Examining the Evidence, the History, and the Psychology Behind One of Humanity’s Deepest Divisions
There are few subjects that generate as much certainty, grief, anger, and division as Israel and Palestine. Entire conversations often end before they begin because people assume that understanding one side requires rejecting the humanity of the other. Labels quickly replace curiosity. “Pro-Israel.” “Pro-Palestinian.” “Anti-Zionist.” “Terrorist sympathizer.” “Colonizer.” “Antisemite.” “Islamophobe.”
Once these identities take hold, evidence often becomes secondary to belonging.
This article is not an attempt to convince you to join one political camp over another. It is an invitation to examine verified evidence, understand the historical events that shaped this conflict, and explore the psychological mechanisms that allow ordinary human beings to justify extraordinary suffering. Whether you identify as pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-American, or simply someone trying to understand what is happening, the same questions deserve honest attention.
What does the evidence actually show?
How did we arrive here?
And why does humanity continue to divide itself into “us” and “them,” even when the cost is measured in the lives of children?
The Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza
As of July 15, 2026, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that 73,246 Palestinians had been killed and 173,727 injured since October 7, 2023. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs publishes these figures while attributing them to the Ministry because the UN has not independently verified every reported death. Of the total, 71,444 fatalities had been individually identified by December 31, 2025, including 21,283 children, 10,983 women, 5,100 older people, and 34,078 men. By comparison, Israeli authorities reported more than 1,200 people killed in Israel during the October 7 attacks and their immediate aftermath, including 1,162 identified fatalities.
Numbers alone cannot determine whether a military campaign constitutes genocide or whether a particular attack was a war crime, but they reveal the scale and asymmetry of the human cost. Gaza’s reported death toll is more than 60 times the number killed in Israel during the October 7 attacks and their immediate aftermath. In a territory with a current estimated population of approximately 2.1 million, the reported Palestinian deaths represent roughly 3.5 percent of the population. When the reported injured are included, nearly 12 percent of Gaza’s population has been killed or physically injured. These percentages still exclude many indirect deaths associated with hunger, disease, exposure, untreated medical conditions, the destruction of hospitals, and the collapse of sanitation and public-health systems.
Independent research does not support dismissing the Palestinian count simply because it comes from Gaza’s health authorities. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet estimated 64,260 traumatic-injury deaths between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024—approximately 41 percent more than the 37,877 deaths recorded by the Ministry for the same period. A later population-based study estimated approximately 75,200 violent deaths by January 5, 2025, again substantially exceeding the contemporaneous official count. These studies did not verify every name on the Ministry’s list; they used independent statistical and survey methods to estimate how many deaths the damaged reporting system had failed to capture.
The UN Human Rights Office has separately undertaken case-by-case verification of a smaller portion of the fatalities. Among the deaths it verified, nearly 70 percent were women and children, and children between five and nine years old formed the largest individual age group. The available evidence therefore does not establish a perfectly complete count—no credible organization claims that such a count is currently possible. It does show that tens of thousands of named Palestinians have been documented as dead, that international investigators have independently verified part of that record, and that peer-reviewed studies have concluded the official total likely understates rather than overstates the number killed.
The physical destruction extends far beyond recorded deaths. By July 2026, UN reporting indicated that approximately 81 percent of Gaza’s structures had been damaged or destroyed, 76.6 percent of its housing units required reconstruction or repair, 93 percent of school buildings required major rehabilitation or complete reconstruction, and more than 63 university buildings had been destroyed. Approximately 88 percent of above-ground water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure was damaged, along with 90 percent of energy infrastructure. More than 58,000 children were reported to have lost one or both parents. These are not abstract measures of political disagreement. They describe the destruction of the physical and social conditions required for a population to live, learn, receive medical care, raise children, and imagine a future.
Acknowledging the scale of Palestinian death does not require denying the approximately 1,200 people killed in Israel, the suffering of hostages, or the continuing trauma experienced by Israeli families. Equal human worth does not require pretending that the scale of harm has been equal. It requires naming every loss accurately and refusing to make one population vivid while reducing the other to an imprecise phrase such as “tens of thousands.”
What Is Genocide?
The word genocide is one of the strongest accusations recognized under international law. Because of its gravity, it should neither be used carelessly nor dismissed without examination.
The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as certain prohibited acts—including killing members of a protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious group or deliberately creating conditions calculated to bring about that group’s physical destruction—when committed with the specific intent to destroy that group, in whole or in part.
