If you wrestle with someone for too long, you begin to stink of his sweat. – Mongolian proverb.

No issue is more polarizing than the so-called Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Pretty much everyone in the world supports one side (often chosen at random) with devotion bordering on (or developing into) a psychosis. And pretty much nobody has a full understanding of what is actually going on. Israelis and Palestinians are in complete denial. People lucky to be outside of the region combine that denial with profound ignorance because nobody ever bothers to understand both sides’ points of view. Over the last few years, I’ve asked many people who use the slogan “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” to name the river and the sea. Virtually no one can. During the same time, I’ve asked many people who say “there’s no apartheid in Israel” to tell me what theythink the original South African apartheid was like and how it was different. Incoherent but increasingly aggressive mumbling was all I ever got in response.

So let me explain. It’s all simple, basic, and plainly obvious, but nobody else will ever tell you, because of the above.

1. Ancient history.

Just like any other part of the world except a few remote islands and the Antarctic, the humorously named “Holy Land” (hereafter THL) has been conquered, reconquered, and ethnically cleansed multiple times. But in this case the history is particularly long and bloody, or maybe just unusually well-documented since most regional players have had writing systems and the natural environment is conductive for archeology.

Anyway, by the 1^st century A.D., THL was a prosperous Roman province with irrigation-based agriculture and highly educated, diverse population. But there was constant tension between coastal cities that had been Hellenized for centuries and the more traditional highlands where people were fanatically religious. Their messianic religion was a relic of a pastoralist society, but increasingly bureaucratic and obsessed with ritual. To the horror of the cosmopolitan elites, the highlanders started a series of doomed revolts against Rome. They scored some hits (even destroyed one legion using the same tactic the Incas would use centuries later to score their only major victory against the Spanish), but eventually each revolt was squashed with increasing brutality. Roman reprisals forced most of the population into emigration, creating a Jewish diaspora throughout the empire. Within a century, THL was largely depopulated, and Jews once again became a nomadic people, a bit like Gypsies a thousand years later, but moving mostly between urban centers. Soon THL was resettled by people from other parts of the empire, and Jews became a minority there, although they never left completely.

The Jews, however, had their last laugh over the Romans. Christianity, a dumbed-down and initially more relaxed spinoff of Judaism, export-oriented and centered on zombie worship, masochistic guilt, and glorifying of slavery, spread like wildfire across Pax Romana. In the 4^th century it became the official religion of Rome, smothering its vibrant culture and plunging the empire into rapid fracturing and decline. As for THL, it was turned into a Jesus theme park dotted with fake historical sites and pilgrim traps, many of which are still making money today.

THL then changed hands a few times before being conquered by Arabs in 635. The newcomers gradually converted some of the population to Islam (a reworked mix of Judaism and Arian branch of Christianity, with emphasis on traditional pastoralist values, oppression of women, and constant warfare). Those who chose to stick to Judaism or Christianity had to wear yellow stars around their necks (Jews) or blue clothes (Christians) and pay special tax. But it probably wasn’t too bad: evidently, life under successive khalifates was better than pretty much anywhere else at that time except maybe Tang China. Arabic quickly replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca of THL, but Muslims remained a minority.

Those good times ended in 1090. THL was repeatedly invaded by Crusaders, Mongols and Mamluks (an army of former slaves mostly of Turkic origin), all of whom slaughtered or drove out much of the population. The Mamluks also destroyed all port cities to discourage new crusades. Peace didn’t fully return for over a century, by which time Muslims became a majority. The Islamic world never returned to its former glory: as Europe very slowly and painfully clawed itself out of the Dark Ages, the Middle East became increasingly stagnant.

