Cognitive Dissonance and Palestinian Terrorism
It's painful to change your mind, so most people don't.
After the unspeakably brutal attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, Jews all over the world were shocked to hear widespread explanations, justifications, and rationalizations based on the premise that Arab terrorism is the result of Israel's purported colonial oppression of a helpless and indigenous Palestinian population. While Jews have taken no pleasure in the reports of civilians killed and wounded while being used as human shields in Gaza, demonstrators have continued to celebrate the rape, torture, and murder of Jews as “resistance.”
The Jewish instinct, when confronted with this mind-bending inversion of reality, is to argue rationally. We point out that Palestine was a colony imposed on the Jewish homeland, not the other way around. That Jews are indigenous to Israel and have no other homeland, while the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians are culturally, linguistically, and religiously indistinguishable from the populations of the 21 other Arab League countries. That they are isolated and used as proxies by those countries in an effort to destroy Israel. That Palestinians did not start attacking Jews because of restrictions placed on them by Israel, but that Israel started placing restrictions on them because their leaders have continually targeted Israeli civilians with terror attacks, rejected all peace proposals, and sworn to annihilate Israel and kill all Jews. That these leaders operate terrorist training camps, glorify jihadist martyrdom for children, and admit to maximizing their own civilian casualties in order to demonize Israel.
But stating these facts accomplishes nothing. Our anti-Israel friends, neighbors and colleagues don't hear us, and if they hear us, they don't believe us.
To understand why, you need to know about cognitive dissonance.
The concept of cognitive dissonance was developed in the 1950s by a researcher named Leon Festinger. Like several of his contemporaries in the field of social psychology - notably, Stanley Milgram who studied obedience to authority, and Solomon Asch who studied conformity - Festinger was a Jew struggling to understand how and why the civilized world had perpetrated the Holocaust.
Milgram concluded that regular people will do almost anything, up to and including murder, simply because somebody who seems to be in charge tells them to. Asch demonstrated that regular people will knowingly affirm falsehoods to avoid disapproval from a group of strangers.
Festinger went one step further: through a variety of experiments, he proved that people automatically and continually deny objective reality, just to keep from changing their minds.
Festinger's explanation of the unconscious process at work is brilliantly simple. We feel psychological pain when we are exposed to information that contradicts our pre-existing beliefs. To resolve this discomfort (which Festinger named “cognitive dissonance”), we either deny the new information, dismiss its importance, or rationalize it in a way that reconciles the contradiction. In very rare cases, we change our minds, accepting the new information and rejecting our prior beliefs.
In the wake of a horrific attack perpetrated by Palestinians against largely defenseless families and young people in Israel, cognitive dissonance looks like this:
Deny - “It's all fake Jewish propaganda. Palestinians don't rape women and murder babies, Israelis do that.”
Dismiss - “The attack was terrible, but it was a one-time event, while Israel has been committing genocide against Palestinians for decades.”
Rationalize - “This is what happens when you oppress an entire population and force them into an open-air prison with no hope of a better life.”
Each of these assertions can - and has been - extensively debunked and proven false. But, again, it doesn't matter. For decades, the media, the UN, and a legion of progressive pundits have made excuses for Arab violence while scrutinizing and condemning any Israeli use of force. At least two generations of liberal Westerners have been raised to believe that Israel is an apartheid, colonial state that commits wanton abuse against an impoverished, native population of Palestinians.
It doesn't matter that no other country would ever be expected to tolerate a rapidly-growing population of violent jihadists running terrorist indoctrination programs within its borders. Or that the Islamic world is openly committed to forcing the Palestinians into serving as a permanent underclass weaponized against Israel. Or that Palestinian leaders siphon billions of foreign aid dollars into their personal bank accounts while their people live in squalor.
That is, it doesn't matter to the people who are certain that Palestinian suffering is the result of inexplicably irrational Israeli malevolence rather than blatantly self-interested Islamist politics. Or to the people who ignore the delusional contradiction of LGBTQ college students marching for a "Free Palestine," when gay and trans lives would immediately be forfeit in such a country, were one ever to exist. These people - and there are many of them - believe what they believe, and they are not going to change their minds.
