This is the Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long-Wheed.

Hi, my name is Roy Cohen.

I'm a writer and filmmaker based in Tel Aviv.

I'm the author of, in our teens,

we dreamed of making peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Then my friend was shot, which was published in January 2022.

I wrote this piece in 2021.

It came out in 2022 because I had just returned to Israel in 2019.

I think what you see in the piece is a lot of my coming to terms with what I knew this place could be

as a teenager who went to seeds of peace and that relationships with people that I love to this day

and some of whom I'm lucky enough to call friends to this day.

The first couple of years after you return home, I think it's such a weird time to be abroad

somewhere and I lived in a couple of different places and then returning home and seeing

the reality of it and I think the first couple of years what was obvious to me is the racism

in Israel and the inherent violence in Israeli society that makes people

beyond edge and the outright denial of the occupation or at least what I thought was the outright

denial of the occupation in Israeli society.

I think since then I've realized that Israel is not a denial about the occupation,

it knows about it but it just doesn't want to deal with it.

That's not exactly the same thing and I think that peace was originally I'd actually written it

as a letter to a seal and I think that if I ever make the documentary that I intended to make,

...