Among the participants was Hussain Abdul-Hussain, whose book The Arab Case for Israel I had enthusiastically recommended only weeks earlier. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that some of the strongest voices defending Israel’s place in the Middle East were not Jewish at all. Yet they shared a conviction that extremism threatens all of their communities, not just Israel. The Middle East is often portrayed as a collection of rigid, irreconcilable camps: Arab versus Israeli or Muslim versus Jew. Today, I believe the future of the Middle East depends on building many more rooms like it.