It has always been intellectually easier to make war than peace. In one case, it’s a matter of mobilizing without qualms, here and now, against a clearly identified enemy, and doing everything in one’s power to defeat them. In the other, you have to bring yourself to gamble on reconciliation with a despised enemy, to the point of entrusting them, at least in part, with the security of future generations.

The 75-year prolongation of the Middle East conflict compounds such a cognitive bias with layers of hatred, stigmatization, lies and resentment. To break out of such a destructive spiral, the priority must be clarifying – with deliberately simple ideas – a situation that war-mongers actually present as inescapable. The method modestly followed is to pose, for each fundamental question of a possible settlement, the terms of an alternative of which only one term is retained.

Is it an Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

The founding conflict of 1948 is significantly referred to as the “War of Independence” by Israel, which won its right to exist as a state by force of arms. But it is just as significantly called the “Palestine War” by the Arab side, which breaks it down into two phases. Firstly, the war between Jews and Arabs in a Palestine under British mandate. Secondly, a war between the newly proclaimed State of Israel and five Arab states (Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq). The Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the exodus of over 750,000 Arab residents from Palestine, began in the first phase of this war and continued throughout the second. But this first Arab-Israeli conflict ended in 1949 with a series of ceasefires between Israel and its Arab neighbors, leaving the fate of the Palestinian refugees indefinitely suspended. It would be a quarter of a century before the Arab summit in Rabat recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

In the meantime, two Israeli-Arab conflicts – as short as they were deadly – reshaped the Middle East: the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 18-day war of October 1973 (called the “Yom Kippur War” by Israel and the “Ramadan War” by the Arabs). A separate peace agreement was signed in 1979 between Egypt and Israel, giving Israel a free hand to crush the PLO in Beirut. This three-month war in Lebanon ushered in an ongoing cycle of long-lasting Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, each with a more appalling human toll than the last, from the first intifada of 1987-1993 and the second intifada of 2000-2005, to the Gaza wars of 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023-2024.

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