The Gauntlet of Peace or Justice

There are more and less productive ways to think about the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine. This piece presents a re-framing of the dynamics at play that I believe makes things clearer and can hopefully help us all move towards a better place. While many Israelis and Palestinians have come to see such an endeavour as pointless, I have not, and I refuse to take this tack. As per the wisdom of Micah Goodman, when trapped in a Catch-22, unable to progress either forwards or backwards, the solution is to manoeuvre laterally. That is my hope here: to identify, and then replace, the binary that holds two nations static.

Popular consensus draws a false dichotomy in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The conception is so widely accepted that it is engraved into the very way we define the region and its events: The conflict is between Arabs and Jews. For one to win the other must lose. This binary dynamic comes with an accompanying moral overlay. One should win, and the other should lose. And when the side that should win does, there will be peace. But here, as is so often the case, that which appears so obvious to so many, is wrong. The true divide is not between Arabs and Jews, but between the Arabs and Jews that hold justice as their highest value, and those Arabs and Jews that prefer peace. These are the real sides in this conflict, and only by shifting our conception towards such a perspective can there ever be hope for the people that live between the River and the Sea. Unless we can forgo our immediate desire for justice, all we will have is suffering.

Of course, to any well-meaning Jew, Muslim, or modernist, the thought of abandoning justice seems absurd. While defining justice precisely is an endeavour more than a millennium old, what is uncontroversial is that it comes with normative force. That which is just is what is right. It is what should be. I won’t dispute this. It is right to do what is just, and the case in which justice is served is the morally, legally, and emotionally preferable state of the world. But the question is not whether justice, but rather what justice? What is just? When phrased this way the complications become obvious. In Israel, in Palestine, and beyond, there exists a multitude of people with a multitude of ways. The Middle East is a massive region populated by so many different ethnic groups and so many different religions. Each comes with thousands of years of history. The result is not only differing narratives, but differing value systems underlying those narratives. This is where justice becomes unworkable, because there is no unitary conception of what is ‘right’.

Both Jews and Arabs tell themselves extended stories about their presence in and around Jerusalem to a singular effect: they develop answers to the question ‘What right does who have to which land?’ The language itself exposes the common underlying moral appeal. Who has a ‘right’ to do what? What is deserved? A moral claim is being asserted. Justice is served when the material reality is aligned with the moral. Morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a relation of people to others, to events, and to places. And so the defining features of the normative space that those driven by justice wish to align our world with are determined by the ‘history’ of the region and the people in it. But history is long gone. What remains are records, fragments, and stories, open to interpretation, retelling, and reconsideration. From the fragments we build narratives, grand arcs of interrelated events constructing meaning at scale. Events happen, but history is constructed. And so, although there is only one region, one set of events, and one ‘real’ reality, there is not one single narrative that determines right.

To understand this in practice it’s worth comparing the two essential narratives fuelling the fighting. Who does deserve to live in Israel? The Arab answer is straightforward: Since the Islamic conquests in the seventh century, Islam holds the right to hegemonic control of Israel. The land was declared ‘Waqf’, meaning that it is eternally Islamic. That which they took and held is theirs. Furthermore, having resided there since, their claim is strengthened by a broad appeal to the extent of their residency, their integration with the conquered populations that preceded them, and their relation to what they see as the new external forces that removed them from the land. These forces they associate with the broader trend of Arab military loss at the hands of Europeans in the twentieth century and so situate their struggle as one in opposition to Western colonialism (making claim to the title of ‘indigenous’). As part of this history, they feel that the British promised the land to them. Since losing control of most of the land in 1948, that which was considered ‘Waqf’ became ‘Dar al-Harb’, meaning the abode of war, or infidelity. As a result Islamic law demands that pious Muslims retake the land and return it to its rightful, Islamic, state.

The Jewish answer is equally straightforward. The Torah states that God promises the land to the Jews. Jews trace their continuous presence in the land of Israel back to before the formation of Islam and the Arab conquests, with the first extra-biblical mention of the people of Israel as a distinct group from as early as the 13th century BCE in the Egyptian Merneptah Stele. Although the Jewish Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, the Jewish religion considers Israel to be no less the holy land of the Jews today than it was during the Roman conquest. They see Islamic imperialism as no different than European imperialism — an expansive, violent force that subjugates minorities to said imperial hegemony. Where Islam reigns, the local minorities (Copts, Druze, Kurds, Berbers, the list is extensive) live in an oppressive state of low-intensity conflict with their Muslim overclass, or as totally subjugated people. Israel, since its independence, is the exception in the region, considered the only successful de-colonial project in the Middle East (making claim to the title of ‘indigenous’). The Jews see themselves as reasserting the essential rights of an indigenous minority in the face of a hegemonic power that controls the rest of the Middle East. As part of this history, they feel that the British promised the land to them. As a result, Zionism, the political movement for the formation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel, is a de-colonial land-back movement by which a tyrannised minority has successfully managed to reassert itself as the regional ruler of their native homeland.

