Israel-Palestine: Exploring Singularity's Approach to Lasting Peace

One of the greatest tests of the heart in our times is staying connected to what is happening in this conflict without going into polarisation, numbing, or checking out.

There is perhaps nothing more shocking to our system than the mass death of the most vulnerable and innocent members of society, on both sides.

In many ways, the conflict is incredibly complex, stretching back through a chain of highly inflammatory events over the last 70+ years. 

These extend from the current war that (re)ignited on October 7th 2023 back through the previous eruptions of this war over the last twenty years, the Hamas-Fatah split in 2006, the Oslo Accords of 1993, the first and Second Intifada, 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1967 Six-Day war, the 1948 war, the Nakba, the original 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine that the Palestinian Arabs rejected and went to war to defend against, the rise of Zionism and its support by Western nations such as Britain and the USA, the operation of colonial powers in the region, and the Holocaust. Of course there are whole trajectories of suffering that both communities experienced prior to this too.

Through all this pain, at the root of this conflict is two communities who are essentially longing for the safety, security, and sacred connection to their true home. This is a story not only limited to them, but belongs to humanity as a whole. We all share some piece of this longing.  

There is no doubt that a range of approaches are necessary to bring this war to a lasting peace, ranging from international diplomacy and mediation to collective trauma work and more.

In this article, I want to explore what Singularity’s approach to bringing an end to this conflict would be, were Singularity in a position of such influence as to implement it. Singularity stands for a radically different approach to politics, leadership, and governance, and it is critical we explore the application of its approach to the major issues of our time.

The Israel-Palestine conflict represents one of the most challenging, persistent, and tragic conflicts of our time, which demands new approaches to a lasting peace. And the steps outlined below also serve as a template for how Singularity could effectively address any of the other major persistent wars in the world.

Singularity’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict would start with a demand for a truce and the willingness of both sides to be available to a novel approach to ending this war.

The first step in that process would be to support those on both sides to go to a place humans involved in generations-long wars rarely go: to shift out of their armoured, reactive state, to connect with their body, and start to feel their grief.  

By this is meant the raw heartbreak that lives in so many bodies after the generations of warfare and threat. The grief that isn’t about blame, accusation, or stories about who is responsible. We can get to the relational dynamics later, but the first step must be to stop, feel the naked grief underneath the reactive impulses toward violence and vengeance, and create space for the emotions that then flow. The tears, the grief, the rage, the despair, and the horror.

So much of the ongoing cycles of violence are actually a desperate attempt to avoid feeling this grief. And yet grief, when felt in its most naked form, is one of the most powerful forces to bring us home to Life’s inherent unity.

Because in the core of that heartbreak - in the fracturing of the regular armour that guards most people’s hearts - especially those in such intense situations as warzones - the deeply vulnerable truth of the one indivisible Life that exists at the core of us all, and of the Earth itself, is revealed.

Singularity stands for an affirmation of this One Life as the basis for an entirely different way to navigate the seemingly never-ending and most intractable schisms, arguments, polarisation, and tribalism that pervade so much of our world.

This would be where Singularity would seek to go next with those involved.

As the mystical heart of every religious and spiritual tradition tells us, the current of this Life vibrates in the root of all hearts, and brings a transmission of reality that is beyond all separation, schism, and difference.

Experiencing it even for just a moment reveals the root nature of reality as inherent unity, totality, indivisible life, and opens us to identification as that One.

This vanishes the illusions of separation that drive all conflict, polarisation, tribalism, and schism. The kind of which that have become so endemic in our systems of politics, leadership, and governance. The kind that drives such conflicts as Israel and Palestine.

Of course this would require trained facilitators to be able to support this inner work, and a continued, courageous willingness of those on both sides to engage with it. Additionally, it’s important to be realistic that even when this deep level truth is experienced, it is a temporary opening. It does fundamentally change something in us, but this practice must be returned to again and again for that change to truly gain traction in our outer life. It must become an anchor for how we choose to live.

Singularity is dedicated to a politics sourced in this surrender to the One at the root of the Many, as this is the only foundation that can reset us at the root of our being to be able to then engage relationship rightly, especially relationships filled with conflict and polarisation.

Of course, the other layers of our humanity are still there, and additional approaches are needed to honour them. This surely must include international diplomacy and mediation that recognises and validates the basic needs and feelings of each side (this doesn’t mean their stories, accusations, and blame).

It surely must involve a two-state solution that recognises of the right of each community to land where they can feel safe and live right life must be implemented.

It must involve collective trauma work over generations that continues to create space for an upwelling of the grief, rage, despair, and terror this conflict has seared into such a vast number of nervous systems.

It must confront all colonial scars and mindsets, selfish or racist agendas of nations related to this conflict, as well as all ethnocentric agendas (Zionist, Christian Zionist, Islamist, colonialist, white-Eurocentric, etc.) These must all be subordinated to a recognition of one humanity that expresses in celebrated diversity.

And it must include national soul work that calls each nation into its most aligned expression of soul. Each an expression of the one humanity and the one Earth.  

And it must also be part of a radical reset to how human beings relate to land. The deep truth is that human beings cannot ever truly own the crust of the Earth. That is an arrogant misplacement of our position within the wider living system of the planet. As my teacher, Bruce Lyon once said, it is as if mites living on my arm suddenly erected a minuscule flag there and claimed ownership in perpetuity. Humanity cannot claim ownership of land. We can steward and serve it though, and the Israel-Palestine conflict is one that demands that these two communities acknowledge their shared love for this land and show up to steward and serve it in cooperation, rather than fight over who it belongs to.

Each of these recommendations could easily have entire books written on them (and some of them have), and the brevity of their discussion here is not naive to the amount of work they would require. Rather, the point I’m looking to make here is that it is only through the integration of the very best conventional approaches with new, radically different approaches to those normally implemented in such scenarios too, which penetrate much deeper into the core energies driving this conflict, that we can expect peace to become possible.

Even when a lasting peace is established, this kind of work will be needed for decades. There is no one solution that will bring this conflict to peace. Its roots extend back through millennia and is also deeply interconnected with the balance of power over so much of the rest of the world. As such, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is an extension of the core schisms, separatism, and ethnocentric agendas still present in humanity as a whole.

Singularity’s position is that for this conflict to be sustainably resolved, it will not only require engagement with the kind of processes listed above by the Israeli and Palestinian people, but also transformation in the wider community of nations and institutions that surround and influence it.

Ultimately, what is needed is a global governance, leadership, and politics that starts with the indivisible One at the root of all apparent diversity and difference, and that leverages the very best approaches for healing humanity’s schisms and most deep-seated traumas on that basis.

This is what Singularity stands for.