When I enlisted in the IDF in 2004, I became the first of my family to serve in the armed forces for three generations. The last of my ancestors to take the King's Shilling had been my great-grandfather, who fought for the British empire during the first world war, and took part in the fierce battle of the Somme.

Despite surviving the carnage relatively unscathed, physically speaking, he bore the mental scars for the rest of his life, plagued forever more by memories of the horrors he encountered on the battlefield. He used to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, sweat pouring from his fevered brow as he drowned beneath a deluge of imaginary rats swarming through the trenches in his mind.

The closest I came to his torment during my time in uniform was simply dealing with the self-reproach and discomfort of policing the occupation in Palestinian cities; my spell of national service fortunately coinciding with a relative lull in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I demobbed six months before the second Lebanon war broke out, although many of my former comrades were unlucky enough to be caught up in the fighting, some of whom never made it back across the border to Israeli soil.

Not a day went by during the summer of 2006 when I didn't thank God that I hadn't had to be exposed to the true horrors of war; for all that we had taken part in some pretty unsavoury – and pretty violent – incidents during our own tour of duty, what we encountered paled in comparison to those who participated in battles to the death for days and weeks on end.

For all that I cannot begin to understand what they – or my great grandfather – went through on the front lines, similarly I defy anyone who has not served in a war zone such as the West Bank or Gaza to comprehend how these experiences take their toll on those who served in such conditions on a daily basis for years. Similarly, much as people strive to grasp what drives victims of oppression – be they Palestinian farmers, Vietnamese villagers, or any other downtrodden people – to such desperate measures in their acts of resistance, there can be no true understanding without having been in that situation for themselves.

It is easy to be an armchair supporter of either side in the Israel-Palestine imbroglio and take potshots from afar at those in the opposing camp, yet to do so without having walked a mile in the shoes of those with whom one disagrees is utterly unhelpful in the bigger picture. While I detest the lengths to which the Israeli government and army go in order to suppress the Palestinians in the apparent pursuit of security, I cannot ignore the fear factor which propels the Israeli electorate to give their leaders carte blanche to carry out such abuses.

A collective memory stretching back generations, encompassing the Holocaust, eastern European pogroms, and events all the way back to Temple times, has taken a heavy toll on many Jews, allowing rhyme and reason to be replaced with rampant nationalism and state racism when it comes to modern-day Israel. While the fear in no way excuses the abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians, it has to be first identified and isolated before the malignant disease coursing through Israel's psyche can be dealt with at all.

To some extent, it appears that Israeli society is already embarking on a process of introspection and self-evaluation, if films such as Waltz With Bashir and Beaufort are anything to go by. I saw Waltz With Bashir in a packed Tel Aviv cinema, and the silence as the credits rolled was deafening, given the Israeli tendency to talk nineteen-to-the-dozen at any opportunity. Instead, the audience sat in contemplative, stunned quiet, the trauma of the film's central characters having seeped from the silver screen into the hearts and minds of all who had witnessed the story play itself out.

I have no doubt that, were the same audience to be exposed to a Palestinian version of a psychological war film such as Waltz With Bashir, they would begin to view the experience of Palestinian fighters and militants through far more understanding, if not wholly sympathetic, eyes. As an ex-soldier myself, who was schooled on a diet of anti-Palestinian propaganda throughout my army service, it wasn't until I began to talk to Palestinians for myself that I began any kind of process of judging their situation in an honest and balanced fashion.

For all the poppies worn brazenly on lapels the length and breadth of England this week, the most fitting tribute to those who fell in defence of our freedom is to use our liberty to push beyond our comfort zones, and look at what catalysts are fuelling those who we are quick to castigate as evil and irredeemable. War takes an immeasurable toll on all who are touched by it – be they my great-grandfather, the mother of a fallen soldier in Lebanon, or the child of a militant shot dead by the IDF – and dismissing their reactions out of hand leaves us as far back on the path to peace now as we were 90 years ago.