The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: History, Terminology, Ethics, Psychology

Israeli settlement in the West Bank near Za'atara. Photo by Ralf Roletschek, Wikimedia Commons.

Hersh Shefrin

Hersh Shefrin is the Mario Belotti Chair in the Department of Finance at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business and a faculty scholar with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are his own.

Suppose you were about to be reborn as either an Israeli or Palestinian, and did not know which. Given your position behind this veil of ignorance, how might you resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to avoid a life of suffering rather than happiness? This is the kind of question a Rawlsian ethicist might ask you to ponder when thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A life of suffering: It is easy to imagine living in an environment characterized by war, starvation, unsanitary conditions, with death all around, wanting to flee but having no place to go. This is life experienced today by many Gaza Palestinians. It was also life experienced by the Jews of Europe, persecuted during World War II, and prevented from escaping to Palestine.

A life of suffering: You might be reborn as a resident of a kibbutz such as Kibbutz Be’eri, to witness some of your family members slaughtered in an attack and others carried off as hostages. You might be reborn as a Palestinian, to witness most of your immediate family blown up by an Israeli bomb, and those that initially survive die because your local hospital lacks medical supplies.

Think about the events of October 7, 2023 in Israel or the events in Gaza during the months following. Think of these events as potential dress rehearsals for major genocide that follows because of an inability or unwillingness to make peace. And now think again about the Rawlsian question when you don’t know who your future self will be.

As long ago as 1759, moral philosopher Adam Smith wrote about a person’s “passion” interfering with cool headed reasoning (“impartial spectator”). There is much emotion associated with the complex conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. It is no secret that emotion can interfere with rational thought. For this reason, we might benefit by considering what insights come from applying academic frameworks for ethics and psychology to analyze the conflict, and think about its possible resolution.

Psychologically, fast thinking is the modern term for thought process based on subconscious intuition, gut instinct if you will. Slow thinking is consideration based on conscious deliberation. For as complex and heated as is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we can do with more slow thinking about the underlying ethical issues and less fast thinking.

The ethical frameworks I have in mind for analyzing the conflict relate to philosophical thought experiments about loss of life, conflicting claims about property rights, utilitarianism, and Rawlsian principles. These frameworks pertain to slow thinking. The psychological concepts I have in mind mostly relate to fast thinking, involving perceptions of gain and loss, framing effects, sunk costs, cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and trust.

History and Terminology

Historically, the term “Israel” has its source in the Hebrew Bible, as a pseudonym for the patriarch Jacob, which subsequently applied to his descendants as the “children of Israel.” Israelites settled in the “land of Israel.” Approximately 1,500 years after the term Israel appears in the historical record, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, the term Palestine appears. At the time, the land of Israel was a Roman province named Judaea. In the second century, the Romans renamed Judaea, “Syria Palaestina” after suppressing two Jewish revolts. Five centuries later, Islam came into existence, and shortly thereafter, Muslim Arabs conquered Palestine. Over a thousand years later, around 1910, Arabs living in Palestine began to refer to themselves as Palestinians.

The two failed Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, the burning of its Temple, and massacre of over half a million Jews. Still, a remnant of Jews remained in Palestine after the revolts and the renaming of the province. That remnant engaged in academic scholarship, especially on the version of Jewish Law (Talmud) known as “Talmud Yerushalmi,” which was often called the Palestinian Talmud. They also began to rebuild the Temple, a centuries long project that ended when a strong earthquake destroyed the structure. After conquering Palestine, Muslims subsequently built Al Aqsa and other mosques on the Temple Mount, and referred to the area as the Noble Sanctuary.

For the last two thousand years, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been living in Palestine. The old walled city of Jerusalem has four quarters: Armenian Christian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. For most of this time, the majority of the population in Palestine has been Muslim, although there were times of turbulence. Palestinian Jews and Muslims both suffered at the hands of the Crusaders who came to retake the Holy Land from Muslim control and make it Christian. Muslims subsequently reconquered Palestine, the Ottoman Turks conquered Christian Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, and Muslims remained in control until World War I when the Ottomans lost much of their empire to the British and French. Britain had the mandate over Palestine.

After the two failed revolts against Rome, Jews had structured their culture, religion, and national identity around a return to Zion. During this time, most of the world’s Jews lived in the Diaspora, meaning outside Palestine. In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, a small number of Jews began to migrate from Europe to Palestine. The majority of these Jews were Russian. The modern Zionist movement came into being, which had at its goal the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as a response to the persecution of Jews.

