After Nearly Eight Decades of Conflict

A Middle East Teach-In

R.M. Westerink; September 2026

TEN READINGS. FIVE QUESTIONS. ONE PURPOSE.
To replace fragments, slogans, and inherited certainties with a structured inquiry into how the conflict became locked—and what might unlock it. The cycles have continued for too long and exacted far too great a human cost to be accepted as permanent. Understanding how they sustain themselves is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is necessary if the cycles are finally to be broken — and another generation is to be spared their price.

Why a Teach-In?

Thirty-one EUROPE-IS-US essays produced, constitutes an investigation base.
Together they trace history, competing memories, failed peace efforts, maximalist strategies, Western responsibility, European choices, and possible alternatives. Yet volume can conceal the argument.
A reader who encounters one article at a time may see individual trees while missing the forest.

This Teach-In turns the collection into a guided inquiry.
It does not ask the reader to accept a finished doctrine.
It asks five questions, offers ten core readings in a deliberate order, and makes the remaining work available as evidence, challenge, and extension.
The aim is not false imbalance. The aim is disciplined moral and political clarity: the same human worth, the same rules, and the same scrutiny for every actor.

Why this matters now

The human cost is not an abstraction. Israeli fear, Palestinian dispossession, civilian death, displacement, hostage-taking, settlement expansion, dehumanizing speech, and recurring regional escalation live in different memories—but they interact in one political system.
Moral alarm is justified. It becomes useful only when joined to analysis: What mechanism is producing the next cycle? Who benefits from it? What incentives keep it alive? What could credibly replace it?

The companion alarm essay, We Promised “Never Again”, argues that a universal promise loses its meaning when it is reserved for one people. Its place here is to establish urgency—not to substitute analogy for evidence or conscience for strategy.

How to use this Teach-In

Read the five modules in order, alone or as the basis for a seminar.
Each module contains two core texts: one establishes a problem; the other complicates or redirects it. The short notes below tell you why each text is included. The further-reading section lets readers test the argument rather than merely follow it.

1. What happened—and why did the conflict become locked?

Begin by separating chronology from interpretation. A shared factual baseline is indispensable, but facts do not explain themselves. Communities organize them into stories about origin, necessity, victimhood, return, and security. Those stories then shape what each side considers possible.

1. Israel 1948–2025: Expansion, Casualties, Displacements—Timeline

Why read it. It places territorial change, war, casualties, and displacement in one chronology. Without that baseline, argument drifts toward selective memory.

Takeaway. The conflict is not a string of isolated eruptions. It is a cumulative process in which territorial change, violence, and displacement alter the starting point of every later negotiation.

2. Israel–Palestine: How Visions of the Past Shaped a Locked Conflict

Why read it. It moves from events to the rival meanings attached to them: refuge and return, liberation and catastrophe, security and dispossession.

Takeaway. Historical memory is not background material. It is an active political force. Peace cannot require either people to erase its memory, but memory cannot be allowed to dictate permanent domination or permanent war.

2. Why have negotiations and force reproduced the conflict?

After the history comes the machinery. Negotiations fail when they postpone foundational disputes, lack enforceable symmetry, or leave spoilers better rewarded than builders. Violence also has a feedback structure: each side’s maximalism supplies the other side with its strongest argument.

3. Israel–Palestine: Can the Cycles of Conflict Be Broken?

Why read it. It compares failed peace efforts and asks what structural conditions were missing.

Takeaway. An agreement is not a peace system. Durable change needs institutions, public legitimacy, mutual recognition of loss, and external powers willing to align incentives with a reciprocal settlement.

4. The Tragic Paradox of Maximalist Anti-Israel Resistance

Why read it. It examines a conclusion that criticism of Israeli policy often avoids: eliminationist resistance can strengthen the very fortress state it seeks to defeat.

Takeaway. When resistance promises Israel’s disappearance or celebrates attacks on civilians, it validates existential fear, weakens Israeli dissent, and makes territorial hardliners appear necessary. A just cause can be damaged by a self-defeating strategy.

3. What remained unresolved in 1948—and where does territorial maximalism lead?

The decisive question is not whether either people possesses a genuine history, trauma, or claim. Both do. The question is whether one people’s safety can be built through the political negation of the other. The essays in this module test two routes: a reciprocal settlement that was not built, and a territorial completion that promises security through dominance.

5. The Road Not Taken in 1948

Why read it. It uses counterfactual reasoning to clarify the principles absent from the founding settlement: reciprocal self-determination, reciprocal security, and reconciliation.

Takeaway. The value of the counterfactual is not that history could simply be replayed. It reveals the unfinished work carried into the present: neither national freedom nor lasting security can be one-sided.

