Not Everyone Wants the Same Thing
The assumption that breaks Middle East analysis
There is a sentence you hear constantly in American discussions about the Middle East. It sounds reasonable and humane, but might be the most consequential piece of bad analysis in circulation today: “Deep down, everyone wants the same thing.”
Peace. Stability. A home. A future for their children. Americans generally believe that these are not American values but human values. Universal and self-evident. And therefore, if we could just get the right people in the room, the right framework, enough diplomatic pressure, the Middle East would eventually arrive at the destination everyone supposedly wants.
Unfortunately, this belief is wrong.
In a previous piece, I wrote about the problem with applying the American racial lens to this conflict. This piece is about the assumption underneath that - and underneath so much Western engagement with the Middle East. The assumption that the goal of politics everywhere is what the goal of politics is in a liberal democracy: individual rights, peaceful coexistence, and negotiated compromise.
That assumption is a product of a particular history. And when you carry it into a region with entirely different histories, you don’t understand the conflict better. Instead, you misunderstand it in a very specific, very consequential way.
Hamas does not want a two-state solution and this has never been - and never will be - their negotiating position. The 1988 Hamas Charter calls for the destruction of Israel and frames this not as a political goal but as a religious obligation. October 7 was not a desperate act born of hopelessness. It was planned, deliberate, and celebrated. The videos Hamas made of it were made to celebrate it.
An American watching this assumes that at some level, this is rhetoric - that everyone is ultimately a pragmatist playing for a better deal. But that instinct assumes the goal of Hamas is a Palestinian state. It is not. The goal of Hamas is a particular vision of Islamic order in which Israel does not exist. You cannot negotiate between a movement that wants a Jewish state to persist and a movement whose founding purpose is its elimination.
The Western liberal tradition believes political conflicts are disputes about interests, and that interests can be negotiated. You have something I want. I have something you want. A deal is possible. The architecture of modern diplomacy is built on this.
But some conflicts are about truth claims. About who has the right to exist where and yes, even about what God commands. You can’t split the difference on a truth claim. You can’t broker a deal between parties who don’t share a vision of the good.
Americans understand this in other contexts. But when it comes to the Middle East, the universal assumption kicks in, and suddenly we are back to looking for the deal everyone supposedly wants.
The universalist filter feels moral. It feels like the generous, humanistic thing: we are all the same, reachable through empathy and negotiation. But applied improperly, it becomes a form of narcissism - making the Middle East a screen onto which we project our own values, then judging everyone for failing to live up to them.
The more honest position is uncomfortable: different movements want genuinely different things. Some of what they want is not compatible with a liberal order. It is a lesson so many Americans learned in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, controversial as they were. Acknowledging that is not giving up on peace. It is the precondition for understanding what peace would actually require.
You can’t solve a problem you have misdiagnosed. And the first misdiagnosis - the one underneath all the others - is the assumption that everyone in the room is ultimately trying to get to the same place.
Some of them just aren’t.