After World War I, the British and French set themselves the task of dividing the former territories of the Ottoman Empire into countries. The result of this process was the creation of the modern states of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The British also faced the question of what to do about Palestine; and this takes us to the heart of the modern-day conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ethics and Fairness in Dividing Palestine into Arab and Jewish States

When it came to the question of its mandate for Palestine, Britain’s role was akin to a mediator/arbitrator. In this respect, the British offered a vision of a two-state solution through two key documents, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the Peel Commission report of 1937. The Balfour Declaration supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the Peel Commission proposed a plan to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with most of Palestine allocated to the Arab portion.

Rights-based arbitration and interest-based arbitration both provide insights into the ethical issues associated with the partition of Palestine. Rights-based arbitration is based on pre-existing rules or customs. Notably, when the rules are unclear, the arbitrator makes a judgment about the meaning of the rules, thereby deciding the parties’ rights. In contrast, interest-based arbitration is based on the direct interests of the parties rather than rules.

Consider a stylized example to fix ideas. An Islamic will or trust is called a wasiyya. A frequently asked question by Muslims, wishing to follow Islamic law, is how to prevent heirs from fighting over an inheritance. A related question in Jewish law (Talmud) is how to divide an estate when there are conflicting wills, when each appears to be legitimate.

Here is the example. A man named Abraham has two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Abraham leaves two wills, both dated the same day and both signed by him. Isaac holds the first will, which assigns both sons an equal share of his estate. Ishmael holds the second will which assigns him, Ishmael, 100 percent of Abraham’s estate, with nothing going to Isaac.

How might an arbitrator decide to divide the estate fairly, as both sons together claim 150 percent of Abraham’s estate. One possibility is proportional assignment, a methodology favored by Muslim scholars. This methodology assigns 100/150 or two thirds of the estate to Ishmael and 50/150 or one third of the estate to Isaac. A second possibility is for Ishmael to say that what is in dispute is half the estate, and that the fair thing to do is split the difference over this half. Doing so would provide Isaac with 25 percent of the estate and Ishmael with 75 percent. I would note that the second possibility is Talmudic. The modern academic literature on rights arbitration would reject both ways of thinking and propose a third approach, which is more complex and based on game theoretic principles.

Jews and Muslims trace their lineage back to Abraham, Jews through Abraham’s son Isaac and Muslims through Abraham’s son Ishmael. This example serves as a vehicle for discussing the ethical issues associated with the partition of Palestine.

In the Abraham-Isaac-Ishmael example, what is common to all three solutions is that they provide Isaac with some portion of Abraham’s estate. That is, all three techniques imply a partition of Palestine that includes a Jewish state. The techniques pertain to partition based on rights.

The Arabs of Palestine rejected the Balfour Declaration and Peel Commission, effectively denying rights claimed by Jews. The twelve years that followed the Peel Commission report featured the British closing down immigration of Jews to Palestine, the death of six million European Jews in the Holocaust, a 1947 resolution by the United Nations General Assembly to partition Palestine into an Arab state and Jewish state, and in 1948 the creation of the State of Israel. Western countries generally supported the 1947 UN resolution while all Arab states, except for Jordan, opposed it. Subsequently, the state of Israel came into being after a war of independence with the Arab states and Palestinian Arabs.

With this history in mind, consider the ethical dimension of interest-based arbitration, which focuses on net benefits rather than rights. Specifically, consider an academic thought experiment often used in the teaching of ethics. An onlooker sees a runaway trolley. If the trolley continues on its current track, it will strike and kill five people. The onlooker sees a switch that can divert the trolley onto a separate track, in which case the trolley will strike and kill just one person. If you were the onlooker, what would you do, divert the trolley, or not?

The utilitarian approach to ethics would favor diverting the trolley, so that one person dies, not five. The deontological approach to ethics would favor not diverting the trolley, because diverting the trolley requires an action that causes a person’s death.

Figuratively speaking, the British saw two tracks, the current track carrying cattle cars filled to capacity with Jews on their way to the death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau; and the separate track leading to Palestine. When the British closed the doors of Palestine to Jews fleeing persecution in World War II, they acted as if they chose not to divert the trolley. The analogy to the five hypothetical deaths is, of course, millions of Jewish deaths in the Holocaust. I would make the case that British interests, not deontological considerations, drove British policy. Until 1939, the British allowed, if not encouraged, Jewish immigration into Palestine. Indeed, they brutally repressed a Palestinian Arab uprising that began in 1936. However, in 1939 they switched sides, out of self-interest.

Psychology of the Conflict

Psychology is central to the conflict as it pertains to preferences, motivations, judgments, and emotions. Especially important are how parties to the conflict view each other on issues of trust, such as friend or foe, good or bad, and love or hate.

In 1977, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat described the Arab-Israeli conflict as being 70 percent psychological. He made this remark when he visited Israel as the first step to a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. In addressing the Israeli Knesset, Sadat emphasized the importance of Israel making peace not only with his country, but with Palestinians.

