Former US president Barack Obama has said there is no military rationale right now for continuing to pummel what is already broken in Gaza, and he said it was unacceptable to ignore the human crisis that is happening there.
He said children there were starving and that a starting point in the crisis would be for both sides to acknowledge each other's history, in a bid to break the cycle of violence.
He told a paying audience at the 3Arena in Dublin that where the truth becomes whitewashed "you lose touch with reality and it puts you in a position where you are willing to dehumanise others and say anything is justifiable to win".
He said that the conflict in Gaza was caused by both sides willfully ignoring history and the past.
"Not just the Palestinians, but also folks outside of the conflict oftentimes will efface or erase or ignore the very real history that led the Jewish people to insist on a homeland of their own, because of their historic vulnerabilities that resulted, in Europe, in the systematic slaughter of millions," he added.
He said if you do not acknowledge that truth, it is difficult for Israelis to listen because that is such a profound truth for them.
Mr Obama said Israelis also refused to acknowledge that Palestinians were displaced from their lands, often violently and that what had occurred since was an occupation that created "a second-class citizenship, or not a citizenship at all but a no-man's-land and that would be intolerable for most people."
He said the Palestinian people had a justified reason to be angry and frustrated, and if you can not acknowledge that, then Palestinians cannot listen.
Speaking to an audience of 7,500 at the sold-out event, he was asked early on in the discussion led by The Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole, about the current situation in the Middle East.
He said breaking the cycle would take courage, "and unfortunately oftentimes the leadership, the politicians, may have a vested interest in maintaining the notion that it is simply 'us and them' and it is their fault, because that keeps them in power."
He said he and the Prime Minister of Israel, who was still there, "were not the best of friends" and did not always get along.
However he said Hamas's vicious approach to try to solve a problem that put all their people at risk, was the height of cynicism and one he rejected too.
Mr Obama's comments in Dublin followed his being awarded the Freedom of Dublin by the city council on Thursday, an event which the Independent Group of city councillors boycotted, over what it said was his administration's unprecedented military support for Israel in 2015 with a $38 billion dollar aid package.
There were no protests outside the Dublin gathering, with Mr Obama receiving a standing ovation and applause as he arrived on the stage. The only interruption to proceedings was the ringing of a phone in the audience, which the former president pointed out.
To applause, Mr Obama said: "The President of the United States is a powerful position. When people say something bad about you, you don't say 'Let's go target them!'
He warned that some people would now like to see a return to "might makes right" and the "blood and soil nationalism" that he said had helped give rise to fascism in World War II.
He said it had turned out that capitalism was entirely compatible with authoritarian beliefs.
At a similar gathering in front of an audience in London this week, some audience members also noted that Mr Obama also did not mention the current US President once by name.
Mr O'Toole referred to him in a question only as 'the T-word' when he asked about the scale of the current threat to US democracy.
Mr Obama said he had been known during his time in office as "No drama, Obama" and that his default was not to panic.
He added that he had been very hesitant about sounding alarmist or hysterical, but he said it was indisputable that basic norms and the habits of the heart and shared ideas of what democracy looks like, were fraying around the world and "that includes the US."
However, he said America was never a perfect democracy. He said democracy there and in another large democracy, India, had been backsliding.
Read more: Obama accepts Freedom of Dublin 'with great humility'
He added that when he was in power the military was not politicised and that their loyalty had been to the country, in giving him the best advice possible.
He said the same was true of the Justice Department and he warned that politicising the justice system would erode people's trust that the law would be impartially applied.
In an apparent reference to the TV host Jimmy Kimmel, Mr Obama said people who are oppressors would go after storytellers, comics and artists.
He said social media was also leading to a crisis where it was hard to distinguish what is true and what is not, and he said this was about to be "turbo-charged" by Artificial Intelligence.
He said that on social media, an expert who had studied something for years, concluding that vaccines do not cause autism, could look the same on your phone as someone "sitting in their basement, citing all kinds of disputed, flawed, debunked studies".
He said businesses were making money through engagement "and it turns out what engages people, in addition to cat videos, is fear, resentment, anger and spectacle".
He added that he had no magic bullet and the temptation to censor and regulate should not come from the state.
Mr Obama said consumers could put pressure on companies with their expectations and demands, but this would involve them putting down their phones, taking off apps and being willing to have conversations instead.
