The Israeli-Palestinian conversation has hardened into two stale grooves: final-score punditry (“who’s winning?”) and moral spreadsheets (“who’s worse?”). The obstacle to resolution is deeper and older. The two national movements were forged in the post-Ottoman scramble for ethnically homogeneous states, and each now treats its founding trauma as a veto on compromise. Israelis translate insecurity into an existential imperative; Palestinians distil dispossession into the heart of their identity. This essay explores how mutual denial, more than land or ideology, sustains the conflict and considers what it might take to end it.
Fairness does not require that every party be treated identically, only that their choices are weighed against their freedoms, constraints, intentions, and consequences.
The pages that follow foreground local Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, not those of distant diasporas. Much remains unsaid and many viewpoints unrepresented, but the narrative condenses a century of shared ordeals and diverging hopes.
Reading time: about 25 minutes. Use the linked table of contents to jump straight to any section. References are given at the end.
Table of contents
I. The Israeli Story
There is no single Israeli narrative. Zionism, from its beginnings, contained multitudes: secular socialists, religious traditionalists, and right-wing nationalists, all competing to define its character. That internal tension continues to this day. However, there are common elements in most of these narratives that a majority of Israelis agree on.
For the Jewish people, the founding of Israel in 1948 was not an act of conquest, but of reconstitution. After centuries of exile, marginalization, pogroms, and finally genocide, Zionism emerged not just as a nationalist project but as a civilizational lifeline. The horrors of the Holocaust cemented for Jews a conviction that safety could never again be left to the goodwill of others. A state in their ancestral homeland would guarantee their survival and be their bulwark and last line of defence.
The major wars of Israel's history, in 1948, 1967, 1973, were existential in both rhetoric and substance. Surrounded by hostile neighbors, some openly vowing annihilation, Israelis developed a worldview where eternal vigilance became virtue. Even as Israel evolved into a technological and military powerhouse, this siege mentality persisted, fed by rocket fire, suicide bombings, and, sometimes, diplomatic isolation.
Israelis have not been passive spectators of attempts to peaceful resolution. Even before the creation of Israel, there were moments of compromise pursued. The original British Mandate for Palestine, as envisioned at the 1920 San Remo Conference, encompassed both sides of the Jordan River.
In 1921, Britain administratively separated Transjordan from the rest of the mandate, effectively excluding it from the provisions concerning a "Jewish national home." This arrangement, later ratified by the League of Nations, created an Arab state east of the Jordan river. To many Zionists, this already constituted a major compromise, limiting the territorial scope originally imagined for Jewish self-determination. Others simply accepted it as a concession to political pragmatism.
In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning the remaining land west of the Jordan river into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish leadership accepted the principle but rejected the borders; the Arab leadership rejected it outright. Tensions intensified. The 1939 British White Paper, issued just before the Holocaust, reversed the Balfour Declaration’s trajectory by severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine at a time when European Jews were desperately seeking refuge.
In 1947, while the smoldering embers of the Holocaust still burned in memory, the United Nations again proposed a two-state plan. Again, the Jewish Agency accepted it, while Arab leaders and surrounding states rejected it and launched a war against the nascent state. Roughly one percent of Israel’s Jews were killed in the 1948 War of Independence, and a striking share of the dead were Holocaust survivors, some of whom had been in displaced-persons camps only weeks earlier.
These early refusals to compromise left a deep mark on Israeli political consciousness and helped entrench a suspicion that Arab rejectionism, not Israeli intransigence, was the root obstacle to peace. Complicating matters further, after the war in 1948, roughly 800,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, where they had lived for centuries. Most of these Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were absorbed into the young Israeli state, often in harsh conditions. Their story, too, became part of the region's great unraveling. This mass displacement has largely been forgotten in international discourse, but for many Israelis it reinforced the sense that the Jewish people could never rely on their neighbors for protection or permanence, only on themselves.
In more recent history, from the Camp David Accords to the Oslo Process and the Gaza Disengagement, Israeli leaders, particularly from the left, made repeated efforts to find a resolution. These efforts were often met not with compromise but with violence, from the Second Intifada to the rise of Hamas. The collapse of these hopes helped shatter the Israeli left and emboldened security-first politics.
