Remember This.

What we are able to remember is important, but how we remember is even more so. Nowhere is this more true than in the middle East. While on a recent sabbatical in Israel, I interviewed a Palestinian Muslim woman about her recollections of family history, their struggles during the last 50 years, and how that shapes her view of the situation in Israel and Palestine today. She spoke with surprising equanimity about having to flee Jerusalem with her family to her uncle's home in Damascus during the 1948 war, fully expecting to return within a couple of weeks. She still recalls her father telling...