There is no objective reason why Israelis and Palestinians must fight each other. Though both peoples lay claim to the same land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, that land is in fact big and rich enough to allow all its current inhabitants to live there in security, prosperity and dignity.

If we avoid all moral judgments and ideological claims, and simply count how many square kilometres of territory the land contains, how many kilowatts of electricity it can produce, how many kilogrammes of wheat it can import, and how many water molecules it can pump or desalinate, we would discover that the land could quite comfortably support all Israelis and all Palestinians. 

What fuels the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t an objective lack of territory or resources, but false moral certainties produced by oversimplified historical narratives. Deep down, too many Israelis and Palestinians are convinced that they are 100 per cent in the right and the other side is 100 per cent in the wrong, and that the other side therefore has no right to exist.