With growing expulsions and mass persecutions of Jews in Europe, there was a constant trickle of Jewish immigration to THL which became a stream in the late 15^th century. By the time of the Ottoman conquest (1516), Jews and Christians living there were in a somewhat profitable position. Christians, particularly priests, were making a good living by performing slave castrations (Muslim slave owners were prohibited by the Shariah law from doing it themselves) – it was a great source of income as millions of slaves from Africa and Christian lands were traded through the area. Jews were pretty much the only people who could trade in both Christian and Muslim worlds; they invented the banking system, and a few of them became very rich although their position in either world was never truly safe. By 1844, Jews were the largest religious group in Jerusalem (of the total population of about 15k). The entire population of THL at that time was just over 300k; it was 88% Muslim (including Druze), 9% Christian and only 3% Jewish.

2. Zionism.

At the end of the 19^th century millions of Jews moved to the US and Western Europe to escape prosecution in the Russian Empire.  For almost two thousand years, diaspora Jews viewed THL as their promised land that they should one day return to. Perhaps now was the time? THL was sparsely populated, land was cheap, and the rural economy could use some modernization. The idea and the political movement centered on it became known as Zionism. By the onset of WWI, about 100k European Jews had moved to THL.

After the war THL was under British control, supposedly more enlightened than the 400-years Ottoman rule. For a while, the British supported Jewish immigration, in part because many viewed it as the only force capable of shaking the Middle East out of its centuries of stagnation. They envisioned Jewish Palestine as a steam engine that would pull forward the entire region – much like Hong Kong in China decades later. Meanwhile the Russian Empire collapsed, and the resulting civil war was accompanied by pogroms reaching the level of genocide. Between the world wars, hundreds of thousands of Jews moved to THL, buying land, establishing agricultural communes, building irrigation systems, creating a democratic government for themselves. They were still a minority, but that was obviously about to change, even though the British increasingly tried to slow down the immigration.

Muslims of THL, who by that time almost universally considered themselves Arabs, were increasingly unhappy about this. Local economy was in terrible shape due to growing population and worldwide economic downturn. Some people profited from the influx of immigrants, but most didn’t – instead, local peasants found themselves increasingly outcompeted by the newcomers and had to move to impoverished cities. The Arabs didn’t want to become a minority in their own land, and many didn’t want any changes in traditional culture. They viewed Jewish immigration as part of British colonial takeover, not very different from Crusader colonialism of the past. The Arabs’ position was not unlike that of Jewish rebels of the Roman times who revolted against Hellenization, but the irony was lost on everyone. The Arabs started a chain of pogroms against Jews, including a massacre of all Jews in Hebron in 1929. In the 1930s, Nazi propaganda along the lines popular with all right-wing parties in the West today (“the Great Replacement”) was hugely successful. An Arab uprising in 1936-9 was brutally crushed by the British. By that time Jewish communities were rapidly arming themselves and their militias were terrorizing Arabs, bombing marketplaces and forcing farmers off their land.

At the same time the Nazis were trying to expel all Jews from Germany, but all other countries denied them entry, and Britain banned immigration to THL almost completely. Germany became a death trap, and prosecution of Jews began in countries occupied by Germany or allied with it, including Iraq and much of North Africa. By 1945, six million Jews had been killed, but Britain still banned Jewish immigration to THL. Illegal immigration, however, became a flood that the British could no longer control, even though they put thousands of Jews into concentration camps. Jews now made up a third of THL’s population and were waging a guerilla war against British colonial rule. It was probably the last opportunity for Jews and Arabs to make peace and unite against the common enemy – but neither side was any longer interested in peace.

In 1947, the British decided the whole thing wasn’t worth the trouble and asked the UN to take over.

3. The Partition.

At that time Britain was facing a similar problem in India, where a colony about to be given independence was torn between two religion-based communities. In India the British partitioned the territory, in THL they didn’t. The result was the same: massive bloodshed and decades of wars.

