The way that people conceptualize the war, and how it could be ended, is impacted by a number of well-known cognitive biases. Unfortunately, they all operate to Hamas's advantage.
I always read your posts with great interest. But I believe that in this case, as you observe in the beginning, the various biases you mention constitute a tragically small part of how the war is framed, and the hopes of "reframing the narrative" to clear it from such biases are vain, and only point to how smart we are in identifying how things should be in a perfect world.
The world is unfortunately far from perfect and seems, in this cycle, to be getting worse by strides.
Wars are fought on two levels: on the field, in battle, blood and destruction; outside the strict theatre of hostilities, through propaganda.
"Reframing the narrative" is a propaganda tool that the staunch supporters of Israel use and have been using all along; and it does very little difference as it preaches to the choir. The rest of communication is not interested in "reframing the narrative", because it is held captive by a worldwide view -- which spreads much wider than the West, for several reasons of national and cultural interests -- in which Israel is a proxy of the West and therefore guilty by association of all the old evils (common to humanity) with which the West is today singularly and uniquely identified.
I spent the last 3 months, for very personal reasons, studying more of the history of the XX century than I ever wanted to (my field is Medieval History). The tangle is so ugly at this point that one despairs it will ever be unravelled without a massive amount of death and destruction.
There is no amount of stategising on communications that the friends of Israel (Hebrews and not) can do to help -- and truly counterproductive to insist on the "war of Hamas on Israel", because the war of Hamas on Israel is just the last instance of the war of a certain section of the Arab world on Israel, which has been going on since the foundation of the state of Israel and has become a building block of a (not exclusive but today dominant) Arab identity natively connected to fundamentalist Islam.
When war breaks out on the ground with movements of troops, it is war between two sides. It is the Hamas-Israel war because those are the two sides that are fighting. WWII was the war of the Allies against the Axis powers -- and there is little doubt about who started it, but also little sense in calling it the "war of the Axis against the Allies".
And again, propaganda. Hamas has an advantage because it does not field regular troops, because it hides behind the civilian population, because it gathers its fighters in a network of tunnels that span miles and centre their hubs under public buildings. This causes the war, after the Israeli regular troops are on the ground, to be a war of whack-a-mole against a slippery enemy that hits and disappears, like in textbook guerrilla war, leaving the civilian population to bear the brunt. All worsened by the cramped up space.
And the burden of collateral damage becomes hard to bear, and there is no just war nor savvy propaganda that can lift it. We bombed parts of Germany flat in WW2 and we are still questioning about choices and the responsibility for 400000 civilian deaths -- it is not an easily solved moral problem. And today, we can choose to say that the Palestinians, as a population, deserve it (just as the enemies say that Israel, or even the Jews, as a population, deserve the war that has been waged on them for decades though with less horrid attacks than 10/7), because the Palestinians voted for Hamas, because they seem to support Hamas, because they have not risen up to bring down Hamas. But it is a choice, and a choice that not many can make and feel well with, if we have a modicum of human empathy beyond what your science calls the in-group.
So you see -- Israel itself is increasingly divided on this. Not because of having fallen victim to the oppressor-oppressed mentality (nobody can, I think, say that Ehud Olmert is woke) but because the human cost, on one side and the other, is becoming too high, without a clear hope of truly eradicating Hamas. That the whole world (for reasons of ideology, of regional and national interests, of alliances and silent conflicts) is wrapped in restraints that prevent it from putting pressure on Hamas and its allies, instead putting pressure exclusively on Israel, is horribly sad.
But it is Israel that will choose how to continue or end this war, as Israel remains the only democratic side in the conflict, whose population has actual agency. Truly, that is the only thing that matters.
Thanks for your very thoughtful comment. I can't say I disagree with very much (if any) of it. I don't *think* you were saying that I think the Palestinians deserve all of the death and destruction that is occurring. I don't. But I do -- like Douglas Murray among many others -- place the blame on Hamas, and I definitely do not feel I'm in a position to substitute my judgments for how the way should be fought for those of the IDF. Unlike previous wars between the two, this time it sure seems that there is only one way the war will end -- with the elimination of the Hamas threat in Gaza. Not sure what that will look like, but I can't imagine Israel returning to the situation as it was on Oct. 6. I don't perceive Israel as having any choice about continuing the war. They must. It is only Hamas that really has a choice about when it will end. It really is tragic that they love death (of Israelis and Palestinians) so much.
I never for a moment thought that you think that the Palestinians deserve all of the death and destruction that is occurring (at times, in my darkest moments, I do -- half my family is in Israel, I knew people who have been murdered, my son is now doing his duty in the IDF -- but then I recover my humanity). And the blame is totally on Hamas -- and on the warmongering of Hamas's patrons. The blame is on an ideology that has poisoned the Islamic world, to be honest... and that is one of the most sore points of it all, because it is the hardest to fix by external pressure.
