Tal Becker is the vice president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he leads educational initiatives on Israel in the Jewish world. He served until recently as a legal advisor with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has been a senior member of Israeli peace negotiation team in successive rounds of peace negotiations. He also played an instrumental role in negotiating and drafting the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. America. In this lightly edited interview in with Fathom editors in late May – prior to Iran-Israel escalation – Becker recounts his time negotiating during the Annapolis process and the Abraham Accords, and shares his insights about creating a better future in the Middle East.

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Jack Omer-Jackaman: We’re speaking at a time when, tragically, Israeli-Palestinian peace seems a distant prospect. We will get to the present later, but I want to start in in general terms, in considering what we’ve learned from previous efforts. You’ve written in the past that we’re often too preoccupied with a peace agreement itself, seeing it as an end rather than a means to an end. Could you expand on that for us?

Tal Becker: I think it really starts with the question about how do you conceive of peace? What is peace? And I think there are many people who think peace is that magical signing ceremony. The instruments around that, the document we draft. But essentially, peace is a shift in consciousness. People who see each other in a certain way, they think they’re in an adversarial relationship – they might even think they’re in a zero sum relationship – create a reality and a narrative and a mindset that enables them to understand themselves and each other in a different relationship. So what you’re trying to do in a peace agreement or in any peace process is create the conditions for a different consciousness to emerge.

When we were involved in the Annapolis process, I asked my staff to prepare a compendium of every peace agreement that had been reached around the world in the last 50 years. And I spent two days just reading peace agreements. Which is a rare thing to do because Israelis and Palestinians are very proud of the idea that we have nothing to learn from anybody else most of the time. And I just thought ‘let me see if I can get inspiration’. What happens when you read peace agreements is that you realise that they’re really boring documents. They’re very technical – ‘we’ll redeploy troops here, we’ll draw a boundary here’. Sometimes there’s some flowery language, usually in the speeches. But they are not what you might expect, this transcendent idea that we’re moving into a new reality. They are very technical. And I think there’s a big insight there, which is that peace agreements are not really about bringing peace. They are an investment or a gamble in the idea that if you shift reality on the ground, you will cultivate a different consciousness in the people over time. And the engineers of peace, children, educators, business leaders who emerge in the new reality that that agreement created, and that creates space for new narratives.

So what matters at the end is whether the agreement created a reality that enabled that shift in consciousness and identity, not the actual document itself.

Sometimes that can be achieved without an agreement at all. You could shift the reality and enable a different consciousness to emerge without the negotiators and without the ceremonies. And that may be just as valid.

CBD: I was involved in one particular Israeli-Palestinian group that takes peoples to Northern Ireland, and I remember we heard we had the Catholics and they said ‘we signed the Good Friday Agreement. By signing it, we guaranteed that, Ireland will one day be completely independent. Northern Ireland will be part of Republic of Ireland’. Then we had the Protestants and they said ‘we signed the Good Friday Agreement. We guaranteed Northern Ireland is going to be part of the United Kingdom forever’. Something doesn’t quite add up. And you go there and we thought, ‘this is peace?!’ There is this is this kind of utopian idea that we’ve been told about in Northern Ireland. And you realise actually, that you need to reframe your idea of what peace is in a way that I think is actually quite similar to what you just said. That the Good Friday Agreement creates space for new generations. It rejects violence, and then it creates space for new generations to have a better life. Rather than this utopian reconciliation of historical claims and grievances.

TB: Jack described me as a peace part of the peace process although I don’t know whether that ought to be considered such a distinguished group at the moment. But I sometimes ask myself why I lasted so long in that process. And I think it’s because I’ve never had a conception of peace in utopian terms. I think about peace in the way that I think about security. We never think about security as being ultimate and hermetic and bringing a messianic age. There’s more security or there’s less security. And in the same way, there’s more peace or there’s less peace. Even a peace agreement, with all the fancy signings, there’s still going to be problems. I’m someone who doesn’t like using the word solution in foreign policy, because I don’t think countries have solutions. They’re not math problems. What you’re trying to do is have more prosperity, more peace for more people, more of the time. The agreement is just one component of a much broader attempt to create that space that you’re mentioning. Sometime you need to use constructive ambiguity that enables each side to read into the agreement a narrative in the way that you described in the Northern Ireland context.

