Over the Towers of Jerusalem

In September 1993, I taped the front page of the Jerusalem Post to my dorm room wall. The cover photograph is indelibly inked on the memories of so many. The Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, with his thick glasses and dark suit, stands on one side, while the Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, in keffiyeh and khaki military jacket, stands on the other. U.S. president Bill Clinton is positioned between them, his arms outstretched like a benevolent god. The former antagonists lock hands — a gesture, along with the agreements behind it, that would win them the Nobel Peace Prize.

As I look back to that time, when I was studying at Hebrew University, I can see the picture there above my bed. But is it true, as I dimly remember, that I put question marks around it? Why would I have done that? Was it my learned distrust of a man who I had been told my whole life was a terrorist? My father had escaped persecution in Egypt in the late...