After Oct. 7, young Israelis are the hardest to lecture about peace with Palestinians - opinion

On Sunday evening, I lectured to a group of about 40 university students at Reichman University. My talk was about negotiations and essentially how to make peace between Israel and Palestine – two states for two peoples.

It is also difficult to challenge the common thinking (very much groupthink) because almost all of the Israeli mainstream media is an echo chamber for the IDF spokesperson and members of the Israeli government. Adding to the difficulty, we tend to read and listen to what we already agree with and not challenge ourselves by listening to and reading things we don’t agree with.

In light of this, presenting alternative narratives for what we have been through – not just for the past two years but for the past decades – with a large amount of real data, facts, and actual events presents a new challenge to the listeners.

I don’t think I actually convinced any of the students who did not already agree with me. But I am quite sure that I presented real challenges to those who did not agree with me – and they were the majority.

From my presentation of the two-state solution as the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (because the conflict is about territory and identity of the people and the land – the same land for both people between the river and the sea), one student responded by saying: I don’t care if there is a Palestinian state next to Israel, I just don’t want to see them anymore. Let them have a state, but we will build walls so high that they will never cross into Israel again.

Another student said: I have no mercy for them, let them rot, I don’t care. Israel doesn’t have to give them anything. Another student responded to me stating that the conflict was essentially a conflict between Judaism and Islam – not a political conflict. He said: Islam is against the Jews because the Muslims see Jews as heretics.

Peace has to be built by cooperation in every aspect of life possible – from culture to tourism, commerce, and even education. We have to learn about each other. For that, every Israeli should study Arabic from grade one and every Palestinian should study Hebrew from grade one.

I said that we don’t have to feel mercy for the Palestinians and we don’t have to give them anything. What we need to do is stop being an obstacle in the way of their economic and political development. Most of the obstacles on Palestinian economic development are Israeli blockages on the Palestinian economy, from banking to trade limitation on imports and exports, to movement of people and goods, and more.

We don’t have to show mercy, but it makes absolutely no sense for Israel to want to have poor Palestinian neighbors. Palestinian prosperity is an Israeli national security interest.

Regarding whether or not this is a conflict of religions between Islam and Judaism, my claim is that it is not, but it is a political conflict of territory and identity where a lot of the questions of identity are firmly based on religion.

Even Hamas, I said, is not exactly the Muslim Brotherhood from which it grew. Hamas is a Palestinian national Islamic movement, not a pan-Islamic movement. Its goals have been to liberate Palestine from the Zionists and not to make the whole world Muslim. Something many people don’t know is that in 18 years of full Hamas control in Gaza, Sharia (Islamic law) was never made the law of the land. Gaza was governed by Hamas with Palestinian civil law, not Islamic religious law.

I presented to the students what I see as a very logical and even simple equation between Israel and Palestine. Israel will never have real security if the Palestinians do not have real freedom, and Palestine will not have real freedom if Israel does not have real security. It is as simple as that. Israelis need security, the Palestinians need freedom.

One student asked: How can we trust them? They violated every agreement we made with them. To that, I answered: First of all, both Israel and the Palestinians violated every agreement that was signed. Neither side implemented the agreements that they signed. Secondly, Oslo was a very naïve process. There was a built-in assumption in the Oslo agreements that we would work together and build trust enough to negotiate the tough permanent status issues – Palestinian statehood, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, etc.

Secondly, we cannot enter into a new peace process that does not ensure full implementation of obligations undertaken by both sides. This means that we have to create a trusted third-party mechanism to monitor and verify the implementation of the agreements.

There must be measurable and benchmarked steps and a third-party mechanism that will determine when we can move to the next stage, based on the implementation of obligations of both sides undertaken in the agreements. The next stages involve taking on more risks, so the third-party monitoring and verification mechanism significantly mitigates the risks.

There was a lot more very interesting discussion, but since I meet and lecture to groups of Israelis and Palestinians often, there will be more to share in the future.

I concluded my talk with the words that I often say when I meet students: Don’t believe anything that I said! Put a question mark at the end of every sentence that you don’t agree with and then check what I said. But don’t just go to sources that you agree with – search out other voices, other sources that you don’t agree with, and challenge yourself to face an alternative reality from the one you are very secure with in your life.