An Open Letter on Israel: Why Can’t These Two Countries Just Get Along?

This post is longer than my usual posts, but it’s important.

Last month my Swedish friend asked me a question I’ve been hearing for some time. “Why can’t the Israelis and the Palestinians just get along? Swedes and Norwegians killed each other for centuries,” he said, “and today they get along fine.” I needed some time to give him a full answer, so I’m putting it here.

What I’d tell him is that Israel has made peace with its neighbors before, over and over. In 2020 the Abraham Accords normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994. The big one was Egypt, which went to war with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. In 1979 the two countries signed a peace treaty, and Israel gave back the entire Sinai Peninsula, which is bigger than Israel and has oil, forcing its own citizens out of their homes to do it. Egypt and Israel haven’t fought since. It’s a cold peace, but it’s peace.

The peace was still spreading. By 2023, Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest sites, was working toward recognizing Israel too. One theory about October 7 is that Hamas attacked to scuttle that deal. Two weeks later, President Biden said he believed one of the reasons Hamas moved on Israel was that it knew he was about to sit down with the Saudis. A week after the attack, Saudi Arabia suspended the talks.

What hasn’t worked is the offers that were turned down. May 14, 1948, the date that became Israel’s Independence Day, was also supposed to be the independence day of a new Arab state, which would have been the twenty-third. No Arab state was declared, because the Arab leaders of the time preferred destroying a Jewish state to creating a twenty-third Arab one, and the day after Israel declared independence, five Arab armies invaded. In 2000 Israel offered the Palestinians a state at peace talks. Yasser Arafat walked away without making a counteroffer, and the Second Intifada followed, with years of suicide bombings on buses and in restaurants.

What I believed at the time was that the Jews have a strong right to the land, that we’ve been there for three thousand years, and that the world just doesn’t want to accept it. What I didn’t realize until I read Dara Horn’s new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, was that this was never two peoples, or two countries, who couldn’t agree. There’s coordinated action by people with a vested interest in keeping them fighting. Horn has been one of the leading voices on antisemitism since her book People Love Dead Jews came out in 2021. In late 2023 and early 2024 she served on an advisory group at Harvard, fielding complaints from Jewish students after October 7. Here’s what I learned from her.

The first thing I learned is that my friend’s question pictures two countries facing each other across a line, and that picture is wrong. Horn borrows an image from Matti Friedman, an Israeli journalist. Imagine a history class that taught about the America-Italy War. Students would learn that the United States invaded Italy, fought its way up the peninsula, and killed Italian civilians along the way. They’d come away thinking America was a monster, because nobody ever mentioned Germany. Studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like that. The larger war belongs to Iran, which has spent decades paying for armies on Israel’s borders, with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and later the Houthis in Yemen.

Hamas, which the United States has designated a terrorist organization since 1997, has a 1988 founding charter that calls for the genocide of Jews worldwide. It built about six hundred miles of tunnels under a strip of land smaller than 150 square miles, at a cost of about a billion dollars. Nobody spends that much money on tunnels unless they are planning to fight a war. That’s also the only way to explain putting tunnel entrances under and beside hospitals, including al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest, which otherwise sounds like a crazy thing to do.

The tunnels are one example of a much bigger problem. Almost anything well-meaning people sent into Gaza could be turned into something else. According to Israeli officials, cement meant to rebuild homes went into the tunnels. Hamas also taxed incoming goods, including medicine. Even water pipes donated by aid groups were turned into rockets, as a 2021 video from Hamas’s military wing showed, with fighters digging up pipes to make them.

The part of the book that rearranged my thinking most was about antisemitism itself. It’s a lie people use to gain or keep power, and the lie is always the same, that Jews are destroying whatever a society values most. Only the thing being valued changes. The historian David Nirenberg’s book Anti-Judaism traces how the West has used Jews as the name for whatever it feared, even in places with no Jews at all. Christians called Jews Christ-killers, and the Nazis managed to call them capitalists and communists at the same time. The Soviets went with racist colonialists. Today, among people who care most about human rights, Jews are the world’s worst human rights violators.