6. The Greater Israel Mirage—A Hazardous Dream at Enormous Cost

Why read it. It examines the strongest version of the Greater Israel promise on its own terms: territorial permanence will eventually force acceptance and deliver a safe haven.

Takeaway. Even its most “successful” outcome would require indefinite coercive capacity, external protection, and management of accumulated resentment. Greater Israel promises permanent security. The Dream proves to be a Mirage, instead entrenching conflict, isolation and enormous costs.

4. What rules permit moral clarity without prejudice?

Criticism becomes credible when its rules survive a change of actor.
Antisemitism is real and lethal; so are anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. None can be used to immunize a state, movement, or military strategy from scrutiny. Nor may scrutiny of political power become collective blame against Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, or any diaspora.

7. Can You Question Israel Without Being Called Antisemitic?

Why read it. It provides a practical bridge between two obligations: confronting antisemitism and judging Israeli claims and conduct by ordinary political and legal standards.

Takeaway. The test is consistency. Critique evidence, policy, ideology, and power. Reject ethnic conspiracy, collective guilt, and demands uniquely applied to Jews. Equal rules protect both free inquiry and human dignity.

8. A European Declaration for Middle East Stability

Why read it. It condenses the inquiry into three reusable principles: future, security, and reconciliation.

Takeaway. A proposal should be judged by whether it offers every population a livable future, treats security as reciprocal, and incorporates—not erases—historical injury. Principles matter when they constrain allies as well as adversaries.

5. What could break the cycles?

A diagnosis that ends with condemnation leaves the political field to armed actors and territorial facts. The final module therefore asks what kind of power could make a different future credible.
The answer offered here is European civil power: coordinated diplomatic, economic, legal, and civic support for actors who can build reciprocal political agency.

9. A European Civil Power Initiative for the Middle East

Why read it. It translates the series’ principles into an institutional proposal: give nonviolent political organization more capability and credibility than armed maximalism.

Takeaway. Civil power is not passivity. It requires conditional relationships, protection of civic space, sustained resources, and clear consequences for settlement, collective punishment, hostage-taking, attacks on civilians, and incitement—whoever commits them.

10. The Middle East Still Possible

Why read it. It ends with the destination rather than the machinery: a region whose histories and identities become sources of connection instead of permanent mobilization.

Takeaway. Peace must offer more than the absence of war. It needs a compelling picture of normal life, shared prosperity, cultural encounter, and political dignity. Without such a destination, fear will continue to outperform hope.

What the ten readings reveal

· Security without reciprocity produces insecurity.
Military superiority can suppress threats, but it cannot by itself produce legitimate acceptance. When control is experienced as permanent humiliation or dispossession, it continually regenerates resistance.

· Maximalisms reinforce one another.
Greater-Israel territorialism and eliminationist anti-Israel resistance present themselves as enemies, yet each supplies the fear, evidence, and recruitment narrative the other needs.

· Historical memory must be acknowledged but cannot govern the future alone.
The Holocaust, the Nakba, expulsion, persecution, terrorism, occupation, and war are not interchangeable. Each deserves precision.
Their political lesson is nevertheless universal: no people’s trauma grants a permanent exemption from another people’s humanity.

· Outside powers are participants, not spectators.
Western military, diplomatic, and economic choices have helped shape the incentive structure. Europe and the United States cannot plausibly call for peace while underwriting strategies that make a reciprocal settlement less attainable.

· A viable alternative must be both principled and powerful.
Equal rules are the compass; institutions, leverage, protection, and credible political agency are the vehicle.

The hard conclusion

Nearly eight decades after 1948, neither territorial expansion, overwhelming force, armed maximalism, nor externally managed negotiation has delivered the promised destination.
The Greater Israel project has advanced on the map, yet the safe, accepted, normal state it was meant to secure remains out of reach.
Palestinian strategies centered on Israel’s defeat or disappearance have likewise failed to restore rights or produce sovereignty; they have repeatedly helped Israel’s fortress logic prevail.

This is the mirage at work: every costly step appears to bring security or liberation closer, while the political conditions required for either recede.
The price has been enormous—paid first in Palestinian and Israeli lives, freedom, displacement, fear, and moral injury, and then across a region repeatedly organized around conflict.

The conclusion is not that history has made peace impossible.
It is that the strategies pursued most relentlessly have not been routes to their declared ends. Enlightenment begins by seeing that contradiction clearly.
Political responsibility begins by refusing to finance, excuse, or glorify another cycle—and by building a reciprocal alternative strong enough to compete with it.

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Thursday, September 17, 2026