---
type: Tip
title: Talk to both sides
description: In a contested place, interview across the whole range and adjudicate none of it — and expect each side's warnings about the other to be the first thing disproved.
tags: [politics, conflict, interviewing, perspective, israel, palestine]
timestamp: 2026-08-05T19:00:00Z
---

# Talk to both sides

The method Harry states out loud before filming anywhere contested: speak to
everyone — both nationalities, the religious communities, the people whose
politics he finds hardest — let each of them talk at length, and don't rule on
any of it. He is explicit that this pleases nobody and that he expects to be
attacked from every direction for it.

It is a working method rather than a moral position, and it earns its place
because of what it reliably produces: **each side's warnings about the other are
the first thing the trip disproves.** He goes in having been told by Israelis
that Palestinians will kill him and by Palestinians that Israelis will kill him,
and the test of the rule is what actually happens on the road.

Related and not the same:
[judge a place for yourself](/tips/judge-a-place-for-yourself.md) is about
testing a reputation by going, and
[a government and its people](/tips/separate-a-government-from-its-people.md) is
about who a reputation attaches to. This one is about **how many people you have
to ask before you have anything worth saying**, and about not resolving it for
the viewer afterwards.

## How Harry applies it

**He says the method before he uses it.** At the top of the Israel video he sets
out who he intends to speak to — Israelis, Palestinians, settlers, religious
communities — and commits to presenting the range without picking a side. The
result is a video in which every interviewee holds someone else's government
responsible, nine or ten positions are recorded in full, and none is adjudicated.
His only summary is that the world is not black and white but grey.

**The advice also comes back at him from inside.** An Israeli he meets over
breakfast in [Jerusalem](/places/jerusalem.md) — four years in the army, on his
fourth reserve call-up — tells him unprompted to go and visit the West Bank,
because there are extremists on both sides and he should see both. That is the
strongest form the rule takes: it is not a foreigner's neutrality, it is what
someone with everything at stake recommends.

**And then the road settles it.** Cycling from Jerusalem to
[Bethlehem](/places/bethlehem.md), warned by each side about the other, he gets a
puncture on a hillside with an hour of light left. Two Israeli men stop within
minutes; one drives him somewhere quiet, changes the tyre, and refuses the $30 he
offers, saying they do good deeds around here. He then crosses into
[Palestine](/countries/palestine.md) and is met, in his words, with nothing but
kindness. Both warnings were sincere, and both were wrong.

## Demonstrated in

- [I Visited the World's Most Controversial Country 🇮🇱](/videos/x-pZDGUahsU.md) —
  the method stated as a method, applied across the political range in
  [Israel](/countries/israel.md), and deliberately left unresolved.
- [I Was Warned Not to Cross Into Palestine 🇵🇸](/videos/lrmE-WiC4eA.md) — the
  same rule as the structure of a single day: the symmetrical warnings, the
  Israelis who stop for him on the way into the West Bank, and the Palestinian
  hospitality on the other side of the wall.
- [I investigated illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank 🇵🇸🇮🇱](/videos/y52gSxWP_PM.md) —
  the version where nothing is disproved, which is why it belongs here. The video
  is built as a matched pair: half a day with an Israeli settler, half a day with
  a Palestinian driver, the same hills and roads explained twice. Unlike the
  puncture on the Jerusalem road, no warning collapses on contact — both accounts
  survive intact and are irreconcilable, and Harry still declines to rule. What
  the method produces here is not a corrected assumption but a pair of positions
  the viewer has to hold at once, and the only thing he adds at the end is how
  close the two are physically and how far apart their realities are.