Tel Aviv

SINCE Wednesday, when Israel killed Hamas’s military chief, Ahmed al-Jabari, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas had fired rockets and mortars only into southern Israel. So on Thursday evening, when I heard an air-raid siren sound in Tel Aviv, I assumed it was a test. But just for a moment. Then I snapped to my senses, grabbed my phone and ran to my apartment building’s stairs. I began to make my way down, running at first, thinking only of my three young sons. Two were in a judo lesson. One was with his grandmother. I could not get to them.

On the second-floor landing, I paused. My heart was racing, but my legs wouldn’t. I was weighing my options, and none seemed good. And eight steps above the lobby of my building I came to a very somber conclusion: this is how life is going to be here, and I can’t change it. Hope for a peaceful Israel is diminishing.

We have no one to make peace with, says the voice on the street. That may be true, but so is this: In Israel, too, our leaders — on all sides — have failed to move toward peace.

Yes, peace negotiations with Hamas are questionable. But just a few weeks ago, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that he would not allow a third intifada to break out, and that although he is a refugee from Safed, a city in northern Israel, he does not intend to return there as anything but a tourist. “Palestine for me,” he said, “is the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital; this is Palestine, I am a refugee, I live in Ramallah. The West Bank and Gaza is Palestine, everything else is Israel.” The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by saying, “There is no connection between the Palestinian Authority chairman’s statement and his actual actions.”