Debates on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict frequently refer to history. But one may wonder whether all this history has done anyone much good. The truth is that the Israelis and the Palestinians have behaved - and will continue to behave - in much the same way as other people in the world do.

This is because of something neither side will admit to - that they are both the products of an arbitrary and recent history, which has created two nations in a matter of a few decades. Reconciliation rests not on arbitrating their ancestral claims but rather on denying the relevance of history at all.

The Jews invoke their biblical claims, the Palestinians see themselves as the heirs of centuries of occupation and as descendants of the Canaanites before them. But here, as in many other parts of the world, these invocations of history are spurious.

Nationalism is a recent phenomenon, a product of political change in the 20th century. The Palestinian nation emerged from this process and was forged in the conflicts with the Zionist project itself (i.e. since the 1920s).

Although the Jewish people have existed for millennia, there is no Jewish 'nation' in the modern political sense. The basis of the historic claim to the land of Israel - that a particular piece of land was 'given by God' hardly allows for rational assessment while a claim based on historical occupation is little better, given that the historic kingdom of Solomon and David lasted for only 80 years.

Any argument for the legitimacy of an Israeli state has to rest on contemporary criteria - that although most Jews did not live in Israel, out of a part of the Jewish people an Israeli nation has emerged.

Its opponents deny its legitimacy on the grounds that it was created through immigration and settlement, but this is true of many other nations the world over.

The map of nations we see today is not the result of ancient history. It is a result of a series of accidents, many of them recent. History cannot resolve questions of legitimacy.

One of the paradoxes of nationalism is that while each one claims to be original they are, in their essentials, all the same.

Croats denounce Serbs who, they claim, were brought in by the Ottomans in the 16th century. In Northern Ireland, nationalists deny the rights of Protestants on the grounds that the latter were colonisers in the16th century.

The common ground of Israelis and Palestininans, shared by many other nations in conflict in the world, is the very arbitrary nature of the entities they claim to represent.

The solution does not depend on the reconciliation of ancient and traditional antagonisms, but rather on the acceptance that Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to what other peoples have. Neither more nor less.