Becoming a Middle East expert used to be a serious undertaking. There were languages to learn, histories to study, and endless archives through which to trawl.
One was expected to know the difference between Sunni and Shia Islamic teachings, locate the Golan Heights on a map, and spend enough time in the region to discover that Jews, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, Druze, Bedouin and everyone else living there had stubbornly refused to organize themselves according to any Western undergraduate’s reading list.
Fortunately, those exhausting days are over. Expertise has been democratized.
Today, becoming an authority on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires approximately seven minutes-eight if you are a complete duff-a TikTok account and the ability to say “settler colonialism" with sufficient moral disappointment.
This is progress.
The old expertise model was terribly inconvenient. The experts often knew things that complicated what would otherwise be a simple argument.
The modern Middle East expertise industry-and it is an industry-has solved this problem by eliminating unnecessary information that occupies space in your brain that could be better used for looking vacuous.
Here is everything you need.
Minute One: Learn the word “colonialism"
This is foundational. Every complicated conflict becomes considerably easier once one party has been identified as an imperial master.
This allows you to label Israel a settler-colonial state without getting distracted by troublesome questions such as where Jews are indigenous to, why Jewish religious texts contain so many references to Jerusalem, why Hebrew is a Semitic language, why Jews have prayed toward Jerusalem for millennia, why there were continuous Jewish communities in the land way before Islam existed, or why archaeology keeps inconveniently revealing Jewish things in places Jews were not supposed to come from.
These are details. The important thing is that many Jews arrived from elsewhere, and that is as good as a homicide detective finding a body when it comes to proving colonialism.
You may encounter some irritating know-it-all who points out that enormous numbers of Israelis descend from Jews who fled from or were expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries.
Do not panic. They are also colonizers. How Iraqi Jews colonized the Middle East by being expelled from Baghdad to Jerusalem is an advanced theoretical question that need not concern beginners.
Colonialism is not really about geography anymore anyhow. It is about vibes, and Israeli vibes are extremely colonial. It has an army, borders and people who sometimes speak English as well as Hebrew.
Case closed.
Minute Two: Memorize “apartheid"
Now that you possess one powerful word, you need another.
“Apartheid" is ideal because everybody knows apartheid was evil, which saves considerable time establishing whether Israel is evil.
The technique is simple. Say “apartheid." If challenged, say “Amnesty International." If challenged further, look appalled that anyone could dispute Amnesty International.
Do not get drawn into tedious discussions about Israeli Arabs voting, serving in parliament, becoming judges, doctors, university professors or anything similarly distracting.
Someone may explain that Judea and Samaria have a different legal and political status from sovereign Israeli territory. This person is trying to exhaust and overwhelm you with nuance, which is a classic Zionist mind trick.
Remember: expertise means refusing to allow complexity to interfere with moral clarity.
Not this Moral Clarity, obviously. The other kind.
Minute Three: Discover 1948
This is the crucial year in which Israel declared independence, was recognized by the UN, and the ancient Hebraic state was recreated.
Crucially, for our purposes, nothing happened before this year. There was no British Mandate, no Ottoman Empire, no Arab conquest, no Roman conquest, no Jewish kingdoms, no pogroms, no Holocaust, no rejection of partition proposals, and definitely no competing nationalist movements.
History began in 1948 when European Jews arrived unexpectedly in "Palestine" and decided to create Israel on a whim.
This is an exceptionally useful chronology. Starting history at carefully selected moments is one of the great skills of political analysis.
For example, if discussing the October 7 pogrom, begin on October 8. If discussing an Israeli airstrike, begin immediately after the event that prompted it. Palestinian Arab refugee discussions should always begin with their displacement.
If Jewish refugees from Arab countries are the topic, terminate the topic instantly.
You are learning quickly.
Minute Four: Learn the oppressor-oppressed matrix
This is the most important minute. You may previously have believed that human beings were morally responsible for their actions. That is an outdated framework.
Modern expertise requires placing everyone into one of two categories: oppressor and oppressed.
