On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians in the deadliest attack on Israeli soil in its 76-year history [1]. In response, Israel has killed nearly 15,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, over the last two months. The heart-wrenching violence of the last two months is only the latest chapter in a conflict that has raged between Arabs and Jews in the land of historic Palestine for almost a century.
Discussing this conflict, especially in the poisonous context of social media, can generate a feeling of profound hopelessness. Experts and international observers have been markedly pessimistic about the chances of any significant change to the status quo after this conflict ends, besides the thousands of dead bodies that will litter the streets of Gaza [2]. Israel has been criticized for failing to provide any solid post-crisis plan for Gaza [3]. After the horrific violence, including war crimes on both sides, any hope for a constructive peace dialogue seems to be all but lost.
But why? Why does it feel so hopeless? What makes the Israel-Palestine conflict different from any other ethno-nationalist war that has been fought and eventually resolved over the last century, like the Rwandan Civil War or the wars in the Balkans? Why won’t this problem go away? There is no simple answer to this question, but I’d like to suggest four contributing factors.
First, important pre-conflict historical factors created a uniquely contentious situation that set the stage for a uniquely intractable conflict. On the Palestinian side, the early 20th century saw the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the oppressive Turkish theocracy that had ruled Palestine since 1517. In exchange for the Arabs’ help overthrowing the Ottomans, the British Empire made a vague territorial promise to the Arabs, who interpreted the promise to mean Arab control over the territory of Palestine in the future [4]. On the Israeli side, the horrors of the Holocaust gave Jewish settlers a unique moral authority to create their own exclusive ethno-state to protect Holocaust survivors from annihilation at the hands of their enemies [5]. Additionally, the fact that ancient Jewish presence in Palestine is not only well-documented but integral to the dominant religions of the region makes the two groups’ competing claims unusually balanced—both groups can legitimately claim to be the rightful possessors of the land.
Second, both sides have received backing from external powers, which has enlarged this conflict beyond two small ethnic groups in one small corridor of the world. The United States has supported Israel militarily for decades, helping them transform into one of the most formidable militaries on Earth, one of only nine to possess nuclear weapons [6]. The Palestinians have also received support, though to a lesser extent, from the wider Islamic and Arab world—countries like Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and eventually Iran [7]. This has created a situation where both sides have benefited from the backing of huge segments of the international community, a situation that tends to prolong ethnic conflicts generally.
Third, religious extremists on both sides have prolonged the conflict and derailed potential peace talks over the decades. In 1995, at the height of Israel-Palestine peace talks, the Israeli prime minister was assassinated by a Jewish extremist who wanted to prevent a negotiated peace settlement with the Palestinians [8]. Even today, right-wing extremists hold seats in the Israeli government [9]. Obviously, extremism is a problem on the Palestinian side too—after all, the government of Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group that launches rockets indiscriminately into Israeli cities. Israel responded to Hamas’s seizure of power in Gaza in 2007 by blockading the entire Gaza Strip, a blockade that continues to this day [10]. A depressing pattern has emerged over the decades—moderate delegations of both sides get close to a peace agreement, then extremists kill some innocent people and the negotiations are called off in the ensuing chaos [11].
Finally, I argue that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has persisted because it reveals a fundamental flaw in the philosophy of nationalism, which has been the dominant philosophical framework of global politics since at least 1945, if not 1776. Nationalism, in its most basic form, is the idea that every nation on Earth has a right to establish a state on the land it claims for itself. Nationalism has achieved unprecedented success, dethroning imperialism, colonialism, and dynastic monarchy to become so ubiquitous most of us just take it for granted these days. As a philosophy, it has been wildly successful in liberating human beings from foreign oppressors and allowing for human flourishing.
But the philosophy of nationalism fails to provide a solution to the question posed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: What happens when two nations have equally legitimate claims to the same land and refuse to share it? Historically, the answer has been simple, but horrifying—one nation destroys the other (there’s a reason there’s no similar “US-Native American conflict” today). For what it’s worth, neither side of this conflict has utterly annihilated the other. So in the modern world, with norms against war and genocide, what happens? As far as I’m aware, nationalism can provide no satisfactory answer.
I argue that there is only one possible solution—a move away from nationalism in the land of Palestine. Rather than insisting that distinct nations need their own distinct states, peace requires prioritizing liberal democracy and multi-ethnic republicanism. This means equal rights for all citizens, regardless of nationality or religion. This means disempowering nationalist and fundamentalist extremists on both sides. Most crucially, this means recognizing and ultimately accepting an extremely uncomfortable reality—that the borders that exist today are products of violence and injustice, but that they cannot be changed without unacceptable levels of violence today.
Accomplishing this goal will likely be the single most difficult issue in modern international politics. It cannot be done by force—if there’s anything the first 23 years of this century has taught us, it’s that Middle Eastern countries don’t take kindly to having democratic ideals forced on them by Americans. This transition away from nationalism and toward multi-ethnic republicanism must be a bottom-up intellectual revolution among the people who live in Israel and Palestine. There is perhaps no better application of the phrase “easier said than done”—but there is no other way.
