Why can’t Israel accept Palestine and its people as equals, as fellow travelers on the path to peace? What does the war in Gaza mean for the future of the two countries?
Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Nakba (the “catastrophe” as the Palestinians call it), many efforts have been made to establish peaceful and equal relations between Palestine and Israel – after the Six-Day War in 1967, the Oslo Accords, and even after the war that began on October 7, 2023. However, every effort has been undermined by Israel, which is why the situation in the West Bank is unbearable and the genocide in Gaza continues.
In this book, Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh shares his personal testimony about understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while exploring what went wrong and why, as well as how things could have been different. Because man by nature can be led astray by prejudices, but in the case of Palestine and Israel, as the award-winning author strongly argues, the two nations can coexist based on mutual interest.
With the establishment of Israel, Palestine ceased to exist. To this day, Israel refuses to recognize the Palestinians as a nation with the right to self-determination. This situation worsened with the outbreak of the war in Gaza, as, during the military operations against Hamas, the Israeli army killed tens of thousands of civilians, destroyed homes and razed Palestinian universities, museums and historical monuments in order to eliminate the Palestinian presence.