Israel-Palestine: we really need to talk
By David Warden
Few subjects provoke such fierce disagreement and heated emotion as Israel and Palestine. But can humanists discuss this seemingly intractable conflict without resorting to anger and denunciation? Drawing on a challenging but constructive encounter with a Dorset discussion group, David explores competing historical narratives, allegations of genocide, and the possibility of disagreeing well without abandoning our convictions.
David is Editor of Humanistically Speaking and the humanist representative on the Bournemouth & Poole Holocaust Memorial Day committee.
“It is not sufficient to be in solidarity with only Palestine. And it is not sufficient to be in solidarity with only Israel. We should be in solidarity with both peoples. Humanism should not contribute to polarization. It should cultivate an ethos that embraces complexity. It should resist simple, reassuring answers. And it should resist simplistic either-or thinking.” Professor Dr Ralf Schöppner in this issue of Humanistically Speaking.
At Humanists UK’s Festival of Humanism in Bournemouth in June 2026, an Israeli humanist and a Palestinian humanist took part in a dialogue entitled No Hope but Peace and Justice. Although intended to foster mutual understanding, they revealed markedly different interpretations of the conflict. An audience question about alleviating Palestinian suffering subsequently prompted a presentation by Trisha Rogers of Central London Humanists at Humanists UK’s Group Representatives Annual Meeting in Reading in October. Trisha, a former Vice-Chair of the British Humanist Association, chairs the United Nations Association’s London and South East Region and has been active in campaigning for Palestinian human rights.
I was surprised that a meeting primarily devoted to developing local humanist groups included a session on Israel-Palestine activism. Trisha suggested challenging the IHRA definition of antisemitism, campaigning for Palestinian prisoners and supporting organisations such as UNRWA and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. She advocated engagement with Hamas in peace negotiations and described Gaza as an “open-air prison”. Accompanying briefing notes of unknown authorship characterised Zionism as “a settler colonialist project depending on subjugation, apartheid and removal of indigenous Palestinians”. While many of these concerns will resonate with humanists troubled by Palestinian suffering, I was disappointed that there was no opportunity to examine these claims through dialogue, particularly with Humanists UK’s Dialogue Officer present. I subsequently wrote to Trisha, who I know and respect, raising questions and concerns. She responded in a spirit of dialogue.
One difficulty in discussing Israel-Palestine is that we rarely approach the evidence without an existing picture of what the conflict is fundamentally about. If we see it primarily as a story of colonial dispossession, subsequent events tend to reinforce that interpretation. If we see it primarily as a story of Jewish national survival in the face of repeated threats, the same events may acquire a very different meaning. Neither perspective should be immune from scrutiny. The challenge is to recognise the picture we are using, consider what it explains and what it overlooks, and ask whether the conclusions we draw genuinely follow from the evidence.
Putting factfulness to the test
Ten days after the meeting in Reading, I was invited to discuss Israel and Palestine with a U3A current affairs discussion group in Lytchett Matravers, Dorset. The group had been studying the conflict for some time and was familiar with its history. Its organiser, Alan, had originally hoped to invite a rabbi, but when that proved difficult I volunteered to offer my perspective as a humanist.
Alan had helpfully set out the group's concerns in advance. They could see why Jews, after centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, might want a secure homeland. What they struggled to understand was why the Jewish diaspora should have a claim to Palestine based on what they regarded as tenuous ancient historical connections. More provocatively, Alan asked why Jews should have the right to colonise and ethnically cleanse someone else's land.
These were serious questions, but they also contained a number of assumptions. Rather than immediately defending or rejecting them, I suggested we approach the discussion in the spirit of factfulness, a term popularised by the Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling. This means slowing down, identifying the assumptions behind our beliefs, and examining whether the evidence really supports the conclusions we draw.
I also suggested that we should be alert to our own cognitive habits. We tend to select information that confirms our existing worldview and discount evidence that challenges it. Our beliefs can become badges of social belonging, making disagreement feel like a moral failing rather than an opportunity to learn. I recalled how a planned Dorset Humanists discussion on Israel and Palestine had been cancelled nearly three years earlier after the Palestine Solidarity Campaign threatened to protest outside the venue. Whatever our views, we ought to be able to discuss difficult questions without intimidation.
How tenuous Is the Jewish connection?
I began with Alan's suggestion that Jewish historical connections to Palestine were tenuous. Jews had lived in the region in antiquity, and Jewish religious and cultural traditions had preserved an attachment to Jerusalem and Zion across many centuries of diaspora. This was not merely an invented connection arising in the nineteenth century.
But what makes a connection to an ancestral homeland legitimate? Must it depend on genetic ancestry? I offered the example of an English friend whose parents had arrived from Poland as wartime refugees. Nobody would reasonably suggest that his connection to England was tenuous because his ancestors had lived elsewhere. Conversely, people can retain a strong attachment to an ancestral homeland even when they have lived abroad for generations.