What I meant is that placing on the Palestinians as a people the responsibility for such destruction and carnage is one of the ways to look at this war, a way embraced by a large number of the ultra-nationalist Right in Israel. A way that is not utterly devoid of sense (the Germans, as a people, allowed and fostered Nazism, after all, and many of us -- many of my German friends as well -- believe that they bore responsibility for the destruction visited on them by the Allies), but a way that is the mirror of the way in which a large number of Palestinians look at this war and at the conflict in general. In fact I believe, from what broad lines psychology I know, that the two approaches are symmetrical and feed on each other.
My main problem with the discussions of the war that happen on the outside -- among Jews who do not live in Israel, among non-Jews -- is that most miss an essential point: this is not a war between armies. The Six Days was, Yom Kippur was. But this is a war against guerrilla inside a very small, extremely overpopulated stretch of land. And unfortunately, the hopes to eliminate Hamas in Gaza decrease with every day that passes and with every increase in the civilian deaths, destruction and humanitarian crisis that war causes. If we had managed to go in and decapitate Hamas quickly, it might have been a possibility, even with all the questions about "then what". But Hamas has proved to be a hydra with too many heads, and eliminating it would probably, to be realistic, mean to give the whole of Gaza the Darmstadt treatment.
And this is something that Israeli society is not comfortable with (even if some sections are) and that the world is very much not going to accept. This is why Olmert has been calling for stopping the war, negotiations and the exchange of hostages (the concept is revolting to me -- as I have always believed that if you cave in to the demands of terrorists who hold hostages you have set out a path for this to happen again indefinitely -- but it may be that I am too rigid... and none of mine is held captive).
It increasingly feels like a dead end. If the world cared for peace, there would be more hope. But the world does not: there is no will to put pressure equally on both sides towards a solution... the only pressure is always exercised on Israel. While unfortunately, the only ones who can eliminate Hamas, from within, are the neighbouring Arab states, and they are in no shape to do that even if they wished: Syria and Lebanon in the situation that they are in, partitioned between warring militias; Egypt, that keeps its border sealed against Palestinian refugees for fear of the contamination of Hamas, after having barely quashed the Islamic Brotherhood within its border; and Jordan, who clings to its precarious internal peace, unwilling to stir the waters even a little bit. They do not want a Palestinian state there, which they would be responsible, for their own sake, to prevent from turning into a state governed by a proxy of Iran.
Sorry for the amount of rambling. I have not been able to think of much, or clearly at all, of late. But like so many, I fear, that have a closer view of events because of blood ties, I feel together with Benny Morris a great sense of despair.
Dear Professor Guttentag,
I always read your posts with great interest. But I believe that in this case, as you observe in the beginning, the various biases you mention constitute a tragically small part of how the war is framed, and the hopes of "reframing the narrative" to clear it from such biases are vain, and only point to how smart we are in identifying how things should be in a perfect world.
The world is unfortunately far from perfect and seems, in this cycle, to be getting worse by strides.
Wars are fought on two levels: on the field, in battle, blood and destruction; outside the strict theatre of hostilities, through propaganda.
"Reframing the narrative" is a propaganda tool that the staunch supporters of Israel use and have been using all along; and it does very little difference as it preaches to the choir. The rest of communication is not interested in "reframing the narrative", because it is held captive by a worldwide view -- which spreads much wider than the West, for several reasons of national and cultural interests -- in which Israel is a proxy of the West and therefore guilty by association of all the old evils (common to humanity) with which the West is today singularly and uniquely identified.
I spent the last 3 months, for very personal reasons, studying more of the history of the XX century than I ever wanted to (my field is Medieval History). The tangle is so ugly at this point that one despairs it will ever be unravelled without a massive amount of death and destruction.
There is no amount of stategising on communications that the friends of Israel (Hebrews and not) can do to help -- and truly counterproductive to insist on the "war of Hamas on Israel", because the war of Hamas on Israel is just the last instance of the war of a certain section of the Arab world on Israel, which has been going on since the foundation of the state of Israel and has become a building block of a (not exclusive but today dominant) Arab identity natively connected to fundamentalist Islam.
When war breaks out on the ground with movements of troops, it is war between two sides. It is the Hamas-Israel war because those are the two sides that are fighting. WWII was the war of the Allies against the Axis powers -- and there is little doubt about who started it, but also little sense in calling it the "war of the Axis against the Allies".
And again, propaganda. Hamas has an advantage because it does not field regular troops, because it hides behind the civilian population, because it gathers its fighters in a network of tunnels that span miles and centre their hubs under public buildings. This causes the war, after the Israeli regular troops are on the ground, to be a war of whack-a-mole against a slippery enemy that hits and disappears, like in textbook guerrilla war, leaving the civilian population to bear the brunt. All worsened by the cramped up space.