Once assigned, these categories perform most of the intellectual work. The oppressor possesses agency, while the oppressed possesses context.
If an Israeli commits violence, ask what this reveals about Israeli society. If a Palestinian Arab commits violence, ask what happened to him. If an Israeli says something hateful, quote him. If a Palestinian Arab says something hateful, explain him. If Israelis elect extremists, this reveals the darkening character of Israeli democracy. If Palestinian Arabs elect extremists, this reveals their desperation.
Notice the elegance. One side acts; the other reacts. One side has ideology; the other has trauma. One side makes choices. The other has root causes.
This framework is particularly useful because it allows you to insist that you respect Palestinian Arabs while quietly denying them the moral agency normally associated with adulthood.
Never underestimate the sophistication required to patronize an entire people while calling it solidarity.
Minute Five: Acquire a keffiyeh
You now know enough to start appearing and speaking in public. A keffiyeh helps if you are lacking confidence.
Until recently, you may have known almost nothing about Palestinian politics. This is not an obstacle. Clothing has long been an efficient substitute for scholarship.
Wear the keffiyeh around your shoulders, photograph yourself, and add a watermelon emoji.
You now possess roughly the same Middle East credentials as several hundred student organizations. At this stage, you may begin correcting Israelis.
This is particularly important. An Israeli may tell you something about October 7, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Second Intifada or what it feels like to run with children toward a bomb shelter.
Listen respectfully, then explain why their lived experience is structurally unreliable. Normally, lived experience is sacred, but we must not become fundamentalists.
Some lived experiences are more lived than others. If the Israeli becomes irritated, this demonstrates Zionism’s inherent aggression.
Take notes. You may have material for your dissertation.
Minute Six: Master selective specificity
The advanced Middle East expert knows precisely when details matter. Israeli politicians should be quoted by name. Every offensive remark should be documented. Every coalition partner matters, and every settler outburst reveals something profound about the Zionist project.
On the Palestinian Arab side, specificity is frequently unnecessary. “Hamas" may be replaced with “Palestinian resistance." “Palestinian Islamic Jihad" can usually be omitted altogether. Iranian funding is an unnecessary geopolitical complication.
Hamas’ wicked and twisted religious ideology risks Orientalizing the resistance. Its charter is historical context, its statements are rhetoric, its massacres require context, and its popularity requires more context.
Context is one of the Middle East’s great renewable resources. It is generated in unlimited quantities whenever Palestinian Arabs do something awful.
Israelis receive rather less. There is an important academic principle at work here: powerful people require scrutiny; powerless people require explanation.
Therefore, if a powerful country responds to a weaker armed organization, the intellectually serious approach is to examine the powerful country’s response while treating the weaker organization’s behavior primarily as evidence against the powerful country.
This may sound circular. That is because you have not studied enough theory.
Minute Seven: Announce the solution
Congratulations. Six minutes ago, you could not distinguish Ramallah from Riyadh. You are now ready to solve the conflict (and you stiill can't distiinguish Ramallah from Riyadh).
The solutions are obvious: ceasefire, end the occupation, dismantle apartheid, decolonize "Palestine", return the refugees, one Arab-majority democratic state, or two states or maybe even no state at all.
The details are flexible, but the moral confidence is not.
Should some smartypants ask what happens to seven million Israeli Jews under your preferred arrangement, explain that equal rights will protect everyone. This is very reassuring even if it is entirely implausible.
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya demonstrate the Middle East’s famously effortless relationship with multiethnic democratic arrangements, so there is little reason for concern.
If an Israeli asks why Jews should gamble their physical survival on your constitutional theory, accuse them of catastrophizing and projecting their historic fears onto the present day. Jews can be notoriously neurotic about these things.
History provides no obvious explanation. You have now completed your training and are ready for television. Yet before accepting your first invitation, here are some advanced techniques worth mastering.
The first is geographical confidence.
