Applying Israeli and Jewish ingenuity to peace
Across physics, medicine, chemistry, literature and economics, people of Jewish heritage have enlarged humanity’s understanding of itself and its world. Einstein transformed physics; Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen advanced knowledge of growth factors; Paul Berg helped open biotechnology’s possibilities. Pasternak, Sachs, Bellow and Singer enriched our literary and moral imaginations. Their contributions crossed borders and became humanity’s common inheritance.[nobelprize][stljewishlight][jewishvirtuallibrary]
Jewish achievement is not synonymous with Israeli achievement. One encompasses people of many nationalities and beliefs; the other concerns a particular country. Admiration for the wider inheritance frames my question; responsibility for Israeli policy rests with the institutions and leaders who make it.
Israel’s laureates nevertheless offer remarkable examples: Agnon in literature, Yonath’s work on ribosomes, Shechtman’s discovery of quasicrystals. Kahneman explored judgment under uncertainty; Aumann examined conflict and cooperation through game theory. Here were minds investigating how we understand reality, assess danger and negotiate competing interests.[en.wikipedia][nobelprize][nobelprize]
Peace, too, belongs to this history. Begin shared the 1978 Peace Prize with Sadat; Rabin and Peres shared the 1994 prize with Arafat. Whatever our judgments of these leaders, Israeli political imagination has not always stopped at military advantage.[timesofisrael][nytimes]
That makes the question more difficult—and more necessary.
Why has such intellectual achievement not translated into a durable settlement with the Palestinians? What would it mean to devote comparable ingenuity, seriousness and institutional commitment to coexistence?
Consider Unit 8200, which recruits talented young people and cultivates technical initiative. Its veterans have become prominent in technology and cybersecurity. Ingenuity here is identified, trained and organised. What comparable political commitment would make peace a governing ambition?[reuters]
Israel has faced, and continues to face, real military threats. Some require a military response. But the necessity of defence does not place every method beyond scrutiny—or remove the need for a political horizon. Weapons deliver force. Surveillance gathers information and enables control. Hasbara presents and defends policy.
Each requires separate scrutiny, but together they invite a common question: when does managing a conflict substitute for resolving it?
What the other people lost
Perhaps part of the answer lies not in a shortage of ingenuity, but in the assumptions that determine its purpose. Before asking how to achieve coexistence, we might ask how the people with whom coexistence must be negotiated have been imagined.
The question is not only whether Palestinians have recognised Israel’s need for security, but whether Israeli political life has adequately recognised what statehood meant for Palestinians and their actual historical physical connection to the land.
Palestinian roots extend well beyond the four centuries of Ottoman rule. By around AD 500, Palestine had substantial, long-established Christian communities alongside Jews, Samaritans and others. Following the seventh-century Arab-Muslim conquest, much of the existing population gradually adopted Arabic, and many subsequently adopted Islam. The Palestinian Arab majority encountered by modern Zionism emerged from this long history of local continuity, migration and cultural change—not from the sudden arrival of an entirely foreign population.
The first British census of Palestine, conducted on 23 October 1922, recorded 757,182 inhabitants: 590,890 Muslims (78.0%), 83,794 Jews (11.1%) and 73,024 Christians (9.6%), with smaller communities making up the remaining 1.3%. These figures describe religious affiliation, not nationality, but establish that Palestine already contained a substantial, predominantly non-Jewish population a quarter-century before partition.
The British census of November 1931 recorded approximately 1.04 million people in Palestine: 73.3% Muslim, 16.9% Jewish and 8.8% Christian. Muslims and Christians together constituted approximately 82.2% of the population. These were religious categories rather than national identities, although Muslims and most Christians identified as Arabs.
In 1947, Jews constituted approximately one-third of Palestine’s population. The UN partition proposal allocated about 55–56% of the territory to a Jewish state, with an Arab state alongside it and Jerusalem under an international regime. This was a proposed allocation of sovereignty, not ownership of every property within the boundaries. The Jewish state would contain a substantial Arab population, and much of its territory was the Negev. Those qualifications matter, but they do not make Palestinian objections inexplicable.[un][britannica][palquest.palestine-studies]
So while the ever growing Jewish population of Palestine and then Israel would have felt strong religious or cultural attachment to the region, the Palestine people had many centuries of direct ancetral and traceable connection to the physical land itself, which made the displacement even more painful for them.
Many European Jews who migrated to Palestine in the 1930s were seeking refuge from persecution, not simply answering a spiritual or nationalist call. Their homes, families, professions and cultural attachments lay in Europe; others sought futures in the Americas or elsewhere. But escape depended on which countries would admit them, and those doors were increasingly closed. Palestine became a refuge for some who might otherwise have rebuilt their lives elsewhere. Religious attachment, Zionist conviction and the imperative of survival could overlap, but they should not be mistaken for a single motive.
Recognising the desperation of those seeking refuge does not diminish the losses of the people already living there; it makes the collision between the two experiences more necessary to understand.
By the 1949 armistices, Israel controlled approximately 78% of former Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan. Around 700,000 Palestinians had become refugees. Hundreds of villages were depopulated, many subsequently destroyed. Displacement was followed by legal and administrative measures through which refugees lost control of land and homes.[en.wikipedia][news.un][en.wikipedia][badil]
Even access to money could disappear. Palestinian refugee bank accounts in Israel were frozen in 1948; subsequent negotiations secured the release of funds over a period of years. It would be inaccurate to describe all those funds as permanently confiscated, but the freezing of accounts was another material consequence of displacement.[un][jstor]
These are not merely rival memories. They are documented events, although historians dispute aspects of their causes, intentions and interpretation. Direct expulsion, flight from fighting and fear of attack must be examined in their particular settings rather than compressed into one explanation.