Yet power should be matched by accountability. The Israeli occupation that followed the war in 1967, while born of security imperatives, has uncomfortably calcified into something more permanent. Over 50 years of military control, settlement expansion, and legal stratification have embedded a dual legal regime in the West Bank. Many Israelis still view the territory chiefly as a strategic buffer and only secondarily as a historic or religious claim, yet the security rationale has, for some, evolved into a conviction of permanent entitlement.
Much of the international community condemns Israeli settlements in the West Bank, yet that criticism often overlooks both the Jewish people’s ancient attachment to Judea and Samaria and the Jewish communities that survived there until 1948. When Jordan took control of the area (1948–1967), those ancient communities were uprooted, dozens of synagogues were demolished or left in ruins, and Jews were barred from visiting holy places despite armistice promises of free access.These experiences still shape Israeli fears of relinquishing territory without firm guarantees of religious freedom and minority rights.
With the legal and political status of post-1967 settlements highly contested, a deeper moral question looms: should Jewish presence in a future Palestinian state be inherently illegitimate? Roughly a fifth of Israel’s citizens are Arabs who vote, hold office, and participate in civic life. At the same time, the Palestinian national movement continues to uphold the “right of return,” at least symbolically, for millions of refugees and their descendants. Should a credible vision of peace not also contemplate a future in which Jewish families might also live peacefully in Palestine, not as settlers or occupiers, but as ordinary Palestinian citizens and a protected minority? If coexistence is expected of one side, can it be categorically denied to the other?
Calls for the total removal of Jewish residents from future Palestinian territories, if presented as a non-negotiable precondition for peace, risk echoing a darker period of exclusion and undermining the very principle of pluralism that a just resolution requires.
II. The Palestinian Story
The Palestinian story is also not a single narrative. But, here again, there are common threads that most Palestinians agree on, woven from memory, loss, endurance, and unrealized statehood.
For Palestinians, the birth of Israel is synonymous with the Nakba, the catastrophe. In 1947, Palestine’s Arab majority still tilled nearly three-quarters of the land. After the 1948 war, over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled. Entire villages were erased, families shattered. To this day, many of their descendants remain stateless, living in camps across the region in legal limbo. The Nakba is therefore not only a historical trauma, it is experienced as a daily inheritance.
Armistice lines froze Palestine into three non-contiguous spaces: the West Bank under Jordan, Gaza under Egypt, and the rest under the new State of Israel. No Palestinian state emerged from this arrangement. Refugee camps in Jericho, Khan Younis, Tyre, and Damascus became improvised cities of canvas and concrete where the right of return was taught before everything else.
After the 1967 war, which brought Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli military control, Palestinian despair deepened. What many Palestinians expected to be a brief military rule ossified into the longest occupation of the modern era. The resulting sense of deadlock deepened Palestinian frustration and energised the national movement. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) tied liberation to armed struggle and, over the years, gained momentum and international attention.
The deadlock finally burst into the First Intifada (1987-1993), a largely grassroots uprising of strikes, boycotts and street clashes that put the Palestinian question back on the world’s front page.
During the revolt the PLO formally accepted a two-state solution and recognised Israel. That shift, plus American and Arab diplomatic pressure, led to the 1991 Madrid Conference and, secretly, to the back-channel Oslo talks.
The Oslo accords in 1993 and 1995 transferred limited powers and responsibilities to the newly formed Palestinian Authority, but also fragmented the West Bank into Areas A, B, C and isolated Gaza. Inside this quasi-state, a culture of resistance emerged that sometimes prioritized symbolism over strategy, while Israeli settlement expansion continued.
Subsequent attempts at resolution, in 2000 and 2008, also failed. In 2000, at Camp David, Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton offered a framework including parts of East Jerusalem; Yasser Arafat refused, citing inadequate sovereignty and lack of resolution for refugees. Negotiations gradually collapsed as the Second Intifada erupted. Another attempt was made in 2008, when Ehud Olmert offered roughly 90-95 percent of the West Bank plus land swaps, a shared Jerusalem administration, and a refugee-compensation mechanism. Mahmoud Abbas, constrained by Hamas-Fatah rivalry and doubts about Olmert’s political survival, remained skeptical and never signed. From a Palestinian perspective, both initiatives failed less because of internal paralysis than because key demands, like full sovereignty in East Jerusalem, viable territorial contiguity and a just solution for refugees, remained unmet.
