An attempt to understand the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

I live in Jerusalem. As such, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict surrounds me. Even though it plays such a great role in the shaping of my society, most people don’t make any effort to truly understand what’s going on.

We are fed by rumors and prejudice. We crown demons and martyrs as easily as we open up our phones. I too didn’t know enough to justify the confidence I was talking about the subject.

Last September I took matters into my own hands and started to get educated. My way of tackling this was through learning the history of the conflict. The Martyrmade Podcast has a six-part series covering the roots of the conflict up until 1948. Great effort was put into this and I recommend you to give it a try.

To get more details and wider scope I turned to Professor Benny Morris’s book - Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict. Morris did a good job at painting a clear narrative without dropping details. To remember as much as possible I decided to summarize the book [Hebrew].

During this process my views shifted several times. Some of the underlying truths have shown themselves as narratives. It was a good example of the close connection between knowledge and worldview. A different subset of knowledge (e.g one-sided narrative) paints a completely different picture.

Even though the bond between the two is strong, interpretation plays a crucial role. Scholars in every field hold different and even conflicting opinions. Moreover, the same knowledge subset can lead to different conclusions in different people.

It does not mean that there is no reason to strive for knowledge. Opinions that can be backed up are mostly superior over ones that can not. I encourage you (and should repeatedly remind myself) to aim for depth at anything we claim to understand.