Cowritten by Arie W. Kruglanski and Joel Singer

The Gaza war between Israel and Hamas (2023-2024) is but the latest round in the tragic, and increasingly horrific, struggle between Israelis and Palestinians that has been ongoing at least since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, and actually from the earliest waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine (1881-1903) onward. What forces drive this seemingly interminable and intractable conflict?

In what follows, we offer a socio-psychological perspective on the conflict’s history and nature that, to our mind, is crucial to understanding its dynamics and guiding its ultimate resolution.

Typically, the Israeli-Palestinian entanglement is perceived as a “realistic” conflict over a scarce resource: the territory of Palestine. We submit, however, that land here is but a proxy, a means to an ultimate psychological end: the feelings of significance and mattering over which Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a deadly struggle.

Throughout history, land and territory have been the hallmarks of national pride and glory. Ruling vast lands and their inhabitants has motivated conquests, imperialisms, and expansionisms from antiquity to the present.

Land, as such, is a fungible commodity interchangeable with cash; in fact, it was sold in large quantities by Palestinian Arabs to Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the first half of the 20th century. But sovereignty over territory carries a much deeper and symbolic value as a means to significance, which cannot be replaced by material means. Understanding this holds the key to any attempts at resolving the conflict, and envisioning the circumstances in which it might be possible to attain this elusive end.

In the early 20th century, when the seeds of the conflict were sowed, both European Jews, who fled from Europe to Palestine, and local Palestinian Arabs were waking up to a new opportunity to enhance their significance and mattering that for centuries were badly wanting. The nationalist spirit that then swept the international order beckoned to both peoples who, for different reasons, felt downtrodden and humiliated.

Like other Arabs, the Palestinians were under colonial dominion that lasted for centuries, first by the Ottoman Empire which ruled Palestine for some 400 years, then by Great Britain which took over Palestine at the end of WW1. When new Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan were being carved out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, the Palestinian Arabs too sought to obtain a country of their own.

At the same time, for a variety of reasons, virulent antisemitism in Europe reached new heights. Publications such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in 1905 in Russia, generated theories of an international Jewish conspiracy. These fomented waves of massacres of Jews across all Eastern Europe and in Russia in particular (the infamous "pogroms"). Feeling unwanted anywhere, the Jews concluded that they must have a state of their own and that the only place on earth fit for that purpose was in their ancestral land of Israel—now called Palestine.

Arab and Jewish forms of nationalism emerged, separately and in parallel, as glimmers of........

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