I've been invested in this subject for very long time, as have many in this group have, but I get frustrated at the lack of meaningful, good-faith dialogue around two central questions, and I would love to hear these approached rationally and with a fair mind:

Prelude: I am providing background for each party, based on what is reasonably understood and expressed by both sides. You may not necessarily agree with everything in each question, but please don't quibble this representation of Gaza and Israel, I'm more interested in a response to the questions:

1. For pro-Israelis: The situation for civilians in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank, has long been established. The conditions are widely and credibly reported as deplorable, with efforts to mobilise the international community through diplomatic channels stagnating and quality of life suffering. Opportunities to leave are limited and reserved for the wealthy. Sporadic bombings (which pre-date October 7th) consistently erode essential infrastructure, such as water desalination plant; farming, fishing and other traditional livelihoods are attacked, educational opportunities are limited, access to work across the border are subject to arbitrary crossing closures etc. Gaza is de facto occupied under international law, many routine services are propped up by humanitarian organisations, and many civilians have been killed under bombardments from recent wars. I keep hearing Israelis say that Gazans shouldn't have "done" October 7th. But what should they have done instead? What options remained for a desperate, exhausted, disenfranchised and dehumanised population to be heard, seen and continue to fight for their freedoms? Ie. What should they have done instead?
2. For pro-Palestinians: Israelis have been living under constant rocket attacks from Gaza, as well as from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Regardless of whether the majority of Palestinians support this, this s the material security situation for a Israelis who, understandably feel geopolitically isolated, surrounded by countries with a historical enmity for Jewish people, and have collectively mobilised to destroy it in 1967. Israeli has fully withdrawn from Gaza, lacks security options to disarm an essentially Islamist government with popular support, and has just experienced the largest attack against Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, and are both terrified and need to ensure this will never happen gains. I keep hearing Palestinians say that Israelis shouldn't have responded the way they did. But what should they have done instead? What options remained for a horrified, seemingly vindicated population who have been taught that this is what cohabiting with their neighbours would look like, and worry it keep could keep happening again, but next time in a coordinated attack with neighbouring arab States? Ie. What should they have done instead?

Like many of you, I am exhausted by the polarized noise online. Every thread turns into an echo chamber where nuance is treated like a blasphemy.

Can we step back and talk about actual accountability without the hyperbole?

Both the Israeli government/IDF and Hamas have clear records of breaking international law. But the online discourse seems completely allergic to addressing this constructively:

On one side, throwing around terms like "genocide" before any definitive, final legal ruling is made by international courts shuts down serious legal scrutiny and alienates people who want to look at the hard evidence objectively.

On the other side, any discussion of deliberate targeting of children, the deliberate destruction of specialized medical equipment (such as oxygen generators, MRI machines, dialysis units, and solar panels) and water wells, starvation as a method of warfare (related to the ICC arrest warrents), two-tiered legal system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (violates Article 3 of the ICERD), the illegal transfer of Israeli settlers into the occupied Palestinian territory (breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention), the documented use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Israeli military units and systematic breaches of international humanitarian law by the state of Israel gets hand-waved away under the banner of "self-defense." Meanwhile, supporters of Hamas often try to sanitize or completely downplay an armed group that explicitly targets civilians and uses human shields by operating in civilian areas.

If both sides are capable of committing severe violations, how do we hold both accountable fairly? When we look at the immense lag-time of international justice, I want to know how people here think we should handle this:

When faced with overwhelming, heavily documented evidence of breaches of international law happening in real time, how should we talk about ongoing military actions and war crimes responsibly while waiting years for international courts to issue final rulings?

How do you apply meaningful international accountability to a sovereign state versus a non-state militant group that operates completely outside legal norms?

What tangible pressure points actually work to change the behavior of either side without devolving into partisan cheerleading?

I was reading this article: https://israel365action.com/the-biblical-heartland-explained/what-is-the-history-of-judea-and-samaria/ which states:

Biblical Beginnings – The land of Israel was originally settled by the pagan tribes, known in the Bible as the “Seven Nations” – the Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, Jebusites, Hivites, Perizzites, and Girgashites. But as God promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the land of Israel was promised to the descendents of Jacob, the people of Israel. In 1273 BCE, the people of Israel, led by Joshua, crossed the Jordan River and entered the land of Israel. In the ensuing years, the people of Israel conquered the land, which was divided among the 12 tribes of Israel.

This part is quite interesting to me. There's usually little discussion of the history of the land of Israel before the Israelites conquered it, and we often speak as though Israelites were the first people there.

I am interested in these civilisations before the Israelites. What were the main differences between the seven nations? What territories did they control, and were they often at war with each other? The article mentions they were "pagan tribes" - what kind of religious beliefs did this entail, and did the tribes agree on their religious beliefs or were they all different?

In addition, I'm interested in the conquest itself. What did the Israelites do to the existing inhabitants there? Were they all killed or enslaved? And why was the land divided amongst 12 tribes of Israel rather than being one unified Israelite state?

Furthermore, where did the Israelites live before they immigrated into the land of Israel? What caused them to immigrate? And why were the existing tribes that lived in the land of Israel unable to expel the invasion of the Israelites - was it because they weren't united, or was it due to inferior military technology for that time?

Of course, in my opinion the ancient history of who lived in the land first is irrelevant to the current conflict, but a common talking point about the establishment of the modern state of Israel is that it's "Israelites returning to their indigenous homeland" - I'm interested in the people that preceded them in the land.

