Photo via iStock/EA

Voices & Opinion

POV: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Psychology of Trauma

A BU professor who studies how violence connects to trauma and terror, and a renowned psychiatric researcher, argue that there is not only a moral case for a Middle East cease-fire but also a strategic one

Every perpetrator of terrorism sees themself as a victim. Such is the case not only with individual terrorists, who often compete with their enemies over who is more victimized, but also with terrorist groups and nation-states. Terrorism is psychological warfare, and so it requires a psychologically informed response. Those who study trauma know that “hurt people hurt people,” and the adage holds true for terrorists. People who live in a state of existential anxiety are prone to dehumanizing others. Hamas, for instance, calls Israelis “infidels,” while the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has referred to members of Hamas as “human animals,” and both sides have called the other “Nazis.” Such dehumanizing language makes it easier to overcome inhibitions against committing atrocities.

Just as individuals can relinquish their righteous rage and compulsion to punish indiscriminately, so, too, can groups and nations. But doing so requires leaders who can reach across divided communities and provide hope in a seemingly hopeless time to override the all-too-human drive to retaliate. They must understand that a legacy of trauma makes Israeli Jews and Palestinians vulnerable to reactive violence, leading to a seemingly endless cycle of bloodshed.

Although terrorists rarely achieve their political aims, they often succeed at one goal: forcing the enemy to overreact. Terrorists try to provoke a disproportionate response, hoping to win sympathy and radicalize a new generation of victimized youth. Hamas exemplified such a strategy when it attacked Israel on October 7, which triggered in many Israelis an intergenerational memory of trauma from pogroms, the Holocaust, and expulsions from European countries, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. And Israel’s indiscriminate retaliatory air strikes in Gaza, which have killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more, have triggered in Palestinians a reliving of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the violent displacement of Palestinians during the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are now locked in a snare of Hamas’ creation: a traumatic embrace of death and despair in which each side—understandably seeing itself as a victim, feeling righteous rage, and desiring retribution—is vying for global sympathy.

It is too late for Israel to pursue a limited response. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Israel has killed more than 15,000 people (the latest number as of January 8 was said to be at least 22,835), over two-thirds of whom are women and children. The costs of the Israel-Hamas war will long be felt by both its immediate victims and the children who survive, whose developing minds will be forever shaped by their exposure to horrendous violence and the loss of loved ones. This is true for both Israelis and Palestinians. There is not only a moral case for a cease-fire but also a strategic one, born of insights from the psychology of trauma.

Defeating the Hydra

Populations that experience terrorism naturally coalesce around their national, tribal, or religious identities and demand that their leaders retaliate. But massive retribution rarely works. Usually, in fact, a disproportionate response to terrorism breeds even more terrorist attacks. In 1986, for example, terrorists acting at the behest of the Libyan government bombed a nightclub in Germany that was popular among US servicemen, killing three people and injuring over 200. In retaliation, the United States killed dozens of people in a bombing campaign against Libya that targeted military facilities and a residence of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi. According to a study by the political scientist Stephen Collins, the US retaliatory raid led to a fourfold increase in fatalities: Libyan-backed terrorists killed 599 people in the four years after the US response, compared with 136 people in the four years beforehand.

The Irish Republican Army similarly flourished in the face of aggressive state repression. In 1968, the IRA seemed to be on its last legs, but over the next two decades, it would grow to become the best-funded terrorist group in the West. In 1969, Catholics rioted in response to rampant discrimination by the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland. The uprising was instigated, in part, by the IRA. Over the next four years, Protestant extremists drove some 6,000 Catholics from their homes, in what was, at that time, the largest case of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. The displacement increased support for the IRA’s cause. According to terrorism researcher Andrew Silke, “The IRA themselves worked to provoke harsh measures from the unfortunate security forces, knowing full well the benefits it would reap in terms of support and recruits.” When the group provoked a riot in 1970 in the Ballymurphy neighborhood of Belfast, for instance, security forces responded with the widespread use of tear gas, alienating Catholics in the area. Silke observes that the security forces “lacked the restraint necessary to win the propaganda war.” As Seán MacStiofáin, an IRA leader, wrote in 1975, “Most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments.” He was right. By responding so aggressively, British forces and the Northern Ireland police walked into a trap laid by the IRA.

Governments continue to fall for similar traps. Academics often compare terrorist organizations to a hydra, the serpent from Greek mythology. Each time the state tries to cut off the hydra’s head, two more heads grow back in its place. More than 20 years ago, Ismail Abu Shanab, a founder and high-ranking member of Hamas, told one of us, Jessica Stern, that the “genius” of the terrorist fight against Israel is that it feeds off of Israel’s “atrocities.” If Israel ramps up its fight against Hamas, it will only energize Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups and risk drawing Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, or even Iran into the conflict.