Sometimes that ambiguity can be destructive. And you actually need to be clear that you are jettisoning some vision or some dream. It’s not always that reading multiple narratives into a paragraph is a good idea. Ambiguity can actually sow the seeds of subsequent problems. But broadly, yes, that is how I think about it. I think that a lot of damage has been done by people who are too ideological and too utopian, and I think even of a peace agreement itself as just yet another building block in creating the space for stories of coexistence to get legitimacy within each society.

CBD: You’ve written about some common misconceptions of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that we think are very instructive. We would like to run through some of them and for you to explain what you meant. One is – and interestingly two other ‘peace processors’ we have spoken to mentioned this as well – that the sides have been negotiating for 20 or 30 years. Another is the idea that ‘nothing has been achieved’. Another is  ‘just get to the damn table’. Also, ‘if only’ – in other words there’s just one missing element and then we’ll be there. And, perhaps the most famous one, ‘Everyone knows what an agreement looks like.’ Could you could you comment on some of those and what you meant?

TB: When you read them out, it still kind of resonates. I think first of all, it’s worth noting that, from a broad perspective, they’ve only been really three significant efforts to address the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a Track 1 level, on the official level. In the context of the Camp David process; in the context of the Annapolis process; and what’s called the Kerry talks, or London talks in 2014. Broadly over an almost 30 year period, that’s not a lot of time. I think that we have spent more time arguing about why we’re not negotiating than we have actually negotiating.

I think there’s good news and bad news in that. The bad news is we wasted a lot of time and to understand the issues – not at the level of slogans, but deeply – is a real effort. And there are only a handful of people who really have a good grip on the complexity and depth of each of the issues in dispute. But the good news – at least in principle, and of course the current reality makes this kind of feel fantastical, but I think that we can’t ever let go of the hope that we can get back to a discourse about how to advance coexistence – is there’s still a lot of work to do. There is dialogue we haven’t had. And there are ideas that are still there to explore. So I think that is one important part of this.

‘Just get to the damn table’ is connected to that ‘if only’ thing. Which is you hear this phrase ‘all we need is political will’. That to me sounds like saying all we need is everything. And this kind of language misunderstands the complexity and depth of this conflict.

I’ll just say something from many years in the negotiating room. One basic takeaway for me is that this is a dialogue between two traumatised people, who basically need therapy on a national scale. And the idea that that the core issue we need to do is discuss the issues in conflict and find some magic formula to compromise between them is a classic kind of foreign policy way of thinking about problems, but it’s actually not the essence of the conflict. I’ve been in a lot of very difficult conversations. One of the things that characterises difficult conversations is that the thing you’re talking about is not actually the thing you’re talking about, and the thing you’re talking about is just a stand in for some other conversation.

So you think you’re in the negotiating room talking about refugees or borders or any other issue. But what’s actually happening very often is that that conversation is a stand in for a deeper conversation about each side’s sense that they’re in a zero sum contest, each side’s need for the other to see their legitimacy. And every issue is the stage upon which you act out your differences, not the form by which you resolve your differences. Because what is shaping the conflict are not the issues in dispute. It is the identity stories of each society that understand their reality, understand their identity through the conflict. On the Palestinian side, I think that the sense of Palestinian victimhood is very often the oxygen of Palestinian identity, so much so that resolving the conflict involves reimagining Palestinian identity.

I think for a lot of Israeli Jews, it’s hard to understand their own Israeli Jewish identity without the conflict. It doesn’t always make sense that there are these deep societal issues, and we make the mistake of thinking this is about choreography. ‘Oh, you know, it should be bilateral’. ‘No, it should be multilateral, we should do refugees first’. ‘No, we should do borders first’. Those are the symptoms, they’re not the cause.