For Jews, the experience of cognitive dissonance is different. We don't have the luxury of rejecting the new information with which we have been confronted. The burned bodies of Jewish children with soot in their lungs and Jewish women with shattered pelvic bones are not things we can explain away or ignore.
Instead, we have been forced, painfully, to confront our own cognitive dissonance - our own pre-existing beliefs. The belief that the world would not allow another Holocaust against us. The belief that the general public recognizes the danger Islamic extremism poses, not just to Israel but to all of Western civilization. The belief that our friends and neighbors understand that, in every war, innocents will suffer and die, but there is a difference between a violent attack that gleefully targets civilians and a forceful defense that unavoidably harms civilians.
We thought that most people understood these things and shared those beliefs. But we have been proven wrong. We have been proven wrong on the campuses of elite colleges, where Jewish students are being bullied, spit on, and threatened - often with the tacit approval of faculty. We have been proven wrong on social media, where almost every post in support of Israel is immediately swamped by comments condemning Jews and cheering for Palestine. We have been proven wrong on the streets of major cities, where posters of Israeli hostages are torn down and Jews are violently attacked.
Now, having been forced to resolve our own cognitive dissonance, we wonder what it will take to resolve everyone else's. Perhaps the next Islamic attack on the West will be so terrible that those who turned their backs on us will finally realize what Israel has been dealing with. Or, perhaps there will be no end to the dissonance. Perhaps it will simply fall to Israel to be the sin-eater of the world, doing whatever is necessary to quash Palestinian terrorism, while being vilified by those who would rather deny reality than change their minds.
Hi Alex, there's a lot of ways to respond to this post. But let's break it down by group:
1) The left in the west is driven by an intense egalitarianism deriving from Paul of Tarsus, as we discussed long ago. This is manifested in intersectionality politics. Pursuant to intersectional politics, Israel is white, rich and strong, and the Palestinians are brown, poor and weak, and hence the left in the west sides with them. Simple as that. Israel/Jews try to create an exception for themselves from intersectional politics by leaning on the Holocaust, and I think a big part of the shock among Jews is that this exception is no longer being acknowledged by their leftist allies.
2) Muslims in the west, of which there are many millions, among over a billion worldwide, will naturally side with their own. Their fertility rates are much higher than native populations everywhere, including within the west. Tribal politics is strong and isn't going away no matter the intellectual arguments used. And countries like China need access to Muslim oil and to the billion+ Muslim consumer markets; Israel has very little to trade in comparison.
3) White Christians in the west, especially younger one, feel increasing anger against Jews and Israel due to the hypocrisy of Jews pushing open borders, endless immigration and globalism in the west while pushing a wall, no immigration and a nationalism exception for Israel.
As such, younger generations in the west are increasingly anti-Israel, a trend which is accelerating.
Ultimately, there have been many millions of non-white, Islamic immigrants pushed by Jews into the west, but these immigrants are not controllable and have morphed into a Golem. Is it too late for Jews to change track, to close the borders and expel the illegals? I think it is, personally, but it will be interesting to see if there is a serious attempt to change (I am pessimistic about it).
Hold that concept--"Sin Eater of the World"--brilliant an' I daresay it applies ta we "chews" too. They have re-defined "zionism" as bein' tantamount ta genocide. I see it like J6th--good folks, with BELIEF an' TRUST in the insty-2-shun (our gubbamint, our gubbamint "giftin' " Israel to the Jewish people as a homeland)--got led by the nose! As I wrote (take a look-see at my stack if ya got time!):
"With so many strident voices hatin’ Israel an’ hatin the Chews without (much-needed) discernment—while some of the same species-human are YET harborin’ hate, anger, an’ declarin’ war against the regular folks that went inta the Capitol on January 6th—I see thin lines, parallel lines, telegraph lines, and lines in the sand… all of them lines that connect the people an’ their plights— all of them invisible to the LOUD voices that decry them. RIP all who died from the hands of HARM an’ ANGER an’ HATE.
RIP to all the many many LIVES…SO senselessly.
https://thcsofdaisymoses.substack.com/p/january-6th-explains-the-story-of
Keep on coverin' this good stuff Alex!
Also, ya might wanna visit Karen Hunt-Mezek's stack--she's gotta lotta good stuff ta say 'bout this sit-u-eye-aye-shun too!
https://substack.com/@breakfreewithkarenhunt/posts