Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. —JORGE LUIS BORGES

Barak was one of Israel’s most decorated soldiers, known for having orchestrated the assassination of several top-ranking Palestinians. He had opposed the Oslo Accords on grounds that they provided insufficient security guarantees. Some might have seen these attributes as warning signs; to Americans already giddy at Netanyahu’s defeat, Barak’s

It is convenient to personalize this affair, to turn it into the story of a single individual and his loathsome partners. Netanyahu is the ideal offender, one whose ouster would set things right. He makes it so much easier to exonerate successive Israeli governments that sought to liquidate the Palestinian cause, eliminate its leaders, and deepen

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things…; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else. —FERNANDO PESSOA, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET

What remains is a naked contest that originated long ago and stubbornly refuses to go. To focus on the here and now—on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition partners, their suspicions and zealotry; on Hamas and its armed wing’s leadership, their brutality and readiness to gamble with people’s lives—may be comforting. It is

is the story of how illusions repeatedly clouded judgments; of how outsiders sought to shove aside the past, culture, and beliefs, to belittle the part played in politics by intangibles—humiliation, anger, dignity. It is the story of how logic, rationality, and the most meticulously prepared peace plan were no match for the raw power of history and

What was striking about this concentrated fire against Netanyahu was how much it revealed about those who mobilized against him. The nostalgia was not just for a pre-Netanyahu Israel, but for a pre-Netanyahu Netanyahu: The prime minister, as then–US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer put it, was a man who had “lost his way,” the implication being

return to a life that is no longer there. Tomorrow is yesterday because yesterday—before the pretense that history matters little and before sanitized negotiations between two unequal parties mediated by a powerful third that sides with the stronger of them—is where Israelis and Palestinians seek refuge. They seek refuge in the wish that the other