These missed moments were not purely the result of maximalist ideology. They were also shaped by fear: of backlash, of making irreversible compromises, of legitimizing what many saw as a permanent loss. The leadership’s hesitancy mirrored the population’s disillusionment.
Even today, most Palestinians feel disappointed by their leadership, betrayed by Arab nations who use their cause symbolically while offering limited tangible support, and abandoned by the international community. In their eyes, the statehood dream is receding. The key issues in peace negotiations, final borders, Jerusalem, refugees, mutual recognition, remain unresolved. For Palestinians, accepting limited sovereignty in a fragmented archipelago of territory while relinquishing the right of return is widely seen not as peace, but as surrender. This perception has only deepened over time. When politics offer no dignity and diplomacy no return, resistance becomes the vocabulary of identity.
The Palestinian political landscape remains fractured and stagnant. Hamas rules in Gaza through an authoritarian Islamist administration that tolerates little dissent. The Palestinian Authority governs the West Bank with little democratic legitimacy or political efficacy.
Many Palestinians no longer believe in a two-state solution, not necessarily out of rejectionism, but from frustration and despair. Their leaders have failed them, and their faith in peace has withered. But despair must not be confused with a blanket rejection of coexistence. A large part of it reflects the erosion of credibility after decades of failed negotiations, unmet promises and vanishing horizons.
Palestinian leadership has historically failed to prioritize pragmatic state-building over ideological maximalism. Opportunities to compromise were missed. Radicalization was allowed to grow. Instead of developing democratic norms or economic resilience, the struggle became its own justification. The duty to resist.
Yet behind the failures of leadership and ideology are the quieter, daily struggles of Palestinians experiencing life under occupation. For most, the conflict is not only a matter of diplomacy or resistance, but of navigating a world shaped by uncertainty and restriction. Whether it's the challenge of securing travel permits, delays at checkpoints, building restrictions, or limited access to resources and services, these constraints form the mundane reality of life for millions.
These are not spectacular acts of violence but the persistent friction of a system that curtails autonomy and predictability. Even amid these conditions, communities adapt, schools function, businesses operate, and families strive to maintain some sense of normalcy.
This resilience is not heroic, but habitual. What endures is not only frustration or grievance, but an insistence on dignity and perseverance in the face of uncertainty. It is this quieter resilience that forms the backbone of a people still seeking self-determination, still demanding that their history not be erased, and their future not be denied.
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, Palestinians face a stark ledger: no sovereign state, shrinking territory, fragmented leadership, 2.3 million people penned into Gaza’s ruins, and a West Bank carved by walls and settler roads.
Despite fatigue, two convictions persist across all Palestinian factions. First, self-determination: the land between river and sea is seen as the Palestinians’ ancestral homeland, and statehood, or equal citizenship, remains a key demand. Second, the right of return, as codified in UN Resolution 194 and engraved on camp murals, is as much a demand for acknowledgment as for physical repatriation. Polls show most refugees would accept a symbolic implementation, yet few will concede the principle while their dispossession goes unnamed.
III. Empire’s End and the Age of Displacement
To understand why Zionism emerged the way it did, and why Palestinian resistance took the form it did, it helps to step back and look at the wider historical and regional canvas on which these movements took form.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire did not simply redraw political maps, it unleashed a wave of ethnic displacement, nationalist fervor, and violent state formation that engulfed the region. The new Middle Eastern and Balkan nation-states that emerged from the imperial wreckage were rarely ethnically homogenous. Instead, they gradually became homogeneous by design, by forging new national myths of ethnic identity, and by means of war and forced migration.