The UN, however, did try to partition THL. It came up with a checkerboard pattern, with Jewish and Arab states each consisting of three parts, all touching in corners. It also told Britain to remove all barriers to Jewish immigration. Everybody knew there will be war, but the British didn’t want to leave in a way that would angry Arab countries, so they left a lot of weaponry and hilltop fortifications to the Arabs. Thousands of Arab volunteers poured into THL, followed by armies of seven Arab states. They laid siege to Jerusalem and declared their intent to restore THL as an Arab country. Notably, some Arab villages opted for peace with the Jews in 1947. But by 1948 all of them were drawn into the war, except one (Abu Gosh, a peaceful and prosperous place ever since).

Hundreds of thousands of Arabs emigrated to escape the war, becoming the first Palestinian refugees. But Jews had nowhere to emigrate. Instead, they organized themselves into what would become the world’s best fighting force. On the day the last British soldiers left THL, the Jews proclaimed the new State of Israel on the entire territory. They managed to obtain some heavy weaponry from Czechoslovakia and produce some themselves, eventually lifted the siege of Jerusalem at great cost, and took over most of THL. Only parts occupied by Jordan (the West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem, formally annexed), Egypt (Gaza Strip), and Syria (a slither of land in the northeast) remained under Arab control, and were constant sources of guerilla infiltration (or terrorism, depending on your definitions).

Approximately 1% of Jews in THL died in the war; the number of Arab casualties is unknown but probably somewhat similar. Almost 80% of Arab residents (over 700k) had left, voluntarily or not; most of them were Muslims but about 10% were Christians. The new state quickly passed a law preventing them from returning. It was a national catastrophe (Nakba in Arabic) for Arabs of THL. All Arab countries where the refugees went, except Jordan, settled them in huge, overcrowded and impoverished refugee camps and made it impossible to get citizenship. The idea was to forever keep them willing to go back and fight with the Jews again. Jordan later came to regret its hospitality: in 1970 Palestinians tried to overthrow the monarchy and invited a Syrian invasion. After weeks of fighting the Jordanian army killed thousands of them and expelled the most militant factions to Lebanon.

The UN created a special agency (UNRWA, the largest UN agency) for Arab refugees from THL and still considers their descendants refugees (unlike the descendants of all other refugees in the world). But those Arabs who remained were given full citizenship and mostly equal rights, at least on paper. In reality there are all kinds of discrimination; Jewish Israelis love to point out that Israeli Arabs have much higher standards of living and more political and personal freedom than Arabs in any country bordering Israel, but that’s a very low bar.

4. The warrior ethnostate.

Since day one, there were three major problems with Israel, and the fact that it was created on somebody else’s land and surrounded by enemies was just one of them.

The main problem was that Israel had been conceived and founded as an ethnostate. The concept of a state created for a particular ethnic group first emerged in the 19^th century, and in the 20^th century proved to be the worst idea in human history, causing two world wars and multiple genocides including the Holocaust. It was to work the same way in THL.

The third problem was that the founders of Israel considered Judaism to be the most essential part of Jewish culture and gave a lot of power and privileges to the clergy and the most fanatical religious sects. The opposition to this suicidal policy was so strong that the country never agreed on a constitution, but it failed. Religious fundamentalism became a lethal disease that increasingly consumes the country from the inside, as the proportion of secular Jews (who have created the state of Israel, made it prosperous, and defended it with their lives) is steadily declining through lower birthrates and, more recently, emigration. The number of essentially parasitic ultra-Orthodox Jews is growing exponentially and is forecast to reach 1/3 of the population within a generation. There are now more first-graders in religious schools than in secular ones. It is estimated that in each generation, about 15% of the ultra-Orthodox leave their communities and choose secular life, but that’s not nearly enough to offset the population takeover.

But by the end of the 1940s Israel was full of optimism, despite constant threat of invasion, Arab guerilla warfare, economic boycott by Arab neighbors, and extreme economic hardship in general. More than a million Jews soon arrived from Europe (where antisemitism in many countries only got worse after WWII) and from the Middle East (where centuries of relative tolerance suddenly ended and governments began to violently persecute and forcibly expel their Jewish minorities). Almost none of the new arrivals were recognized as refugees by the UN, so there was no aid except reparations from Germany and money borrowed from the Jewish diaspora, particularly in the US. The Soviet Union pulled all support when it became clear that Israel was not to be their client state with Stalinist economy, and sided with Arabs in all subsequent conflicts, sometimes sending not just billions worth of weaponry, but also fighter pilots and other combat personnel.

