The 11 biggest myths about Israel-Palestine

Once you see the truth about a few widely held misconceptions, the conflict starts to make a lot more sense.

Myth #1: The conflict is too complex to possibly understand

This is, in many ways, the Israel-Palestine misconception from which all other Israel-Palestine misconceptions flow: that the conflict is an impossibly complicated mess so far beyond human untangling orcomprehension that we should not really try.

It's true that Israel-Palestine is complicated, but it's not thatcomplicated (you can get the full primer here). At its most basic level, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is over who gets what land and how that land is controlled. Yes, there are some very thorny details — how to divide the city of Jerusalem, for example — but the list of such details is not impossibly long. And while these issues can be extremely difficult to resolve, grasping them is not.

There are three main reasons the conflict can feel much more complicated than it actually is. First, it's been going on for several decades, which is a long time. That means hashing out any one detail means reciting through lots of history; while it can be tough to remember all that information, this does not make the issues inherently impossible to understand or resolve.

Second, each side has a very different narrative of the conflict, what's happened, what matters, and who bears what responsibilities. So you'll hear a lot of contradictory information, which can be confusing and exhausting; this effect is compounded by the fact that American public discourse also splits between the two narratives. But having two versions of history is not at all unusual in big conflicts, and it does not actually make the reality of what's happened somehow beyond human understanding.

Third, pro-Israeli/pro-Palestinian partisans often push the idea that the conflict is complex beyond outsiders' comprehension, or that it is exceedingly simple ("our side is right"). In both tellings, the conclusion is the same: you shouldn't think too hard or read too much about what's happening. This is a sadly effective way to shut down conversation; it make people want to ignore the other side's legitimate positions, ignore their own preferred side's abuses, or simply check out altogether.

The effect of all this, by the way, is to yield the conversation to the most vehement partisans, which is one of several reasons why that conversation is so toxic. It also helps serve the status quo of perpetual conflict, which is great news for extremists on both sides that want to see the conflict end through total military victory over the other. So consider it your civic duty as a citizen of the world to ignore the naysayers who insist you could never possibly understand this conflict — you can.

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