In this context, Zionist claims to a national home were not historically unique, but rather one example among many of a people seeking nationhood in a world rearranged by power politics and imperial collapse. Jews, unlike many other ethnic groups, were not concentrated in a single geographic region of the Ottoman empire. From Baghdad to Istanbul to Thessaloniki and Jerusalem, they were a dispersed minority with no autonomous territorial unit to claim. And while they were generally regarded as second-class citizens under Islamic law, life for Jews in the Ottoman Empire was, for the most part, markedly safer and more stable than in much of Europe.
The Balfour Declaration’s promise of a national home in Palestine, later formalized in the British Mandate, applied to a relatively small area of the Ottoman Empire, when compared with the sweeping territories claimed by other emerging nationalisms. While relatively vague in its geography, the declaration translated, in practice, into a vision of Jewish refuge in a land already inhabited, with no pre-existing Jewish majority or territorial autonomy.
Importantly, the envisioned Jewish homeland was never meant solely for Jews living under Ottoman rule. The epicenter of political Zionism was Europe, not the Levant. From the pogroms of Tsarist Russia to the racial ideologies of Central Europe, Jews faced escalating persecution. Theodor Herzl articulated Zionism not from Jerusalem but from Vienna and Paris, where integration had failed and antisemitism flourished. By the 1930s, as fascism rose and immigration quotas closed off escape routes, the idea of a Jewish refuge ceased to be political theory; it became a matter of survival.
Meanwhile, across the former Ottoman domains, dramatic population movements were becoming the grim norm. The 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange, imposed under the Treaty of Lausanne, uprooted and resettled about 1.6 million people: 1.2 million Anatolian Greeks and 350,000-400,000 Muslims from Greece, based on a vision of ethno-religious separation as a guarantee of stability. Earlier, the Armenian genocide of 1915–17, together with subsequent deportations, had all but erased a centuries-old Armenian presence in eastern Anatolia, shattering another of the former empire’s historic communities.
This pattern, where the construction of a new national identity required the removal of “others”, was widespread. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often framed as an anomaly, but in truth, it was part of a much broader, blood-streaked age of displacement. That does not excuse any one side's failures or excesses. But it does remind us that this is part of a greater tragedy between peoples caught in the gears of a collapsing empire and the brutal reality of new nationhood.
The idea of a state with a dominant ethno-national identity is therefore not uniquely Israeli. Many of these new nations defined themselves around a core national group and exchanged populations. What matters is not the presence of a dominant identity, but the presence of rights: for minorities, for dissenters, for those who do not conform to the majority’s vision of belonging.
If Israel’s Jewish character is subject to scrutiny, then so too must be the ethno-religious character of dozens of other states. The point is not to deflect criticism of Israel’s actions, but to demand a consistent framework of critique, a universal standard. National identity becomes dangerous not when it exists, but when it becomes exclusionary.
IV. Agency and Accountability
Both Israelis and Palestinians possess agency. They are not puppets of history or prisoners of circumstance. They make choices, and these choices shape the course of the conflict as much as the structures they inherit.
Palestinian leaders made consequential choices even in the earliest phases of the conflict. During the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, Jewish civilians and British officials were targeted. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, collaborated with the Nazis and incited violence against Jews fleeing persecution, decisions that haunt the moral credibility of early Palestinian leadership to this day.
After 1948, Arab states claimed to champion the Palestinian cause, but often used it for their own strategic ends, leaving the Palestinians stateless and dependent. In more recent times, Hamas's decisions, launching rockets, embedding military infrastructure in civilian areas, ruling with an iron fist, are choices. They incur moral responsibility. At the same time, many Palestinians have pursued paths of nonviolent resistance, civic education, and cultural preservation, efforts often sidelined by both their own leadership and the Israeli government.
Israel, in turn, is reckoning with its own history and policies. Early Zionist settlers, though motivated by utopian ideals, often purchased land from absentee landlords under Ottoman law, displacing Arab tenant farmers in the process. While legally sanctioned, the effect was one of dispossession, and it sowed the seeds of resentment that would deepen over decades. Both communities committed acts of violence, and Jewish self-defense groups at times targeted civilians. From the late 1960s, a series of Israeli governments have permitted settlers beyond the 1967 lines, turning a short-term security arrangement into a semi-permanent claim.