Up to that time Israel was basically a Western colonial project; now about a half of its Jewish population was suddenly of Middle Eastern and North African origin, including people from essentially medieval communities in places like Yemen and later Ethiopia. Despite wildly different cultural backgrounds and some tension (as an Israeli saying goes, the second to last wave of immigration always hates the last one), the society worked incredibly well, kept together by external threat and exhilarating feelings of freedom and independence after 19 centuries of being everybody’s favorite scapegoat and punching bag. The fact that the whole concept was based on events and foundation myths from almost two thousand years ago didn’t bother anyone; even secular Jews now believed it was their promised land and manifest destiny, and constantly quoted the Book of Exodus.

In 1956, Israel decisively and easily won a war with Egypt (caused by Egypt closing the Suez Canal and the northern Red Sea to Israeli shipping) and would likely take Cairo if it wasn’t for international pressure. But all Arab countries were still clamoring for war. Hatred of Israel and calls for liberating THL from Jews became the favorite rallying call for every Islamic government in the world, and after decades of propaganda became the unifying cause of modern Islamic culture – but the same governments kept treating Palestinian refugees as dangerous animals that had to be confined, so there was no shortage of Palestinians willing to die in suicide missions.

In 1967, Egypt closed the Canal and the Red Sea again, and armies of four Arab countries began to mass on Israeli borders. Israel responded by preemptive strikes that destroyed Soviet-made Egyptian air force, and within six days occupied all of THL, plus the Sinai Peninsula (which it eventually returned) and the Golan Heights (which it eventually annexed). Despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned, Israel inflicted casualties on the Arab armies at the rate of 20 to 1.

The Six-day War was the highest point in Israel’s history. It changed the worldwide perceptions of Jews and filled the country with immense self-confidence and millions of new Jewish immigrants, particularly from Muslim countries (where the war generated yet another wave of persecution) and from the Soviet Block (where moving to Israel became an obsession for many ethnic Jews). But it was a Pyrrhic victory, even though nobody understood that yet. Things were to go only downhill from there.

By the onset of the war the Arab population of Gaza, the West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem was well over a million; between a quarter and a third were forced to leave during and immediately after the war. Then Israel offered full citizenship to Arabs in East Jerusalem (where most people refused) and the Golan Heights (where villagers were mostly Druze rather than Muslims), but not in Gaza and the West Bank.

People escaping from something bad often recreate it in their new home. When freed African slaves from the US established a new country called Liberia in West Africa, they immediately enslaved the native population and forced it to work on plantations. Russian immigrants to the US mostly vote Republican because the Republicans are trying to turn the US into a clone of authoritarian, corruption-based, hate-centered Russia. Israel was created by people escaping from ghettoes, and now it created two giant ghettoes for Arabs.

As for the Arabs, PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yassir Arafat), which by that time became by far the most important Palestinian faction, decided that trying to destroy Israel by open warfare was hopeless and that terrorism was the only way. Terror attacks against Jewish Israelis in THL and abroad became commonplace.

5. The forever war.

For the next sixty years, the two peoples operated under the premise that the other side could be forced to leave if enough pressure was applied, neglecting the fact that there was nowhere to go and both sides considered the land their own.

Israel fought another war with Egypt in 1969, and was almost wiped out in a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria (heavily armed by the Soviet Union and aided by troops from many other Muslim countries and the Soviet Block) in Yom Kippur (Judgement Day) War of 1973. The latter war was so bad that Israel briefly considered using nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union moved nukes to Egypt to respond if that happened, but in the end Israeli troops were threatening Cairo and Damascus. Both sides suffered heavy losses, this time with a ratio of about 6 to 1; both Egypt and Syria killed or tortured to death almost all Israeli POWs and numerous civilians.

