FOUR ISRAELI civilians were recently shot dead in their car near Hebron in the West Bank. The military wing of Hamas claimed credit. Israel’s Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz said: “Our answer to this murder is to hold onto the Land of Israel and build Beit Hagai . . . The murderers have one purpose, to rid the Land of Israel of Jews. They don’t distinguish between men, women, and babies.’’
As the Israeli-Palestinian peace process once again crashes on the hard rocks of Middle East reality, it is worth stepping back to reconsider the conventional wisdom on this apparently intractable situation. In a paper we recently published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,’’ we found that, in contrast to the perception on each side of the conflict that the other side is the aggressor while it only retaliates, in fact, both sides act in response to the other’s aggression.
Most Israelis see Palestinians as inherently, fundamentally, uncontingently hostile, wishing only to “throw us into the sea.’’ Similarly, Palestinians see Israel as unshakably determined to expel them from their land.
Although anecdote and speculation are popular in discussions of the Middle East conflict, we used data and quantitative analysis to determine whether these perceptions are true.
Nancy Kanwisher is a professor of neuroscience at MIT. Anat Biletzki is a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and Quinnipiac University. Johannes Haushofer, a research associate at the University of Zurich was also an author of the study.
Full Article
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/10/14/a_cycle_of_retribution
Full Report
http://web.mit.edu/cis/pdf/Haushofer.PNAS2010.pdf
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