For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.
On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged "Jewish" state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.
Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to "the Arabs", seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.
A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.
It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state - armed by the US and Europe - bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.
On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.
Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.
The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria.
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