Nor is there a single, unchanging Israeli account. Research on Israeli textbooks documents both the persistence of an official national narrative and the emergence of more critical approaches. The question is not whether every Israeli knows or understands the same history, but how much public and political weight Palestinian experience receives.[quest-cdecjournal]
None of this makes attacks on Israeli civilians legitimate. It does make Palestinian opposition intelligible without reducing it to an inexplicable hatred of Jewish statehood. A serious account of peace must ask not only what each people fears losing, but what the other has already lost.
The assumptions behind the impasse
Different Zionist movements understood their undertaking through different stories: national liberation, refuge from persecution, historical restoration and religious promise. Sometimes these also drew on European claims to civilisational superiority. They were overlapping arguments, not a single creed shared by every settler or leader.
In The Jewish State, Herzl imagined the proposed state as “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” The language placed his project within a familiar European hierarchy. It invites a troubling question: how readily could the existing population’s rights be recognised as equal if the undertaking was imagined as an advance of civilisation? This is evidence of a particular outlook, not proof of a belief held by all Jews.[gutenberg]
The problem was recognised within Zionism itself. In his 1891 essay “Truth from Eretz Israel,” Ahad Ha’am criticised settlers’ treatment of Arabs, desribing cruelty and beatings. [proquest][shaulmagid.substack]
Religious territorial claims supplied another justification, but their timing matters. Gush Emunim, formally established in 1974, encouraged settlement in territories captured in 1967 as a religious undertaking. For its supporters, settlement in biblical Judea and Samaria carried divine significance. Such convictions were not identical to the secular nationalism of Israel’s founding leadership, but they could make territorial compromise appear a betrayal of sacred obligation rather than a political negotiation.[britannica][en.wikipedia]
“Greater Israel” cannot therefore be reduced to one interpretation of covenant. Territorial maximalism can be secular as well as religious. What matters politically is whether a claim to land leaves room for the rights and national aspirations of those already living there.
The Holocaust brought another, profoundly different inheritance: catastrophic loss and the urgent need for safety. Survivors’ enduring psychological injuries are extensively documented. But diagnosing a whole population—or its leaders—with PTSD would replace historical inquiry with an unsupported collective diagnosis. Zionist settlement, Palestinian resistance and arguments for territorial sovereignty all predated the Holocaust. The question is how persecution and its memory subsequently shaped political judgment, not whether trauma made a people incapable of moral recognition.[ushmm][en.jabotinsky]
Nor was Palestinian resistance always misunderstood. In “The Iron Wall,” published in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky recognised that a native population would resist settlers seeking to change its country’s national character. His answer was a force sufficient to make successful resistance appear impossible. The disturbing possibility is not simply that Palestinian attachment went unseen, but that it was seen and treated as an obstacle to be overcome.[en.jabotinsky]
Yet Jabotinsky’s argument did not end with permanent confrontation. He envisaged eventual negotiations, mutual concessions and guarantees. That qualification sharpens the question: if overwhelming strength is justified as the preliminary to agreement, how do leaders decide that the time for agreement has arrived? What prevents the preliminary from becoming permanent?[en.jabotinsky]
So it can be seen that Palestinian resistance did not arise in a vacuum.
It was not because of ‘jew hate’ or jealousy or any of the other egocentric reasons often given for resistance to occupation and suppression. Opposition to losing homes, communities and political control is understandable. That does not confer legitimacy on every act committed in its name. Explaining a grievance and justifying violence against civilians are different undertakings. But it does explain the level of resistance and its persistence, as was anticipated years before.
Neighbouring Arab states also intervened, but religious solidarity alone does not explain their actions. Their governments combined opposition to Israel’s establishment with competing territorial and strategic ambitions. Transjordan’s Abdullah sought control of Arab Palestine; Egypt feared his expansion. Palestinian interests were not always the interests those governments served.[britannica][palestine-studies]
Making coexistence a governing ambition
These histories do not supply a single explanation for every failed negotiation or renewed war. They do suggest an obstacle: if Palestinians are approached chiefly as a population to contain—a threat, an “other,” a people regarded as lesser—rather than as people whose consent and rights matter, what kind of peace can follow?
Accounts of peaceful and respectful cooperation between Jews, Muslims and Christians before Israel’s establishment deserve a place in this history—not as proof of an unbroken harmony, but as a challenge to the idea that hostility was inevitable. The question is not simply whether a Jewish state would emerge, but how it would be established, and what place its leaders envisaged for the people already living there. The manner of its creation, and the attitudes and decisions of the principal actors, deserve scrutiny alongside the pressures they faced. Those pressures were real; they did not make every choice inevitable.
The danger was not merely that force would be used. It was that the ability to impose conditions became a substitute for negotiating them.
The alternative is not imaginary. Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian movement Women of the Sun have worked together towards a negotiated resolution. Their existence challenges any easy claim that either people lacks the imagination for coexistence. People are already doing this work. Why have they not gained the political power to make their vision prevail?[wagingnonviolence]
Peace is not an engineering problem. It requires decisions and commitments from Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and Israel cannot produce it alone. But difficulty cannot excuse abandoning sustained political effort. Security matters profoundly; the question is what can make it genuinely durable.
Ultimately, this is a question of priorities. The question is not why Israelis have failed to imagine peace. It is why those who imagine it have so often failed to prevail—and whether the ingenuity devoted to overcoming an adversary can also be directed towards recognising a neighbour.