Why Israel?

Why is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the one conflict that everyone is focused on?

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know about Israel’s recent bombing in Gaza. You’ll know many quite intricate details—the hospital misfire, originally thought to be from Israel, later convincingly evidenced to be from an Islamic Jihad rocket. You’ll probably know the death toll, around 20,000, as well as various features of the history, potentially those trotted out by the side you agree with. If you’re generally pro-Palestine, you’ll find yourself with detailed knowledge about the 48 Nakba, as well as why those historians who think it wasn’t that bad are wrong, and why a historian who agrees with you is the most reliable source on the subject. If you’re pro-Israel, you’ll have off the top of your head various dates when the Palestinians allegedly turned down magnanimous, generous, once-in-a-lifetime, huge, tremendous, beautiful offers of a state—48, 67, 2000, 2000 again, 2008.

You probably won’t know anything about Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, that came to a close recently (thank goodness!). You probably won’t know about Azerbaijan’s aggression. You probably have a vague idea that there’s a war in Syria but won’t really know the details. I bet you’ll be unable to name a single currently ongoing conflict in Africa, even though there are a bunch.

This is a rather odd state of affairs. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets much more attention than all the other wars in the world, even those like the Syrian civil war that result in many more deaths. Why is this?

A first hypothesis is that it’s because of antisemitism. This hypothesis seems especially popular among those who are pro-Israel, many of whom make the argument that the only reason people condemn Israel’s actions but not other worse actions is because they hate Jews. But it’s an extremely implausible hypothesis. A significant chunk of the country has strong views on the conflict, but the number of genuine antisemites is quite low. This theory explains why so many people are so virulently anti-Israel, but fails to explain why there are also so many who are extremely pro-Israel. You might supplant that hypothesis by suggesting that the strong sentiments are the result of a combination of antisemitism and pro-Israel sentiments from those who are zionists for religious and cultural reasons, which make up a significant chunk of Jews. But this again fails for the first reason, there just aren’t enough antisemites.

A second hypothesis is that Israel’s war is uniquely pernicious. One might point to the fact that, for example, Israel has been killing children at a much higher rate than died even in the Syrian civil war, the deadliest recent conflict. This, however, isn’t plausible as an explanation; Israel and Palestine were in the news long before Israel’s recent war. Furthermore, while on a few statistics this war comes up as worse per day, it’s almost certain that the death toll will be much lower than the wars in Yemen or Syria.

A third hypothesis: it’s uniquely criticized because it’s being done by U.S. allies. When crimes are done by U.S. allies, we care about them more and the spotlight is shown on them to a much greater degree. I hope the poor, innocent soul who came up with this hypothesis is protected at all costs, who maintains the naive belief that we’re especially concerned about bad things done by U.S. allies. Unfortunately, as Chomsky and Herman show, at some length, in Manufacturing Consent, we tend to care less about crimes done by our allies. The murder of Oscar Romero by U.S. allies got much less attention than the murder of Jerzy Popiełuszko, done by U.S. enemies. Similarly, the horrifying crimes by Suharto in East Timor were ignored, as we condemned smaller atrocities. Iraq’s mistreatment of the Kurds got much more attention than Turkey’s similar mistreatment. A Harvard study showed that the same actions are far more likely to be called torture if done by our enemies and enhanced interrogation if done by our allies or ourselves.

Furthermore, many of the world’s crimes are carried about by U.S. allies. The Saudi coalition as they carried out their worst crimes in Yemen did it backed almost exclusively by U.S. arms. This doesn’t explain why Israel is much more extensively discussed than the Saudi’s crimes, for example.

I think that the correct explanation is two-fold. First, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for much longer than, for example, the war in Yemen did. As a result, people have had decades to develop extremely strong views on the matter. People hear about these things from their parents who have been thinking about them since childhood, so it’s no surprise that people have stronger views. This is, I’d imagine, a small part of the story.

The larger part was discussed by Scott Alexander in his article The Toxoplasma of Rage. In it, he explains why people spend so much of their time on social media sharing things that outrage people. You get no social credit for sharing banal moral messages that everyone agrees with. No one is proud that they condemned the holocaust on Facebook, because everyone’s against the holocaust. But you can signal what type of person you are—a progressive, enlightened type—by expressing views that are only held by those people. So, as a result, people express strong views on one of the more complicated conflicts for signaling—only when your views aren’t universally adopted does it show what kind of person you are.

The bigger factor, however, is that outrage is addictive. People say they don’t like being outraged, but on social media they spend the substantial majority of their time finding things to be outraged by. As it so happens, for easy-to-understand reasons, there are a lot of people who are extremely pro-Israel—many Jews and Christians feel a deep attachment to Israel. As a result, because discussion of Israel-Palestine outrages people more, discussion of it spreads. Because people can find other people to argue with about it, discussion of it never leaves the news.