Intellectual honesty in Israel & Palestine produces radically different outcomes

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Intellectual honesty is a rare commodity in the divide between Israelis and Palestinians.

It is even rarer with the rise of Jewish ultra-nationalism and a generation of Israelis and Palestinians nurtured on prejudiced, biased, and often supremacist perceptions of the other.

The irony is that historically, it was far-right militants, and currently, it is fringe left-wing intellectuals who displayed intellectual honesty, even if their conclusions differ radically.

With few exceptions, intellectual honesty has long been lost on the Israeli right and left. What intellectual honesty survives is posited in fringe pockets of the left that propagate a paradigm cultural change on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide that goes against the grain of mainstream Israeli and Palestinian thinking and, in today’s fog of war, has a pie-in-the-sky quality.

Even so, these pockets put forward ideas that offer a pathway towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has the potential to bridge the traumas shaping generations, contribute to preventing a one- or two-state solution from producing future wars, and ensure that peace agreements with Israel have street credibility on both sides of the divide rather than amount to arrangements among elites with little popular support beyond Israel’s borders.

Education sits at the core of contrasting views of the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations and diametrically opposite historical narratives.