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How Revenge Perpetuates Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
ScienceDaily (Oct. 4, 2010) — Revenge cuts both ways in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Scientists of the University of Zurich, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tel Aviv and Quinnipiaq Universities show that attacks by either side lead to violent retaliation from the other. Both Israelis and Palestinians may underestimate their own role in perpetuating the conflict.
A team of scientists from the University of Zurich, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tel Aviv and Quinnipiaq Universities have found that attacks by both Israel and Palestinians lead to violent retaliation from the other side. This finding challenges claims by both Israelis and Palestinians that they confronted with a fundamentally hostile and implacable foe, suggesting instead that part of the violence of each side is a direct reaction to previous attacks by the other party.
The team analyzed a large dataset of killings and rocket attacks in the Second Intifada between Israel and Palestine, spanning the years 2000-2008, using a statistical method called Vector Autoregression. "This technique allows us to study the effect of a single additional attack from one side on future attacks by the other side," says lead author Johannes Haushofer, a neurobiologist and economist at the University of Zurich. "We find that when one side attacks the other, they directly inflict a certain additional number of fatalities or rocket attacks on their own people, because they can be nearly certain that the other side will retaliate. For example, when Israeli forces kill 5 Palestinians, they automatically increase the probability that Israelis will die from Palestinian attacks on the following day by 50%."
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, overturns earlier findings which had suggested that only Palestinian attacks lead to retaliation, while Israeli attacks did not. "The previous evidence suggested that Israeli attacks were often responses to Palestinian aggression, whereas this did not appear to be true for Palestinian attacks," says Anat Biletzki, a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv and Quinnipiaq Universities, and former head of BT'selem, an Israeli human rights organization that collects the data that were used in the study. "This implied that the conflict was one-sided, with Palestinians attacking Israel, and the Israeli army merely responding to this aggression. Our findings suggest that the situation is more balanced than that."
The scientists hope that this insight will lead to a better understanding of the forces that perpetuate the conflict. "Psychologists have long known that people tend to understand their own behavior in terms of the external situation they find themselves in, but another person's behavior in terms of that person's inherent character," says Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the senior author of the study. "This cognitive bias may exacerbate blind spots on both sides of the conflict and tend to think of themselves as victims who merely respond to external violence, without appreciating their own causal role in provoking those acts of violence."
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Historically speaking, Israel has always been the invader, aggressor, and an extremely genocidal one, at that.
I would not rely on university academics what sound common sense better and more quickly tells us. Either way, we have to know enough about the history, and we should never blindly believe academics or academians; especially when many universities and colleges are "in the pockets" of the rich imperialist elites, who have a lot of control over academia.
When Palestinians first began attacks, it was in retaliation for or against the genocidal murderousness and destructiveness of this illegally established stated called Israel. It was illegally established, because no one had any legitimate authority for ordering its establishment. No one has the right to push aside a population in order to make room for people being transferred from a different region, especially when they're from a completely separate and distant region. No one had the right to dictate that Palestinians had to make room for the Jews of Eastern EUROPE.
The Eastern European Jews were imposed on the Palestinians because of the hein that European countries and the U.S. had against Jews. The Palestinians weren't given any real vote in this process, which was imposed by the imperialist powers of Europe and the U.S.; but the Palestinians lived peacefully and constructively with the transferred Jews. That happy co-existence was not tolerable, it seems, for the rich and powerfully influential Zionist nutcases turned this situation into murderous and very destructive genocide against the Palestinians; no less bad than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis who were aided and abetted by the other European countries and the U.S., which refused Hitler's offer for transferring Eastern European Jews to countries that would receive these Jews.
Attacks by Palestinian fighters, defenders sometimes had sad consequences, but these have basically all be understandable attacks; because they've always been because of Israel's diabolically extreme crimes against the Palestinians.
And it's not certain that all attacks the Palestinians [allegedly] committed were really committed by them. It's very possible that some attacks were covertly committed by Israel, which has a proven history of committing false flag attacks.
Put aside mere academicians. Stick with sound common sense and true knowledge of the Israel-Palestine "conflict", instead. And it rather really isn't a conflict, for what it really has always been is Israel-U.S.-Britain war of aggression, genocide, destruction, and theft against the Palestinians.
No one can justly fault the few Palestinians who've launched some home-made rockets or fireworks into Israel, or even for historical suicide bombings, which weren't many. The most tragic thing about those past suicide bombings were that Israel's extreme or supreme criminality against the Palestinians rather justified such attacks being committed, historically, in Israel.
It's the U.S., Israel, Britain, the illegitimate Palestinian PM or President Abbas, et cetera, that are the guilty parties; and the UNSC has repeatedly permitted the criminally placed vetos of the U.S. to stand as if these were legitimate, approvable or tolerable vetos. They've always and completely been criminal vetos of super-rogue state USA.
Sometimes Israel attacks first while claiming that Hamas or other Palestinian resistance fighters attacked first. One example was in Nov. or Dec. 2008 and Israel not only lied about Hamas then striking and thereby justifying Israel's war on Gaza; Israel conducted that extremely criminal war of entirely aggression and genocide against a comparitively [defenseless] Palestine.
If people want to find fault in this so-called conflict, then it's not the Palestinians we should look. It's the U.S., Israel, Britain, et cetera, that we should look at and condemn for their joint supreme crime against the Palestinians.
But Israel is an undefeatable foe for Palestinians, as well as for people of many countries, since Israel is the either 4th or 5th military power on Earth and is the sole Middle-Eastern country to be nuclear-armed; with hundreds of nuclear arms or missiles. The Palestinians have no military match for Israel. The Palestinians basically have nothing for military defense.
We definitely don't need university or college degrees to be able to determine this for ourselves. Common sense and being sufficiently knowledgeable about the reality in Palestine and how Israeli leadership, political and military, is suffices.
For morons, perhaps this study will be helpful; if they're not so moronic that they can't learn from the findings of this study that shouldn't be needed at all.
But it still wouldn't provide appropriate "enlightenment", for the conflict is [not] perpetuated for the reasons that these academicians are saying. The real reason is that Israel wants all that remains of Palestine. Israel hasn't been stealing Palestinian lands and potable, safe drinking water for a very long time because Palestinians refused to share. It has always been about murderous genocide, destruction, and theft since 1948.
The Palestinians haven't lost over half of their land due to having refused to share. Israel aided, abetted, protected, et cetera, by the U.S. and some, if not many, European governments stole this land and other natural resources from the Palestinians.
Nothing the Palestinians do can ever be sanely considered as justification for the genocidal, and so on, actions of the illegitimately established state called Israel against the Palestinians. Nothing can ever justify this supreme international criminality!
Academicians should get out of their ivory tower jobs, off their asses, and join the [real] world. And Science Daily should stick to the physical or natural sciences; staying out of politics, except when it comes to R&D and use of weapons of war, including bio. and chemical warfare agents, and government spy technology, f.e. A journal or magazine like Science Daily, as well as Scientific American, f.e., should not be considered good resources for political analysis; and the same is probably true for economic analysis.