A speech on the role of mediators in the Palestinian Israeli conflict

I was asked to give a speech on my perspective on the role of mediators in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I thought it might be of interest to some of you. So, here it is (for whatever it’s worth)

Václav Havel once said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

I come back to that quote often, especially when confronting this, seemingly most intractable of conflicts.

Because optimism feels like a luxury, almost an affront, when faced with the sheer, visceral reality of the grief, the rage, and the endless cycles of intergenerational trauma that define so much of what we see.

Optimism asks you to believe, often against evidence, that it’s all going to be okay.

But Havel’s hope asks here for something harder, something more profound. He asks that we keep showing up, keep bearing witness, keep striving, even when it’s not okay. Even when it keeps NOT being okay, year after year.

That’s the frame I want to use today. Because the question of mediation, whether external actors can authentically contribute, isn’t about quick fixes, or fleeting photo ops, or superficial Band-Aids on gaping wounds, it’s about helping to carve out space through principled pressure, unflinching truth, radical empathy, and yes, the discomfort of genuine growth.

Carving out space for the people mired in this conflict to imagine a future that makes sense for them, on their own terms. Even if arduous. Even if it requires confronting their deepest pains. Even if it takes longer than we, in our impatience, want.

So I begin: Not with facile optimism or self-serving fantasy. But with disciplined hope. And the belief that humane striving still, and always, matters.

When most people imagine peace talks or mediation, maybe they picture a long table. Mahogany, with tea and coffee, and hushed tones. Pens, nameplates, and meticulously prepared folders. It looks civilized. Rational. Symmetrical.

But honesty requires us to recognize that the table has never been balanced or neutral, has never been a meeting of equals. And for too long, folks have refused to acknowledge this core structural imbalance.

One side shows up stateless, occupied, its people and territory fragmented by decades of siege, blockade, pervasive surveillance, military control; horizons often limited by the next checkpoint, permit, demolition order.

The other side: one of the world’s most advanced militaries, backed by significant international alliances, nuclear capabilities, billions in aid, and a sophisticated global diplomatic and communications apparatus.

This is not a negotiation between equals. It’s more often a performance, to manage perceptions, to maintain a status quo, not resolve core issues. For years, many mediators, consciously or not, have played their part in that theater.

Calling for “restraint” as airstrikes flatten apartment blocks and refugee camps. Nodding solemnly while illegal settlements expand and checkpoints multiply. They talk of “both sides” compromising as if both possess the same tools, freedom, margin for error, or capacity to concede essentials in return for a dignified survival.

Let me be unequivocally clear:

I am not against Israel’s right to exist in security.

I am not denying a real and meaningful Jewish connection to the land.

I am not opposing the right of Israelis to liberty and self-determination, free from fear.

What I am against is the pernicious idea that ANY nation’s existence, security, or self-determination should come at another people’s existential expense for the same right.

What’s mediated — stripping spin and euphemisms — isn’t merely a border dispute or security dilemma.

It’s whether Palestinians are recognized and treated as fully human. To have the same fundamental rights, inherent dignities, that Israelis, like all peoples, insist on for themselves.

The stark truth is a binary one. You can’t mediate fundamental humanity. No percentages are allocated or negotiated. You honor it — wholly, unequivocally — or betray it.

About 15 years ago, my wife had one of those monumentally challenging days, the kind that makes you question every life decision, perhaps (or even especially) the decision to have children.

Our son, now 17, who’d cringe if he knew I was sharing this, was then a formidable two-year-old. She was exhausted. He was incandescently cranky. As she tried to make him dinner, he announced with the unshakeable confidence of a 2-year-old that he wanted ice cream.

Not AFTER dinner.

FOR dinner.

And, like any parent trying to maintain a semblance of order and nutritional sense, she said, “No.”

And he lost it. Absolute, seismic, Category Five Meltdown. Screaming. Sobbing. Full body, full volume existential collapse.

And she, a tired human at her wits’ end, gave in.

She figured: I’ve had a day. It’s one bowl of ice cream. I’m not dying on this particular hill. So she gave him the ice cream.

Problem solved. Peace restored. Right?

Wrong.

He kept crying. Harder. Louder, if possible.

She knelt, genuinely bewildered, and asked: “Honey, I gave you the ice cream. Why are you still crying?”

And his answer, delivered between body-shaking, snotty sobs, was, “I… don’t… know.”I

n many ways, that’s where the political machinery, the emotional heart of this ecosystem, of this conflict, has landed.

The original fight — safety, justice, dignity, land, the haunting legacies of trauma — is still there, buried deep under layers of accumulated pain, political performance, and identities forged in bitter opposition and mutual demonization.

The fight has become the habit.

The trauma, the script.

They’re not crying over ice cream anymore. They’re crying because crying has become a ritual, a language, a shield from the terrifying vulnerability of imagining something different.

Mediators, if they are brave and insightful and committed to resolution and the humane ending of this conflict, have a real job.

And that job isn’t to referee the tantrum, say, “Go to your room,” or tell one side that, “You apologize first.”

The job is to kneel, with genuine curiosity and profound respect, look the conflict in the eye, and ask: “What’s truly hurting you, beneath the accumulated anger, beneath the decades-old scars of trauma and fear? What do you fundamentally need? What do you yearn for, as a people, as humans?”

