For the past few months or perhaps years, depending on how you count, I’ve been bushwhacking my way off the beaten path of contemporary Jewish discourse.

The familiar responses never sat right with me. Diaspora should not be a choice between ever-expanding boundaries around Orthodoxy and slow attrition over generations. Israel-Palestine should not be a choice between moral compromise and irrelevance. And rising antisemitism feels driven as much by ignorance and misunderstanding as by hatred itself.

Years ago, I created my own online community for discussing Israel-Palestine, focused on finding areas of agreement and connecting Palestinians and Jews in meaningful ways. I had been following the repeated diplomatic failures of the two-state solution. Again and again, I heard some version of the same idea: maybe coexistence was possible, but not friendship.

I kept wondering: could we actually come to want each other?

In New York City, this was real. Groups that were enemies in their home countries found an anchor of common ground here. People walked through each other’s neighborhoods, ate at each other’s restaurants, talked about each other’s cultures, and felt something begin to open. There was no holy site to own. We were simply jumbled together and left to discover what was possible.

It is often taken as a given that this could not happen at scale in Israel and that the culture is different, the violence too deep, the history too heavy. The conclusion, from many directions, is that Israelis and Palestinians would never come to want each other.

And yet, I later found examples of former enemies who came to want each other—some of them quite striking.

Long before modern diplomacy, a group of nations that had been mortal foes found a way to live together that went beyond mere coexistence. They built a confederation that endured for centuries and grew powerful, which still exists today—yet is rarely part of our conversation.

It is called the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy and is in eastern North America. I had heard of it, but had not known this.

What struck me first was that this was something people were passionate about, not as a quiet arrangement to keep the peace, but as something alive with its own energy. It had roots. It had tradition.

It preserved the integrity of its member nations and, as I would learn, their religions. Christians could be part of it and eventually were. Jews might have been, in significant numbers, had history gone differently. The........

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