Why can’t Israelis and Palestinians just get along?

The more poignant question is: Can’t we all agree on the same historical context and timeline?

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A few weeks ago, world-renowned Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari made this statement:

“We know from history that after years, the pain heals somewhat. Germans and Jews, after what happened during the Holocaust, eventually became friends. So if this is possible, then anything is possible.”

Certainly, such a sentiment makes for a storybook ending befit of a “feel good” fiction novel, but for someone who’s written six nonfiction books, I was quite surprised at Harari’s off-base analogy.

After the end of World War II, many Germans knew that something had gone terribly wrong. The responsibility for World War II and the national sentiment of guilt shaped the role of German politicians and citizens in Europe for decades. After the bitter experience of the Nazi regime, Germans turned away from militarism, a pacifist attitude and a certain skepticism about army activities that are still observed today.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, it’s unclear who the Palestinians in Harari’s analogy. They are neither the big bad Nazis (although some might wish they were) nor are they the defenseless and innocent.

For now, all we now is that a healthy majority of them (more than 75 percent) support Hamas and what they perpetrated on October 7th, according to a poll by Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. If Palestinian elections were held today, Hamas would almost certainly win by a large margin.

How could this be the case? Don’t Palestinian women empathize a least a bit with what so many Israeli women experienced on October 7th? Wouldn’t Palestinian parents want their children to grow up in a world not characterized by persistent, relentless attacks and retaliation?

Can’t we all just get along?

The more poignant question is: Can’t we all agree on the same historical context and timeline?

The answer? It depends how far back you want to go.

If you start the conversation from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, or what Palestinians call “the Nakba,” then yes — it’s easy to throw around terms like “occupation,” “dispossession,” and even “ethnic cleansing.” And it’s even easier to make claims like the Palestinians are “paying for” the Holocaust.

It also explains perhaps the most egregious part of the Palestinian narrative: the belief that antisemitism started in 1948, as a result of “the Nakba.” But don’t just take it from me. Shaun Maguire, a partner at the American investment firm Sequoia Capital, has no dog in the fight, yet after spending more than 30 hours talking with Palestinians, in “15 out of 16 calls,” unprompted they each said: “Antisemitism didn’t exist in the Middle East before 1948 or in Islam.”

“The brainwashing runs deep, and frankly is at the core of this issue,” said Maguire. “One side rewrote history.”¹

When you begin to understand that “one side” has a “program” so caught up in refuting the Jewish narrative in order to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Jewish People, you can quickly see through many of their obscene grievances, such as:

• Israel launches vengeful and preemptive wars.

• Israel imposes an inhumane blockade on the two million people, mostly “refugees,” living in Gaza.

• Israel is “an army with a country attached.”

• Israel has the world powers on its side, with the United States in its pocket, Europe behind it, and the Arab regimes sucking up to it.

• The Palestinians have a historic and cultural belonging to Palestine (even though they never had sovereignty over it, but that’s neither here now there).

• Zionism has had to manufacture belonging to the land in order to entice Jews into becoming colonial settlers.

• Israel has long resorted to theology and mythology to justify its existence.

I’m not making this stuff up. I sourced it from an article titled “Why Israel hates the Palestinians so much,” written by a so-called senior political analyst for Al Jazeera, the Qatari outlet that one Saudi researcher called “a mouthpiece of Iran’s ayatollahs and of its criminal militias.”²

The senior political analyst started his article by writing: “The Palestinians have every reason to hate Israel; it is a settler-colonial apartheid state erected on the ruins of their homeland. But why does Israel hate the Palestinians so much?”

The more accurate analysis of Israel’s view on the Palestinians is not one of hatred, more one of ambivalence, as in: “We tried to make peace with you guys for decades. You obviously weren’t that interested, so we’ve moved on.”

But the Palestinians have too much pride to accept that Israel has moved on from them. They’d rather feel like they’re hated than feel like they’re irrelevant, because that gives them and their quasi-political movements purpose. Hamas’ attack on October 7th was as much a “reminder that we’re still here” as it was anything else.

Yet even after learning about all the devastating horrors that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists executed on October 7th, more than half of Israelis oppose annexing the Gaza Strip and reestablishing settlements uprooted during Israel’s 2005 Disengagement, according to a poll from the Hebrew University published Sunday.

Translation: “We want nothing to do with you.”

Why? Because quite frankly, the relationship with the Palestinians has been one of psychological and emotional abuse. It’s a relationship that no other country would tolerate (no less on its border), and it’s rooted in lies, distortions, and gaslighting.

