Hopes for peace must overcome our fears

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In this season of peace on earth, there is no peace in Israel or Gaza. The trail of tears that is human history winds onward. The chronicle of this land read by both sides, called the Old Testament, extends the tale of murder, war and devastation back 3,000 years.

The nightly news features unbearable pictures of bleeding children. The whole situation seems hopeless. Yet we cannot afford to indulge in despair. Perhaps we can find guidance from Albert Einstein: "We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created them."

This tragedy was created by age-old geopolitical thinking: Two peoples think they are entitled to the same land.

What would different thinking about Israel and Palestine look like? It might look like the thinking of organizations engaged in what is called "people to people peacebuilding." These groups think two peoples can share the same land if they know, understand and respect each other.

Hope in peacebuilding might seem naive, but it must be recognized as a profound shift in thinking. In his 2022 book, "Profiles in Peace," Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, called peacebuilders "the only game in town."

There are different kinds of peacemakers. Dignity House in the West Bank holds activities and dialogues between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, people whose lives otherwise never intersect. Combatants for Peace gathers Israeli and Palestinian military veterans to share their personal stories. The Parents Circle-Family Forum brings together 700 Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones since 1995.

The peacebuilders' coalition, the Alliance for Middle East Peace, includes over 160 members.

President Joe Biden and others keep laying out the geographic and political principles of a framework for peace. Good ideas — but peace between Israelis and Palestinians at the geopolitical level has been discussed, debated and negotiated in reports, articles, books, conferences, commissions and meetings for 50 years.

Still, bullies and extremists get the headlines, warriors get the money, and peacebuilders labor in obscurity and scrape for funding. The leaders of Roots, which operates the lovely Dignity House, are planning a trip to the U.S. early next year with the exalted goal of trying to raise $100,000.

The truly Einsteinian thing about peacebuilding is that it actually does employ a different way of thinking by different brain systems.

The Israelis and Palestinians have been stuck for decades in the mother of what is called a negative reciprocity cycle. The passions for revenge are white-hot. To make matters worse, the political conflict is layered onto religious and cultural differences that also make this a poster child of out-group hostility. Every fiber of Israelis and Palestinians cries out with what noted psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls "groupish righteousness."

The grip of negative reciprocity cycles in the Middle East has been so tight that the two heroes who tried to break out of them paid with their lives — not at the hands of their opponents but by zealots on their own side: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for his historic visit to Israel in 1977 and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin for his handshake with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993.

But human nature includes a different pathway.

Two million years of evolution have blessed us with some remarkable machinery for getting along. Early in childhood we develop a "theory of mind," the recognition that the knowledge, thoughts and feelings of someone else are different from our own. We have extraordinary "mirror neurons" that actually duplicate in our own brains what someone else is experiencing. We have the self-control to dampen our intense self-interest enough to pay attention to others. This collection of skills is what we usually call empathy.

Our capacity for empathy is so powerful that it can break through group hostility. The problem is that not only are we unable to empathize with entire groups, we instinctively feel for people like us or those on our team at the expense of strangers.

Empathy must be built between individuals. Sociologists call this "contact theory;" it means people have a safe opportunity to get to know each other.

Fortunately, when people can talk to each other, they find that they both love their children, worry about their health and want peace and prosperity. They are deeply similar.

Moreover, as a conflict persists, it becomes oversimplified: us and them, white and black. But as soon as you talk to a few of "them," you find out that there are many "thems" with lots of different ideas.

Contact theory is a proven success. The interethnic dialogues in Kenya organized by Bishop Cornelius Korir that diffused the chronic violence following the 2007 elections come to mind; there are many other examples.

The peacebuilding groups are largely immobilized right now by the ubiquitous violence, as well as by intense emotions and the lockdown by the Israeli Army. But here is a way to employ a sort of contact theory tomorrow. Israel's mobile field hospitals are not needed in a battlefield so close to home. Dr. Michael Gross, an Israeli expert in military ethics, urges Israel to deploy those hospitals in Gaza to treat civilian victims of its own bombing. Sure, it would be great PR for Israel, but think of all those Israeli medical professionals spending time with wounded Palestinian women and children. Empathy building!

Yes, I know that empathy is not the whole answer. In fact, some peacebuilders have become dispirited by the persistent power imbalance and human rights violations. But none of the extremists, the politicians or the warriors has any idea how to manage Gaza after the war or how peace will magically break out after the Israeli Army goes home.

We desperately need a new way of thinking about Israel and Palestine. The person whose birthday we are about to celebrate, who was born in the West Bank and killed in Jerusalem, gave us a start: "Blessed are the peacemakers."

Bruce Peterson is a senior district judge and teaches a class on lawyers as peacemakers at the University of Minnesota Law School.