We discussed how identity can have several layers. A participant originally from South Africa described feeling entirely at home in Britain while retaining a powerful attachment to the country of her birth. Others reflected on whether they considered themselves English, British, Scottish or Welsh. The discussion illustrated how difficult it is to reduce national belonging to a simple formula of birthplace, ancestry or cultural identity.
There was also the question of genetics. Research into Jewish populations has found substantial Middle Eastern ancestry alongside varying degrees of European and other ancestry. Ashkenazi Jews are neither an unchanged population transplanted from ancient Judea nor simply Europeans who happen to practise Judaism. Equally, Palestinians have deep historical connections to the region. Neither people's attachment can sensibly be dismissed by demanding genetic purity.
Indeed, I suggested that making genetic ancestry the decisive test of national belonging was a distinctly uncomfortable approach, with potentially racist implications. Human populations have always migrated and intermingled. Our sense of belonging involves history, culture, memory and identity as well as ancestry.
Interestingly, this first part of the discussion met with relatively little resistance. One participant explicitly said that he had no difficulty accepting the Jewish historical connection or the desire for a homeland in the region. His concern was what happened when that aspiration encountered the equally legitimate claims of the Palestinian population.
That was precisely the question we needed to address next. A historical connection to a homeland does not, by itself, settle questions about sovereignty, territorial boundaries or the rights of people already living there. Recognising Jewish attachment to the land is not the same as justifying everything subsequently done in the name of Zionism, any more than recognising Palestinian attachment determines the political solution.
We had established some common ground. The harder questions were still to come.
Colonisation, ethnic cleansing and the birth of Israel
We then turned to Alan's more provocative question: why should Jews have the right to colonise and ethnically cleanse someone else's land? I suggested that almost every word in that question needed examining.
First, was Zionism a form of settler colonialism? There were certainly some similarities. Jewish migrants settled in Palestine, established communities and acquired land, sometimes using the language of colonisation themselves. The Zionist project also benefited from British imperial support following the First World War. But there were important differences from familiar examples of European colonialism. Unlike British colonists in Kenya or French settlers in Algeria, Zionist Jews were not establishing an overseas possession for a European mother country. They understood themselves as returning to an ancestral homeland, increasingly driven by persecution and the conviction that Jews could never be entirely safe as a minority elsewhere.
I suggested that this made Zionism difficult to fit neatly into the conventional colonial template. But recognising its distinctive origins does not mean that Palestinian displacement can simply be discounted. One movement can understand itself as national restoration while being experienced by another population as colonisation.
What, then, of the supposed right to establish a Jewish state? The Balfour Declaration of 1917 supported a Jewish national home in Palestine, a commitment subsequently incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate. In 1947, the United Nations proposed partition into Jewish and Arab states. The mainstream Zionist leadership accepted the proposal, while Arab leaders rejected it. These developments provided significant international support for the idea of a Jewish national home and, subsequently, a Jewish state, although the partition recommendation did not itself establish either state or resolve the competing claims of the two populations.
The question of ethnic cleansing was even more contentious. By 1947, Palestine's population was approximately two-thirds Arab and one-third Jewish. Following the UN partition resolution, civil war broke out between the communities, followed by the invasion of the newly declared State of Israel by neighbouring Arab armies in May 1948.
The Israeli historians Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris offer markedly different interpretations of what followed. Pappé regards Plan Dalet, adopted by Zionist military leaders in March 1948, as evidence of a systematic programme of ethnic cleansing. Morris interprets it principally as a military plan developed amid escalating warfare, while acknowledging that Jewish forces carried out expulsions. The disagreement concerns not whether Palestinians were displaced, but the intentions, decisions and circumstances behind that displacement.
Approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the war, and most were prevented from returning. This was a catastrophe for Palestinian society, remembered as the Nakba. At the same time, a substantial Arab population remained within Israel, and today around two million Arab citizens live there. In the years following Israel's establishment, hundreds of thousands of Jews also left or were driven from Arab countries, many finding refuge in Israel.
My argument is that the familiar portrayal of Zionism as a colonial project designed to displace an indigenous Palestinian population is fundamentally misleading. It imposes a false binary between “indigenous Palestinians” and “colonial settlers” that obscures the deep historical and ancestral connections of both peoples to the land. Neither Palestinians nor Jews constitute an ethnically homogeneous population whose ancestors have remained in one place throughout history. Both populations have experienced migration, intermarriage and cultural change. Arab migration into Palestine continued during the period of modern Jewish immigration, although to a lesser extent.
