In the courses that I used to teach, I would sooner or later mention what I perceived to be a cardinal rule of politics: Every day you must eat some shit.
Some of my students tittered. Others were annoyed. I explained that politics is not getting everything you want. Sometimes you have to accept something that you really do not want in order to remain active, in the hope of getting some or a lot of what you do want. A less scatological way of saying the same thing is, you have to go along to get along.
Of course there is a point of appropriate rebellion. It depends on how much shit someone is asking you to eat. Everyone has a limit, but in politics, the limit cannot be zero.
There are profound reasons for this. Resources are limited. Desires or demands are likely to be greater than what it is possible to attain. Different individuals or groups who must cooperate for mutual advantage want contradictory things. Compromise means losing. It may mean losing everything in one confrontation in order to remain as a participant and to get something else at another time. "Side payments" is a term meant to compensate for a loss elsewhere that was more or less inevitable in order to keep a partnership together so that its members could continue to participate in governing.
Coping is a close cousin of eating shit. Coping recognizes that some wants are unattainable, and that some problems are insoluble. It is likely that policymakers cope when they deal with difficult issues, even if they tell the public and themselves that they are solving the problem.
Parts of Jewish ritual describes the shit that the people have been eating over the course of 3000 or so years. Take a look at Maoz Tzur (Rock of Ages), which we sing after lighting the Hanukah candles.
We ask God's help, and we have learned to cope with our limited resources and the great powers that are not always friendly. I learned as a child that God helps those who help themselves.
Jews generally, and Israelis in particular, have done better than the average. And all the surveys I have seen about Jewish and Israeli opinions is that we are aching to make reasonable deals with the Palestinians and other Arabs. Jewish expectations are that such a deal will include territorial compromises. We argue among ourselves as to what we should offer.
So far the Jewish arguments about what to offer remain irrelevant insofar as the other side has not learned the basic lesson of politics. Some want Israel to disappear. Even mainstream Palestinian leaders cannot bring themselves to accept the symbolism of Israel as a Jewish state. We have proved over the course of 60 years that the expression does not mean the repression of the Arab minority. Discrimination exists, as it does against minorities in many countries. And Israel's minority has a record of violence. Yet laws and courts have targeted the discrimination with some success. It is arguable that Israel's minority has more political and economic opportunities than ethnic or religious minorities in Arab or Muslim countries, and maybe even more than the Arab or Muslim majorities in those countries.
Mainstream Israeli politicians ask if there is any point in negotiating with Palestinians when elected Arab politicians of Israel will not fly the national flag or accept other national symbols, and ranking Palestinians demand--as they have since Annapolis--full concessions to their demands for territory, and the return of refugees to homes that existed prior to the 1948 war.
Historical justice is confused by conflicting views of history. It gets in the way of negotiations about the present and future to recite tendentious claims about the past that only produce counter-recitations. No side can assert a monopoly of suffering and get on with making a deal. Each side has to eat some shit for the conversation to continue, and cope with adversity for the negotiations to succeed.