I have come to the conclusion that we negotiators are self-important people, but we’re not important people. We’re only relevant if we are reflecting the societies that sent us to the room. The work of creating the conditions for peacemaking is not a drafting exercise, or an idea, or creativity.  It’s not ‘let me figure out this Rubik’s Cube of all these different core issues’. The question is whether the societies themselves have created, in their self-understanding, the possibility of coexistence and of reconciliation as authentic to their identity. And if the societies have gone to that process, then the negotiators themselves can do something to help them.

But if they haven’t, you’re just doodling on a piece of paper.

JOJ: Does that mean that in order to make progress, one needs to on the bilateral level be much more explicit about addressing those issues behind the issues. I don’t necessarily want to use ‘truth and reconciliation’ terminology, but does that mean that we have to get to the issues behind the issues in a much more explicit way?

TB: There’s no university you go to get a degree in how to achieve a peace agreement. Nobody knows the answer to these questions, and there isn’t a magic key. That’s a little bit ‘if only’ stuff. There isn’t a formula. The challenge in my mind is how do you generate dynamics that enable each society not to think that they’re in a zero sum contest? And that may be a truth and reconciliation process, it may not be. It may be something that the leaders do, but it may also be something that happens in an educational form, in a whole host of different ways. It may be an external event that you don’t even control, that shapes it in one way or the other.

I like to tell this story about one of the rounds of negotiation where a senior Palestinian representative, a friend of mine actually, presented an idea, and I thought it was a good idea. And the Americans were sitting there, and the Israelis and Palestinians were sitting there and I, like some rookie negotiator who had never done any negotiation, said, ‘that’s a great idea.’ And it took my Palestinian colleague about two minutes to retract the idea, because I had embarrassed him in front of his colleagues by being too enthusiastic about the idea. Had I wanted the idea to get traction, I should have been much more circumspect about it. And had we had this one on one, it would have been different. But in the theatre of the negotiating room, because the mindset is a kind of zero sum mindset, the prospect of agreement is itself a warning sign. I’ve seen this dynamic quite a bit.

What does that tell you? It tells you that you are representing societies. That if the dominant narrative in those societies is ‘the other people don’t recognise my legitimacy and think we’re in a zero sum contest’, then agreement is a sign of your negotiators not doing their job well enough. So it’s a systemic problem, if agreement is evidence that your negotiators have failed. And the disagreement of the other side is evidence that your negotiators are representing your interests, because obviously it’s a zero sum contest, they’re going to be upset with what you’re doing, then you have evidence of something deeply affecting the societies, which then influences the negotiating dynamic. How we deal with that is a much bigger question about how change happens in the stories people tell themselves about who they are.

That’s why I’m a big believer in the normalisation process, and it’s potential to help Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, because that has an within it an engine for potentially legitimising other stories, other ways of understanding ourselves – and for Palestinians as well.

CBD: Don’t you have a story that just before an agreement, Palestinians come with a demand to add in a line, and the Israelis go to you, you read through it and you say, ‘that’s absolutely fine’. And then after you’ve agreed, they retract the demand.

That was another case where our refusal to object to the change made the other side nervous that they had not seen something, and in the end they withdrew it because they thought they’ve made a mistake.

CBD: So you talked about normalisation, so let let’s move on to the Abraham Accords. You’ve said before – and it’s a beautiful phrase – that the Abraham Accords accord signal the move from ‘arguing over who the land belongs to’, towards ‘the understanding that we all belong to the land’. I would actually add that I think there’s a kind of Hamas-Hezbollah-Iranian paradigm of Jews as white settler colonialists who armed struggle will send back ‘home’. And the Abraham Accords has an understanding that both Jews and Arabs have a shared ancestor, Abraham, who, according to tradition, lived in the Holy Land. So it’s actually a competing and much more constructive model of recognition. Can you tell us about the process that led to the Abraham Accords? Who are the main players? Having spent many hours in a room discussing and negotiating over Israeli Palestinian issues, can you give us a taste of what it’s like in the room when you’re discussing the Abraham Accords?

