Yuval Noah Harari

If you stop feeding it, eventually it dies down and peace always remains a possibility.

So I would not despair.

No matter what are the stories that kind of fill people's mind right now, the possibility of eventual reconciliation and peace is always there.

And I have something to say also about pain, but if you want to... No, I'd like to hear what you have to say about pain.

What we've been seeing throughout this war and many other wars is that when people are in pain, they simply cannot acknowledge the pain of somebody else.

Anytime, if I'm in pain, anything that distracts attention from my pain feels to me unjust and, again, even painful.

I mentioned earlier that Israelis are really, many Israelis, not all of them, simply incapable of acknowledging that the Palestinians are suffering.

Intellectually, they know it, but emotionally, they cannot be in the presence of

of an image, a text, a person telling them about the suffering of Palestinians.

Even if you tell them, I'm not accusing you of anything.

You're 100% just.

You're the most just people that ever existed.

And now let you acknowledge the pain of this Palestinian child.

They cannot do it.

And the same is true of the other side.

You know, I've seen examples of, you know, peace activists who kind of devoted their whole life to peace and reconciliation.

And yet, in the case of October 7th, they simply cannot recognize that Israelis suffered.

It's, you know, the human brain is an amazing thing with all these billions of neurons and hundreds of billions of synapses.

And yet it is so difficult for all these hundreds of billions of synapses to hold two ideas at the same time.

that the attraction to have a simple story.