The collapse of empires and the emergence of new nation-states frequently involved competing national aspirations, territorial conflict and sometimes appalling population displacements. Turkey and Pakistan provide other examples. Such comparisons cannot justify expulsions or massacres, but they can help us understand the historical circumstances in which states emerged. Above all, we should resist turning complex histories into mutually exclusive identities. The more important question is how the legitimate historical connections, human rights and national aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians can be accommodated.
Why was there no Palestinian State?
The discussion then turned to a question that brought us closer to the present. If the United Nations had proposed two states in 1947, why had only one come into existence?
One participant asked whether Palestinian rejection of partition was the principal explanation. I acknowledged that the proposed division of territory was deeply contentious and that there were understandable reasons why Palestinian Arabs regarded it as unjust. Nevertheless, I suggested that rejection of Jewish sovereignty had also been an important element of Arab and, subsequently, Palestinian political thinking. Hamas's founding charter of 1988 was an especially stark expression of this rejection, although it would be wrong to treat Hamas's ideology as representative of all Palestinians.
The discussion revealed a fundamental difficulty. For many Israelis, the central obstacle to peace is the refusal of Palestinian movements to accept the legitimacy and security of a Jewish state. For many Palestinians, it is the continuing denial of their own national aspirations, compounded by occupation and dispossession. Each side can point to actions by the other that appear to confirm its fears.
A participant then challenged me about Israeli settlements in the West Bank, particularly reports of settlers attacking Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest. If Israel supported a two-state solution, how could the continuing expansion of settlements be justified?
I pointed out that Jews, like Palestinians, should in principle be able to live peacefully in the region. But the participant made an important distinction: the objection was not to Jewish people living alongside Palestinians, but to the expansion of settlements on occupied land and the intimidation of established communities.
I also raised Israel's security concerns. A complete withdrawal from the West Bank, without credible safeguards, could expose Israeli population centres to serious threats. The experience of 7 October 2023 had made such fears especially acute. Yet security concerns do not, by themselves, justify settlement expansion or violence against Palestinian civilians. When asked directly how I justified those actions, I made clear that I was not attempting to defend them.
Gaza: the elephant in the room
One participant suggested that, whatever the merits of my historical analysis, we had yet to confront the elephant in the room: the appalling suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians had reportedly been killed, including many thousands of children. How could this possibly be justified?
I began by recalling Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, when its settlements were dismantled. I suggested that Gaza might have had a very different future had Hamas, which took control in 2007, devoted its resources to peaceful development rather than building an extensive underground military infrastructure. Hamas's attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, involving the killing and abduction of civilians, had convinced Israeli leaders that the organisation posed an intolerable threat.
I argued that Hamas's tunnel network, much of it constructed beneath densely populated urban areas, made the ensuing war exceptionally difficult to conduct without extensive civilian casualties and destruction. Israel's declared objective was to destroy Hamas rather than the Palestinian population. But participants challenged this explanation. Whatever Hamas had done, they pointed to the devastating consequences for civilians, including children killed, families repeatedly displaced, and people deprived of food, water and medical care.
The discussion became particularly animated when the word genocide was introduced.
I questioned whether the term was appropriate. Genocide, I argued, involves the intentional destruction of a protected group, rather than civilian deaths arising from warfare, however terrible. I suggested that if Hamas had surrendered, Israel's military campaign would have ended. Others challenged this reasoning, pointing to the scale of destruction and the fact that genocide can involve the destruction of a group in part, not necessarily its complete annihilation.
We were now confronting a difficult distinction between the consequences of military action and the intentions behind it. Was the devastation of Gaza the foreseeable consequence of a campaign against an armed organisation embedded within civilian areas, or did it reveal an intention to destroy Palestinians as a group? And what evidence would be needed to distinguish between those possibilities?
There was also disagreement about the reliability of information. I suggested that news coverage did not always convey the extent of Hamas's military infrastructure or the threat it posed to Israel. Participants countered that restrictions on independent journalists entering Gaza made it difficult to verify what was happening. One asked how we could confidently assess Hamas's tunnels, or the conduct of Israeli forces, without independent reporting.
Interestingly, the group was not uniformly opposed to my interpretation. Some participants emphasised that Israel faced a genuine security threat and that Hamas had deliberately placed its military operations among civilians. Others remained deeply troubled by the scale of Israel's response. One participant, who had previously been sympathetic towards Israel, said that its conduct had profoundly changed his attitude.
As the discussion continued, it became clear that recognising Israel's security predicament did not necessarily lead to agreement about the legitimacy or proportionality of its military response. Nor did recognising Palestinian suffering settle the question of genocidal intent. These were separate questions, although understandably difficult to disentangle in the heat of discussion.
Is there a way forward?
As our time ran out, I returned to my original plea for factfulness. We all have opinions, often strongly held, but we should continually ask whether they survive scrutiny. We should be particularly cautious when an interpretation becomes so morally compelling that contrary evidence is automatically dismissed.