Today, with sovereign power and overwhelming military superiority, Israel must distinguish between defending itself and entrenching the occupation. But the threats Israel needs to contend with do not come only from Hamas, but from a wider arc of hostility: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and above all, the influence of Iran, which funds and arms these proxies while advancing its strategic ambitions across the region. These threats are real, multi-directional, and cannot be dismissed as paranoia. They complicate any strategic calculus and heighten Israel’s security anxieties. Israeli commanders therefore argue that some occupied ground is simply non-negotiable until negotiations resume and a reliable security architecture is in place.
But these dangers do not absolve Israel of the need to address the conditions of ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. They underscore that the occupation is not simply a local or bilateral issue; it is a layer within a larger regional puzzle. Israel’s security policies must contend with existential threats, but also with the moral cost of indefinite oppression of another people.
Recognizing that complexity highlights the urgency of a more sophisticated strategy, one that defends against external threats without normalizing permanent dispossession. Continued settlement expansion and harsh discriminatory policies are not strategies of defense; they are strategies of entrenchment, and they blur the line between security and domination.
The asymmetry of power is real. The threats are real. But so is the lack of visionary leadership. Neither side currently shows the consistent political will to champion coexistence above grievance. And nowhere is this blurring of lines, between fear and aggression, defense and punishment, more evident than in Gaza.
V. Gaza
A common belief among Israelis is that the 2005 disengagement from Gaza proves the futility of withdrawal. Israel unilaterally dismantled its settlements, pulled out its military, and left Palestinians to self-govern. Practically, Ariel Sharon’s government judged that safeguarding about 8,000 isolated settlers amid more than a million Gazans was draining troops and money, so pulling out would cut casualties, lower costs, and free resources to defend the larger settlement blocs in the West Bank.
In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Hamas, an Islamist movement openly committed to Israel’s destruction and rejection of the Oslo framework, won a parliamentary majority. A year later, it consolidated control after a bloody clash with Fatah. Reassurances demanded by the UN were rejected and diplomatic and financial quarantine was imposed. Israel and Egypt responded with strict containment. Qatar and Iran quickly moved in and replaced some of the lost money flows. What followed was not quiet, but rocket fire, kidnappings, and repeated violence. To many Israelis, this confirmed a brutal logic: compromise invites catastrophe.
Hamas entrenched its rule through violence and suppression, cancelling elections, jailing critics, building smuggling tunnels, and purposely embedding rocket launchers and military infrastructure in civilian areas.
Israel’s concern about border security, arms trafficking, and terror cells is grounded in painful and repeated experience. No state can be expected to ignore threats on its doorstep. But security controls are one thing; economic suffocation another. Sweeping limits on exports, construction materials and worker travel hollowed out Gaza’s economy. Intermittent international aid freezes, Egyptian border closures and Hamas’s own priorities compounded the collapse.
Gaza remains a parable of failed strategy. Over the years, billions in aid flowed into an enclave whose borders, airspace, and economy remained tightly restricted. Hamas continued to prioritize armed struggle over effective governance. The international community offered funding, but no cohesive framework, and no viable economic or diplomatic horizon. There was no plan to deflate extremism. That policy mix didn’t just contain threats; it perpetuated abuse and entrenched despair.
On 7 October 2023 thousands of Hamas-led militants broke through the Gaza-Israel barrier, overrunning nearby kibbutzim, towns and army bases. About 1,200 people, roughly two-thirds of them civilians, were killed and 251 hostages were dragged into Gaza. Israel’s response was swift and expansive: air and artillery strikes, followed by a ground invasion. The campaign, still ongoing at the time of writing, has left Gaza in ruins. The human toll has been staggering. International sentiment, which initially almost universally condemned Hamas’s massacre and affirmed Israel’s right to self-defence, has steadily shifted toward sharp criticism of Israel’s conduct and increasing calls for an immediate cease-fire as civilian casualties rise and humanitarian access remains constricted.
Many that rally to Israel’s cause insist that Hamas must no longer govern Gaza because, while it does, both Israelis and Gazans will keep paying the price. The concern is well founded, yet it raises a crucial question: What alternative future did Israel, or anyone else, put on the table?
