One thing I am — and have all along been — trying to do is to dig down into the barest bones of this conflict, penetrate into its core, on the assumption that neither people like Israeli progressive novelists and essayists Amos Oz and David Grossman, nor leaders like PA President Abbas and PLO ambassador to the US Afif Safieh, are moral imbeciles.

Amos Oz once wrote that the Arabs think the Jews were European colonialists, when what they were were panicked survivors of an Israel that was and is actually one giant refugee camp.

What he doesn’t say is that even if he’s right, traumatized and panicked survivors can be themselves dangerous. And then I wonder whether if it were anyone but the Jews — say, Evangelicals in Palestine — or like Afrikaners and Brits in South Africa — everyone would say, bite the bullet and reunite. And sometimes I think that too. Bite the bullet, like the Afrikaners did.

Then sometimes I think that this conflict is just unique, that the fact that they’re Jews is relevant, the fact that they were chased out (to their homeland is of perhaps some but even then secondary importance) is relevant– again, my formulaic nub of the conflict, the immovable object of the Palestinians who had every right to stay put, to resist, and driving this to the farthest wall that they even had every right under the sun to be xenophobes, while, on the other hand, the Jews had every right to flee for their lives and to live and try to survive.

Ironically, the “irresistible force” of adrenlinized energy and momentum that may have helped the Jews survive in 1948-9 may harm them now, as well as raising anti-Semitism once again. Martin Buber and especially his colleague Judah Magnes rather predicted that such a destiny could follow.

What polarizations here– not only the polarized partisans in the conflict, but also the disparate interpretations of it.

Right now the “right to be an immovable object” and “right to be an irresistible force” is the best that I can do — and added to it, that one side being an “irresistible force” nevertheless is going — self-evidently — to generate profound resistance. And especially because of the overwhelming demographics against the Israelis from the Arab and Persian and Muslim worlds, one may wonder whether, if the Israelis do not someday relent and become part of a reunited or federated historical Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, if instead we may see the resistance bring about the unutterable anguish and hell of Israel’s destruction– that the Jewish short-run “irresistible force” could be in the short run precisely “resistible,” and so perhaps instead lead to its quick and horrific and hellish destruction (say, from Iran or neighbors radicalized into Islamists) or toward its long-run fatigue and enervation and decline.

In the period of Holocaust and partition and war, 1939-1949, perhaps the Jewish people of Palestine did urgently feel that they had no choice and were faced with prospective extermination. They were certainly threatened with it– by both the Germans and Arabs.

Moreover, whether they were right or wrong, this Holocaust-period and post-Holocaust traumatized –and therefore so unprecedentedly burdened–leadership was far from perfect.

In sum, who has ever, ever, ever, been put in a similar existential bind about what to have done?

Then the Palestinian leadership wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect either. And also who has also been put into as much of a bind as that “immovable object,” the Palestinians, about what to have done in the face of this “irresistible force”?

Perfect leaderships would of course have avoided the conflict, and could have resolved and healed it all along, and could resolve and heal it now. But such leaderships exist nowhere and never have ever existed.

Ha’aretz asks what Passover is about. One thing it is about is freedom– from slavery and war. Abraham Lincoln said that “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master”, and he “who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.” Passover means freedom from slavery, from mastery, from conflict, from swords, from Jews oppressing Palestinians and Palestinians oppressing Jews.

But how? For centuries the Palestinians were 95% of the people and land of Palestine, and then Jews from Europe took over. But the Jews were refugees fleeing persecution who were peaceful and liberal. Without decades of Arab anti-refugee violence including a war against partition, which was not fought over return of Arab refugees since there were no Arab refugees, the area would be so demographically heavily and peacefully Arab, and the Jewish refugees so peaceful and liberal, it would be unrecognizable today: Without any Palestinian refugees from Israel, there would long be two (yes, two) peaceful Palestinian-majority states — Israel, majority Arab but with a large and safe- and-sound minority of Jewish refugees, Jews back home, and Palestine, largely Arab but also with a large number of safe and secure Jews. In such currently entirely unrecognizable circumstances, they may even have reunited or federated by now.

As seen in Theodor Herzl’s classic, “Old/New Land,” Zionism was a peaceful and liberal movement of fleeing refugees and a dream of a multiculturalism in one land. It was Arab anti-refugee violence, not peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, who ruined the liberal dream.

The refugees’ right to have children who did not have all their throats slit open forced them to circle their wagons.

But the Arabs, to be blunt, had the sovereign right not to welcome strangers– the sovereign right to be xenophobes, to be unwelcoming. But not any right to be murderous against innocent people. On the other hand, the Jews, facing just such mass murder in Europe, had the right to life, the right to live, the right to survive, the right to escape to wherever they could come hell or high water.

And it has become for both peoples both hell and high water. One side that has the right to be an irresistible force and the other that has the right to be an immoveable object.

Can they share the land? Even by 2000 Japan and Russia had still not signed a peace treaty ending World War II, because of a “handful of small islands off the northern coast of Japan’s Hokkaido island, which are part of the Kuril Island chain” [from geography.about.com]. The islands are far less than 1% of the area of each country. Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falklands, thousands of miles from Britain and again far less than 1% of the area of each country; as have India and Pakistan over Kashmir, which is less than 1% of the land of each of these countries.

So how does anyone expect Israelis and Palestinians to succeed in the superhuman feat of reasonableness over emotion of sharing Palestine, when the whole, entire, 100% of the land of Palestine is what is at stake?

Passover is a reminder of both sides in bondage and the absolute miracle required for both sides — and also with the world’s steady help — to “learn war no more.”