The legal question is therefore not simply whether civilians have died in enormous numbers.
The legal question is whether there is evidence that those actions were carried out with the intent to destroy Palestinians as a protected group.
Intent is often the most difficult element to prove.
What Is the Evidence?
The question is not whether accusations exist.
They do.
The more important question is why so many international organizations, legal scholars, and human rights investigators have made them.
Those who argue that Israel has committed genocide point to several categories of evidence.
They cite the extraordinary scale of civilian deaths and injuries, including large numbers of women and children. They point to the widespread destruction of homes and neighborhoods across Gaza, leaving much of the population without permanent shelter. They highlight repeated attacks affecting hospitals, ambulances, schools, universities, refugee camps, journalists, aid workers, and medical personnel. They cite restrictions on humanitarian aid, food, fuel, electricity, medicine, and clean water, arguing that these policies have created living conditions incompatible with civilian survival.
Investigators have also examined statements made by certain Israeli political and military leaders that describe Palestinians in dehumanizing language or appear to advocate measures extending beyond military objectives. Those statements have been cited by legal scholars and United Nations experts as potentially relevant when assessing intent under the Genocide Convention.
Amnesty International concluded in 2024 that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Numerous United Nations Special Rapporteurs have argued that the available evidence is consistent with genocide. A growing number of genocide scholars have reached similar conclusions.
The International Court of Justice has not yet ruled that genocide has occurred.
However, in January 2024, the Court determined that South Africa’s claim was sufficiently plausible to justify issuing provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts, preserve evidence, and facilitate humanitarian assistance while the case proceeds. The Court has since issued additional provisional measures as conditions in Gaza deteriorated. A final judgment has not yet been delivered.
The International Criminal Court has separately issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Court also issued arrest warrants for Hamas leaders on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the October 7 attacks. These proceedings remain part of ongoing international legal processes.
Israel firmly rejects allegations of genocide and many allegations of war crimes.
Israeli officials argue that the country is exercising its inherent right of self-defense following the October 7 attacks. They maintain that Hamas deliberately embeds military operations within civilian neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, and refugee camps, making civilian casualties tragically difficult to avoid. Israel also argues that it has taken measures to reduce civilian harm while denying any intention to destroy the Palestinian people.
Readers may ultimately reach different conclusions.
The evidence should be examined honestly regardless of where those conclusions lead.
Evidence of Alleged War Crimes
Even if the legal threshold for genocide were never met, allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity would remain profoundly significant.
International investigators have examined allegations including indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks on civilian areas, attacks affecting hospitals and protected medical facilities, attacks on humanitarian workers, forced displacement of civilian populations, collective punishment, the obstruction of humanitarian assistance, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, arbitrary detention, torture, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure not justified by military necessity.
Many of these allegations have been documented by United Nations bodies, humanitarian organizations, journalists, and independent investigations.
Israel disputes many of these findings, arguing that military necessity, Hamas’s tactics, and the realities of urban warfare provide important context often omitted from international criticism.
These competing legal arguments are now being examined through international courts rather than public opinion alone.
How Did We Get Here?
The present conflict cannot be understood without understanding the history that preceded it.
Palestine has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years by diverse communities, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, Samaritans, and others. During the late nineteenth century, modern political Zionism emerged in Europe as a response to centuries of antisemitism, persecution, and exclusion. Many Jewish thinkers concluded that Jews could never be truly safe without exercising political self-determination in a homeland of their own.
For many Jews, Zionism represented survival.
For many Palestinians already living in Palestine, it represented the arrival of a political movement that threatened their own future within the land they had called home for generations.
These two experiences were not identical.
Neither were they entirely unrelated.
During World War I, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration expressing support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while also promising that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities.
Those two commitments proved impossible to reconcile.
Following the Holocaust, international sympathy for Jewish survivors increased dramatically. In 1947, the United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leaders accepted the proposal in principle despite disagreements over its boundaries. Palestinian Arab leadership and surrounding Arab states rejected it, arguing that the United Nations had no legitimate authority to divide a country against the wishes of its majority population.
War followed.
Israel declared independence in 1948.
Approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the fighting, an event remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Hundreds of villages were depopulated or destroyed. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jews later fled or were expelled from Arab countries over the following years and resettled largely in Israel.
History produced two refugee populations.
One eventually acquired citizenship and a state.
The other remains, for many, stateless generations later.