The war left the Israeli society deeply traumatized and paranoid; many came to believe that peace with Arab neighbors was impossible. Right-wing parties began to gain popularity. It is important to note that in Israel, the ideal balance between free enterprise and socialist state is generally believed to exist already, so political terms “Right” and “Left” mostly refer to different approaches to the relationships with Arabs inside and outside the country. The global stereotypes of left-wingers as naïve hippies and right-wingers as dumb racist thugs are fully applicable, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Arab governments increasingly realized that by refusing to trade and otherwise cooperate with Israel they were inflicting a lot of self-damage, but now they were hostages of intense anti-Israel sentiment they themselves had been whipping up for over 30 years. In 1979, Egyptian president Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel and was assassinated within two years. PLO shifted its center of operations to southern Lebanon, took full control of the area and began to conduct bloody terror attacks from there. Israel responded by repeatedly invading Lebanon, and occupied Beirut in 1982. The Lebanese prime minister agreed to sign a peace treaty but was also assassinated. Israel forced PLO fighters to move to Tunisia and then allowed local Christian militias to massacre Palestinians in two refugee camps.

Expulsion of PLO didn’t bring peace to the Lebanese border. The occupation of Lebanon ended in 1990, but the Lebanese themselves became increasingly hostile towards Israel, particularly the Shi’a Muslims, who made up about a third of the population, were generally at the bottom of the social ladder, and were supported only by the young Islamic Republic of Iran – now the most determined anti-Israel force in the region. Iranian emissaries created Hezbollah, a militant organization that has dominated Lebanon ever since. At first Hezbollah pretended to be mostly a mutual-aid NGO channeling Iranian funds to the poor, but as soon as it took firm control of Shi’a communities, it quickly changed into a death cult-based army that tried to become de-facto government of Lebanon. In the following decades Hezbollah kept Lebanon a poor, unstable, corrupt country with non-stop economic crisis and massive emigration, not to mention regular wars with Israel, always fought on Lebanese territory.

In Israel, the right-wing political forces increasingly dominated the political landscape. Their base was the new Religious Zionist movement, essentially a copycat of the German Nazism of the 1930’s, complete with Lebensraum concept but quoting the Torah rather than Mein Kampf. Zionism had always been accused of being a version of fascism, but that clearly wasn’t true… until it was.

Religious Zionists pushed the government to build Jewish settlements in occupied Gaza and West Bank; the settlements became incubators for new generations of Jewish Nazis who in turn built new settlements. Very quickly, West Bank was sliced into an archipelago of Arab enclaves modelled on South African Bantustans of the Apartheid era, separated by fortified hilltop settlements, military bases, walls and checkpoints.

The immediate goal of this was to make the so-called “two state solution” – a version of the partition originally mandated by the UN in the 1940s – impossible. The ultimate goal was to somehow push all Palestinians out by making their life conditions intolerable. Where they were supposed to go, nobody could say, but nobody really cared. The settlers started terrorizing Palestinian villages, cutting olive trees, burning houses, beating or murdering people. The government pretended to respond, but in virtually all cases the Jewish terrorists got a slap on the wrist, if anything.

As the chances for two-state solution faded, there remained a possibility that in some distant future, the “one state solution” could become a reality. Despite being treated worse than Jews in most ghettos, Palestinians were slowly rebuilding their economy and increasingly integrating into Israeli life. They were an essential source of cheap labor, and everyday contacts became more common. But that was about to end.

6. The loss of hope.

As the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank grew ever more oppressive, the local Arabs, who now were increasingly known as Palestinians, couldn’t take it any longer. In 1987 they started a massive uprising, the Intifada, originally mostly non-violent but not for long. Israel responded with disproportional brutality. During six years of hostilities more than a thousand Palestinians and more than a hundred Israelis were killed and many more wounded.