Sadat succeeded in shifting the psychology of the conflict, away from the polar extremes of “foe” and “untrusting.” That was a major accomplishment, given deep seated hatred in the region. Indeed, for his efforts, Sadat paid with his life when he was assassinated by members of the extremist group, Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2000, and again in 2008, Israeli Prime Ministers offered Palestinians a peace deal with a divided Jerusalem and a Palestinian state occupying almost all the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Palestinians rejected both offers.

The psychological landscape changed discernably during the 1990s in the leadup to the failed negotiation of 2000. Trust between Israelis and Palestinians increased. Israeli guards and Palestinian guards played cards together at checkpoints. Goods, services, and people flowed across the region, with few barriers. While not perfect, it was better. Israel’s peace movement grew in strength, and was able to maintain momentum despite the assassination of Itzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, by an extremist right-wing Israeli.

The Palestinian rejection of Israel’s 2000 peace offer marked a psychological turning point. Palestinians orchestrated an intifada, with many terror attacks and suicide bombings. The resulting trauma to Israelis led them to shift back, towards “foe,” “hate,” and “untrusting.” Israelis built walls to separate themselves from Palestinian suicide bombers, and instituted major restrictions on the Palestinian population. These restrictions were very cumbersome, and moved Palestinian psychology also towards “foe,” “hatred,” and “untrusting.” Hamas took control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority, and vowed never to make peace with Israel. Israel responded with strong restrictions. Hatred increased, all round.

For this conflict, the psychology of gains and losses looms large. Palestinians might have as their reference point a Palestinian state that spans the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In this case, a solution with anything less will place them in the domain of losses. Psychologically, people who view themselves in the domain of losses are prone to accept imprudent risks instead of accepting a sure loss. They double down, taking an imprudent risk that they will end up with something worse than the sure loss.

Palestinians took a big risk when they rejected the 1937 Peel Commission proposal. After World War II, Britain reopened Palestine to Jewish immigration, and Jewish refugees flooded in. The 1947 UN partition plan offered Palestinians less territory than did the Peel Commission proposal. Palestinians rejected the 1947 partition plan. During Israel’s war of independence, many Palestinians fled their homes during the fighting, becoming refugees. Israel refused to let them return. The cease-fire lines from that war left Palestinians with less territory than they would have had under the 1947 plan.

One consequence of Israel’s war of independence is that it produced a situation in which Palestinian Arabs came to be governed by Jews. This situation was accentuated by the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, which left all of Palestine under Israeli control. Christians and Jews qualify as Dhimmi, non-Muslims. Islamic law and culture respect Dhimmi as People of the Book, but impose restrictions in a way that confers on them second class status. Muslims living under Jewish rule have to deal with psychological pain and cognitive dissonance. This is an important part of the conflict that could benefit from more attention.

Palestinians took a big risk when they rejected the peace deals offered by Israel in 2000 and 2008. Those rejections were coupled with violent protests which Israel met by imposing severe constraints on Palestinian mobility.

Palestinians took a big risk when Hamas launched its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, killing roughly 850 civilians, 400 soldiers, and abducting 250 hostages. Israel responded by launching a major offensive that has devastated Gaza’s infrastructure, featured much hunger and suffering, and has killed roughly 35,000 Palestinians, with an undetermined number of those being Hamas fighters.

The major framework underlying the psychology of loss was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In addition to being two of the most important psychologists in the last fifty years, they were Israeli and founding members of Peace Now, Israel’s peace movement. In 1996, Tversky was optimistic that the gains Palestinians had been experiencing during the Oslo peace process would lead to a shift in their psychology. This shift, he suggested would lead them to accept half a loaf, rather than settling for nothing less than the full loaf. Tversky was right about many things, but sadly not about this.

There is a religious component to Palestinian Muslims’ “whole-loaf” perspective. According to the Quran, just before ascending to heaven, a mythical creature flew the Prophet Muhammad overnight from Mecca to Jerusalem where he communed with the Almighty.

Hamas’ 1988 charter very clearly states that Palestine is an Islamic holy possession (Waqf), not to be renounced or abandoned in any part, and consecrated for future Moslem generations until the Day of Judgment.

Hamas has an ideological counterpart in Israel’s religious right wing. They too refuse to settle for half a loaf. Indeed, Israel’s current government is further to the right than any other in the country’s history. Religion is a key driver of the psychology of the Israeli right, just as it is for Hamas. The Israeli right based its whole loaf claims on divine promises made to the children of Israel in the Hebrew Bible.

There is a psychological principle known as the sunk-cost fallacy. People who succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy confuse the past and the future, and this confusion leads them to make poor choices about the future. The behaviors of both extremist camps in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are driven by the sunk-cost fallacy.