How to resist

Hamas’ leaders have always been willing to let young Palestinians die to carry out suicide bombings. In 1996, the Israeli security services killed Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ top bombmaker, with a booby-trapped mobile telephone. Afterward, his deputy, Hassan Salameh, organized the deadliest series of suicide bombings that Israel had known up to that point, killing more than 60 people. Salameh explained that he felt no remorse about the lives of the young Palestinian men that were lost in the attacks, saying, “The terrible things that have happened to the Palestinian people are far bigger and far stronger than feeling sorry or guilty.” Suicide bombings surged again during the second intifada, which began in 2000. Palestinian terrorist attacks killed an estimated 1,000 Israelis over the next five years, while Israelis killed an estimated 3,000 Palestinians in response. (It is not clear how many were civilians, on either side.) Also in reaction to the second intifada, Israel built a seemingly impenetrable wall on its border with the West Bank, which drew condemnation from the International Court of Justice and the United Nations for isolating Palestinians, leading to accusations that Israel had created an apartheid state akin to white supremacist South Africa.

Hamas is willing to sacrifice the lives not only of individual suicide bombers but also of thousands of civilians. Hamas publicly predicted that its October 7 attack would eventually lead to the deaths of numerous Palestinians. Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, told the New York Times in November that the group had known the reaction to its attack “would be big.” Hamas was desperate to shatter the status quo and push the Palestinian question back onto the world stage.

Many analysts had warned that violence would break out under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history. In April, Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami argued in Foreign Affairs that “the risk of large-scale violent confrontation grows with every day that Palestinians are locked in this ever-expanding system of legalized oppression and Israeli encroachment.” The October 7 attack was both horrific and predictable. 

The interests of Palestinians would be better served if their leaders chose nonviolent resistance rather than terrorism. Historian Rashid Khalidi has noted that, even though Jewish people have an “unquestionable connection” to the Holy Land, “Israel was established as a European settler colonial project.” And although all native people resist colonization—be they Algerians, the Irish, or Native Americans—the Palestinians’ struggle is complicated by the history of persecution against Jewish people. Because of this history, armed resistance seems to be particularly counterproductive in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite working in some other anticolonial wars. As the scholar Edward Said has argued, the Palestinians are the “the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.”

And, in general, nonviolence tends to be the most effective means of resistance. According to a study by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were twice as likely as violent ones to achieve their stated goals. But such strategies can work only if Palestinians reject violence in favor of nonviolent protest and Israel lets Palestinians protest nonviolently. Take, for example, the African National Congress, the political party that ended the apartheid regime in South Africa. The ANC largely refrained from terrorism against civilians. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance in India, the movement was intimately linked to the understanding that a country conceived in bloodshed would be caught in an endless loop of ethnic violence. As the journalist Peter Beinart has argued, “It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it was not trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.” Hamas, unlike the ANC, has no such vision of a multiethnic state, hence its lack of interest in nonviolent resistance. The group’s goal, according to its founding documents, is to destroy Israel, exterminate Jews, and establish a theocratic state. Israel’s current right-wing government also seems uninterested in creating a multiethnic state with equal rights for Israeli Jews and Palestinians, guaranteeing ongoing strife.

For the sake of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, Hamas needs to be forced out of power. But eradicating the organization through a massive bombing campaign would come at too high a cost. The best way for a government to fight terrorist movements is to avoid killing civilians—otherwise, the cycle of victimization just breeds more terrorists. Disrupting the intergenerational cycle of violence will require an Israeli approach that scrupulously avoids civilian casualties. Pressure from foreign governments can also help. The United States, for example, should demand the protection of civilians as a condition for sending Israel weapons and should deny visas to Israelis who live in illegal settlements.

Finding empathy

When people have experienced chronic terror, their minds become quick to detect danger and they tend to react strongly to even minor provocations. Shared trauma creates strong bonds between survivors. It also leads to an “us versus them” orientation, in which the outside world is (often justifiably) perceived as hostile, and only people who belong to the same tribe, religion, or ethnicity are considered worthy of trust and loyalty. Growing up in terror, whether caused by domestic or political violence, leaves deep traces on developing minds, brains, and identities: detecting and coping with threats becomes a central preoccupation at the expense of nurturing a capacity for work and play. Disrupting the intergenerational cycle of trauma requires stopping violence in the first place and developing empathy in those who have suffered trauma.

There are glimmers of hope that outside powers will now find a way to help the Israelis and the Palestinians come to a solution—whether it involves the creation of two states, as envisioned in the Oslo Accords; a confederation like the European Union, an idea supported by a new generation of Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers; or a single state with equal rights for both Palestinians and Jews. Whatever comes next, it will be important to bear in mind that after having been hurt, hatred can be enormously energizing, while mourning, reciprocity, and reconciliation are profoundly complex and laborious processes. But they are the only hope for breaking the intergenerational transmission of violence.

Jessica Stern, research professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, can be reached at sternjes@bu.edu. Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatric researcher and the author of The Body Keeps the Score. This column originally appeared in Foreign Affairs on December 7.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.