Around the same time, Palestinians dissatisfied with heavily corrupt and inefficient PLO created Hamas, a Sunni Islamist organization. Just like Hezbollah, Hamas originally positioned itself as a largely humanitarian NGO building schools and hospitals, but very quickly turned into yet another death cult. Israel initially supported Hamas to undermine the secular, more moderate PLO and prevent the creation of the Palestinian state.

Many still thought the two-state solution was possible. In 1993 and 1995, Israel and PLO signed the Oslo Agreements, supposed to give Palestinians increased autonomy and eventually their own state; in exchange they agreed to recognize Israel (and thus drop claims for its territory). More militant Israeli and Palestinian factions, including Hamas, opposed the agreements and continued terror attacks. Israel responded by building a wall around Gaza and further restricting Palestinian movement; an influx of immigrants following the collapse of the Soviet Union provided an alternative source of cheap labor, complimented with imported laborers, mostly from Asia. Both one- and two-state solutions were becoming impossible, especially after the assassination of left-wing president Rabin by a Religious Zionist terrorist. Soviet immigrants were mostly extremely racist and supported right-wing parties, so the political shift continued.

In 2000, the talks to finalize the Oslo Agreements collapsed. What exactly happened and who was to blame is still unclear, in part because the parties’ positions were never put into writing. The main sticking points were the status of East Jerusalem (which both sides wanted for religious reasons), the territorial continuity of West Bank, and, most importantly, the right of return for Palestinian refugees (who had very high birthrates and already numbered in millions) to Israel as well as Palestine. Israel was afraid to eventually become a Jewish-minority state and understood that returning property would likely cause a civil war. Arafat knew that his constituents still believed that the refugees would someday reclaim their lands and homes. The two-state solution will never be a real option again.

Within two months, the second Intifada was on, further severing economic ties between Israel and Palestine. It was much more violent than the first, with rockets regularly fired at Israeli cities. Israel pulled all its settlements and troops from Gaza, replacing occupation with blockade, supposedly to prevent the import of weapons. It also began to build a wall around the West Bank, as well as huge desalinization plants to cut the dependance on water sources there.

In 2006, Hamas won the legislative elections – the only real elections in the history of Palestine – and next year took full control of Gaza, violently expelling the PLO. Israel tightened the blockade, making life in Gaza increasingly dependent on smuggling. Hamas and Hezbollah kept firing rockets into Israel; Israel kept assassinating their leaders and periodically sending troops to Gaza and southern Lebanon. Military operations in the West Bank were becoming more routine, and settler terror more brazen and violent. All civilized ways of changing the status quo had been exhausted, but the status quo was increasingly untenable.

In 2020, one Arab country after another began to give up the boycott and normalize relations with Israel. Support for Palestinians was still high among Muslims worldwide but was steadily eroding among Arab governments. As the outside threat was diminishing, Israeli unity began to weaken. Secular Jews were emigrating in growing numbers, and for the first time draft dodging became an issue.

In Palestine, meanwhile, the sense of national unity was only strengthening. Israeli pressure was forging the new Palestinian nation, just like Arab pressure helped forge the new Israeli nation seventy years earlier. But unlike young Israeli state, Palestine remained a depressive place, with catastrophic overpopulation (following decades of having some of the world’s highest birthrates), ever-growing poverty, increasingly violent fighting between factions, and well-justified sense of desperation. Gaza was in particularly bad shape, as Hamas terrorized its population and used virtually all foreign aid to build a network of tunnels and arm itself.

7. No lesser evil.

After the 2022 elections, Netanyahu, an indicted criminal, became the prime minister for the third time (with two gaps). His government was by far the most extreme right-wing in Israeli history. He immediately started to undermine the democracy, put fanatical Religious Zionists into positions of power, and sacrifice the competence of the military for political purposes. As every far-right government around the world, Netanyahu’s government heavily depended on constant lying, creating a fictional alternative universe for its electoral base. A few years earlier, Sheldon Adelson, an American billionaire and later the largest financial backer of Trump, launched Israel Today, a free newspaper designed as far-right alternative to fact-checking media. By 2022 it was the most read newspaper in Israel.

