Jasr Kawkby is a doctor, originally from Gaza and now living in London. He is a member of the Steering Group of UK Friends of Standing Together.

Yaniv Aknin is a tech worker, originally from Tel Aviv, now living in London. He is involved in UK Friends of Standing Together’s London branch.

Jasr and Yaniv both gave speeches at Humanists UK’s Festival of Humanism 2026, on 13 June. Thanks to both for their permission to republish the speeches, which reflect their personal views.

Click here for Jasr’s speech

Click here for Yaniv’s speech

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Jasr Kawkby:

I’d like to share with you some reflections on the Palestine-Israel conflict through a humanist-rationalist lens.

How I Became Humanist

I grew up in Palestine in a Muslim family, and already in my early teenage years the concept of accident of birth was shaping my thinking.

I remember thinking that had I been born a few streets down the road, I might have been born into Christian belief. And had I been born only thirty kilometres to the north, I could have been born into Jewish belief.

I was dissatisfied with inheriting something as important as a belief system and a worldview. I wanted to work it out for myself.

That was one of the early threads that eventually led me away from Islam, and how I became a humanist, long before I knew the word existed.

Eventually, I left Gaza for Europe to study, but the concept of accident of birth continued to shape my thinking.

Just as I refused to inherit a faith, I became unwilling to inherit a political cause.

So I deliberately stepped away from the Palestinian cause and became involved in other struggles for justice and equality far from home, for example those of the Kurds and the Tamils.

There, it was easier for me to be confident that I was acting out of universalist humanist principles rather than ethnic or religious allegiance.

I learned that in our part of the world, it is easier, and more forgivable, to leave a faith than to question the cause of your people.

Inevitably, I returned to Palestine-Israel and tried to apply the same universalist lens to my own cause.

Now, I cannot pretend that I managed to do this fully. I think our tribal allegiances run much deeper than our reason or conscious thinking can reach.

But I tried as best as I could. And I’m still trying.

This conflict, from its very roots, evolved because of departures from humanist universalist principles.

It has also been riddled with cognitive fallacies, moral blind spots, and imprecise language, making it appear too complex to understand.

I don’t believe it is too complex to understand when examined through a rationalist lens, though too complex to solve.

I’m also of the view that Palestinian and Israeli humanists, when examining this conflict, should arrive at similar conclusions if they start from universalist principles, making this framework a powerful bridge between both communities.

If they noticeably diverge, I would assume that tribal allegiance has quietly displaced the universal principle.

Language and Misnomers

Precise thinking requires precise language.

The language of the conflict has often been distorted, and so has thinking about it, by misnomers designed to frame thinking and cloud judgment.

I’ve chosen two to look at: the War of Independence and the Law of Return.

The War of Independence

The war that expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 was named the War of Independence.

Yet independence is the language commonly used by peoples throwing off colonial rule.

Once the commonly used language is applied, it becomes apparent that this was a colonial war, one that left the natives fighting for independence ever since.

The Law of Return

The term return is used for a law that grants any Jew in the world the right to settle in Palestine-Israel, even when neither they nor their families have ever lived there.

This law was built upon another departure from rationalist thinking: the unprecedented assumption that a right to return can be established by the presence of one’s ancestors in a land thousands of years ago.

Or that historical connections and spiritual attachments can be translated into territorial claims.

While, in parallel, and compounding both the injustice and the absurdity of this terminology, return is denied to those who had been expelled.

And here I want to step slightly outside analysis and make a point.

I find it morally wrong to take advantage of this law and to settle in a land from which the natives had been expelled and prevented from returning.

And I call on those who benefit from this law to reject this dubious privilege.

Predictable Consequences

Much of the development of this conflict was, and must have been, predictable.

Honest, rationalist cause-and-effect reasoning about the Nakba, the primal wound, would have foretold much of what followed: that a displaced people would continue to fight for return.

And that the state which displaced them would have to grow militarily, becoming increasingly ruthless and oppressive in order to sustain itself against them.