TB: The dynamics were very different in the sense that there was a kind of mutual enthusiasm for making progress. And so the emotional scars and the trauma that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict invokes were just not there. I think there are multiple conditions that produced the Abraham Accords. It helped that we invested over two decades in these relationships, quietly. I think it helped that there was a convergence of interests about threats and opportunities. I think the courage, in particular of Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE, was very important. The investment of the Trump administration was critical. There are a whole set of things that produced the possibility to have the breakthrough, and the feeling when we were doing it was one of a real partnership to push back, in the way you were saying, against those who have this kind of zero sum version of the conflict.

I would slightly amend the way you put it, and say that there are two dominant narratives in the world and in the Middle East that we are fighting against. One is this idea that Israel has a kind of colonial presence, as you described, and that’s a moral kind of secular language like, we’re the French in Algeria or something like that. But a second one is that Israel’s existence is irreconcilable with Islam. It’s a kind of theological dynamic. And the Abraham Accords push back on both of those. One of the core significances and the potential of the Abraham Accords is that these are Muslim countries saying ‘we don’t think opposition to Israel is inherent to our idea of Islam. We don’t think Jews are infidels’. And that creates momentum and legitimacy behind a way of understanding yourself as an authentic Muslim, and hopefully as an authentic Palestinian, not in conflict.

And on the Israeli side, we are at a moment in Israeli society where Israel is also contesting its story of itself, where there are illiberal voices in Israel who are pushing their own version of a kind of zero sum contest. And the Abraham Accords are also saying to our own society, ‘no, we don’t understand our Jewishness and Zionism as being about a zero sum contest with the Palestinian people or with Islam. The Palestinian people also have a right to self-determination. They also belong here. They don’t have a right to deny our self-determination. But our Jewish identity doesn’t require a rejection of others’ belongingness.’

So, I think the Abraham Accords create precisely that kind of framing that can compete with the Iranian-Hezbollah-Hamas way of talking, That’s what I was talking about: a kind of therapy on a national scale, that can create the ways to understand your identity in different ways. So the potential there is huge. And the importance of Saudi normalisation in that context is really huge, because if the custodian of Mecca and Medina essentially articulates a view that Saudi Arabia is able to normalise relations with Israel… What is the word ‘normalise’? Just think about it for a second. Normalise means that there’s nothing remarkable about Jews and Arabs living together in the Middle East. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a threat to our identity. And I know we get very excited about it. I certainly got very excited about it. But the point is for it to not be exciting, because it’s not this kind of cosmic issue – can Jews and Muslims be partners in the Middle East? Obviously we’re partners, because we’re both children of the Middle East, and it’s a kind of pushing away of that narrative that says that somehow our very existence is a threat to the other side.

CBD: You describe that process as well, when you’re in the Gulf. At one stage you realise that you’re not emotional about being there. And then you become emotional about not being emotional.

TB: So I had the privilege of drafting much of the UAE-Israel agreements with the UAE and American partners. And I think, with some help, I put in a key sentence there that said, ‘recognising that the Jewish and Arab peoples are descendants of a common ancestor, Abraham, and in that spirit committed to fostering a Middle East based on mutual understanding and respect between peoples of all different faiths, ethnicities and nationalities.’ And I wasn’t sure that that language would be accepted by the Emiratis, because even though it sounds like motherhood and apple pie, we really have never had the kind of articulation of the sense of a common ancestry, a common sense of belonging. And that was language that the Emiratis accepted, and I think the potential in that is huge because it speaks, in my mind, to the potential for a Judeo-Muslim civilisational consciousness or awareness. Even though I grew up in Australia, I’m much more Middle Eastern in the way that I think about this conflict.