Today there are people who say they aren’t antisemitic, they’re only criticizing Israel, and that calling them antisemitic is just a way to shut them up. In a 2023 lecture, Nirenberg described a popular activist whose rhetoric got him accused of antisemitism. The activist argued that the accusation was just a way to silence criticism and shut down free speech, and, according to Nirenberg, he sued newspapers for libel over it and won. His name was Adolf Hitler.

Right now the worst thing anyone can be is a perpetrator of genocide, so that’s what Israel has to be. In mid-October 2023, hundreds of Harvard students marched behind a banner that said “Stop the Genocide in Gaza,” before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza. The news media was so hungry for stories of Israeli genocide that it eagerly ran with the 2025 announcement from the International Association of Genocide Scholars declaring the war a genocide. Fewer than a fifth of the members had voted for it, and the only requirement for membership was a thirty-dollar fee, which came out when pranksters started signing up their pets.

The war wasn’t clean. Like every long war, it surely involved war crimes and atrocities, and that should have been terrible enough. By Hamas’s own figures, Israel destroyed about 70 percent of the buildings in Gaza while killing about 3 percent of the population, combatants included. Those numbers don’t describe a genocide, but genocide is evil, and so it had to be Jewish.

The 1948 war gets framed as a catastrophe too, the displacement of people who were driven from their homes. Today it’s called the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” and Palestinians mark it every May 15, one day after the date Israel declared independence. The displacement was real. In the fighting of 1948, about 70 percent of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from what became Israel, sometimes violently. About 20 percent stayed, and Arab citizens are still about a fifth of Israel today.

What almost never gets told is the other half. In the West Bank and Gaza, the areas that would have become the Arab state, the Jewish population went to zero. Across the twenty-two Arab states, nearly a million Jews were pushed out. Baghdad, Tripoli, and Aleppo were between 15 and 30 percent Jewish in the 1920s and 1930s, which is more Jewish than New York is now, and today the number in each is zero. The displacement was tragic, but it wasn’t special, since the same thing happened on a bigger scale between Greece and Turkey and in the partition of India.

Even the word has a history I didn’t know. It comes from a 1948 book by the Syrian intellectual Constantine Zureiq, who used it for the Arab armies’ failure to defeat Israel. As I read Horn’s account, the catastrophe Zureiq described was the humiliation of Arabs who might be forced to return to their homes, “there to live under the Zionist shadow.”

Anyone who says Israel is an apartheid state should compare how Arab citizens of Israel live with how Jews lived in Islamic countries. Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in the Knesset, and sit on the Supreme Court, and in 2021 an Arab party joined the governing coalition. For roughly a thousand years in much of the Islamic world, Jews lived as dhimmis, a legal second class. They wore badges, paid extra taxes, lived in assigned neighborhoods, and stepped into the gutter to let Muslims pass. If apartheid means anything, it means that. The Soviets supplied the modern vocabulary. Mahmoud Abbas, now the Palestinian Authority’s president, went to Moscow to write a dissertation claiming Jews had collaborated with the Nazis, when in fact it was Arab leaders who did.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, Iran raced into the space it left, and in 2001 it found its opening in a conference about racism. The UN had announced the World Conference against Racism in 1997 and chose Durban, South Africa, a country that had just ended apartheid, as the host. The goal was to confront racism everywhere in the world. The documents for the main event were drafted at four regional planning conferences in early 2001, and the one for Asian countries was held in Tehran that February. By then Iran had spent years building proxy armies around Israel and was financing and training the terrorists of the Second Intifada.

Iran kept Israelis and Jewish organizations out of the Tehran meeting. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, asked Mary Robinson, the UN official running the conference, to move it. She refused but promised that Jewish groups could attend, and their permission came after the last flights to Tehran had left. With nobody in the room to object, delegates from Iran and other dictatorships, regimes that jailed, tortured, and executed their own minorities, drafted a declaration that named exactly one country on earth as a racist violator of human rights guilty of crimes against humanity. It was Israel. The draft accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “a new kind of apartheid.”