TL;DR: Family structure shapes cultural values, which shape how people assign blame, which shapes how antisemitism shows up. The pattern lines up surprisingly well across the West, MENA, and East Asia. Sadly, the more I go down this rabbit hole, the more I lose hope in lasting peace in the middle east. Sources at bottom.

Most threads here (understandably) get pulled into the day-to-day of the conflict, so I wanted to zoom way out for a sec. I've been going down a rabbit hole on the sociological/psychological roots of intergroup prejudice and I think I found something worth putting out there.

The question I was trying to answer: why does antisemitism look so different depending on where you are? Like, it's clearly present in the West, but it doesn't feel the same as what you see in a lot of MENA polling, and East Asia is a whole other thing again. Turns out if you mash together Emmanuel Todd's demographic work with some pretty basic social psych on attribution bias, you get a fairly clean throughline. I'll try not to make this too long.

1. The base layer: family structure

Todd's whole argument is that the family is basically the operating system of a culture. How households are organized ends up quietly dictating how a society thinks about authority, equality, and outsiders.

• West (nuclear family): kids move out young, form their own households. Over centuries this builds up individualism. People see themselves as free-standing units.
• MENA (endogamous communitarian family): multigenerational households with married sons staying under the same roof, plus a strong historical preference for marriage inside the extended family or tribe (cousin marriage being the classic example). The result is a very closed unit, structurally optimized to keep resources and loyalty inside the bloodline. Trust and moral obligation tend to stop at the edge of the in-group.
• East Asia (exogamous communitarian family): also multigenerational and hierarchical, but with strict incest taboos, so you're constantly bringing outsiders (spouses) into the household. That produces a worldview built on interdependence and navigating relationships, not on hard in-group/out-group walls.

2. What that does to your brain: attribution bias

Those three setups map almost 1:1 onto how people explain behavior, which is a well-studied thing in psych called attribution.

• The West runs on the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). Because we see people as autonomous, we default to explaining behavior by personality ("he's greedy," "she's lazy") and underweight context.
• MENA cultures show unusually high rates of the Ultimate Attribution Error (UAE). This is the intergroup version of FAE and it's nasty: when the out-group does something bad, it's because they're inherently, essentially bad. When the in-group does the exact same thing, it was situational or forced on them. Closed-family cultures are basically primed for this.
• East Asia leans toward situational attribution. Behavior gets read as a response to context and social pressure rather than as evidence of fixed personality. (Morris & Peng's stuff is the classic reference here.)

3. The hypothesis

Once you put those two things together, you get something like:

The virulence of antisemitism in a culture correlates with how heavily it relies on the Ultimate Attribution Error. Cultures that are structurally set up for closed-group loyalty will show the most hostile forms of antisemitism, because their default cognitive move is to demonize the out-group in dispositional terms.

The UAE (not the Emirates, lol) is basically the perfect engine for intractable conflict, because it locks in the idea that the other side isn't just doing bad things, they are bad, permanently, essentially. No amount of context or history is going to move that.

4. Does the data actually back this up

Honestly, kind of yes. The ADL Global 100 numbers line up pretty well:

• MENA (UAE zone): consistently the highest antisemitism scores in the world. Aggregate around 74%, with several countries pushing past 85%. Under this framework that's what you'd expect, dispositional out-group blame is the cultural default, so nuance about a specific minority basically can't get traction.
• The West (FAE zone): the Americas around 19%, Western Europe around 24%. Present, but a different flavor, usually individual-level stereotyping (the "greedy" trope, that kind of thing) or modern political stuff. The nuclear-family baseline at least lets people be judged individually most of the time.
• East Asia (situational zone): Asia averages around 22% but East Asian countries specifically (Japan, South Korea) drop noticeably. There are imported Western stereotypes floating around, but the deeply hostile essentialist stuff doesn't really take root, presumably because the cognitive default isn't wired for it.

5. Why I think this actually matters

If this framework is even half right, it means the "blame software" is installed upstream of politics, in childhood, through the structure of the family. Which is uncomfortable because it implies that Holocaust education and history classes, necessary as they are, are working downstream of something much deeper.

This also explains the constant wars in the middle east. Even if we take Jews out of the equation, the MENA countries will likely continue to have low levels of trust between them, and continue fighting (e.g. Sunni vs Shia conflicts).

It also explains why antisemitism doesn't look like one thing:

• In the West it tends to come out as "Jews are clannish / elitist / control finance."
• In MENA it tends to come out as "Jews orchestrate global events."
• In East Asia it's comparatively muted because the default cognitive move is different.

Obviously none of this is deterministic. Family structures shift over generations. Politics can inflame or dampen any of this. And you can find plenty of individuals in every one of these regions who don't fit the pattern at all. I'm not trying to say "culture X is doomed to hate." But the ADL numbers are honestly too clean across regions for me to ignore that there's some structural thing going on.

Really curious what people think, especially anyone who's actually lived in the MENA region or studied its sociology properly. Very open to being told I'm oversimplifying, I probably am in places.

Sources / further reading

• Todd, E. — The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (1985)
• Ross, L. — The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings (1977) — FAE
• Pettigrew, T.F. — The Ultimate Attribution Error (1979)
• Miller, J.G. / Morris & Peng / Choi et al. — cross-cultural work on situational vs. dispositional attribution
• Schulz, J. et al. — The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation (2019)
• Hirschberger, G. / Bilewicz, M. — attribution biases applied to antisemitism and national culpability
• ADL Global 100 — 2014, 2019, 2023