Israel · Palestine · beyond the slogans
Shared Future Lab makes space for what public arguments keep forcing apart: Palestinian and Jewish dignity, agency, history, and belonging—and safety and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians. That full frame also requires accountability for the choices that make peace harder.
Palestinians and Israelis each carry history, belonging, vulnerability, aspiration, and deep internal disagreement. Each has the right to shape its future—and each lives with choices that can protect life, deepen suffering, or make peace harder.
Shared Future Lab asks what each people has lived through, what each fears losing, and what both will need to build a future in which neither is dominated, displaced, or asked to disappear.
Language shapes the debate
These terms carry factual, legal, and moral claims that deserve serious examination. Yet while those disputes continue, Palestinians and Israelis still need safety, freedom, dignity, and a future.
Palestinian suffering deserves to be faced fully. So do Jewish history, vulnerability, and the ancient connection to the land.
People are more than their leaders. That does not require pretending that leaders, movements, and public choices have no consequences.
A shared future asks more than goodwill. It requires security, political courage, truthful memory, and the rejection of elimination as liberation.
We are creating a public learning space for readers who sense that the familiar scripts are inadequate, but do not want another arena for shouting.
History, language, data, and contested claims made understandable without stripping away context.
Read The Problem With Free Palestine →
Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, and others who pair empathy with responsibility.
Ways to examine sources, recognize flattening narratives, and think beyond inherited camps.
“I want Palestinians to be free and Israelis to be safe, with neither people asked to surrender their history or disappear for the other to have a future.”
I’m Jonathan Kaplan—an Israeli-born American Jew, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, and a psychotherapist. My own history is part of why I care so deeply about this work.
As a psychotherapist, I have seen how quickly people stop listening when another person’s story seems to threaten their own safety, identity, or belonging.
I created Shared Future Lab to bring Palestinian and Israeli experiences into the same conversation—and to give both the care, attention, and seriousness they deserve. The purpose is not to force agreement. It is to understand more fully what people have lived through, what they fear, and what a future together will require.
Jonathan Kaplan Founder, Shared Future Lab