Moving from war to peace will require a move away from extremist narratives. For Israel, this means accepting that modern Israelis are not the children of Israel entering and seizing the promised land from Canaanites. It means moving away from apocalyptic visions in which the deadly battle to seize the whole land of Israel is the prelude to the Messianic era. It means recognizing that Palestinian Arabs have rights to part of Palestine and that the Talmud provides guidance about how to deal with conflicting rights.

For Palestinians, moving from war to peace means accepting that Jews preceded Muslims in Palestine, and co-existed with them from the first day Muslims set foot in Jerusalem. It means accepting the veracity of 3,000 years of Jewish history, and that the Jewish presence in Palestine did not begin with the birth of the modern Zionist movement. It means accepting that modern Zionism is not about European Jews colonizing Palestine, but about Jewish refugees fleeing persecution and death.

False narratives feed sunk-cost beliefs and behavior. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, false narratives are serious obstacles to peace and are rooted in the past. We should not forget the past, but we should also not let the past prevent us from creating a better future, a more just future. An ethics-based approach, such as that of Rawls, would have us to do that.

Ethics and Psychology in Pro-Palestinian Demonstrations

Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel marked the beginning of a tragic war between Israel and Gaza. Some have argued that the viciousness of Hamas’ attack is an indication of the strength of its hatred for Israel, and vice versa. In respect to the war, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and for the Israeli prime minister and defense minister. American leaders from both parties, and most Israelis and Palestinians have criticized this request as being unbalanced from a moral perspective, with differing views about who bears greater moral culpability.

The Israel-Gaza war also marked the beginning of pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel demonstrations across the United States, many on American campuses. Pro-Palestinian, and especially Pro-Hamas supporters appear to be motivated by the same false narratives and hatred held by extremist Palestinian protagonists. Pro-Palestinian protests began immediately after the October 7 attack, celebrating the attack and vilifying Israel. As Palestinian casualties mounted, protestors shifted attention to suffering, death, and destruction in Gaza, all of which are considerable.

While demonstrators have the right to exercise free speech, they routinely violate the rights of others. Protestors block traffic on bridges, set up encampments in unauthorized campus locations, occupy buildings, interfere with political candidates during campaign speeches, make a noisy nuisance of themselves at municipal meetings, disrupt college graduations, tear down posters of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas into Gaza, and took the life of a Jewish counter-protester.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy by failing to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They succumb to motivated reasoning when they fail to acknowledge that Jews accepted and/or proposed all four partition plans that would have produced a two-state solution, and Palestinian Arabs rejected all four plans. The plans proposed by Israel in 2000 and 2008 featured almost all the West Bank and Gaza as the territory for a Palestinian state, a divided Jerusalem, and some form of shared sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount.

Motivated reasoning is a psychological term for overemphasizing information that supports one’s own position and underemphasizing information that runs counter to that position. Students who call for a cease-fire in Gaza, but fail to call for the release of Israeli hostages, let alone the surrender of Hamas, exhibit a form of motivated reasoning.

The death and destruction in Gaza are tragic. There is shared culpability for the highly disproportionate death tolls of the conflict, (numbers of Palestinian dead relative to number of deaths of Jews and Bedouins). Hamas’ killing of Israelis on October 7 conforms to their charter, which states: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.” Their use of innocent Palestinians as human shields during Israel’s response is immoral. As Israel began its offensive into Gaza, Hamas was clear to say that as soon as they had the opportunity they would repeat the attack of October 7. Israeli Jews remember that before the Nazis systematically slaughtered most German Jews, before moving on to the rest of Europe, they first pressured those Jews to leave Germany. Hamas’ words and deeds mirror those of the Nazis. October 7 vividly tripped the Holocaust memory switch and Israelis’ existential fears. Jewish history features two thousand years of subjugation and persecution at the hands of both Christians and Muslims.

It is time for pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel groups to come together and support a half-loaf solution to the conflict. Doing so is consistent with Rawlsian principles. It is consistent with utilitarian principles. It is consistent with the ethics of conflicting rights.

Israelis and Palestinians can follow the practice of land acknowledgment, as done at many American and Canadian universities, including Santa Clara. In our case, we acknowledge that the land on which our university sits is the ancestral tribal land of the Ohlone people. While doing so, we do not transfer the university’s property to Ohlone descendants, nor vacate our buildings for the use of these descendants, nor give to them our personal property; and we are not leaving North America to return to our own ancestral homelands. The same applies to Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

A half-loaf solution for each side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might not be perfect, but it will be a lot better than sliding down the slippery slope both sides now share. That slope ends in genocide for one side or both, of a magnitude that Jews have seen too often, and which Palestinian Arabs through their current suffering might now comprehend. It is time to shift from the psychology of hatred to the psychology of peaceful resolution.