The resulting disaster came sooner than anyone expected. In 2023 Hamas staged a surprise invasion, hoping to seize most or all of THL, and if that didn’t work out, to at least disrupt the normalization of Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia. In an attack eerily reminiscent of the failing wall scene from 2013 movie World War Z, Hamas breached Israeli defenses and went on a rampage. Numerous Gaza civilians joined the massacre. More than two thousand people – Israelis and foreigners – were killed or taken hostage; there were numerous cases of rape and torture.

The Israeli government saw that as its chance for the final solution of “Palestinian problem”, at least in Gaza. A military campaign against Hamas immediately turned into genocide. One of the world’s most densely populated cities with half of the population under 18 years old was carpet-bombed. At least 5% of Gazans were killed and twice as many wounded; more than 80% of all buildings and pretty much all civilian infrastructure destroyed or severely damaged; the entire population was repeatedly pushed to the brink of starvation.

It quickly became clear that the idea of Israel’s moral superiority over Arabs, carefully cultivated by Israel and its allies since the 1940s, was no longer sustainable. The numbers of Palestinian casualties published by Hamas health ministry were more accurate than the ones given by Israel. Cases of Israeli soldiers intentionally killing paramedics, journalists and children became commonplace. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners were routinely tortured in Israeli prisons and kept in worse conditions than Israeli hostages in starving Gaza. The more rabidly neo-Nazi ministers of Netanyahu government were openly calling for ethnic cleansing and telling troops to see every Palestinian over the age of 12 as a terrorist sharing responsibility for the murders of 2023.

Netanyahu was widely blamed for the Hamas invasion and attempted to hold on to power by waging constant wars on all fronts. In response to Hezbollah firing missiles into Israel on Iranian orders, Israel invaded Lebanon twice in three years; each time Hezbollah suffered heavy losses but retreated to the north and then came back. Its popularity in Lebanon and the flow of money and weapons from Iran were declining but not sufficiently for any serious change to the status quo. Israel conducted military operations in Syria, undermining the chance for lasting peace with a country that got an Israel-tolerant government for the first time in many decades. It also conducted two large-scale bombing campaigns in Iran (the second one jointly with the US), killing much of the country’s leadership, but, again, not achieving any permanent change.

8. There is no future.

The campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon were technically self-defense but clearly disproportional, the campaign in Syria and bombings of Iran were illegal acts of aggression. Israel’s support abroad is plummeting, particularly among younger people. But inside the country it’s the opposite: young Israelis and Palestinians hate each other even more intensely that older generations. Their parents used to mingle at bazaars and construction sites, but almost all interactions between people born after the second Intifada are violent. People who grew up watching videos of Palestinians massacring Jews at a music festival during the invasion of 2023 or seeing their entire city bombed into rubble by Israeli planes don’t want to hear about one-state or two-state solutions anymore. But they don’t offer their own solutions other than genocide. Popularity of Hamas dropped in Gaza where it wages a campaign of terror, but keeps growing in the West Bank, and even in Gaza there is no shortage of wannaby martyrs. Young Israelis increasingly support far-right parties.

The saddest thing about this century-long fight to the death is that soon there might be little left to fight for. THL is grossly overpopulated. For decades both sides were dumb enough to have a lot of children because their propaganda was telling them that they could somehow outbreed the enemy. And both sides firmly believed that the land could accept an unlimited number of immigrants. Two centuries ago, there were 300,000 residents in THL and the land was already under stress from overgrazing and water shortages. Today there are 10 million people in Israel, 5.6 million in Gaza and West Bank, and nearly 5 million Palestinian refugees outside THL, a third of them still living in refugee camps which by now look more like city slums than stereotypical tent camps. Two million Gaza residents, on the other hand, do live mostly in tents because their homes have been destroyed.

