How to Talk About Israel and Palestine With Friends & Family

There is a lot of moral fundamental disagreement on Israel and Palestine. In my view, that is primarily because we are all exposed to different arguments earlier in life.

There are those among us who have never even heard the Palestinian case from a Palestinian voice. And then there are those who never talked to the Israeli community about how they feel in constant threat of terrorism from violent jihadists.

Our social media echo chambers are not helping either, of course.

It has been my effort on this blog to show that we can have moral convictions (I do indeed blame politicians for their moral and political failures) and express nuance at the same time.

Must we choose between sides? I believe that we do not. It is possible to see the failures and successes of each political entity in the region. We all want peace but we fail in our solutions.

So, I thought that in this post I will be addressing how cognitive failures are built into our computation; in other words, I will argue that intuitive thinking often overrides our ability to see things clearly. This is a view I promote in my book, Beyond Reason: Why We Fail at Understanding Each Other.

When it comes to this debate in particular, these truths and observations might help prevent us from giving up on each other. We can indeed find common ground; in fact, we must.