An Israeli government that was less ideologically shackled, rather than merely responding militarily, could also have articulated a vision of a future for Gazans beyond Hamas. It could have said: "We must ensure that Hamas can no longer operate from Gaza. But here is what life might look like the day after Hamas."
Such a vision would never be Israel’s alone to draft or deliver. With Egypt, key Arab states, and the wider international community, Israel could have sketched a roadmap: a temporary multinational security presence, ring-fenced reconstruction funds, monitored civil infrastructure, an education overhaul, and a staged path to autonomy and representative governance. It could have planned for more transparency and accountability, without compromising operational security. This would not only have isolated Hamas ideologically, it would have offered Gazans something Hamas never could: a way out of the cycle of despair.
The failure to articulate this possibility has allowed Hamas to claim the mantle of defiance and victimhood unchallenged. Vigilance eclipsed vision. And in the absence of vision, each side has drawn the wrong lesson: that compromise invites catastrophe, and that continued suffering confers moral authority.
But there will come a time to rebuild from the ruins. In March 2025, mass protests erupted across Gaza. Civilians called not just for an end to the war, but for an end to Hamas rule. The response from Hamas was brutal: mass arrests, violent suppression, and the killing of protesters.
Yet these protests revealed a deeper truth: many Gazans are fed up. They reject both occupation and repression. And they are ready for change.
VI. A Way Forward?
Perpetual occupation is costly and corrosive. The two-state solution is invoked almost reflexively yet believed by few: decades of violence, settlement expansion, and stalled diplomacy have hollowed out trust on both sides. Still, the absence of better options does not make it easily dispensable. A single bi-national state, with equal rights for all, remains beyond reach because Israelis and Palestinians do not agree on many things, including a common narrative of national purpose.
Any new effort must begin with mutual recognition: not only of political borders, but of historic narratives. Israelis will need to acknowledge the Palestinian dispossession as real and traumatic. Palestinians will need to accept that Jewish self-determination is not some colonial scheme, but the revival of a people long persecuted and repeatedly expelled from their ancestral lands. Jewish self-determination, like that of the Kurds, Armenians, or Palestinians, is rooted in the classical criteria of peoplehood recognized by international law: a shared history, a collective identity, and an enduring attachment to a particular territory. To delegitimize it outright, as some modern critics do, is not principled anti-colonialism, it is selective erasure.
Progress also requires abandoning maximalist dreams in favour of coexistence as a practical survival strategy. Important voices in Israel continue to advocate for this vision, loudly, among civil society groups, minority parties, and former security officials, even amid ongoing political polarization and recurrent violence. Mass-protests against the excesses of the current administration are intense, frequent and well attended. These groups continue to insist that Israel’s security and democracy require a credible political horizon for Palestinians.
On the Palestinian side, such voices are markedly fewer, often silenced or marginalized within a fractured political system. But such voices exist. One of the few remaining figures who commands broad respect across Palestinian factions is Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader imprisoned since 2002. Barghouti has long advocated for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, and has repeatedly emphasized the importance of democratic reform and nonviolent resistance within Palestinian society. While a controversial personality, given his conviction for orchestrating attacks during the Second Intifada, he has nonetheless repeatedly issued calls from prison for unity, compromise, and a strategic pivot away from destructive impasses. His stance is noteworthy precisely because it blends grassroots credibility with a vision that acknowledges both Palestinian aspirations and Israeli fears. Yet he still languishes in prison.
The disparity is therefore not merely ideological, it is structural. Israel’s institutions, for all their flaws, still tolerate boisterous public dissent; the Palestinian arena suffers from fragmented authority, the absence of national elections since 2006, while overlapping controls imposed by Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas stifle open debate. Until Palestinians restore institutional coherence, rebuild civic legitimacy through elections, and rally around a unifying reform agenda, even the most persuasive advocates of compromise will find it hard to mobilise their society and to convince external partners whose backing any meaningful political reset will require.
VII. A Reckoning
This conflict endures not because one side is fully evil and the other fully righteous, but because both have hardened into roles they cannot easily shed. Victimhood becomes a claim to innocence and power becomes a shield from doubt. This is not to draw any moral equivalence between the two sides, but to point out facts. The tragedy, therefore, is not only that the fighting goes on, but that both sides currently cannot muster the will to imagine one another’s dignity.