Asked whether I could envisage a solution, I argued that Palestinian national aspirations needed to be disentangled from movements committed to Israel's destruction. A viable Palestinian state, in my view, would have to coexist peacefully with a secure Jewish state.
But a participant immediately challenged the one-sidedness of my answer. Why had I spoken about de-radicalising Palestinians without mentioning extremism within Israeli politics? It was a fair challenge. The discussion itself had demonstrated that neither population, nor either national movement, should be exempt from critical examination. If we want Israelis and Palestinians to recognise one another's legitimate aspirations, we must be prepared to apply comparable standards of scrutiny to both.
I left Lytchett grateful for the invitation, and conscious that we had covered an extraordinary amount of difficult ground in little more than an hour. We had not resolved our disagreements. But we had managed to discuss them face to face, and some of the questions raised deserved considerably more investigation. The allegation of genocide, in particular, was one I subsequently decided to examine in greater depth.
On further reflection: was Gaza a genocide?
Following our discussion, I decided to investigate the allegation of genocide more thoroughly. At Lytchett, I had strongly resisted the description, arguing that Israel's objective was to defeat Hamas rather than destroy the Palestinian population. But what exactly does genocide mean in international law?
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide involves certain prohibited acts committed with the specific intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. The crucial distinction is between killing people who belong to a protected group and killing them with the intention of destroying that group. Military objectives and genocidal intentions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
There is no doubt that Palestinians in Gaza have suffered catastrophic loss of life, injury, displacement and destruction. The central legal question is whether Israel's conduct also demonstrates the specific intention required by the Convention.
Those arguing that genocide occurred point not only to the scale of destruction but to the pattern of military operations, restrictions on humanitarian assistance and statements by senior Israeli politicians. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a comprehensive siege and referred to “human animals”. President Isaac Herzog appeared to attribute responsibility for Hamas's actions to the wider population. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical Amalekites, whose destruction, including women and children, is commanded in the Old Testament. Critics regard such statements as evidence of genocidal intent; in some cases, defenders argue that the remarks referred to Hamas rather than Palestinians generally.
Several influential investigations have concluded that Israel committed genocide, including those by Amnesty International, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese reached a similar conclusion. These findings deserve serious consideration, although their interpretations and methodologies remain open to challenge. The International Court of Justice has ordered measures to protect Palestinians' rights under the Genocide Convention, but has not determined whether Israel committed genocide. Its proceedings remain ongoing.
There are substantial counterarguments. Israeli historian Benny Morris rejects the genocide allegation, distinguishing the military campaign against Hamas from an intention to destroy Palestinians as a people. Military analyst John Spencer, who has observed Israeli operations while embedded with the IDF, argues that the extraordinary difficulties of urban warfare, Hamas's extensive tunnel network and Israeli precautions to protect civilians have been insufficiently considered. Neither argument automatically excludes the possibility of serious violations of international humanitarian law.
I remain unconvinced that the specific intention to destroy Palestinians as a people has been established. But I recognise that this conclusion cannot rest simply on Israel's declared military objectives, the proportion of Gaza's population killed, or comparisons with the Holocaust and Rwanda. Genocide is a legal question about prohibited acts and specific intent, not merely a measure of the number of people killed.
I also remain deeply concerned about the potentially lethal effect on Jewish people throughout the world of describing Israel through a relentless vocabulary of evil: colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide. If such accusations are to be made, each one must be evaluated on the basis of evidence – not treated as part of an interlocking and self-evident narrative. In this regard, humanists have a profound moral responsibility to use language accurately and responsibly, and to scrutinise not just their conclusions but the assumptions that shape them.
My underlying position remains that both Jews and Palestinians have legitimate national aspirations and deserve security and self-determination. But I believe the principal obstacle to peace is the persistence of forms of Palestinian nationalism, particularly those represented by Hamas, which seek the destruction of Israel rather than the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside it. This rejectionism, reinforced by Iran and other armed movements in the region, creates an existential security threat that Israel cannot simply ignore. Reforming Palestinian nationalism to embrace peaceful coexistence is therefore, in my view, an essential condition for lasting peace. This does not absolve Israel of responsibility for its own actions, including settlement expansion, settler violence and the conduct of its military operations. Israeli extremism must also be confronted. But neither the suffering of Palestinians nor the legitimate criticism of Israeli policies should obscure the fundamental necessity of mutual recognition: two peoples, each entitled to a secure national home.
That brings me back to Ralf Schöppner's appeal for a humanism that embraces complexity rather than simplistic answers. Disagreeing well does not mean abandoning our convictions. It means being willing to examine them, acknowledge uncomfortable evidence, and extend to others the same intellectual seriousness we demand for ourselves.
My thanks to the Lytchett Matravers group for helping me put that principle to the test.
Comments