"It's not just that there is lots of resentment and distrust; Israelis and Palestinians have such widely divergent narratives of the last 70-plus years, of what has happened and why, that even reconciling their two realities is extremely difficult."
I liked that sentence because it could just as easily be rewritten as:
"It's not just that there is lots of resentment and distrust; Republicans and Democrats have such widely divergent narratives of the last [fill in the blank] years, of what has happened and why, that even reconciling their two realities is extremely difficult."
And isn't that true? If you're a liberal or a conservative, doesn't it seem sometimes that the other side not only has their own views, but also their own facts and even their own realities? Personally, I've stopped arguing with conservatives because there's no point to it -- I feel like we live in parallel universes.
Maybe this is how the religious wars of the Middle Ages were settled -- people just got tired of fighting and learned to "agree to disagree." I heard George Will once say that the current polarization in Congress will ultimately be decided by elections. And, if you look at California as a harbinger of the future, that may be true. In the Golden State, once Democrats took control of the legislature and the executive branches it began to solve the state's fiscal problems. Maybe we'll all just have to be patient until one side or the other finally takes control of the federal government.
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