I try not to think about peacemaking in western, secular liberal terms, because that’s not the constituents we are representing, by and large, and we need to translate it into the language of the Middle East. And the problem, some of the time, is when you’re in the negotiating room and you have a western mindset, you think what you’re doing is kind of splitting the difference. You hear the sides’ positions and say ‘let’s figure out some kind of creative thing on this piece of paper that will resolve this agreement’. That’s not the essence of what we’re doing here. The essence of what we’re doing is to try to create a sense of consciousness and identity that resonates for people as true to who they are as Middle Easternerns, as Jews and Muslims who are children of the Middle East. It’s not the purchase of a car from a used car lot.

JOJ: I want to stay with the Abraham Accords for a moment, based on what you’ve just said, and ask whether, in your view, those shifts in consciousness that that the Accords represented are reflective of f public shifts in the respective countries, as well as elite shifts. Based on that, what it is that you think caused those developments, those shifts in consciousness. In other words, why, at this particular epoch, did those societies reach that stage of consciousness shift?

TB: First of all, these are these are issues that are in flux. They are contested, they exist within the societies, and sometimes one has more force than the other. For me, it’s such a fascinating and difficult to decipher dynamic about how people’s stories of themselves change over time. If you asked an Israeli Jew what the story of Israel was in the 1990s, they would tell a very different story to what they might say today, and the same is true of the ‘50s and so on. I’m not enough of an expert in each country in the Middle East to tell you how this story of themselves shifted, but I try as a negotiator to really understand as best I can the way each people we’re negotiating with understands themselves. When you think about the way the Emiratis or Moroccans understand themselves, part of the challenge is to craft what you’re doing in a language that resonates with part of that society, to create more momentum. There will be pushback. It’s a slow process. For the Emiratis, people who are genuinely committed to a version of Islam that is tolerating of difference –  I use that word carefully – I wish it was celebrating of difference, but I think that’s a little too far. But certainly being tolerating of difference, allergic to violence, and committed to broad prosperity and stability. Those are all things that are the legacy of the Emirati rulers, but also quite ingrained in Emirati society. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a stigma around Israel and there isn’t concern about the conflict, but there are things to work with there. Obviously, in our own society, there is a huge battle within Israeli Jewish society about the soul of this country, in which direction it’s moving, and what are the ways in which to understand identity. And the Abraham Accords kind of tried to tap into that and create momentum.

7 October, in that sense, was a kind of resurgence of this zero sum sense. ‘We’re on our own, the only option here is for one side to win, or the other side to win’. And in that sense, the war we’re in now, a big part of it is about confronting the capabilities of our enemies. But no less important is taking on the appeal of the stories that they tell. And the normalisation process, the importance of it is that it operates in the realm of ideas. It offers a different way to imagine a Middle East, which I think most of the people in the Middle East want.

JOJ: That leads us into the present moment, and Israeli-Palestinian relations. You’ve spoken in the past about there being three typical responses among people when the track of Israeli-Palestinian peace is not progressing, which I think we can safely say is the case in the present moment. You’ve spoken about despair, blame, and fantasy, but you’ve also insisted that we have to believe in what you call ‘the permanent possibility of the presently unimaginable.’ With those two things in mind, where are we at the moment and what are some useful and productive ways we might approach a better future?

TB: Each of those has their place – the blame, the despair, the fantasy. I go back first to this idea that peace is something you either have more of or less of. And the more we move away from a kind of utopian version of peace, the more we can imagine ourselves in practical terms. What would it take for us to create a more positive dynamic? Part of that I often think about it terms of our tradition to ‘seek peace and pursue it’. It doesn’t say seek peace and achieve it. I think it’s interesting that it doesn’t say achieve it. And that’s probably because it isn’t in your hands to achieve it. There are too many variables you don’t control. And I have developed this analogy for people who think they know the answer to how we achieve it. But pursuing it, I think, is actually something that can be an action plan. Part of pursuing it is targeting its enemies. And I think of this current war as really being about denying the ability of the enemies of peace to dictate the future of the Middle East. The fact that Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have less capability to project their power and their agenda across the Middle East is part of the pursuit of peace, but so is articulating an aspiration for where we want to go. I’m an advocate for articulating aspirations that you don’t know how to achieve. The idea that you can’t you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

We can’t let this war shrink our capacity to imagine the kind of future we want to reach. Yes, there are huge questions – how do we achieve a Palestinian entity that isn’t going to threaten Israel, that isn’t going to be corrupt? How do we ensure that both peoples move to a place where they see each other in a different way? These are huge questions.

