FIRST DRAFT (3 pages)

Israelis and Palestinians are killing one another – yet they share a belief in the Commandment “thou shalt not kill”. In general, the Commandments say that the self should not be negative towards the other. Indeed, rather than being negative, the self should be positive towards the other.

  Since October I have been writing reports on the war and I am now using these to produce a short online book with the sections listed and outlined below.

  Opinions – values and beliefs – drive actions; and actions shape opinions. Here, in this book, it is the opinions that I focus on. Opinions about values … about geography, about war, about nations, about religion and about gender and family.

  The core of the book looks at world opinion, national opinion and national voting in relation to Israel and Palestine (Sections 5 to 7). This is prefaced by a brief note on geography and demographics; and a discussion of the war (Sections 3 and 4). Section 7 discusses the historical background. The broader underlying aspects are discussed in short sections on values, nation, religion and gender & family (Sections 2 and 9, 10 and 11). The book ends with a discussion of modelling (Section 12).

Overview of the chapters

2 Values (5)

3 Geography (4)

4 War (8)

5 World opinion (14)

6 National opinion (26)

7 National voting (10)

8 History (11)

9 Nation (5)

10 Religion (6)

11 Gender and Family (2)

12 Modelling (1)

2 Values (5 pages)

What is happening in Israel and Palestine is driven by values – and in turn affects values. This section is in three parts. The first part explicitly concerns the Israel and Palestine. The second part considers positive and negative values in general. The third part contains various reflections on love and understanding. The final part provides a link to overviews of seventeen chapters which I have written about values. 

Hate … choosing not to hate

Holocaust and Palestine

A little candle burning in the night

Goodwill towards the other

…

Positive and negative

The systems

Positive value in society

…

Love … Arendt, Stonehouse

Love everybody; understand everybody … Robert Burns, 1759-1796

The relationship between the self and the other: love and understanding

Love … positive value

…

Values: overviews of seventeen chapters 

3 Geography (4 pages)

This brief section presents just a few basic points about the geography and demographics of Palestine and Israel. First a schematic map of the area is given. There follow notes on the Arab-Israeli General Armistice Agreements (1949) and on the current regions of Israel. Then some population figures and population demographics are given.

4 War (8 pages)

This section looks at the war and sees “Intense violence, intense suffering, intense anguish … intense opinion” … “Military rampage and military urban devastation”.

It gives the newspaper headlines for the first week and four weeks later. It then seeks to characterise a few of the key features of the military situation. The second part of the section moves on to more general matters. It conceptualises war as a trajectory in relationship value space with a variety of scenarios. Finally, in view of the Ukraine war and the war in Gaza, it asks whether Steven Pinker and Joshua Goldstein were wrong in declaring a “historic decline in violence”.

5 World opinion (14 pages)

This is the first of three sections which form the core of the book. All three chapters concern the opinions of groups of actors. This first section looks at the opinion of world governments whereas the next two sections look at the opinions of individual people in different nations. Opinions are modelled as distributions of individuals or of governments in multidimensional opinion space.

  This section takes a very restricted approach: it simply looks at world opinion in terms of votes cast at the United Nations on three issues, all relating to the Israel-Palestine war. The voting is analysed in terms of an opinion space model and voting patterns and distances in voting space are noted. The voting patterns on different issues are combined and analysed.

6 National opinion (26 pages)

This is the most extensive of the sections in the book. The first three sub-sections look at national opinion in the first month of the war at

In Israel, USA and UK.

The final two sub-sections provide a detailed analysis of the opinion in Israel and in Palestine in mid/late November.

7 National voting (10 pages)

Whereas the previous section looked at national opinion polls, in this section we look at voting in national elections in Israel and Palestine.

National voting is of interest to us here for a number of reasons. It provides important information about national opinion. It gives some insight into government – and territory. It relates to the distinctions made in debate between Israel and Palestine in relation to democracy and the nature of Hamas (both its role and its distinctiveness from Palestinians in general).

8 History (11 pages)

Prime minister Netanyahu clashed with UN Secretary-General Gutierriz on the following point: on the one hand there is the horror of a specific event and on the other hand there is the historical background, the cycle of violence that leads to the horror.

  The discussion and analysis of the war has constantly invoked a wide variety of references to the history of Israel and Palestine. The Times and The Observer have each identified a selection of books to help readers understand the historical background. These books give valuable systematic accounts. Haphazard in contrast are the contents of this section where I have put together a selection of the variety of historical references which have occurred in the reporting over the past few months.

9 Nation (5 pages)

Consider two nations, A and B. Nation A has a conception of itself and also a conception of the other nation B. Likewise nation B has a conception of itself and also a conception of the other nation. For each nation there is the nation’s conception of self and also the other nation’s conception of it. So there are two conceptions of each nation …

… indeed there are more than two conceptions – there are many conceptions of a nation. Within any nation there are perhaps many conceptions of itself and many conceptions possessed by other nations of the first nation.

… a single conception of a nation is likely to be multi-faceted. So we might think of a conception of a nation is being represented by a point in a multidimensional space. The set of different conceptions of a nation can be represented by a distribution of points in the space. For example the answers to an opinion poll about a nation can be thought of as such a distribution.

10 Religion (6 pages)

The present war between Israel and Palestine seems to involve a distinctive combination of violence and belief. Some of the rationales for the conflict offered by the participants are based on religion. The beliefs of the two sides are on the one hand different, and on the other hand both belong to the same broad ‘Abrahamic’ tradition. It so happens that the sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition have been noted by Pinker as having a strong element of violence. This raises the question of whether Abrahamism is more violence-prone than other religious or secular belief systems. Also, religion does not act on its own but becomes incorporated into broader social systems and which are supported by conceptions of the self, such as the national self.

11 Gender and Family (2 pages)

The Times suggests that fundamental Islam has a particularly negative approach to women. This leads us to enquire about the approach of Islam in general and indeed the approach of all Abrahamic religions. Within each religion, there is a distribution of opinion and a major dimension seems to be the balance between tradition and modernity. In substantive terms at issue is the balance between liberalism and conservatism, in relation to social arrangements. In particular there are different conceptions about the appropriate forms for gender relations, and for family and household relationships.

12 Modelling (1 page)

This section has not yet been written. It will give a quick sketch of my approach to a report of a survey ... words, percentages and statistics.