Outside the U.N. General Assembly, I met a 20-year-old Muslim student at New York University named Na. She had been standing nearby, listening as I spoke with a man I had just met. When we introduced ourselves, she told us about an initiative she was involved in that brings Jews and Muslims together.
Na wanted to understand our perspective. More importantly, she wanted to know how Israelis and Palestinians could eventually live together in peace and dignity.
Her question sounded simple, and the conversation lasted an hour and a half. It didn’t end in agreement, but one lesson stayed with me long after I walked away: Sometimes, the three most important words in Israel advocacy are “I don’t know.”
I did not fully appreciate what that meant until musician Ed Sheeran addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a stage in Philadelphia. He condemned the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and spoke about centuries of Jewish persecution. He described the suffering in the Gaza Strip and the “systemic injustice” that he believes is unfolding in Judea and Samaria.
Most people focused on his opinions, but I focused on one sentence: “I do not know enough.” Great, that is where the conversation should begin.
Not because ignorance is something to celebrate, but because recognizing what we do not know is often the first step toward understanding what we should. “Systemic injustice” sounds simple until we begin asking exactly what it means.
As an example, take one statistic: The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports 925 “movement obstacles” across Judea and Samaria. To someone scrolling through Instagram or sitting in a college classroom, that can create the image of millions of Palestinians passing through nearly a thousand Israeli checkpoints.
But that is not what the number means. According to OCHA’s April 2026 fact sheet, only 89 of those 925 obstacles are checkpoints staffed around the clock. Another 218 are intermittently staffed checkpoints. The remainder include road gates, earth mounds, roadblocks and other physical barriers.
Moreover, 34 of the 89 continuously staffed checkpoints are concentrated in one extraordinarily complicated place: H2 in Hebron.
The question is not simply whether 925 movement obstacles exist. The question is what that number represents, why those obstacles were created and whether each one can be discussed as though it were the same as the others.
That question changes the conversation. Once we ask it, the discussion is no longer about a shocking number presented without explanation. It becomes a conversation about policies related to security, terrorism, geography, Palestinian movement and the consequences these policies have for ordinary people.
The same pattern applies to almost every slogan in this conflict: Why do Israelis and Palestinians living near each other sometimes fall under different legal systems? Now we must discuss Israeli citizenship; Palestinian Authority jurisdiction; Areas A, B and C; military law; the Oslo Accords; and an arrangement intended to be temporary that never produced a final agreement.
Give them a fact they did not know; ask a question their slogan cannot answer; show them the chapter missing from the story they were given.
Why not simply create a Palestinian state tomorrow? Now we must discuss borders, settlements, security, Jerusalem, refugees, Palestinian political divisions, Israeli politics and what happens the day after.
None of this requires us to prove that Israel is always right. It requires us to demonstrate that the answer is rarely as simple as a slogan.
For years, Israel advocacy has often operated as though our first responsibility is to move someone from “I disagree” to “I agree.” That is an understandable goal, but it is not always a realistic one.
Na did not arrive outside the United Nations waiting to become a pro-Israel activist. Sheeran did not walk onto that stage prepared to deliver a complete history of the conflict. Most people we encounter will not give us an hour and a half to explain wars, peace agreements, terrorism, borders and competing national movements.
Sometimes, we have only a 30-second Instagram reel. Sometimes, we have one question on a college campus before somebody walks away. That does not leave us with only two choices. We do not have to deliver a 90-minute history lecture, and we do not have to reduce everything to “Israel is right and they are wrong.”
There is a third option: Make someone curious; give them a fact they did not know; ask a question their slogan cannot answer; show them the chapter missing from the story they were given. More importantly, do not try to take them all the way to “I agree.” Get them to say, “I don’t know.” That might sound like a remarkably unimpressive goal. I think it is one of the most important.
A Pew Research Center experiment helps explain why.
When Americans were asked about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi without the option to say they had never heard of him, 34% expressed “some confidence,” and 42% expressed “not too much confidence” in him. Those figures dropped dramatically once respondents were allowed to say they had never heard of him. Many people who appeared to hold an opinion were willing to acknowledge that they did not know enough to have one.
Certainty is easy when people know one statistic, one video, one slogan and one version of history. Questions begin when they discover another.
This does not mean that every claim is equally credible or that advocates should avoid taking a position. Israel should continue correcting misinformation, presenting evidence and defending itself against false accusations. Recognizing complexity does not mean treating every claim as equally valid.
But facts are useful only when people are willing to consider them. And people rarely reconsider what they believe when they are convinced there is nothing left for them to learn.
Na came to us asking how Israelis and Palestinians can live together in peace. I do not think we gave her a peace plan. That was not the goal. But she listened. She challenged us. We challenged her. She learned things she had not known before, and we ended the conversation still talking.
So perhaps our goal should not always be to turn a pro-Palestinian into a pro-Israel activist in one conversation. Start smaller, turn certainty into curiosity, turn slogans into questions—turn “I know” into “I don’t know.”
Once someone is willing to say, “I don’t know,” something important happens. Often, for the first time, they are ready to listen.