And, eventually, in doing so, that state would have to expand its occupation further and take possession of more land.

The Deepest Moral Blind Spot

As we know, the roots of the conflict lie here in Europe, where Jews were subjected to centuries of hatred and persecution, culminating in pogroms and the Holocaust, one of the greatest crimes against humanity.

However, when the grave injustice of expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the Nakba is raised, the answer more often refers to Jewish suffering and the need for a place of safety.

In a profound failure of reasoning, the moral weight of Jewish persecution in Europe is invoked to justify and to deflect moral scrutiny of inflicting suffering on another people who bore no responsibility for it.

This has become the conflict’s deepest moral blind spot.

When the October 7th attack happened, some immediately reached for context and tried to explain its historic roots. Doing so in the immediate aftermath of the attack was wrong and insensitive.

That moment belonged to grief, compassion for the victims and their families, and condemnation of the massacre. But context must eventually be named, and those who seek it must not be bullied into silence by accusations of justification. This very conflation of explanation with justification is a form of thought control.

Those who carried out this attack were the children and grandchildren of those expelled from their land in 1948, kept for decades under a brutal, degrading, and humiliating military occupation.

The Logic of Occupation

The ongoing expansion of colonial settlements in the West Bank, with the continued expulsion of Palestinian families and the demolition of their villages and the aggressive judification of Jerusalem, is the Nakba’s mechanism still running, because the founding assumption has never been challenged and dismantled.

The demise of Israeli democracy and the rise of ultranationalist and supremacist factions were predictable.

A state cannot rule over another people by force and remain truly democratic.

The more than sixty discriminatory laws in Israel, relegating Palestinian citizens to second-class status, culminating in and consolidated by the Nation-State Law, have their roots in the exceptionalism of the Law of Return and its founding logic.

Asymmetry

Here I’d like to stress that rational and moral failures exist on both sides.

However, my focus has fallen primarily on the Israeli side. This is because of the vast asymmetry in responsibility, power, and human suffering. This is a conflict between occupier and occupied, a war between the mightiest military force in the Middle East and a practically defenceless people. And most of the destruction of human life is inflicted by Israeli forces.

Nonviolent Resistance

We Palestinians must, and will, continue to fight for our freedom, dignity, sovereignty, and for our land.

To achieve this, I advocate for nonviolent resistance.

Not because Palestinians do not have the right to armed resistance. Every people under occupation has that right, a right embedded in our deepest intuitions of justice and enshrined in international law.

Yet I advocate for nonviolent resistance for both moral and strategic reasons.

Armed resistance, under the existing conditions, has become morally untenable. With targeted military attacks nearly impossible, most victims of armed resistance are innocent civilians. Armed resistance has repeatedly brought disastrous consequences for the very people it claims to defend.

These attacks have alienated and unsettled international support, making it harder to galvanise it.

And they have fuelled the radicalisation of Israeli society, strengthening the forces most hostile to Palestinians. While weakening our Israeli and Jewish allies, those who stand and fight for Palestinian equality and justice.

But for Palestinians to fully embrace nonviolent resistance, and to trust it as a genuine and effective alternative, not a mere covert demand for surrender, they need to see the international community employ all available political, legal, and economic pressure and sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law and human rights.

And most acutely now, Gaza is crying out for justice.

It calls on the world to hold Israel accountable for the genocide and for those responsible to be brought before international courts.

And here I’d like specifically to call on Humanists UK to be part of this international pressure on Israel: to be more outspoken in condemning its war crimes and in asserting the sanctity of Palestinian lives.

Sadly, I hold little hope, and I am under no illusion that Palestinians will receive justice or equality in the foreseeable future.

Yet I remain convinced that the only path to genuine and lasting peace lies in a framework rooted in humanist and universalist values: reason, equality, and the unconditional dignity of every human being, rejecting all forms of ethnic and religious exceptionalism.

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Yaniv Aknin:

I’m here to share my opinions as a Humanist about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I’ll get to that shortly, but first I’d like to clarify the right order of things. These aren’t my opinions about Israel and Palestine as a Humanist; I’m a Humanist because I was born in Israel and I have these opinions. So I’ll start there.

