Every year on Tisha B’Av, my thoughts return to places that shaped my understanding of what it means to be Jewish in Israel.

As children, my father had a tradition. Instead of spending the day only reading about destruction, he took us to Hebron.

We visited Beit Hadassah and walked through the exhibition documenting the 1929 massacre. The photographs were difficult to look at. Families who had lived peacefully in Hebron for generations were brutally murdered by Muslim neighbors they had trusted. We then continued to the ancient Jewish cemetery, where history no longer felt like something written in books. It felt painfully real. Those visits taught me an important lesson.

The conflict did not begin in 1967. It did not begin with settlements. It did not begin with the........

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