In Durban, that draft became the template for the declaration of the NGO forum, the activist groups meeting alongside the official conference, which branded Israel a racist apartheid state guilty of genocide and called for isolating it. Copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the century-old antisemitic forgery, were on sale, and people who had come to talk about racism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America got pushed to the side. At a youth panel on antisemitism, Jewish delegates were surrounded and shouted down before they reached the stage, and one activist told a Jewish student, “I won’t speak to you until you take this off,” pointing at the student’s kippah.

The United States and Israel walked out. Tom Lantos, a California congressman and the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, was part of the American delegation. He warned Robinson that letting these regimes use words like “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “crimes against humanity” about Israel would “forever debase their meaning.” Debasing them was the plan. Many of the regimes behind the declaration had long since purged their own Jewish communities and were busy persecuting other minorities. As long as everyone was looking at Israel, nobody was looking at them.

The thing that finally answered my friend’s question was about talking. Many antizionist activists practice what they call anti-normalization, which means refusing to treat Zionists as normal people, and in practice that means refusing to talk to them. Zionist describes about 80 percent of American Jews and more than 90 percent of Jews worldwide, half of whom live in Israel. At Harvard, Jewish and Israeli students told Horn that classmates physically turned their backs on them, the way white students once did to Black students entering integrated schools.

What fills the silence is slogans, and most of the people chanting them don’t know where they came from. “Zionism is racism” was Soviet propaganda before it was a campus chant. In 1975 the Soviet bloc and Arab states pushed it through the UN General Assembly as a resolution, which the UN repealed in 1991. “Antizionism isn’t antisemitism” sounds reasonable until you remember what Zionism is. It’s the national movement of the Jewish people, the belief that Jews should have a homeland in the land of Israel, and now that the homeland exists, it mostly means believing Israel has the right to keep existing. That describes the same nine in ten Jews.

“Free Palestine” has become a battle cry. In May 2025, the man who shot and killed two young Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington shouted it as he was arrested. It had nothing to do with freeing anyone.

Even the students who did talk often didn’t know how to argue. A Harvard administrator told Horn that students were arriving unprepared, which sounded absurd about the most selective college in the country until he explained. “They think that if someone says something happened to them, then that’s the end of a debate, rather than the beginning,” he said. Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said the same thing in a public interview in late 2025. “Students came to us that way,” he said, “with a set of expectations that they would not hear language or thoughts that would be offensive to them.” Horn remembers a different Harvard, full of classmates who met hard problems by trying to solve them. Peace needs argument, and argument needs people who will talk.

The last thing I learned is why this keeps happening. Horn’s closing chapter retells the Jewish story as a set of ideas that were radical in the ancient world. In Egypt the pharaoh was a god, and a people who bowed only to one God, a God who belonged to all of them and not to a ruler, were a people who didn’t bow to tyrants. The Sabbath gave even the poor a day that was theirs, and Greeks and Romans who visited Judea decided Jews were lazy after seeing poor people not working. The idea that every human being is made in the divine image came from the same place.

A Nazi propagandist named Johann von Leers understood what he was up against. As one scholar sums up his 1933 pamphlet Jews Out!, von Leers believed the Jews had convinced the world of a great lie, that all humans are equal. Horn writes that the line stopped her short, because it was true.

My friend asked about two countries, and I understand why, because that’s how the war gets taught, like an America-Italy War where nobody ever mentions Germany. Once I put Germany back in, the picture changed. Israel keeps making peace with anyone who will sign, and the regime paying for the tunnels keeps making sure the Palestinians never do. If he asks me again, I’ll tell him the Swedes and Norwegians had it easy. Nobody was paying either of them to keep fighting.

P.S. This isn’t as far-fetched as you’d imagine. Denmark ruled Norway for about four hundred years, and the Danes and Swedes fought each other again and again. In 1814 Denmark lost a war and had to hand Norway over to Sweden. In 1905 Norway voted to leave, and Sweden let it go without a fight. If Denmark had been trying to build some sort of global empire, with Norway as one of its fronts, it’s quite possible they’d all still be at war.