When Hamas-led gunmen massacred nearly 1,200 people on October 7, several fundamental conceptions, together with the Gaza fence, collapsed. Among them were the reliability of Israel’s highly regarded intelligence force, Hamas’s alleged pragmatism since it rose to power, and the deeply entrenched assumption, held by parts of the Israeli left, that resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict rests on the ability to build bridges between people.
The phrase itself has a notable legacy. At the signing ceremony of a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, declared, “Peace between nations is peace between people.” The following year, after signing the second of the Oslo Accords in Taba, Egypt, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing extremist; since then, the Israeli right has tried to convince the public that a political agreement with Palestinians is unsustainable. Initially the left continued to pay lip service to the idea of peace through political settlement, but the political clout to promote this solution had already disappeared by the early 2000s, and the left retreated to a strategy of interpersonal reconciliation—to a focus, that is, on achieving “peace between people.”
The following decades saw a boom in “people-to-people” activities: shared encounters between Israelis and Palestinians, international conferences, joint summer camps, and philanthropic activities. We believed that nurturing personal bonds—in controlled settings—would plant the seeds for future peace. We shifted to a therapeutic paradigm, according to which resolution stems from creating neutral spaces to heal emotional divides and form friendships. Out of necessity and false hope, we brushed aside the structural and institutional aspects of a properly political approach to collective conflict resolution.
This process was galvanized by the boom in restorative justice efforts in the 1990s. Originating as an alternative to liberal criminal law with its emphasis on retribution and punishment, restorative justice aims to allow all stakeholders in the wake of a crime to come forward and address their grievances. In particular, it replaces the adversarial setting of a courtroom with a group therapy setting, where all parties seek to remedy their sense of hurt. As the slogan goes, “As crime hurts, justice should heal.” Following the apparent success of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, wealthy patrons in the West saw this criminal justice innovation as the path forward, and restorative justice—a process typically used after a violent conflict ended—was instead embraced as a strategy for conflict resolution.
The move toward a therapeutic paradigm was in part forced upon us. With the Israeli left perpetually out of government, our grip on political power was severed, and the parties of the Israeli left lost funds and influence. The focal point of our politics moved to NGOs, which rely heavily on donations; these organizations, along with the admirable people working for them, had to cater to the demands of donors. Foreign funders, whether governments or NGOs (Jewish or not), often preferred peer-to-peer activities—in part due to legal difficulties in funding robust political activities, and in part because they looked good in photographs. It is easier to satisfy donors with a nice picture of young Israelis and Palestinians dialoging across a table than with a brief on the merits of research on water resource management in the West Bank. This distortion in incentives diluted our already dwindling political clout further, turning the Israeli left from a political force to essentially a mass project of social work.
Take the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), founded in Washington, D.C., in 2006. The organization envisions “a Middle East in which its community of Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders lead their societies toward and beyond a sustainable peace.” The aim of peacebuilding, on this view, is “less fear, hatred and violence, increased economic growth, and greater understanding of the other, as well as the stake each party has in a shared future.” ALLMEP supports over 160 organizations in Israel and Palestine, a majority of which operate in the “soft” areas of educational programs and interpersonal reconciliation. In the wake of October 7, ALLMEP initiated a “Trauma in Peacebuilding” project to “foster collaboration and exchange between Palestinian and Israeli communities to promote psychosocial support and mental health resilience.” Or take USAID’s People-to-People Partnership for Peace, which funds a variety of initiatives in Israel. A representative example is Photo Salam, a project targeting “Arab and Jewish youth in four mixed cities in Israel with a collaborative platform to document their daily experiences and share their world views through photography.” These different organizations obviously do not think this is the only or the direct avenue for peace, but they are incentivized to operate in soft areas to sustain their nominal influence on reality.
How did we get to this point, where interpersonal exercises have taken the place of organizing for political power, aimed at clear-eyed political solutions? How did we, the Israeli left, get it so wrong? And why do many still fail to realize this failure? Answering these questions is pivotal now with a fragile ceasefire in Gaza and the Middle East in tatters. The Israeli left must regroup and rethink its way going forward. The stakes are too high to allow for another decade of right-wing government.
