds from organizations deemed—however vaguely—to be violating Israel’s foundational tenet of a “Jewish and democratic” state. Kashua, like other Arab Israelis in the public eye, was used to having his words scrutinized. But the summer’s events felt different. As the conflict in Gaza escalated into war, the première of a movie based on his memoir “Dancing Arabs” was hastily scrapped. Flag-draped extremists in Tel Aviv brandished metal rods at antiwar demonstrators. The atmosphere of intimidation became so intense that Ayman Odeh, the youthful leader of the Joint List, an alliance of Arab-backed parties that represent Palestinian aspirations in Israel, announced that an “age of ostracism” had taken hold.

Within the Green Line that separates Israel proper from Gaza and the West Bank, Arab Israelis make up twenty per cent of the population. For liberal Israelis, and for Arabs who hope to be accepted as equals, Kashua embodied the country’s stated ideal of coexistence—of Arab Israelis’ full legal and civil integration. For a decade, he had lived with his wife, Najat, in Ramat Denya, a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, and their children attended the city’s only bilingual school. In a country where columnists have a flair for grandiloquence, Kashua’s columns are conversational, confiding, anecdotal, centered on the rituals and trials of bourgeois life, like the “holiday tour” that includes stopping at sixteen relatives’ houses, or the visiting electrician who reprimands him for his children’s excessive television viewing. While his writing is rarely explicitly political, a sense of uprootedness lurks; when the electrician, also an Arab, overhears the kids speaking Hebrew, Kashua can’t stop apologizing.

Coexistence of the kind that Kashua represents seems increasingly out of reach these days, when more than a third of Jewish Israelis openly say that Arab citizens shouldn’t be entitled to equal rights. Of 1.7 million Arabs in Israel, perhaps forty thousand lead middle-class lives in mixed cities. Ayman Odeh told me that his party’s goal is for Arab citizens “to take part in every institution in the country—except for security, foreign relations, and immigration absorption, because these institutions blur the lines of our national identity.” But even his more hopeful speeches don’t envision such inclusiveness for ten more years.

Two weeks after Kashua’s commencement address, searchers discovered the bodies of the three kidnapped teen-agers in a mound of rocks in a field near Hebron. In Jerusalem, far-right protesters called on Jews to avenge the murders. Kashua watched the news, terrified. As far as he knew, there were only five Arabs living in Ramat Denya: him, Najat, and their three children. When air-raid sirens warned of incoming rockets from Gaza, Kashua sent his kids to the bomb shelter, but he stayed away, uneasy around his neighbors. One day, his teen-age daughter was pummelled with water bottles, apparently for being Arab.

A day after the teen-agers’ funerals, a sixteen-year-old Palestinian was found dead amid the pines in the Jerusalem Forest. He had been bludgeoned and burned alive—an act of revenge for the teen-agers’ murder, his killers later claimed. After that, Kashua said, “I didn’t want my children to leave the house.” He was scheduled to depart later that summer with his family for Champaign, Illinois, to teach for a year at the University of Illinois campus there. He moved up the date of their flight and changed the tickets to one-way. “I’m not coming back to this building, not coming back to this neighborhood, not coming back to Jerusalem,” he wrote in his Haaretz column. “The lie I’d told my children about a future in which Arabs and Jews share the country equally was over.”

For Kashua’s faithful readers, his departure symbolized the country’s decline into angry factionalism. The Israeli author Amos Oz told me, “The fact that he left saddened me greatly. I can tell you that over the summer there wasn’t a decent Israeli who didn’t have similar thoughts.”

On the day the Kashuas were to leave, they scurried to prepare. A news crew from the investigative program “Fact” followed them as Najat filled large plastic bags with food. “They practically left with the pots still on the stove,” a neighbor told me. That night, a minivan drove the family to Ben-Gurion Airport. But first—snaking northwest, on rutted roads—they stopped in Tira. Under moonlight, Kashua kissed his relatives goodbye. “I’ll send you all Adidas,” he joked, as his mother cried silently in the background. His father, Darwish, sat by a picket fence in the back yard, smoking a cigarette. “He didn’t even consult,” Darwish said, visibly shaken. “He said, ‘That’s it, I’m leaving the country.’ ” Finally, Sayed approached him. “Bye, Aba,” he said softly. The two men embraced.