What Gets Lost When We Simplify the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ~via Joel Meyer
Joel Meyer spends much of his life engaged in conversations about Israel–Palestine, geopolitics, and Jewish identity… often with people who are already certain they know what they think. Increasingly, certainty replaces curiosity. Dialogue gives way to performance. His Substack, Simply Complicated, exists to resist that trend. -Ted
A central obstacle to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a lack of information, but the persistence of simplified frameworks.
Too often, the conflict is presented as a clash between two clearly defined and opposing narratives: two peoples, two claims, two truths. While this framing may offer an initial sense of clarity, it obscures more than it reveals. It flattens layered identities, compresses history into simplified sequences, and turns a complex reality into something that appears far more coherent than it is.
The result is not only a misunderstanding. It is a persistent inability to grasp why the conflict continues, even in the face of repeated attempts at resolution.
At the heart of this difficulty lies a deeper issue: how identity itself is understood.
In much of the Western world, religion is primarily viewed as a matter of personal belief. It is something one practices, rather than something one belongs to. When Judaism is approached through this lens, it is often interpreted as a faith detached from land, nationhood, or collective history. Yet historically, Jews have understood themselves not only as a religious community, but as a people bound by shared memory, language, and ancestral land. Their connection to Israel is not reducible to theology. It is embedded in a broader sense of collective identity that integrates religious, historical, and national elements.
A similar complexity exists on the Palestinian side, though it is often approached differently. Palestinian identity is sometimes described as either ancient and continuous or, conversely, as modern and therefore less authentic. In reality, like most national identities, it developed over time, emerging from overlapping affiliations that included Ottoman governance, Arab nationalism, regional belonging, religious identity, and local social structures.¹
Even the term “Palestine” reflects this historical fluidity. It has been used to refer to different territories at different times, but its usage has not always reflected a self-defined local identity. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, used the term as an external descriptor for a region he called “Palaistinê,” rather than as a name used by its inhabitants.²
Centuries later, the Romans renamed the province of Judea as “Syria Palaestina,” widely understood by historians as part of an effort to diminish or obscure Jewish association with the land following revolts against Roman rule.³
For much of the period that followed, including under Ottoman and early British administration, “Palestine” functioned primarily as a geographic designation rather than a clearly defined national identity.¹
These shifts do not negate the later emergence of Palestinian identity. Rather, they illustrate a broader point.
Identities in this region, as elsewhere, are shaped through historical processes rather than fixed categories.
The conflict itself took shape as these identities increasingly crystallized into competing national movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jewish immigration to Ottoman and later British-ruled Palestine, influenced by modern nationalism and driven by a combination of ideological revival, persecution, and exclusion in Europe, led to the establishment of institutions that would later form the basis of a Jewish state.⁴
At the same time, local Arab populations increasingly developed a distinct political consciousness, shaped by concerns over demographic change, land, representation, and future sovereignty.⁵
These developments were not abstract. They were experienced in concrete ways, in land transactions in which Jewish organizations purchased land, often from absentee Arab landowners, leading in some cases to the displacement of Arab tenant farmers; in labor disputes tied to emerging Jewish economic institutions and policies favoring Jewish labor; and in episodes of violence such as the riots of the early 1920s, including those in Jerusalem (1920) and Jaffa (1921), in which violence was directed largely against Jewish communities amid rising tensions between Jewish and Arab populations.⁶
From the outset, the conflict was not only about territory but also about competing understandings of belonging, legitimacy, and the political future.
Yet even this national framing remains incomplete.
The conflict is often approached as a contest between competing claims.
It is more accurately understood as a set of layered identities, in which national, historical, and theological elements accumulate rather than replace one another.
These layers do not operate independently. National identity draws on historical memory. Historical memory is often preserved, interpreted, and intensified through religious narrative. Together, they reinforce one another, shaping both perception and possibility.
For Jews, the land carries deep historical and religious significance, rooted in biblical tradition and sustained through centuries of dispersion. Even many secular expressions of Zionism have drawn, directly or indirectly, on these inherited frameworks of meaning.⁷
For Palestinians, national identity encompasses both Muslim and Christian communities. At the same time, Islamic historical memory has played a particularly significant role, especially regarding Jerusalem. The city is not only a political symbol and contested center of power but also a religious one, tied to sacred history and, in some interpretations within Islamic legal and theological traditions, to the idea that land once under Muslim rule retains an enduring religious significance and ought not to be permanently relinquished.⁸
It is in Jerusalem that these overlapping dimensions come most clearly into focus.
For Jews, Jerusalem represents both ancient political sovereignty and enduring spiritual orientation. It was the site of Jewish self-rule in antiquity, the historic capital of the Jewish people, and the location of the Temple, which has remained central in Jewish religious memory and practice across centuries of dispersion.
For Muslims, it is home to Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the most significant sites in Islam.
For Palestinians, it is also a focal point of national aspiration and political identity.
Any proposal concerning the city therefore engages multiple dimensions simultaneously.
What may appear, from the outside, as a political compromise can be experienced, from within, as a historical rupture or a religious concession.
This helps explain a recurring difficulty.
Proposals that seem pragmatic in structure often fail in practice.
The issue is not simply disagreement over policy.
It is that the same issues are understood through different, overlapping frameworks of meaning.
When identity is reduced to a single dimension, whether national, religious, or political, the remaining layers do not disappear. They continue to shape how events are interpreted, how risks are assessed, and how possibilities for compromise are perceived.
This has implications beyond analysis. It influences how the conflict is taught, discussed, and approached in policy contexts. When complexity is flattened, expectations become misaligned with reality, and outcomes that appear puzzling from the outside become more comprehensible from within.
Understanding the conflict, then, requires more than accumulating information. It requires frameworks capable of holding its complexity.
Without such frameworks, additional facts do not necessarily produce greater clarity. They can just as easily reinforce misunderstanding.
In a conflict shaped by overlapping identities and meanings, what gets lost in simplification is not only detail.
It is the ability to see the structure of the conflict itself.
This dynamic is not confined to the region itself. It is visible in how the conflict is discussed far beyond it, particularly in online spaces, on campuses, and in public demonstrations across the West. What often appears to be a disagreement over facts or positions is, in fact, a conversation in which participants are not engaging the same subject. When one side speaks primarily in terms of national rights, another may respond in moral or ideological terms, while a third operates chiefly within a religious or historical framework. The result is not only disagreement, but dissonance. Conversations become difficult not simply because the issues are contentious, but because the underlying frameworks are misaligned. What is being debated is not always shared, even when the language appears to be.
And in conversations where people often feel they are speaking past one another, the ability to recognize these layers may mark the difference between exchange and understanding.
Sources:
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997); Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (Vintage, 1999).
Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised by John Marincola (Penguin Classics, 2003).
Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE–640 CE (Princeton University Press, 2001); Guy G. Stroumsa, scholarship on Roman-era religious and political transformations.
League of Nations, Mandate for Palestine, July 24, 1922.
James Renton, “The Age of Nationality and the Origins of the Zionist-Palestinian Conflict,” The International History Review 35, no. 3 (2013): 576–599.
George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, in Rabinovich and Reinharz (eds.), Israel in the Middle East (Praeger, 1998).
State of Israel, Proclamation of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948.
Wael B. Hallaq, Shari’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955).