Real mediators don’t police tone or impose superficial solutions. They help re-center purpose, meticulously excavate legitimate human needs from beneath the rubble of corrosive rhetoric and historical injury.

They help both sides remember the thing behind the thing. Not slogans. Not rituals of outrage, however justified. But the actual, universal goals: Safety. Freedom. Dignity. Respect. Justice. Peace. That’s the job. Helping people to stop screaming their pain long enough to remember the ice cream.

This conflict isn’t just policy, geopolitics, or even a contested, blood-soaked land. It’s about deeply ingrained identity narratives. Ego, individual, and collective. And profound, often unacknowledged, existential fear.

Neither side, it must be said, is particularly eager for prolonged, honest self-reflection.

Extremists are useful scapegoats, easy to point at, allowing moderates to feel virtuous.

Pro-Israel folks say, “Oh, I don’t support Netanyahu, violent settlers, or far-right ideologues.”

Pro-Palestinian folks say, “Oh, I don’t support Hamas, indiscriminate rocket fire, or annihilation rhetoric.”

That differentiation is good, essential.

But too often, the self-examination stops there.

People think criticizing their side’s worst, most blatant excesses gives them a pass on the many more insidious and mainstream failings on their part. It doesn’t.

The problem isn’t just the overt fringe. It’s normalizing aspects of it.

It’s about how fear, anger, and exclusionary ideologies get quietly, almost imperceptibly, baked into the center. Into curricula that erase or demonize, state budgets that prioritize armament over human development, into bedtime stories and cultural narratives that shape a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’

Unless we hold a mirror to that — the internal rot, learned hatreds (however subtle), the seductive convenience of perpetual victimhood, all of them foreclosing agency — then nothing will ever change.

Real mediation, then, isn’t just facilitating dialogue between adversaries. It’s fostering courage and safe spaces for each side, each individual, to tell difficult truths to themselves.

The U.S., Europe, Australia, China, Iran — the “international community” — we must stop pretending that we’re merely neutral observers or dispassionate arbiters.

Everyone is an actor in this tragedy, profoundly implicated.

Funding death.

Arming parties.

Legitimizing a status quo that perpetuates suffering and injustice, while expressing performative dismay when predictable violence spirals.

Ethical, effective mediators must include courageous, uncomfortable confrontation first, within their own governments and societies, and then with powers sustaining the conflict.

You can’t credibly guide anyone toward sustainable peace while your hands, actively or by omission, fan the flames of war.

So, what is the authentic role of external mediators in all of this?

It’s not to pick a side in a zero-sum game. It’s not to amplify one nationalist position against another. It’s not to reinforce any exclusionary agenda.

Mediation shouldn’t be sophisticated advocacy for one narrow nationalist vision.

Mediation should be a fierce, unwavering advocacy for people.

All the people at the heart of this conflict. Israeli. Palestinian. Arab. Jew. Muslim. Christian. Druze. Secular. Human.

The people who bear the crushing weight of every missile launched, every home demolished, every checkpoint ritualized, every hostage taken, every prisoner held, every future dimmed, every funeral ignored.

Those are the people who pay the horrific price for the checks we write and for the policies we enact or fail to enact.

They’re the ones who bear the unconscionable cost of our carefully calibrated statements, our strategic silences, and our diplomacy-by-press conference.

And those are the lives, in all their sanctity and complexity, around which we should be building our peace work.

The role of external mediators is to protect THOSE lives. To center THOSE futures.

To push back, with moral clarity, against governments, movements, and systems that treat human beings as pawns, or demographic threats, or regrettable, yet all-too-acceptable, collateral damage.

And yes — that means applying principled pressure, even when it’s diplomatically inconvenient or economically costly.

It means naming injustice with clarity and courage, regardless of who perpetrates it or how powerful they are.

It also means undertaking the patient, often thankless, and always emotionally taxing labor of building fragile trust in rooms saturated with generations of animosity and profound distrust.

But that’s what this moment, and indeed every moment, of this conflict, has demanded, continues to demand, and will demand in the future.

Because this conflict will not be resolved by killing more people. Or by one side outlasting or exhausting the other. Or by waiting until one particular version of God, or history, or trauma, finally, decisively, wins.

There are only three ways off this devastating ride.

The Israelis manage to kill all the Palestinians.

The Palestinians manage to kill all the Israelis.

Or somehow, against daunting odds, but with profound moral imperative, they figure out how to share the land and build a future together, recognizing their intertwined destinies and indivisible humanity.

And if you believe in the inherent dignity of any human being, if you think that peace is more than the mere absence of gunfire, if you are not a fucking psychopath, then there’s really only one option.

I’m not asking mediators to take a side in the conflict. I’m asking them to advocate for humanity.

To take responsibility.

To show up for the people, not the flags, however revered, not the slogans, however catchy, not the abstract ideologies, however compelling, not the entrenched tribes, however historically defined — but the actual, breathing, suffering, hoping human beings.

And to do the thing that real hope, Havel’s hope, demands: Keep showing up.

Keep pushing for something that makes profound human sense, even if it doesn’t turn out well right away or even in our lifetimes.

Because the only future worth striving for, the only peace that can ever be sustainable, is one where both peoples, indeed, all peoples in that land, get to truly live.

Not just exist in the suffocating shadow of fear and recurrent trauma.

But live.

In full dignity.

In lasting safety.

In a just and enduring peace.