And the burden of collateral damage becomes hard to bear, and there is no just war nor savvy propaganda that can lift it. We bombed parts of Germany flat in WW2 and we are still questioning about choices and the responsibility for 400000 civilian deaths -- it is not an easily solved moral problem. And today, we can choose to say that the Palestinians, as a population, deserve it (just as the enemies say that Israel, or even the Jews, as a population, deserve the war that has been waged on them for decades though with less horrid attacks than 10/7), because the Palestinians voted for Hamas, because they seem to support Hamas, because they have not risen up to bring down Hamas. But it is a choice, and a choice that not many can make and feel well with, if we have a modicum of human empathy beyond what your science calls the in-group.
So you see -- Israel itself is increasingly divided on this. Not because of having fallen victim to the oppressor-oppressed mentality (nobody can, I think, say that Ehud Olmert is woke) but because the human cost, on one side and the other, is becoming too high, without a clear hope of truly eradicating Hamas. That the whole world (for reasons of ideology, of regional and national interests, of alliances and silent conflicts) is wrapped in restraints that prevent it from putting pressure on Hamas and its allies, instead putting pressure exclusively on Israel, is horribly sad.
But it is Israel that will choose how to continue or end this war, as Israel remains the only democratic side in the conflict, whose population has actual agency. Truly, that is the only thing that matters.
Thanks for your very thoughtful comment. I can't say I disagree with very much (if any) of it. I don't *think* you were saying that I think the Palestinians deserve all of the death and destruction that is occurring. I don't. But I do -- like Douglas Murray among many others -- place the blame on Hamas, and I definitely do not feel I'm in a position to substitute my judgments for how the way should be fought for those of the IDF. Unlike previous wars between the two, this time it sure seems that there is only one way the war will end -- with the elimination of the Hamas threat in Gaza. Not sure what that will look like, but I can't imagine Israel returning to the situation as it was on Oct. 6. I don't perceive Israel as having any choice about continuing the war. They must. It is only Hamas that really has a choice about when it will end. It really is tragic that they love death (of Israelis and Palestinians) so much.
I never for a moment thought that you think that the Palestinians deserve all of the death and destruction that is occurring (at times, in my darkest moments, I do -- half my family is in Israel, I knew people who have been murdered, my son is now doing his duty in the IDF -- but then I recover my humanity). And the blame is totally on Hamas -- and on the warmongering of Hamas's patrons. The blame is on an ideology that has poisoned the Islamic world, to be honest... and that is one of the most sore points of it all, because it is the hardest to fix by external pressure.
What I meant is that placing on the Palestinians as a people the responsibility for such destruction and carnage is one of the ways to look at this war, a way embraced by a large number of the ultra-nationalist Right in Israel. A way that is not utterly devoid of sense (the Germans, as a people, allowed and fostered Nazism, after all, and many of us -- many of my German friends as well -- believe that they bore responsibility for the destruction visited on them by the Allies), but a way that is the mirror of the way in which a large number of Palestinians look at this war and at the conflict in general. In fact I believe, from what broad lines psychology I know, that the two approaches are symmetrical and feed on each other.
My main problem with the discussions of the war that happen on the outside -- among Jews who do not live in Israel, among non-Jews -- is that most miss an essential point: this is not a war between armies. The Six Days was, Yom Kippur was. But this is a war against guerrilla inside a very small, extremely overpopulated stretch of land. And unfortunately, the hopes to eliminate Hamas in Gaza decrease with every day that passes and with every increase in the civilian deaths, destruction and humanitarian crisis that war causes. If we had managed to go in and decapitate Hamas quickly, it might have been a possibility, even with all the questions about "then what". But Hamas has proved to be a hydra with too many heads, and eliminating it would probably, to be realistic, mean to give the whole of Gaza the Darmstadt treatment.
And this is something that Israeli society is not comfortable with (even if some sections are) and that the world is very much not going to accept. This is why Olmert has been calling for stopping the war, negotiations and the exchange of hostages (the concept is revolting to me -- as I have always believed that if you cave in to the demands of terrorists who hold hostages you have set out a path for this to happen again indefinitely -- but it may be that I am too rigid... and none of mine is held captive).
It increasingly feels like a dead end. If the world cared for peace, there would be more hope. But the world does not: there is no will to put pressure equally on both sides towards a solution... the only pressure is always exercised on Israel. While unfortunately, the only ones who can eliminate Hamas, from within, are the neighbouring Arab states, and they are in no shape to do that even if they wished: Syria and Lebanon in the situation that they are in, partitioned between warring militias; Egypt, that keeps its border sealed against Palestinian refugees for fear of the contamination of Hamas, after having barely quashed the Islamic Brotherhood within its border; and Jordan, who clings to its precarious internal peace, unwilling to stir the waters even a little bit. They do not want a Palestinian state there, which they would be responsible, for their own sake, to prevent from turning into a state governed by a proxy of Iran.
Sorry for the amount of rambling. I have not been able to think of much, or clearly at all, of late. But like so many, I fear, that have a closer view of events because of blood ties, I feel together with Benny Morris a great sense of despair.