Towards the end of the circular, descending corridor of the beautifully designed Yitzhak Rabin museum high up overlooking Tel Aviv, there exists a space for quiet reflection.

Given that Rabin was not a religious man, words for that space are supplied by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai: “From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring.” Few sentiments can be so badly needed in modern Israeli politics. “The place where we are right is hard and trampled, like a yard.”

This is the place where a passionate, sometimes religious, always compacted sense of what is right serves to ensure that nothing ever changes. And in terms of Israel and Palestine, nothing changing means more rockets and more coffins.

Amichai’s insistence that we must press beyond our own righteousness is clearly exemplified by the life and death of Rabin himself, gunned down by an Orthodox Jewish settler in November 1995 who opposed Rabin’s peacemaking with the Palestinians.

Rabin was no naive peacenik. As minister of defence he defended the use of live ammunition against unarmed Palestinian protesters. But by the early 1990s he realised there could never be a military solution to the political troubles of Israel and Palestine. Peace could only ever be reached by compromise. The sort of compromise that some would paint as a surrender of principles.

Which is partly why, for all Rabin’s status as a hero for peace, it was his arch rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, who won the public argument.

The week before the assassination, Netanyahu had been speaking at a rally in Jerusalem opposing the Oslo peace deal. Posters depicted Rabin in an SS uniform and set in the crosshairs of a rifle.

Netanyahu described Rabin as “removed from Jewish values”. And at the election that followed, it was Netanyahu, under the campaign banner “making a safe peace”, that emerged as prime minister. A succession of Hamas suicide bombings scared the public into a vote for hawkish military security. Netanyahu’s uncompromising steadfastness felt like a stand of principle.

Not, of course, that hawkishness has delivered the safe peace Netanyahu promised. Hamas still fire their rockets, now falling closer to Tel Aviv itself. And Israel’s military response serves only to transform the little boys of Gaza into the next generation of ‘martyrs’.

The hawkish idea that peace is established by the big stick fails to understand that violence is mimetic, one act of violence sowing the seeds for the next. We are in another of these cycles now: bombs, fear and elections. Little has changed.

The novelist Amos Oz has always convinced me with his analysis of the situation, which fits well with that of Amichai. The war between Israelis and Palestinians is not a war between goodies and baddies. That’s the battle over the place where we are right.

But, for Oz, the war is not about right versus wrong, but, much more tragically, right versus right: a horrendous dispute between two peoples who both have, in different ways, legitimate claims on territory in a crowded part of the world. In such circumstances, what is required is a divorce. Of course it will be horrendous, especially as both parties will continue to occupy the same house after separation.

Poets understand tragedy better than politicians. For what makes tragedy tragic is not that the situation is sad (there are other words for that) but that it is where the sloganising binaries of right and wrong no longer function as a useful guide. Which is why making peace means leaving the protected place where we are right. — The Guardian, London