I was born in Tel Aviv in 1980; only a few years after Jasr, only 80km north. If I’d ask my parents, are we Jewish? the answer would be an emphatic “Yes!” And does this land belong to us? “Of course.” Because God gave it to us? “Don’t be silly, God doesn’t exist.”

You see, I never left my faith, because I had no faith to begin with.

I grew up through the suicide bombings of the 90s. I remember sitting with my dad at a cafe when suddenly we heard – and felt – a muffled explosion.

“What was that?!” I asked my dad.

“A bus,” he said calmly, as ambulances started wailing in the distance.

I was 14, I’m 45 now, and I still remember that muffled explosion.

I narrowly missed two other buses; in 1995, with seven casualties, and in 2002, ten.

I was happy and keen to join the army, intending to defend my people until peace arrives. I served seven years with dedication and devotion, discharged as a Captain. My time in the IDF made me doubt the premise of fighting until peace arrives. Even doubt that we really want peace, or that what we’re doing can be called “defence”.

Doubt isn’t rejection; I still understand how you might want peace and serve in the IDF. You see, the buses were very compelling.

But “understanding” also isn’t “agreement”, and my doubt remained. After I was discharged I tried to become more active and better informed. I knew I stopped believing things I once believed, but I wasn’t quite sure what new things to believe. Many years later, meeting Faith to Faithless members in London, I felt a lot of kinship with them.

Maybe I did lose some kind of faith, though not a religion.

We moved to the UK a few years later, my wife and older son. I used to say, “I want to raise an Athenian boy, and I don’t think I can do that in Sparta.” I didn’t use the word Humanist at the time, but I guess that’s what I meant by “Athenian boy”. I tried to leave Israel behind, though I knew I would never succeed.

Everything changed in October 2023.

First October 7th, which found me and my wife on a lovely weekend getaway in Suffolk, and that’s where we heard the news. By some coincidence, I was booked for an online Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on October 8th. I never did anything like that, and it was surreal to meet “the other side” exactly “on the day after”. We all knew it’s also “the day before”.

Then on the 21st of October my dad died unexpectedly in his sleep.

I flew to bury him with the backdrop of rockets and sirens and interceptions. Many Israelis felt betrayed by “fellow liberals in the West”. They could only see their pain and fear, and anything but unconditional support was seen as treason and antisemitism. Douglas Murray became an Israeli hero for a while.

I disagree with almost everything Murray says, but I agreed the west can’t protect its values unless it knows what they are.

What are my values? I literally sat in my office in London, wrote down my values on a piece of paper, and searched online to find a match. Humanism: secular rationality, personal liberties, collective responsibility. Spot on! I joined Humanists UK in January 2024, and decided to be more socially and politically active here in the UK.

I can’t afford to lose another country. There is a segue I won’t take here, not a talk from the River to the Sea, but a talk from Clacton to Southport. Another time.

But I can’t let go of my old country, either. One thing led to another, from that dialogue group over Zoom, to in-person meetings, from donating for humanitarian aid in Gaza to organising fundraisers, from joint protests with Palestinian partners to joint public speaking. And maybe most importantly, meeting people, making friends, and studying Arabic.

It’s a journey.

What did I learn? Is there a Humanist solution to the conflict? I’ll share my thoughts, but beyond the usual caveat that I don’t represent Israel (and don’t want to) nor all Israelis, I’ll say upfront I don’t have “The Solution”. In general, I’m sceptical of people who think they know The Solution. But I do think Humanism provides us with a framework to think and act.

Step one, Israel must stop its barbaric actions, or be stopped.

By “barbaric actions” I mean political manipulation of aid in Gaza, abetting daily pogroms in the West Bank, denying prisoners’ human rights and detaining people unlawfully, and regularly eroding the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. For some people, this is an unbearably big first step. For others it’s woefully insufficient.