The impasse is apparent. Both sides claim indigeneity and, by their own standards, are the rightful ‘owners’ of the land (with neither questioning whether land can really be ‘owned’ in such a manner to begin with). Both see the other as an oppressor and their cause as just. These narratives aren’t going to converge. They use the same historical facts to draw radically different conclusions — Islamic Jerusalem is not distinct from Jewish Jerusalem; the Dome of the Rock is built on top of the Temple Mount. Both sides have powerful groups that make a claim to all the land. Israel has the settler movement and the current far-right, anti-peace government. The Arabs have Hamas and the PA, actualising their longstanding commitment to destroy the state of Israel, most recently through support of, and engagement in, the October 7th invasion. The desire for justice commits each side against the other — each with their moral right at their back. And it commits Jews and Arabs alike against stasis, quiet, and peace, all framed as an unjust status quo left un-remedied. Compromise is where nobody gets what they want. For religious or even secular but value-driven individuals, this is the main focus of discussion. We see this tendency well beyond the region as discussions of solutions focus on reparations, justifications, and which side deserves to win or lose. This whole way of thinking represents a united front that includes Yigal Amir and Yahya Sinwar. Those who believe in ‘no peace without justice’ are happy to wait for the former until they’ve carried out the latter.

On the other side of this rift are those who still believe in a possible peace within a shared reality—not total domination of one side over the other resulting in a quiet, eternal, stain of necessary cruelty on the history of the victor. This side recognises that there isn’t one truth to aim for; that there cannot be reconciliation between antithetical narratives; and that there does not need to be. One can respect the other while believing they are wrong, seeing in their opponent that which they carry within themselves. I called this elsewhere ‘mutually acceptable reasons’, the ability to appeal only to that which is shared (in this case, a desire to live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean). In political science it is known as ‘public reason’, defined as ‘a moral ideal requiring that political decisions be reasonably justifiable or acceptable from each individual’s viewpoint’. It’s a pragmatic view, born out of the internalisation of a nuanced reality without one ultimate good. It directly opposes the religious basis for both of the dominant value systems that pride themselves on striving to carry out the divine will of a creator. But it respects our deeply human desire to explore our differences together, instead of apart, and even more primally, to live without the threat of violence.

This isn’t a call for further division. I don’t want to galvanise the peace crowd to war against those who are fighting for what they see as right. I hope to elucidate this distinction both because clarity enables change and further because this perspective appeals to both sides. If you really want justice, and have spent time reading the history, it’s hard to see how more violence could bring a satisfactory end. Peace exists prior to justice, not in a hierarchy of values, but in a pragmatic sense. Had the Arabs accepted partition in 1948, while denying its moral validity, the conflict could have raged on for 70 years in the back rooms and debate halls of the UN. This kind of fight is more nuanced, more intellectually informed, and, as a result, more likely to get at the reality of the situation than anything that can be achieved with weapons. It creates the conditions for the objective, external perspectives that are necessary if we wish to strive for the kind of universal fairness that each side believes it lays claim to (if such a view from nowhere is ever possible).

Some may feel that carving an Arab state out of the Jewish homeland is an affront to God. Others feel that Jewish sovereignty over an Islamic Waqf is an abomination. But most of us, if you catch us on a good day, agree that it’s better to live disappointed than die in the pursuit of a maximalist ideal. This is the peace camp. It exists in opposition to Netanyahu’s government that sends young soldiers to their deaths on a whim, and in opposition to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority who recruit children for, and pay stipends to fund, terror attacks against Jews as preliminary steps towards a second Holocaust. It doesn’t seem like the peace camp is well represented at the highest level in either Israel or Palestine but to challenge this the paradigm has to shift. The dynamic is not Jews versus Arabs. It’s ideology versus pragmatism. Maximalism versus sharing. Justice versus peace. And the question is not ‘Who has what right to live where?’, but ‘How can it be made right for all to live where they already are?’