Benjamin Netanyahu and I agree on virtually nothing. But a statement he made three days after the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas in October 2023 rings true:

“What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”

Just as Israel’s 1982 attempt to eradicate the PLO by leveling much of West Beirut gave rise to something even worse — Hezbollah — Israel’s attempt to eradicate Hamas will surely give rise to an inheritor organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Out of the ashes of physical mayhem, out of the deaths of Gazan civilians, nearly half of them children, will arise the next generation of Gazans willing to die for their beliefs that Palestinians have a right of return to their ancestral homeland.

Hamas is more than an organization of militant terrorists. It is an idea that feeds on the searing losses that Palestinians have suffered over the last century at the hands of the Israeli military. Decades of history have demonstrated that there is no military solution to this conflict. Sadly, the current leaders of the state of Israel have not yet learned that lesson.

During each of my four trips to Israel with an organization called The Compassionate Listening Project, we met with peacemakers who offered perspectives that helped me put the current conflict in context.

One was a former Israeli ambassador to Turkey, who said:

“Palestinians will get their state when Israelis decide to give it to them. And Israelis will get their security when Palestinians decide to give it to them.”

More bombings and killings will not sway Palestinians to give Israel their security.

Another peacemaker, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, a co-founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, told us something in November 2015 that resonates even more clearly now than it did then:

“We’re either going to live here together or die here together.”

“Who is really doing more for Israel’s long-term security interests?! People who demolish homes and steal olives and steal land and violate rights? Or those who replant the trees and help pick olives and return land to its rightful owners and rebuild homes and protect rights?”

“What we’re doing is the just and right and Jewish thing to do. And to be totally honest, it’s the single best thing I can do to protect my children from being the next people to be blown up. We need a nation that is not only physically strong but morally strong, that lives up to our highest Jewish values.”

In 2016, Yaniv Zamor, a Jewish Israeli tour guide with the NGO Ir Amim, told us that nothing would change between Israelis and Palestinians until the United States stops enabling Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. He urged us to proclaim that message to our friends, neighbors, coreligionists and political representatives when we returned to the U.S.

Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who has devoted his life to a just peace between Jerusalem’s Jews, Muslims and Christians, distilled the dilemma most succinctly:

When we met him in East Jerusalem in 2018, he told us that Netanyahu’s right-wing leadership has become increasingly intoxicated by the aura of Jewish supremacy, a drunk driver approaching an existential cliff.

“Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” he told us.

To those of you who, like me, don’t want to witness the suicide of the Jewish people, please tell your representatives that there is no military solution to this conflict. Tell them that each additional Gazan death will undermine the future security of all the inhabitants of the land between the river and the sea. Demand an immediate cease-fire. Stop unrestricted military aid to Israel. Insist on an enforceable resuscitation of the two-state solution.

If you consider yourself a friend of Israel, it’s way past time to take away the keys. Don’t let Israel’s ruling coalition continue to drive drunk.

Joel Berman lives in Concord.