Every group has its own history, I get it, but the Palestinians have systematically duped themselves into some crazed “worldview” that even the most fanatical writers in Hollywood would have a hard time piecing together.

Heck, one of their own, Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, acknowledged that the Palestinians “have failed as much on the level of narrative as anything.”³

This is because the Palestinian position is not one flossed with historical facts, but with selective memory that dangerously confuses recollection with history. Thus, it eventually becomes impossible to divide the two from becoming entwined in the remaking of past events.

Take, for example, the 700,000 Palestinians who fled their homes as a result of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 — a historical fact. But what they don’t remember (or choose not to remember) is one of the main reasons why so many Palestinians fled: They were instructed to do so by Arab leaders and Arab media, promising the Palestinians a victory in the war and the subsequent return to their homes.

Who gave such orders? Leaders like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, who declared: “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.”

The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem, following the March 8, 1948, instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, ordered women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes, saying: “Any opposition to this order is an obstacle to the holy war and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.”

The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: “This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country.”

In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave, writing: “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.”

Even Jordan’s King Abdullah blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem:

“The tragedy of Palestinian Arabs was most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue.”

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas said: “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.”

I’m sorry to say it, but the Palestinian “narrative” is built on a combination of wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, and bold-faced lying. To add insult to injury, this narrative is a double negative, because this lie drives incitement, which drives terrorism, which drives a strong Israeli response, and the cycle only gets worse for everyone involved.

By and large, Israelis don’t deny Palestinian existence, justice, or self-determination. We have no problem acknowledging that “the Nakba” — the greatest Palestinian trauma — occurred in the Jewish pursuit for self-sovereignty, whether or not it was our intention. And history is not a perfect science.

But when your “narrative” is based on some post-modernism ideological supremacy where “truths” go beyond objective realities, it becomes exponentially absurd that “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.

Add to this people’s wired-in cognitive biases, the decline of true journalism and the rise of “citizen journalism,” and the emergence of fake news as a sociopolitical tool, and we have ideal conditions for a Palestinian “narrative” that has gripped so many people across the world.

Hence why, almost instantly after the Hamas attack on October 7th, a host of folks downplayed the slaughter, denied actual atrocities had even happened, or somehow found a way to blame the victim (Israel).

Within certain “woke” circles, there is a perception that Jews and Arabs used to live in peace with one another, and only in modern times did Arabs begin to murder Jews. This is a myth, and here’s just one example: the brutal riots of 1834, which occurred during the “Peasants’ Revolt” in Ottoman-era Palestine.

In theory, the revolt had nothing to do with Jews at all. It broke out due to local Arabs’ resentment over conscription duty to the Egyptian army. But when the governmental order was disrupted, the Jews immediately became its victims.

During the revolt, the rebels from the surrounding villages rioted against the Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed (the Four Holy Cities of Judaism). The evil acts that occurred in the Israeli towns around Gaza on October 7th took place there and then as well.

Jews were murdered, beaten, and abused, and their property was looted and plundered — all preceded by incitement in mosques, just like in our times. The result was terrible destruction.

Many Jews’ homes were destroyed or set on fire. Jews who tried to find refuge in synagogues were beaten to death. The rioters took hundreds of Torah scrolls from the holy arks and disgracefully desecrated them in the streets. They also blocked the roads leading out, so that the Jews could not inform government officials, military forces, and foreign consuls about the pogroms.

There was no issue of “occupation” or “oppression” then, nor any other vain excuses that the naive try to use to explain the lust for murder. It was pure hatred of Jews.

If true peace is ever to be had between Israel and its Arab neighbors, it is vital that the Arabs recognize their self-inflicted tragedies and self-perpetuated hate. No juggling and politicized interpretations of the events can change the fact that the Arab world has repeatedly attempted to destroy the Jewish state, each Arab regime and faction with their own asynchronous operating logic.

That’s why, if there’s any resemblance between the German-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian relationships, it is merely this: Just as real peace could come to Europe after World War II only when Germans abandoned the German “narrative” and accepted responsibility for starting the war, only abandonment of the Palestinian “narrative” and acknowledgment of historical events in their context and entirety, can serve as a basis for fruitful reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

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1. Shaun Maguire on X

2. “Arab Journalists: Al-Jazeera Is A Mouthpiece Of The Terrorist Organizations.” The Middle East Media Research Institute.

3. “Palestine’s Struggle to Create Its Unique Narrative.” https://www.governing.com/context/palestines-struggle-to-create-its-unique-narrative.