Who's being naïve about the Middle East conflict?

It seems obvious to many that violence is the best way to achieve one's security goals, but they are likely engaging in mental shortcuts that lead to biased conclusions

This month, the news cycle in Israel and the United States has hardly let up. It has seen escalations in Gaza, between Israel and the Houthis and now between Israel and Hezbollah. Amid reports of settler violence and international sanctions against violent settlers, the International Court of Justice issued a nonbinding ruling that Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank is illegal. And Netanyahu’s speech to the U.S. Congress was preceded by an attempted assassination of Trump, Biden dropping his re-election bid, and Harris quickly emerging as the new Democratic frontrunner.

To me, complexity science is the most useful lens through which to look at all these developments. No one is able to control the course of events, try as they might. Israel has yet to defeat Hamas and secure the release of its hostages, neither Israel nor Hezbollah is able to deter the other from retaliatory attacks and Biden couldn’t keep the party unified behind him, to name a few.

The biggest destabilizing force is violence. It causes individuals within a complex system to seek new ways to restore order in the way they believe the system should be. The longer the cycles of violence last, the more arrays of adjacent possibilities emerge. All the parties blame their rivals for “starting” the conflict, for provoking them to take forceful action in response because the need for total control has become more urgent.

Consider Israel and Hezbollah, which fired a rocket Saturday that killed a dozen Druze children on a playing field in the Golan. This tragedy-atrocity was made possible by the refusal of Israel and Hezbollah to back down in their secondary conflict, which in turn was triggered by the war in Gaza. Each side strikes the other in retaliation for a previous attack as a way to “punish” the enemy and deter them from further escalation. Each side believes it can control the other, but both sides fail to do so. The latest attack, which Hezbollah is apparently denying because it doesn’t want to be held responsible for the deaths of Arabs, came in response to an Israeli strike that killed four Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah was likely firing at an Israeli military target on the Golan, which is officially Syrian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, considering there is a military base just a few miles from Majd al-Shams, where the rocket fell.

Israel’s threat of retaliation has already led to a new adjacent possibility not contemplated earlier – Turkish intervention. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made an explicit threat in a speech on Sunday that Turkey must be “very strong so that Israel can’t do these things to the Palestinians.” He added: “Just as we entered [Nagorno-] Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we might do the same to them. There is nothing we can’t do. We must only be strong.” While Israel sees this remark as inflammatory, Erdogan probably views it as a form of coercive strategy – trying to compel Israel (there you go, using force, or the threat of force, again) to end its Gaza operations sooner rather than later.

The leaders involved in this conflict don't seem to be thinking deeply about the complexity of the situation or questioning their own thoughts and decisions. They should be, since their choices can lead to many deaths and much suffering. However, they are influenced by cognitive biases and often make quick decisions rather than accurate ones. Both sides believe they are right, which makes them prone to confirmation bias. They see the other side’s aggressive actions as proof of their true nature, deserving punishment, and if the other side backs off, they see it as a sign of deterrence. This mindset, where no further analysis is needed because the situation seems clear, is known as the "Makes Sense Stopping Rule."

These leaders also justify their own harmful actions as necessary, framing them as self-defense or rightful punishment to ease their conscience. If someone questions their use of force, they may dismiss that person as naïve or even traitorous. Yet they are the ones experiencing a human tendency known as "naïve realism." To them, “reality seems clear, obvious and self-evident”, as author and scientist Will Storr puts it, while “those who claim to see it differently must be idiots or lying or morally derelict”.  An example is former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who called for immediate retaliation as the obvious answer to the Golan strike. He didn’t seem to consider the broader context of ongoing retaliations and the resulting mutual suffering that could follow a major escalation. (It didn’t help his case that he referred to the victims as Israeli Druze, when they didn’t have Israeli citizenship because the Golan is officially occupied Syrian land.)

What is so difficult for me, and I imagine for many of you out there, is that I see the situation potentially spinning out of control and into chaos, and there is nothing that I can do to prevent it from happening. I simply can’t change the minds of our leaders – not by a clever opinion piece, not by a protest, not even by personally sitting down with the prime minister.

Moreover, I can’t proclaim that I have the solution. While I am confident that complexity science helps us better understand conflict, my own biases may very well be pushing me toward a logically fallacious conclusion about what should be done.

So, as hard as it feels to not talk about international affairs, I’d like to pivot to the personal – changing our own minds. At a time when the news makes us feel powerless, it’s important to focus on where we can make a difference. Stay tuned for my last post before taking a summer break.

Children laying flowers at the spot where the rocket that killed 12 children in Majdal Shams landed, Sunday. Credit: Alex Levac