When we think a situation is intractable we withdraw our energy from it.

I don't believe the situation is hopeless, but our faith in change ought not to rest with the politicians, it ought to rest with the people who have learned how to listen to each other, and work together.

They exist.

There is a nonviolent resistance movement made up of both Palestinians and Israelis and it deserves our attention and support.

We all recognize the names Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, but would most people know the name: Mubarak Awad, the founder of the Palestinian Center for the Study of Non Violence, founded back in 1983? How about Sami Al Jundi founder of the Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence?

Al Jundi, while serving time in an Israeli prison, read about the nonviolent movements of King and Gandhi, and experienced his conversion to nonviolent resistance.

Jen Marlowe writes in "Yes!" Magazine: "Growing up as a Jewish American, I had been taught that Israelis and Palestinians constituted two separate, irreconcilable sides in the Middle East conflict. It was not until I went to Jerusalem that I learned that there is a decades-long tradition of Palestinians and Israelis working together to confront the occupation and challenge oppression through non-violent protest."

There are two words in that last paragraph that have to be faced, and I think they are often the elephants in the room: Occupation and oppression.

Israel did dislocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, decades ago.

It has since confined most Palestinians to territories. It has built a wall that runs through the Palestinian territories cutting people off from access to their own farmlands. It has continued to allow the building of new settlements in the same territories.

This is the oppression we have to name in Palestine: Apartheid.

We didn't deny its existence in South Africa and we ought to name it again. Jewish peace activists have been naming it for decades. Nonviolent resistance movements are always small to begin with.

They go on for decades before the general population joins in. In the '40s , '50s and even well into the '60s, most Americans didn't know the names Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King Jr. either.

We don't have to choose between Israel and Palestine.

That's a false choice, the kind that keeps our hands and tongues tied, and our hopes held hostage.

To be on the side of nonviolent resistance does mean asking Israel to be accountable for the situation of apartheid, and the U.S., for supporting it.

Being on the side of nonviolent resistance does not mean hating Israel nor does it mean blaming the Jewish people.

Nor does it mean that Jews who work with Palestinians are self-hating Jews.

Neither does it ignore the fact that violence has been perpetrated against Israeli citizens.

The real choice is between being held hostage by a kind of vapor lock in our thinking resulting in hopelessness and cynicism, or standing on the side of peace with those who have found a third way.