It is tempting for those of us who support Israel to speak of the ongoing skirmishes on the Gaza border in the clinical language of field commanders and military analysts. It is tempting to point out that the riots we are witnessing were instigated by Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization, that many of the casualties have been militants and not civilians or that attacking another nation’s sovereign border with explosive devices and Molotov cocktails is an act of aggression no country would ever tolerate.

These are all valid points. And yet all are strangely irrelevant. At its core, this conflict is not about tactics and objectives; it is about history and faith.

Just listen to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader. “Our people can’t give up one inch of the land of Palestine,” he said earlier this year when asked to explain what it was that his organization hoped to achieve. “The protests will continue until the Palestinians return to the lands they were expelled from 70 years ago.”

At its core, this conflict is not about tactics and objectives; it is about history and faith.

You hardly have to be a Middle East expert to understand that such a return would mean the de facto end of the Jewish state, which, sadly, is precisely what Palestinian leadership of all stripes has long considered the end goal. Just last month, for example, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas gave a controversial speech in Ramallah where, in addition to blaming the Holocaust on the “social behavior” of Jews, he argued that historical Jewish claims on the land of Israel were bogus.

“Their narrative about coming to this country because of their longing for Zion, or whatever—we’re tired of this,” Mr. Abbas said. “The truth is that this is a colonialist enterprise, aimed at planting a foreign body in this region.”

Such talk is a much greater threat than combatants marching on the border. It suggests that despite 70 years of tense coexistence and two decades of purporting to seek peace, Palestinian leaders have yet to concede that their Jewish neighbors have a history and a connection to the land that goes back millennia and is at the very core of the Jewish faith.

When my ancestors, exiled to all corners of the earth after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., prayed to God each morning, they prayed for their swift return home, to Zion, to the land God had promised to Abraham, to the home that Moses glimpsed from afar and that Joshua reclaimed. This yearning sustained the Jews for generations, even as larger and mightier peoples faded into the mists of history. And it continues to sustain us now that we’ve once again been blessed with a strong and independent Jewish nation. To deny all that is not only to deny us the basic right of self-determination—it is to deny us our right to exist.

We are ready to make peace. Now, all we need is a partner that is ready to listen to our story.

It is a grim state of affairs, but the path forward, thankfully, is clear even if it is uneasy. It begins with each side offering a simple, human recognition of the other side’s beliefs. Israel took an important step in that direction 51 years ago: Almost immediately after reuniting Jerusalem in the war of 1967, the Jewish state handed over the Muslim holy sites to the Waqf, an Islamic religious trust that remains the custodian of these sacred spots. It was a way of letting the Palestinians know that even as bitter conflicts are likely to emerge when two tribes with competing and equally valid claims try to share a small sliver of the earth, Israel would never deny its Muslim and Christian neighbors their heritage or their faith.

It is past time the Palestinians return the favor.

If they do so, what they are likely to see is nothing short of a miracle. The same Israelis who now rightfully balk as armed men attack its border would be delighted to hear their adversaries concede, for the very first time, that maybe there is room for two nations and two stories in this much-too-promised land. If that recognition were ever to come, most Israelis, as polls have consistently shown for years now, would gladly assent to painful territorial concessions, as they did when the unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

That is because most Israelis, versed as they are in Scripture, realize that the land, ultimately, belongs not to any one side but to God and that God has not, historically, been hesitant to suspend the Jewish occupancy of Zion whenever our behavior fell short of the spirit of the Covenant. The Talmud teaches us that our temple was destroyed and our sovereignty in Jerusalem severed because of excessive hatred, a lesson we have had nearly 2,000 years to contemplate.

We are ready to make peace. Now, all we need is a partner that is ready to listen to our story.