The Contradictions We Inherit
One of the most uncomfortable aspects of this conflict is that nearly everyone involved speaks the language of justice.
Israel describes itself as a democracy committed to protecting Jewish self-determination after centuries of persecution.
The United States frequently describes itself as a defender of democracy, freedom, and human rights while remaining Israel’s closest military and diplomatic ally.
Palestinians seek self-determination, equal rights, dignity, and freedom from occupation.
These values are not inherently incompatible.
The contradictions emerge in how they are applied.
Israel functions as a democracy for its citizens, yet millions of Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank are subject to Israeli authority without participating in Israeli national elections. Critics argue this creates a profound democratic contradiction. Israel responds that Palestinians are not Israeli citizens and are represented through separate governing institutions established under the Oslo Accords.
The United States has long championed freedom and national self-determination while providing extensive military, diplomatic, and financial support to Israel throughout a military occupation that the International Court of Justice concluded in its 2024 advisory opinion is unlawful under international law.
These observations are not unique to Israel or the United States.
History repeatedly shows that nations often struggle to live up to the ideals they publicly celebrate.
The deeper question is whether we are willing to examine those contradictions honestly, especially when they involve governments we admire.
Fear Can Become an Identity
Facts explain what happened.
Psychology helps explain why.
Communities that survive persecution often become deeply committed to ensuring it never happens again. That desire is profoundly human. The instinct to protect our families and our communities is one of the oldest instincts we possess.
The difficulty begins when survival becomes inseparable from identity itself.
When that happens, fear slowly reshapes perception.
Another community no longer appears as neighbors.
They become demographic threats.
Security risks.
Obstacles.
Enemies.
History shows this pattern repeatedly. Empires have used it. Colonizers have used it. Revolutionaries have used it. Democracies have used it. Dictatorships have used it.
The names change.
The psychology rarely does.
Trauma can produce extraordinary compassion.
It can also produce extraordinary fear.
Fear, left unquestioned, often convinces otherwise decent people that harming another population is necessary for protecting their own.
Do Zionism and Palestinian National Identity Share More Than They Realize?
At first glance, these movements appear entirely opposed.
One seeks the safety and self-determination of the Jewish people.
The other seeks the safety and self-determination of the Palestinian people.
Political disagreements over borders, sovereignty, security, refugees, settlements, and governance are real and cannot be dismissed.
Yet beneath these disagreements lies something strikingly similar.
Both peoples carry generational memories of displacement.
Both fear losing their homeland.
Both believe their history has been misunderstood.
Both seek dignity.
Both seek safety.
Both seek the right to exist without fear.
Recognizing these similarities does not erase accountability for violence committed by governments or armed groups. Nor does it imply that every action taken by each side is morally equivalent.
It simply reminds us that beneath competing identities are human beings whose deepest hopes often resemble one another far more than their politics would suggest.
Beyond “Us” and “Them”
One of the central ideas explored throughout Proof That You’re God is that identity is one of the mind’s most powerful tools. It helps us organize the world, but it can also become something we mistake for who we truly are.
When identity becomes absolute, protecting it begins to matter more than understanding reality.
Evidence becomes threatening.
Curiosity becomes betrayal.
Compassion becomes conditional.
History repeatedly shows that atrocities become possible when one group successfully convinces itself that another group is less deserving of dignity than their own. This pattern is not unique to Israelis. It is not unique to Palestinians. It is not unique to Americans or Europeans or any religion or political ideology.
It is a human pattern.
The challenge before us is therefore larger than deciding whose flag deserves our loyalty.
It is deciding whether our loyalty to an identity is more important than our commitment to truth, justice, and our shared humanity.
If there is hope for lasting peace, it will not come from denying history, ignoring suffering, or pretending difficult questions do not exist. It will come from having the courage to examine evidence honestly, hold every government and armed group accountable to the same moral standards, and remember that every life lost belongs to someone who loved and was loved.
Continue the Exploration
If this article challenged you, unsettled you, or encouraged you to look beyond the familiar stories you’ve inherited, continue the exploration with our book, Proof That You’re God. Rather than asking you to adopt another ideology, it invites you to investigate how identity itself shapes the way we see the world. When we begin to understand how the mind creates “us” and “them,” we may discover that our greatest conflicts are not only political or historical—they are deeply human. The path toward a more peaceful world begins with the willingness to see another person, even one we profoundly disagree with, as fully human.
