It is rare for an Israeli voice to emerge from the heart of crisis and articulate what politics itself cannot.

Yet Yuval Noah Harari—neither a politician nor an agent of state power, but a globally respected social thinker—has done precisely that. He argues that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is no longer a dispute over land, but over the moral certainties each side wraps around its own absolute narrative.

In a substantial essay published recently in the Financial Times, Harari does not position himself as a champion of the Palestinian story. He does something more unsettling: he dismantles the Israeli narrative from within, stripping it of the historical sanctity long used to justify force.

He states plainly that the land between the river and the sea is not too small to accommodate both peoples, and that what obstructs coexistence is not geography but myth.

In a rare departure from mainstream Israeli discourse, he acknowledges that Palestinians are not latecomers to the land, and that they possess a full and legitimate right to live on it—not as guests, nor as “potential inhabitants,” but as children of the place, as rooted as Jews and perhaps more deeply woven into its daily life.

This raises an unavoidable question: can a voice like Harari’s—however morally grounded—find an audience within Israel’s political and military establishment?

Can a discourse that challenges historical certainties and affirms Palestinian rights gain traction in a society built on fear and the centrality of force?

Or will his intervention remain suspended in the air, with no political ground on which to land?

Harari proceeds to unravel the Israeli narrative to its logical ends.

He reminds readers that after most Jews left the land, they were never barred from returning. Neither Romans nor Arabs nor Ottomans closed the gates.

The uncomfortable........

© Middle East Monitor