Yuval Noah Hariri: Only generosity can secure peace between Israelis and Palestinians - Financial Times Nov 7 2025
If we avoid all moral judgments and ideological claims, and simply count how many square kilometres of territory the land contains, how many kilowatts of electricity it can produce, how many kilogrammes of wheat it can import, and how many water molecules it can pump or desalinate, we would discover that the land could quite comfortably support all Israelis and all Palestinians.
What fuels the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t an objective lack of territory or resources, but false moral certainties produced by oversimplified historical narratives. Deep down, too many Israelis and Palestinians are convinced that they are 100 per cent in the right and the other side is 100 per cent in the wrong, and that the other side therefore has no right to exist.
Even if they are forced by circumstances to sign this or that agreement, both sides tend to see it as a temporary measure and hope that, in the long run, absolute justice will prevail and they will obtain possession of the entire land. Moreover, both sides are aware of the other’s moral certainty — and are terrified by it. Both sides fear that the other wishes to destroy them, and both sides are right to fear this.
The cycle of violence and suffering can be broken only once people abandon their moral certainties and support practical and generous solutions instead. To understand where the false and destructive moral certainties come from, we need to take a look at the long-term history of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and at the distorted historical narratives that Israelis, Palestinians and many other people around the world have cultivated for far too long.
The narrative that produces the Palestinian moral certainty goes more or less like this: the Palestinians are the original indigenous people of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The land always belonged to them, until the Jews came along and stole it. These Jews, according to this Palestinian narrative, are European colonialists. They came to the Middle East in the late 19th century as part of the broader colonialist European project. Just as Christian Europeans conquered and settled South Africa, so Jewish Europeans conquered and settled Palestine. Political weakness might force Palestinians to compromise with the Jewish settler-colonialists for a while, but deep down the Palestinians know that the Jews have no connection to the land and no right to live there.
No temporary compromise can hold as long as each side is convinced that it is 100 per cent right
The narrative that produces the Israeli moral certainty goes something like this: the Jews are the original indigenous people of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. They were expelled from this land by the Romans. While living in exile, the Jews always wanted to return to their ancestral land, but were prevented from doing so by hostile imperial powers. Finally, in the late 19th century, the Zionist movement mobilised the Jews to overcome tremendous hurdles, return to the land and reclaim their ancient patrimony.
As for the Palestinians, many Israelis believe there is simply no such thing as a Palestinian people. Allegedly, when in the late 19th century Zionist Jews began returning to their homeland, it was largely empty. Granted, it did contain some nomadic tribes and poverty-stricken villages, but their numbers were small and they did not constitute any recognisable Palestinian nation.
Both these narratives fly in the face of numerous historical facts. Let’s review some of the most salient such facts, and then consider how the two narratives can yet be reconciled.
The errors in the Israeli narrative The claim that Jews are the original indigenous people of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is clearly false, for that land has no recognisable “original indigenous people”. Like most other lands on planet Earth, it too was settled and resettled by numerous different peoples thousands of years before the first Jew (or Palestinian) lived. True, there were a few centuries in the first millennium BCE when Jews constituted the majority of the land’s population. However, even then they were not its only inhabitants; they were preceded there by Canaanites, Natufians and Neanderthals; and there is no compelling reason to privilege the first millennium BCE as the starting point of the land’s history.
Nor is it true that the Jews were expelled from the land by the Romans, or by any other subsequent empire. Following the Great Jewish Revolt (66-70CE) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136CE), many Jews were enslaved by the Romans, and Jews were also banned from living in specific locales in Judea, most notably the city of Jerusalem. However, no Roman emperor ever issued a decree permanently banning Jews from the land between the Jordan and Mediterranean, as evidenced by the fact that some Jews — like the authors of the Mishnah and the Jerusalem Talmud — continued to live there throughout the Roman period. Most Jews nevertheless came to live elsewhere because they emigrated voluntarily, in search of better living conditions and economic opportunities. Already prior to the Great Jewish Revolt about 50 per cent of Jews lived outside the land, in places such as Egypt and Mesopotamia.
