From Israeli and Palestinian anger, could hope emerge?

This war is different.

That message, a drumbeat from Israeli leaders ever since the savage Hamas attack on Oct. 7, refers to the unprecedented force and scale of their intended military response.

But it is also true on a deeper personal, psychological, and emotional level – not just for Israelis, but for Palestinians, too. The war is stripping back their conflict over a piece of land to its rawest essentials, leaving people on both sides feeling vulnerable and victimized, apprehensive and angry, to a greater degree than at almost any time since Israel’s founding in 1948.

That is raising the stakes of Israel’s latest conflict with Hamas immeasurably: how it is waged in the days ahead, and for how long it is fought. And how it ends.

The central question is whether this different war ultimately produces a different outcome – a path toward a political resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that both will be able to embrace.

And the answer will depend on a contest between two starkly opposed views of a future Middle East.

In one corner is Iran’s ambition to exert preeminent influence in the region, along with proxy forces, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, encircling, unsettling, and – if Tehran’s ruling theocrats are to be taken at their word – erasing the state of Israel.

In the other is the vision of the United States and its allies of a broad partnership involving Israel and Arab states. It would be rooted in shared economic and security interests and buttressed by a serious, sustained effort to negotiate a way out of the decadeslong Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s hope of seeing that vision survive the Gaza conflict is one reason he boarded Air Force One Tuesday, becoming the first American leader to visit Israel in time of war.

Miriam Alster/AP

President Joe Biden pauses during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the war between Israel and Hamas.

Yes, he wanted to demonstrate shoulder-to-shoulder support for Israel. But in also scheduling meetings with Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, he wanted to keep alive the postwar prospect of a more stable, forward-looking 21st-century Middle East.

The Arab leaders canceled, however, amid protests on their streets following an explosion Tuesday that took hundreds of lives at a hospital in Gaza. Hamas blamed the blast on an Israeli airstrike, but the Israeli military published video and audio clips that it said proved a misfired rocket launched from within Gaza did the damage. President Biden said U.S. defense and national security experts concurred with that view.

Yet the intense political fallout demonstrated the tinderbox volatility of the Gaza war.

It also signaled something else to the U.S. president, and to administration officials shuttling from country to country to try to prevent a wider regional conflagration. The Mideast calendar no longer reads 2023.

It has gone back to 1948.

That date has always been central to both Israelis’ and Palestinians’ narratives of the conflict.

For Israelis, it signifies the birth of their state, with support from the United Nations, in the shadow of the Holocaust that had killed millions of European Jews – even as surrounding Arab armies tried to prevent it from being born.

Palestinians recall the naqba – the catastrophe – in which hundreds of thousands of their forebears fled their ancestral homes or were forced from them by the Israelis.

The events of the past 10 days have reawakened those memories on a painful, visceral level.

Over the years, since Hamas began ruling the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israelis have intermittently endured rocket fire on their towns and cities. Palestinian civilians have suffered the effects of periodic retaliatory strikes on Gaza by the Israeli military.

But the Hamas attack two Saturdays ago – the deliberate slaughter of more than a thousand Israeli civilians, young and old, and the abduction of 200 others back into Gaza – was different.

In a country that had come to believe it was powerful, well defended, and safe, the specter of marauding bands seeking out, cornering, and killing defenseless Jews awakened centuries-old memories of East European pogroms. And of the Holocaust.

The main difference this time for the Palestinians in Gaza has been the scale of their displacement in the face of fierce Israeli bombardment.

The echoes there are of permanent exile, a particular dread since most Palestinians in Gaza are the descendants of Palestinians who lived in what is now southern Israel before the Israelis beat back the Arab armies in 1948.

The prospect that hunger or force may push them to leave Gaza explains why neighboring Egypt and other Arab states have been so adamant in demanding the establishment of a safe haven for Palestinians inside Gaza instead.

The depth of these parallel Israeli and Palestinian agonies is apt to make resetting the Mideast calendar back to 2023 a slow, difficult challenge, no matter how this war ends.

But a decade of diplomatic neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has now ended. Those parallel agonies have focused U.S. and other Western minds – along with those of more moderate Arab regimes – on the urgent need to create a new narrative.

If it addresses the interlocking fears of both sides, it might lay the foundations for lasting peace.

Editor's note: This story corrects the day of the explosion at the hospital in Gaza.