Never allow your inability to locate something or somewhere to prevent you from having an opinion about it. The Middle East expert understands that maps are themselves colonial constructs.
This is fortunate because maps contain troublesome information. Israel, for instance, is surprisingly small, even tiny, which can generate sympathy. Avoid scale wherever possible; use enlarged maps of Gaza.
Never place Israel next to the Arab world unless discussing Israeli expansionism, at which point the visual discrepancy may produce unhelpful cognitive effects.
The second technique is historical compression.
Several thousand years of Jewish history should be described as “religious claims," while the few generations of Palestinian Arab history should be described as “indigenous memory."
Precision matters.
The third is linguistic hygiene.
“Terrorist" is a politically loaded term. “Militant" is safer. “Resistance fighter" may be appropriate depending upon your department.
Israeli soldiers, however, should never just be soldiers. They are “occupation forces," “the Israeli military machine" or, for advanced practitioners, “agents of settler-colonial Zionist violence."
Vocabulary does not just describe reality. Properly deployed, it saves you the trouble of arguing about it.
The fourth technique is perhaps the most important: never ask what the Palestinian Arabs might be doing wrong.
This is victim blaming. If Palestinian Arab political leadership has rejected opportunities, investigate why Israel’s offer was inadequate. Palestinian Arab corruption is an opportunity to look at how occupation corrupts a culture and its people.
If Hamas diverts resources toward tunnels and weapons, discuss the imaginary blockade. If Palestinian Arab society contains antisemitism, discuss European colonialism.
There is always an upstream Israeli cause, which is intellectually convenient because it produces a completely closed explanatory system.
Everything Israel does proves Israeli responsibility, as does everything the Palestinian Arabs do.
Karl Popper would have had questions. Fortunately, he is dead.
The final stage of expertise is learning to distrust real experts. People who speak Arabic or Hebrew may have become compromised by proximity. Those who have spent decades covering the region may possess outdated frameworks. Military analysts are militarists. Historians are contested.
Israelis are biased because they are Israeli. Palestinian Arabs are authentic because they are Palestinian Arabs, unless they criticize Palestinian Arab politics, in which case they may have internalized colonial narratives.
So the purest expertise belongs to the person least contaminated by inconvenient knowledge. Preferably someone 5,000 kilometers away.
This explains one of the great mysteries of contemporary politics.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extraordinarily complicated when Israelis discuss it. Ask Israelis how to solve it and you will receive 12 answers from 10 people: security, separation, annexation, two states, confederation, autonomy, regional integration, deterrence, and economic development.
Nobody knows. Ideology, geography, generation, religion and political allegiance similarly divide Palestinian Arabs.
Yet the further one travels from Jerusalem, the simpler everything becomes.
By the time the conflict reaches an American university campus, several centuries of history, two national movements, competing religious claims, failed negotiations, terrorism, wars, regional rivalries and Iranian geopolitics have somehow been compressed into a four-word placard.
The great advantage of knowing nothing about a subject is that nothing contradicts your theory. Facts are troublesome precisely because they create friction, introduce exceptions, complicate heroes, and humanize villains.
They force you to accept that two or more contradictory things can be true at once.
Israel can have committed mistakes and still face enemies that want it destroyed. Palestinian Arabs can have suffered and still bear responsibility for their awful political choices. Occupation, Islamism, settlements and terrorism matter. History can contain more than one victim.
This is intolerable. Seven-minute expertise, by contrast, offers satisfying certainty.
So congratulations again. You now understand the Middle East. You know who is good and who is evil. You know which history matters and which words to use. You even know which facts require context and which require condemnation.
Most importantly, you possess something that Israelis and Palestinian Arabs themselves, after a century of conflict, have somehow failed to acquire: the solution.
It took seven minutes.
Imagine how much time all those experts wasted learning Arabic and Hebrew with their tricky case structures.
Nachum Kaplan is a journalist, media consultant and commentator. He has 25 years of international media experience, having held senior international roles at Reuters and IFR (International Financing Review). Access his work at Moral Clarity on Substack.