To me, this list – aid in Gaza, pogroms, prisoners, citizen equality – is the non-negotiables. This is what you must call for if you’re pro-Israeli sovereignty anywhere on that land.

A few months ago I was handing out leaflets in London with a joint peace organisation. A young lady handed me back a crumpled leaflet.

“You are naive and you don’t understand. I’ve been to Israel, there is no ‘occupation’, and people like you are only making people like me unsafe here in London.”

“גם אני הייתי בישראל! את מדברת עברית?”

She didn’t speak Hebrew either. She was astounded to learn who she spoke with. I offered to share my personal experience taking part in the occupation that doesn’t exist. But she also surprised me with her first reaction. First thing she blurted after she understood who I am:

“Then, why are you helping them?”

When she said “them” she pointed at the other protesters, and a sign that held the dangerous antisemitic words “Against War and Occupation | For Peace, Justice and Equality for All in Israel-Palestine”.

I told her I’m not here against Israel, I’m here for Israel. I carry this sign not only out of hope for the children in Gaza, primarily because it’s the only hope I see for children in Tel Aviv.

Aid, pogroms, prisoners, citizen equality. These are the prime interests of anyone supporting Israel.

But then what?

I handed a leaflet to another chap at that protest. He looked at it and said:

“I don’t understand; Peace, Justice, Equality, Palestine – I know these words. But what is Israel? It doesn’t exist. It’s a lie.”

His accent suggested he speaks Arabic. My Arabic is far from perfect today and was worse a few months ago, but I gave it a go.

“كيف إنت بتقول إن المكان اللي ولدت فيه كذب؟”

“Why do you say the place I was born in is a ‘lie’?”

Maybe you don’t like it. But how is it a lie? I’m right here!

He looked at me.

“You’re Israeli?”

“Yes.”

“And why do you speak Arabic?”

“So I can speak with you.”

He smiled and we had a civil chat. His perspective was that Zionism ruined the Middle East. That Jews were safe and prosperous in the Muslim world and even in Palestine, until imperial and colonial forces collaborated with Zionists to occupy Palestine.

This is not my perspective, but we couldn’t have a proper historic discussion on the street. We can’t even have a proper historic discussion in this talk.

But if aid, pogroms, prisoners, and citizen equality are the non-negotiable first steps any Humanist must support… what is the second step?

What if you’re anti-Zionist? What is that vision for the land?

Humanism can’t answer that. We can debate the merit of future visions, or if we think we’ll find answers in the past we can dispassionately examine historic facts.

But we can’t move millions of people in a manner that is compatible with Humanist values, no matter if they speak Arabic or Hebrew.

A Humanist vision for Israel-Palestine must take into account at least the 15 million people living on that land, and probably also the other 15 million people living in diasporas.

Whatever our opinion, it should address these people’s safety and dignity. Their freedom of identity, language, and belief.

This is hard, and where we must we may have to take some risks or use different kinds of force. But we must remember that even people with radical ideological beliefs are people, and we can’t harm them collectively either. It’s not ethical and it’s just not effective.

You can punish a person, you can’t punish a people. I don’t care about their ideology or who they voted for or what a public opinion poll says they want to do.

We can and should prosecute criminal leaders, or lay sanctions on oppressive regimes; we certainly don’t have to sell weapons to any oppressive regime (a pet peeve of mine is UK arms sales in the Middle East; catch me later if you’re interested).

We just can’t somehow intervene and forcefully replace the basic foundations of peace and reconciliation.

Listening and dialogue, shared language, de-radicalisation, re-humanisation, joint interests.

We should remain honest and candid about our end goal and thoughtful about how we get there. We can oppose ideology while supporting the people that hold it. I wish Israel knew the limits of power. I also wish the international community knew them. There are many things we can’t really influence.

Millions of people, refugees, slaughtered, hungry, wretched, fragmented. Expelled from their indigenous land. Unbearable guilt.

What can we do? How can we help? What can we do?

Isn’t that what we said about Jews once?

I was born 30 years later.

And here we are.

Posted 17 June 2026