But I think the goal of articulating an aspiration is really important. I think that doubling down on the normalisation process, asking ourselves hard questions and being willing to pay a certain price in order to enable that normalisation process to continue, is critical because, as we talked about before, it creates that alternative set of narratives. And I also think being counterintuitive helps a lot. There are such fixed narratives on each side about the kind of reality we live in. And when we act in counterintuitive ways… For example, I think it’s important to show much more compassion for Palestinian suffering in Gaza. It’s hard to do in war, but I think it’s necessary and moral to do so. I think you try to encourage things that surprise people to begin to shake their consciousness. I don’t want to be naive about it and say, ‘these are the criteria for which we which will achieve something’. There are genuinely irreconcilable forces that need to be confronted. But I think we are a healthier society and a better society by not discounting the possibility that we can emerge from this horrible war, and the trauma of this war, in a reality where the enemies of peace – not only their capabilities, but the way they imagine – the reality is no longer compelling for many people, and we created the energy and momentum behind a different way of seeing things.

I just think it would be devastating if we didn’t have this constant effort to make things better as part of our DNA.

CBD: Who is the ‘our’ in ‘our DNA’?

Israeli policy should on the one hand be focused on survival and defeating our enemies, but it can never abandon a language of aspiration and hope as to where we’re trying to go. If you compare 1948 to this moment – we talk about this war as the Second Independence war in some respect. But in 1948, the Jewish people had just gone through the worst genocide in human history; there were six Arab states about to invade us; nobody knew if Israel would survive; there was a civil war raging within Israel itself. And we were still capable of knocking out an aspiration as to where we wanted to go in the Declaration of Independence. The Arab states said, ‘we’re coming to wipe the Jews of the face of the earth’, and we said ‘we stretch our hand out in peace’. In today’s language, that would be thought of as naïve, and kind of foolish. But what was happening there was critical. It’s not naivete to say that you need to articulate an aspiration in order to be able to rally and have an identity story that isn’t just about survival. I would like to extend the ‘our’. It’s can’t be just us. We need to look for partners. I believe there are partners to that vision. Certainly in the region, and in parts of the world, there are also actors who are strong opponents to that vision. And this isn’t an action plan that I can say in five years will achieve this or that. It’s a pursuit, a direction of movement that I think is not less important than being absolutely vigilant and resilient in our self-defence in military terms.

CBD: There’s an international conference planned for mid-June, organised by French President Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to reports, France is hoping that several states will take the opportunity to unilaterally recognise the Palestinian state. I am interested in your general thoughts, not about statehood per se, but about European unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood at this time.

TB: I have never been a huge fan of these diplomatic conferences. What matters to me is where the parties themselves are able to go, and perhaps diplomatic support for that. A conference that doesn’t involve both Israeli and Palestinian buy-in in a significant way, I’m sceptical about how effective it can be. I don’t know the specific details about this conference, but the tendency in the international community is often to focus on ‘how do we look good’ rather than ‘how do we do good’ –  ‘how do we create the pyrotechnics of looking like we’re investing in peace’, not the actual question about what it would take to move an Israeli society that’s traumatized in a different direction and to help Palestinians move away from this kind of rejectionist language. This idea of a unilateral declaration of statehood, it’s a symbolic act, but the message sent by it is hugely problematic. If it’s framed in that way, the way it will be taken by the Israeli Jewish public as essentially rewarding Hamas for 7 October. As saying the reason why we are in the place we are in is not because there are terrorist organisations supported by Iran who are committed to the obliteration of Israel, but because of the lack of a diplomatic breakthrough and somehow unilateral recognition is going to encourage that breakthrough. It just seems to me, really problematic. Hamas’s celebration of any act towards unilateral statehood – there were a couple of states who moved in that way – is a big indicator of how that move plays. The question that needs to be asked is, ‘how do you help each society come to terms with each other, embrace a vision of their identity that doesn’t involve denying the belongingness and right to self-determination of the other?’ I think unilateral recognition is a recipe for doing the opposite. It tells the Palestinians ‘we don’t have expectations of you. You don’t have responsibilities, you have only rights’. And it tells Israelis ‘you don’t have rights, you have only responsibilities’. In that way, it entrenches what I think are negative dynamics in each side. Both sides have rights and responsibilities, and the role of the international community is to kind of push those parties together, not choose sides, and not create this idea that this is a kind of victim / villain story – a comic strip narrative. There’s a victim, there’s a villain, and we need to figure out who’s who. That’s not that’s not a recipe for peacemaking. It’s a recipe for perpetuating the conflict.

