Discussing Israeli reservations about the Iran nuclear deal you are so energetically pushing, Mr. President, you asserted in your striking, heartfelt Israel Channel 2 interview broadcast Tuesday that “I can say to the Israeli people: I understand your concerns and I understand your fears.”

But here’s the thing, Mr. President: You don’t. And your interview made that so unfortunately plain. You don’t fully understand our concerns and our fears — not as regards the ideologically and territorially rapacious regime in Tehran, driven by a perverted sense of religious imperative, and not as regards the Palestinian conflict.

This is not to dismiss those passionate, fervent entreaties you delivered to us in the interview, about the obligation for Israel to live up to our “core values,” our foundational values — the necessity for us to protect the “essential values” enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, to protect our democracy, and insist upon our morality, and ensure hope of a better future for ourselves and our neighbors, especially our Palestinian neighbors.

Please hear me out. This is not some closed-minded Obama-bashing critique from an Israeli for whom you can do nothing right. Those of us in the complicated middle ground of Israeli politics, which is most of us, endorse every word you had to say about the necessity to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians in order to maintain Israel as a Jewish democracy. We share your worries about what becomes of that “Palestinian youth in Ramallah” who you referenced, embittered and frustrated by the status quo. We share your desire to bolster the hope that you so poignantly recalled seeing, when you visited two years ago, “in the faces of Israeli children… in the faces of Palestinian children.”

You know full well that the Jewish state and its people want nothing more than to live in peace and tranquility alongside their neighbors. After all, as you yourself highlighted in the interview, the biggest applause you got when you spoke to Israeli students in Jerusalem came when you declared, “I know that the people of Israel care about those Palestinian children.”

What you so evidently haven’t fully internalized, however, is the extent to which we Israelis in the middle ground — the non-zealots, the ones who don’t want to annex the West Bank and subvert our democracy, and who don’t want a single binational entity between the river and the sea that puts an end to Jewish statehood — have been battered by recent history, and continue to be battered by the events unfolding all around us.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.