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Nearly two years into a war that has reshaped Israeli public life, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has all but vanished from the country's political conversation.
Even the left is cautious about raising it, says Tzippy Diskind, a haredi journalist from Jerusalem who took part in TEMA, a grassroots initiative launched three years ago to force the question back into circulation. October 7 is still bleeding in our hearts, she says, and it is very hard to talk about.
TEMA's method is deliberately unusual: it advances no position on one state, two states or any final-status arrangement. Participants first study the conflict for a year or more within their own community, Haredi, religious Zionist, secular, traditional, Israeli-Palestinian, guided by academics, before meeting groups whose worldviews differ sharply from their own.
In a wide-ranging interview, three participants describe what that produced. Diskind is candid that the encounter with the Israeli-Palestinian group was, in her words, "a ticking bomb"; only after someone lost their temper, she says, did the conversation become real.
She also recounts learning through the program that Israel's Arab citizens lived under military government for the state's first eighteen years, a fact she calls mind-blowing.
Kholoud Abu Ahmad, chief executive of the Nazareth Culture and Tourism Organization and a former parliamentary adviser to Joint List MKs Haneen Zoabi and Sami Abu Shehadeh, describes a different starting point: growing up Palestinian in Nazareth, she says, political engagement was never optional but mandatory, imposed at an age when other children think about nothing.
Prof. Benjamin Ish-Shalom, founding president of Beit Morasha and former chairman of Nativ, says he joined suspicious of a hidden agenda and found none. Agreements between governments, he argues, do not create peace between peoples: Israel has held a treaty with Egypt for more than fifty years, and Egyptian tourists still do not come.
None of the three claims the process delivered answers. Ish-Shalom describes a collapse in trust between Israeli Jews and Arabs that personal friendships cannot repair, and says a long road remains before anything sustainable emerges.
Diskin says she no longer believes she knows what the solution is, and does not expect the coming elections to change that. Abu Ahmad, who describes Palestinian citizens of Israel as holding a dual role, knowing both societies intimately because they belong to both, argues that no group can now claim the privilege of sitting the argument out.