Zero Sum

Perhaps the strangest thing about the current Israel-Palestinian conflict is the degree to which it's being waged in the Court of Public Opinion in the United States and other Western nations. This has lead to a number of people being at pains to demonstrate that they're on one side or the other, and that neutrality is not an option. (As an aside, I'm apparently complicit in the bad acts that both sides have committed as a result of being unwilling to select a hill to unnecessarily die on.)

Whether it's a cause or an effect, I'm not sure, but related to this is what plays out as a competition by partisans of each side to show that they are the most victimized group in the conflict. The two sides go about this by a single-minded focus on the bad things that people have done to them to the exclusion of all else. Pointing out that there are far more than enough instances of both anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian/Arab/Moslem sentiment to go around can easily trigger a charge of false equivalency.

Domestic American politics does nothing to help, as politicians, never being a bunch that would allow a potential advantage get away from them, have started using the conflict as a signalling device to voters, hoping to gain support from those who might have a favorable partisan lean while convincing those with an unfavorable lean that the other party isn't worth voting for. This, as might be expected, leads to a fairly disingenuous public discourse; nuance interferes with the political point-scoring that is the point of modern politics, and as such, is to be avoided.

It also creates yet another situation where people quickly come to pride themselves on their lack of empathy for others. The recognition that the Palestinians have received a raw deal is seen as being soft on terrorism; understanding that Israelis are legitimately attached to areas that are not part of Israeli is viewed as supporting colonialism and occupation. But here, as in most conflicts, there is no war between peoples, but between governments. (And yes, I'll grant Hamas the status of a de-facto government.)

To the degree that there are factions with both Israel and Palestine who understand that the whole of what was once Mandatory Palestine should belong to them, and them alone, this is a fight between two mutually-incompatible sets of interests. But, like most fights, it's taken on the mantle of a conflict over Right and Wrong. And that's largely what people here in the United States tend to argue over; who's right and who's wrong. But while wars can make people accept certain facts on the ground as existing, wars can't make a new status quo legitimate. And neither can bickering about it at a safe distance from the actual fighting.