Israel exists and has every right to protect its citizens. But it must not let security concerns ossify into permanent dispossession, or stretch the law beyond international limits. Lasting security can only come from compromise. Palestinians, for their part, are entitled to self-determination and a viable state, but that aspiration cannot rest on the fantasy of eliminating their neighbour. Israel is not leaving, and neither are the Palestinians.
The Palestinian rallying cry will need to shift from toxic slogans like "From the river to the sea", widely interpreted as a call for the dismantling of Israel, to something that explicitly envisions peaceful coexistence: Two peoples, two homelands, one future. Such a vision reorients the movement from negation to negotiation, from symbolic absolutism to achievable justice. It also signals to Israelis and the international community that Palestinian aspirations are not predicated on another people’s erasure, but on mutual recognition and sovereign dignity.
Israel, for its part, must signal, credibly and repeatedly, that it is ready to restart substantive talks, and to match security concerns with political horizons. Without such assurances, Palestinian moderates will remain exposed and extremists will set the terms.
The Palestinian national movement will ultimately have to disown eliminationist rhetoric and tactics that target civilians; not as a favour to Israel, but as a marker of its own political maturity and moral authority. Only then can a broad, pragmatic current take centre stage, one capable of winning sustained international backing and speaking convincingly to Israeli moderates. This would rekindle progressive forces within Israel, those still committed to peace, to regain political influence and re-engage in meaningful negotiation.
What Israel’s beleaguered center-left needs is a partner it can believe in, a Palestinian leadership with a clear and actionable vision rooted in coexistence rather than resistance and martyrdom. This will enable them to push back reliably and convincingly against far-right annexationism, and to freeze or reverse settlement expansion. It will not be easy, and rejection will come from entrenched ideologies on both sides. But there is no viable alternative that respects both people's aspirations. Lasting peace demands reciprocal courage, political imagination, and an unshakeable commitment to both peoples’ dignity and self-determination.
Of course these reflections are, for now, exercises on paper; outlines of longer-term compromises that may one day be possible. But are they likely? The conditions on the ground offer little room for hope, yet this is precisely why thought must precede action. Israel is drifting steadily to the right, under the pressure of demographic change and with religious nationalism reshaping its institutions and identity. It risks shedding the liberal and democratic ethos that once animated its founding. On the other side, Palestinians are gripped by despair, with a fragmented and corrupt leadership, and the acute sense of having been abandoned by the world. What is urgently needed is not yet another final-status blueprint, but the cultivation of breathing space, political, emotional, and intellectual, from which something fairer and more stable might eventually emerge. This can come in the form of returning the hostages, limited prisoner releases, a durable cease-fire in Gaza, a settlement freeze in the most sensitive areas, credible timetables for Palestinian elections. All of this can be disrupted by bad actors that want to maintain the status quo.
Justice will not come from slogans, righteous indignation or posturing. It will come from the slow, painful work of compromise, of acknowledging the other, revising one’s certainties, and choosing pragmatism over pride. Compromise can deliver something more lasting than continued defiance: real dignity that can be lived, not just proclaimed. And that, too, takes time; time to build trust, to heal wounds, to reshape narratives. Enduring change is a generational project.
That work remains. The land waits. History records.
References:
Books
Yakobson, Alexander & Amnon Rubinstein. Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights. Routledge, 2009.
Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Vintage, 2001.
Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage:The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Beacon Press, 2006.
Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-2011. Penguin, 2012.
Baer, Marc D. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs. Basic Books, 2021.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. Abacus, 1995.
Roberts, J. M. The Penguin History of the World. 6th ed., Penguin, 2014.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin, 2005.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism, Abacus, 2007.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Fantagraphics Books, 2001.
Eisner, Will. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Primary documents & historical reports
Palestine Royal (Peel) Commission Report, Cmd. 5479. London: HMSO, 1937.
UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 29 Nov 1947 (Partition Plan).
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), 11 Dec 1948 (Refugees & right of return).