There is less and less water. The Sea of Galilee, THL’s only large freshwater lake, is drying out despite water being pumped in from coastal desalinization plants. The Dead Sea level is dropping by a meter a year because virtually no water is coming from Jordan River. A half of all drinkable water in Israel now comes from desalinization, but the plants consume a lot of energy and are vulnerable in case of another major war. The climate is getting hotter and drier: by 2100 the temperatures will likely rise by 3-5^OC compared to 1948 and the precipitation will fall by 10-20%, which is a lot for an already arid region.

Israel has been much better at nature conservation than its neighbors, but it’s falling behind other developed countries in switching to renewable energy despite having nearly unlimited solar resources. In the West Bank things are much worse, and Gaza is a total disaster. The world, meanwhile, is becoming an ever less hospitable place for refugees.

Looking back today, we can clearly see the chain of tragic events in the past that have led to the hopeless present. The failure of Jewish settlers and Arab natives to find a way to live together in peace (that would be very prosperous), the increasing role of bloodthirsty religious fanatics on both sides, the refusal of Israel to quickly end the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the founding and creeping expansion of Jewish settlements there, the delusional Palestinian hopes for large-scale return of refugees… all of that has turned THL into a black hole that can only keep destroying lives and resources.

But it’s easy to blame people of the past because we assume the alternative would be better, which it could be… or not. If Bar Kokhba didn’t start the last suicidal revolt against Rome, there would be no ethnic cleansing, and most Jews wouldn’t end up in the diaspora… but the humanity today would be decades, if not centuries, behind in science and technology. If Zionism never became a thing, there would be no conflict… but millions of Jews around the world would still have nowhere to escape from hatred and persecution. If Amin Al-Huseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, didn’t align with the Nazis to fight Jewish immigration, perhaps the settlement could continue in relative peace… but there was clearly not enough land for everyone, and the war would likely start anyway. If one-state solution was pursued from the beginning, perhaps it could work… but it failed in Lebanon, which was originally carved out by Britain and France as a country where Arab Christians would be a majority, but soon became Muslim-majority due to slightly different birth and emigration rates, went through a long civil war and ended up being little more than a human shield for Hezbollah. If Israel got serious about two-state solution and withdrew from the West Bank and Gaza instead of occupying them, or changed its mind about the one-state solution and offered the people there full citizenship, perhaps there would be peace today… but most likely not, considering that Israeli citizenship is mostly rejected by Arabs of East Jerusalem and that withdrawal from Gaza only made things worse. To me it looks like there was no hope from the beginning.

People around the world must understand that this is not a good vs. evil conflict. This is not like Russian invasion of Ukraine where peaceful, intelligent people are fighting off a plague of brain-dead ghouls. Neither Israel nor Hamas deserve your support. The only help worth providing, other than emergency aid to prevent mass starvation, is helping as many people as possible to emigrate.

It is also important to understand that supporting Hamas has nothing to do with Arab or Muslim unity, and not supporting Israel has nothing to do with antisemitism. If you want to be a good Arab and/or a good Muslim, press your government to give citizenship to Palestinians in refugee camps and accept more immigrants from Gaza and the West Bank. If you want to prevent antisemitism, press your government to cut all support of Israel, which is today an openly fascist state and the main cause of antisemitism worldwide.

I lived in THL for half a year in the early 1990s but left because I could see where everything was heading. I still have friends in Israel and in the West Bank (the only person I knew in Gaza hated Hamas and managed to escape before 2023). But, despite being ethnically Jewish, I don’t want to have anything to do with that place, or to be defined by my ethnicity. I am an Atheist, my motherland is planet Earth, and I don’t like killing children to steal their land. I have more in common with a fellow zoologist from Gaza than with a Torah-toting terrorist from the settlements. All I want for THL is for normal people to be able to get out before their lives are destroyed by murderous fanatics.