Here is the land as two families remember it. Khaled’s family lost their home in 1948, driven from their village near Beit Jibrin, and rebuilt in Gush Etzion. In 1967 they were driven out of Gush Etzion itself, fled to Jordan, and resettled a third time in Beit Ummar. In those same hills, a Jewish community had been under siege since the partition vote, and on May 13, 1948 — the day before Israel declared independence — its defenders surrendered and were massacred. Nineteen years later, after the Six-Day War, the children of those survivors came back and rebuilt Kfar Etzion on the same ground. Two histories, the same soil, both real: a Jewish community destroyed and restored by its own children; a Palestinian family displaced, resettled, and displaced again. Neither cancels the other.

Our Hartman group sat in a circle at the Dignity Center of Roots-Judur-Shorashim, and I met Khaled himself. Years after his family’s second displacement, his brother was killed by Israeli soldiers — shot, by the family’s account, without provocation. In the mourning that followed, bereaved Israeli parents from the Parents Circle, who had buried their own children in this same conflict, asked to come sit with the family of a young man killed by the side they belonged to. Khaled refused. They asked again. He refused again. Then,........

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