The therapeutic paradigm both asks too much in collective conflict resolution and provides too little for securing it. As social conflict resolution becomes therapeutic, it demands that the political settlement of a conflict consider the emotional state of individuals. The therapeutic approach takes reconciliation literally—individuals must feel reconciled. Under the therapeutic approach, a just solution is also a happy one. But as anyone who has gone through group therapy can attest, attaining a happy solution is significantly harder than attaining an adequate one.
Therapy requires a shared commitment to a process conducted in a controlled, neutral environment. Patently, these conditions cannot be provided for entire populations. Even if larger numbers of Israelis and Palestinians could be brought together, the impact would be negligible. The mere knowledge that the other side has a different narrative is insufficient to overcome national sentiments. Crises bring out herd and siege mentalities, and people gravitate toward their identity group. The therapeutic approach overlooks the mechanisms of large-scale persuasion; isolated encounters are helpful but insufficient for systematically shifting public opinion.
Recognizing this inherent problem, advocates of the therapeutic approach focus in practice on two distinct populations: elites, who are assumed to be better positioned to overcome national sentiments and develop durable relationships across ethnic or religious divides; and youth, whose political worldviews, it is thought, are not yet entrenched and can thus be positively influenced by meeting others across the chasm. The Geneva Initiative, which was launched in 2003 with ambitious aims to promote a political solution but has since gravitated to peer-to-peer activities, presents on its website a myriad of activities for youth, journalists, and female leaders on both sides. The restorative justice program of the Parents Circle-Families Forum likewise seeks to bring together families of Israelis and Palestinians affected by the conflict, hoping that the example they set will reverberate within their respective societies. But how exactly this is meant to work remains nebulous. Among the organization’s key activities are dialogue meetings at schools, where families speak with pupils and tell their “personal stories of bereavement and explain their choice to engage in reconciliation instead of revenge”—“reconciliation” here meaning, it seems, little more than adopting an empathic stance toward the other. Such exercises can help to recruit people to a political movement and build solidarity, no doubt, but solidarity is only politically effective when it has a political outlet—and in recent years, these meetings have struggled to take place at all. In May, the Parents Circle’s yearly memorial service had to be held online in the light of concerns that far-right activists would disrupt it.
Working with elites and youth in this way may not seem completely farfetched, considering its success in facilitating the pan-European sentiments of political elites in postwar Western Europe. Organizations such as the European Movement International and the Young European Federalists were pivotal in building a new elite that pushed for European integration across the continent. But the success of these efforts depended crucially on the political arrangements forced on Europe by the Allies in the wake of World War II, which created the stable environment for a body like the European Community to take shape. By contrast, such therapeutic activities have had little success with collectives actively in conflict. Against the background of deeply conflicted collectives, no matter how many controlled meetings people attend, they ultimately go back to their separate lives, where conflict prevails. Even if meaningful friendships are formed, they are unlikely to trump allegiance to one’s family and daily community—especially in moments of crisis. Very few of us have the personality and perspective to overcome that instinct. Stopping violence is a prerequisite to reconciliation, not the other way around.
These problems also reveal the inadequacy of the restorative justice project in conflict resolution. In the criminal justice setting, restorative justice presupposes that harm was committed and ended. But the harm hasn’t ended in active conflicts between collectives. And if the harm is continuous and ongoing, a restorative process can’t even begin. These cases instead require transitional justice, which involves political reform or judicial redress that puts all actors on equal footing. The justice process in South Africa—which proponents of the therapeutic paradigm often hold up as a model example—was only enabled by the fall of the apartheid regime and the enactment of new political arrangements which gave Black South Africans full and equal rights. Restorative justice simply cannot precede peace or accompany peace processes; it is a retrospective project at best.
These differences between the therapeutic and political approaches translate into different objectives. The latter does not seek to turn old enemies into new friends—at least not in the short term. That is a nice dividend, but the primary goal is to stop the violence through institutional arrangements. In other words, a political approach focuses on the macro-social dimension of conflict resolution: What legal standards must be met? What economic arrangements would allow each side to reach a sufficient degree of prosperity? Are joint political institutions representative enough to yield legitimate norms? Does the judiciary sufficiently defend everyone’s rights? And so on. The therapeutic approach has very little to contribute in deciding these questions. It addresses a wholly different set: Are people happy with the outcome? Do they feel heard? The dubious assumption is that if members of communities at odds with one another develop and harbor friendly feelings, better political arrangements will follow.
