My grandparents were born in a swamp-covered strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea, back when it was still Mandatory Palestine. My grandmother’s father, who’d been living in Prague, saw the writing on the wall and decided to get out before things got worse. He immigrated to the place Jews all over Europe had long held up as the solution to the Jewish people’s problems (which seems horribly ironic today). My grandmother was born on the kibbutz* he helped found — a kibbutz that still exists, right to the north of Haifa. My grandfather grew up on a different kibbutz further south. They met as teenagers and got married shortly afterward.

As a kid living in Canada, I fell asleep listening to stories about these small communities; I collected each one like a jewel. Having been one of the only Jewish kids in a town filled with the descendants of English and Scottish immigrants, I loved the idea of being surrounded by people who looked like me and celebrated my holidays. At six years old, I had no concept of why a Jewish state — a state based on religion, or ethnicity, or whatever you want to call Judaism — might be problematic.

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Cut to the present. The current clash between Israel and Gaza is uglier than it’s been in years. I’ve never set foot in the Palestinian territories, so I can’t pretend to understand the suffering that’s happening there on a personal level, and I won’t write about it at length. You can read about it here and here. I do know that I can’t even sign on to Facebook without hearing stories about entire families getting annihilated and about fathers carrying the remains of their sons in plastic bags. The knowledge that my country is directly responsible for the carnage is horrifying. Part of me gets defensive; I tell myself that the British and the United States have done worse in Dresden, that both rebel and government forces are doing worse in Syria right now. But then I remember that for the people trapped in Gaza, none of that changes a damn thing.

The news is also full of intimidating pictures of armed and uniformed Israeli soldiers. But Americans often forget that because Israel has a draft, everyone knows a soldier, and almost everyone has been one. In the past few weeks, the Israeli Defense Forces have pulled around 86,000 reservists from civilian life to ease the burden on the soldiers in the front lines. (To put that number into context, Israel has a population of 8 million.)

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Many Israelis feel that there’s no way to end the suffering of the Palestinian people without leaving themselves vulnerable to attack, that there’s nothing Israel can possibly do to satisfy the international community — nothing short of vacating the land entirely. To some Israelis, leaving is unthinkable for religious reasons. Most people wouldn’t consider leaving simply because it’s the only home they’ve known. Where else would they go? I sometimes fantasize about scooping Israel up cartoon-like and plopping it in an empty and remote corner of the world.

I Skyped with my grandparents the other night. They’ve witnessed Israelis fight, again and again, since childhood. I could hear in their voices that they’ve given up on seeing an end to the conflict in their lifetimes. In recent years, my grandfather has begun expressing the grim, cynical view that Palestinians don’t value human life. The first time he said this to me, we were having tea and cookies at my mom’s house. I told him I was embarrassed to be related to someone who would say anything so bigoted, he retorted that I had zero understanding of what the conflict was actually like, and what was supposed to be our bonding time turned into a screaming match.

This time, when my grandfather made that same point over Skype, I stayed silent; I knew he wasn’t in listening mode, and I don’t ever want to find myself shouting at a 70-year-old man again. “No military in the world behaves the way our military does,” he said, exasperated. The implied question was clear: “What more do you want from us?”

I’m sure someone’s going to read what I’ve written and think, “here’s another apologist for Israel.” Someone else will think, “here’s an Israeli who can’t even stand behind her own country.” But I’m tired of being told that you have to choose a camp and sit in it. I’m tired of people arguing about who started the latest flare-up in a conflict that’s been burning for decades. I’m tired of finger-pointing from people who refuse to acknowledge the enormity of the pain on both sides. Actions can be wrong or right, but there’s no such thing as illegitimate pain. You can’t make pain go away with facts, figures, timelines, or maps.

The only way to get out of this conflict is to recognize the pain — without arguments, without blame — and work on healing it. It will only end when we lay out our stories and strive to create a unified narrative, piece by piece. The process is bound to unleash immeasurable hurt and anger, but if we can’t operate in the same reality, how can we expect to see peace in our lifetimes? If we place the desire to be right above the desire to listen, how can we expect to see anything other than rockets and bombs?