Elites use identity, particularly national identity, as a way of advancing their own interests, often against the interests of the populations that they pretend to represent.
But before we can understand this, we need an ABC of the conflict, to get a grasp of the basic events, and the conflicting historical narratives that Israelis and Palestinians learn, which interpret all of these events in completely different ways, with opposite moral implications, so that we can then proceed to look at what actually happened, and what the moral implications of that are for the present and future.