JOJ: I want to stay with that for a minute and push back on it, because I’ve written in favour of unilateral recognition. You spoke earlier about the need to fight, not only literally the enemies of a peaceful vision, but also to fight their appeal. And my argument is that that a valuable commodity in fighting that appeal has to be hope and optimism, and that unilateral recognition could, if done correctly, be a means of conveying to the Palestinian people that there is there is a hopeful future along a diplomatic and diplomatic track. So I’m interested in your reaction to that, but also more broadly, picking up off you saying we need to fight what we might call rejectionist parties. Hamas-ism is clearly is opposed to the kind of vision that that you outlined, but there are also, as you mentioned earlier, rather powerful forces in Israeli society who are opposed as well. So does opposing those forces look different in each case, Israeli and Palestinian? Or is there some kind of similarity that opposing those forces would have in both instances?

TB: I’ll deal with the first question. The second question is really hard. When I think about the challenge of this conflict, on the Palestinian side it is how to cultivate an authentic form of Palestinian identity that can come to terms with Jewish self-determination. And on the Israeli side, it is about how to cultivate an Israeli Jewish identity that comes to terms with Palestinian belongingness and self-determination. Unilateral recognition is not a recipe for doing that, because what it says is ‘we want to embolden Palestinian statehood without requiring of the Palestinians to come to terms with the fact that another people belong here’. And I think that empowers a narrative that pushes us away from them. I think at the end of the day, actions produce reactions, right?

Unilateral recognition, which the Israeli Jewish public will see as essentially choosing one side over the other, will produce an Israeli Jewish reaction that says, if you don’t see me, then I won’t see you. And where the peacemaking is about seeing, it’s about seeing the other.

Your second question if I understood it, is really to speak about the kind of opponents of this vision and whether confronting them or dealing with them is different in each society. That’s a very interesting challenge. I think it needs some serious reflection. My intuition is not to try to defeat opponents, but rather to create dynamics that diminish their appeal, that marginalise them, but not in some grand kind of triumph, because my instinct most of the time is that when you play a zero sum game, even when you win, you sow the seeds of your subsequent defeat because your triumph is the rallying cry for others to retaliate. And I think a lot of Israeli politics, in particular, but also around the world, is this oscillating pendulum. One side comes into power and tries to undo what the other side did. And the process of peacemaking, if it’s successful, is by creating a dynamic in which most of the of the elements within a society, even those who are opposed, are somehow able to integrate that approach into their story. You will always have margins who oppose it. But my instinct isn’t to have this kind of grand victory strategy over the opponents of this. I’m drawn to the definition of diplomacy, which says diplomacy is the art of letting other people get your way. And that version of it says that we have within Israeli society an identity story of Jews that makes reconciliation with the Palestinian people very difficult. What, in that tradition, may make it more possible to acquiesce or reconcile? I think there is, within that tradition, ways to empower that view.

In Palestinian society, the challenge is much greater, in my view. I think it would be probably presumptuous of me to suggest what to do because I’m no expert in the internal workings of Palestinian society, though I have Palestinian friends.