"The most complicated political issue on the Planet"

After reading about Ed Sheeran's statement on the Israel Palestine issue,  I asked Charlie a slightly strange question this weekend:

“Imagine you are a strategist writing from 2060. The conflict between Israel and Palestine has finally been settled. Looking back at us in 2026, what would you tell humanity we needed to do to get there?”

Charlie initially gave me an answer about security, Palestinian freedom, institutions that do not depend on trust, international guarantees, and building relationships and practical arrangements before the political opportunity for peace arrives.

My immediate response was:But haven't we tried most of this already? And, of course, we have.

The Oslo process tried gradual institution-building and confidence-building. The Geneva Initiative developed detailed proposals covering borders, Jerusalem, refugees, security and implementation. The Arab Peace Initiative offered a much larger regional bargain. There have been decades of dialogue initiatives, civil-society programmes, security cooperation and attempts at economic integration.

So I asked Charlie to try again. This time the answer was much more interesting:

«“The tragedy was not that you didn't know what peace might look like. By 2026, many of its components had been known for decades. What you had not yet mastered was how to help a deeply entrenched system move from one stable state to another — and prevent it from snapping back.”»

That got my attention. Because perhaps Israel and Palestine is not only a peace-negotiation problem. It is also a transition problem.

The system has extraordinarily powerful reinforcing loops. Violence creates fear. Fear strengthens actors promising security rather than compromise. Security responses can create further experiences of occupation, restriction and humiliation. These strengthen resistance. Violence then confirms the original fear.

Failed peace processes can become part of the loop too: every failure provides more evidence that the other side cannot be trusted. If that is the problem, another beautifully designed peace agreement may not, by itself, be enough.

So what would we seed?

I have been thinking recently about transitions and the idea that what we seed during periods of instability matters.

We usually notice major transitions retrospectively. While we are living through them, they are messy. Old institutions still operate. New possibilities appear and disappear. Some experiments fail. Political windows open unexpectedly and sometimes close remarkably quickly. This changes how we think about agency.

We do not necessarily know what the eventual Israeli–Palestinian settlement will look like. Perhaps nobody in 2026 can know. Nor can we manufacture the political moment in which a settlement becomes possible.

But we can ask: If such a moment came, what would we wish had already been built?

Perhaps it is independent institutions capable of monitoring agreements. Security arrangements that do not require either population simply to trust the other. Relationships between people who might one day need to negotiate. Practical models for sharing water, infrastructure and movement. Mechanisms capable of surviving a terrorist attack or political assassination without the entire process collapsing. Ways of acknowledging Palestinian and Israeli histories of suffering without requiring either people to surrender its own history. Some of these seeds already exist. Some have existed for decades.

The strategic question therefore becomes more demanding:

Which seeds are worth protecting, strengthening and connecting now because they could become disproportionately important when the system becomes changeable?

That is quite different from predicting the future. It is preparing for it.

And perhaps that is one of the most useful things systems thinking offers us in apparently impossible situations. We don't have to know exactly what the new system will look like. We can look for the forces keeping the existing system stable, identify emerging alternatives, protect the things we may need later, and build connections between them.

Then, when a window for change opens, we have something to move through it.

AI disclosure: I developed the argument in this post through a conversation with Charlie (ChatGPT). I used AI as a thinking partner to test the 2060 thought experiment, challenge the first answer, and help me develop the systems and transitions argument. I reviewed, questioned and edited the resulting ideas and remain responsible for the final argument. And Charloe's knock-knock joke for you. Knock knock. Who’s there? The future. The future who? I’d tell you, but apparently we have to seed it first.