French intellectual Raymond Aron, in his magnum opus Peace and War (1966), explained that peace and the rationales underlying it are “not different in nature from that of wars: peace is based on power, that is, on the relation between the capacities of acting upon each other possessed by the political units.” Peace is inherently political, always dealing with power relations; emotions play, at best, an instrumental role in facilitating it. The advocates of the therapeutic paradigm conflate political peace with peace of mind and political conflicts with domestic quarrels. In doing so, they overlook the pragmatic value of clear-eyed political struggle.
Every ethnic or national conflict has its idiosyncrasies, of course; each is terrible in its own way. Yet all around the world, conflicts have been brought to an end in a similar fashion: with institutional arrangements to stop the violence. Israel and Egypt waged five bloody wars between 1948 and 1973, costing the lives of tens of thousands, until the 1978 Camp David Accords brought an end to the bloodshed. Personal attitudes remain hostile; according to a 2020 survey by the Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies, 85 percent of Egyptians oppose the recognition of Israel. Nonetheless, peace prevails.
The drift from a political paradigm to a therapeutic one was in part the result of the misfortunes that befell the Israeli left. But it was also in part the consequence of a growing trend that treats politics as downstream of emotional well-being, rather than the other way around. Both foreign donors and the Israeli left were deeply affected by the fashionable emotive politics that has carried the day in our neoliberal era of weakened political organizing and intensified NGOization.
Underlying this trend is an old, perhaps even ancient, split between two currents in political theory: rationalism and psychologism. Psychologism is not a single theory but an umbrella term for theories that posit emotions, feelings, and sentiments as the fundamental basis of the human condition. In political philosophy, psychologism purports to explain social phenomena as a manifestation of underlying personal emotions and feelings. We can crudely divide psychologism into two strains: right psychologism, originating in David Hume’s and his contemporaries’ Georgian-era theories of sentiments and emotions, which saw moral perspectives as preference judgments; and left psychologism, a strain influenced by twentieth-century psychoanalysis and clinical psychology that preserves the traditional emotive conceptual lexicon while conjoining it with political concepts such as oppression and emancipation.
The modern origins of the contrast between psychologism and rationalism lie in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In his monumental 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant put forward his influential notion of rational political progress as the permissibility of individuals to exercise their public reason. The liberal political philosophy of the nineteenth century, though not always explicitly committed to Kant, was always indebted to him as it produced a whirlwind of institutional and democratic reforms across the Western world. Rationalists did not reject the importance of human sentiments; no workable political theory can deny that humans are emotional creatures. But it was extremely wary of emotions due to their inherently subjective nature and, more importantly, their indefeasibility. One simply cannot be wrong about what one genuinely claims to feel; rationality, or at least reasonableness, can appeal to somewhat objective standards. Hence, the rationalists’ approach was to treat public actions—assessable by reason—rather than private emotions as the fundamental layer of normativity and political design.
On this view, the solution to political inequalities is strictly speaking political, and psychologism is detrimental to meeting these challenges as it drifts to therapeutic solutions. In therapeutic practice, resolving interpersonal conflicts is possible by cultivating empathy and, in some cases, pity. This is certainly not always easy—it does take work. But however hard it may be to create in individual settings, empathy is a cheap commodity in politics; it does not require relinquishing institutional power or political privilege and can all too often be simulated or even popularly affirmed by performative gestures. When it crowds out the necessity of challenging political relationships of domination and hierarchy, psychologism becomes instrumental in maintaining them. Conversely, personal empathy can be costlier than politics requires; we sometimes reasonably hold personal grudges that can’t go away. When political theory is marred with psychologism, political and moral goals narrow down to mirror those of a wellness center. As Judith Shklar aptly phrased it, for psychologism “the end of ethics has now become ‘positive mental health’; the aim of politics, the ‘sane society.’”
Rationalists were quick to warn against the growing sentimentalization of politics as early as it began to appear. In the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem that “the role of the ‘heart’ in politics seems to me altogether questionable.” She recognized that to make “love” the terminus of politics was to risk depoliticizing it. “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly,” Arendt wrote, “and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.” Empathy and compassion, like love, are “politically speaking irrelevant and without consequence.”
This is a lesson the Israeli left—any left—must relearn today. Because the development of the “right” emotional stance is a politically vacuous gesture, it risks becoming an aesthetic response. But as Hermann Broch once noted, “The essence of kitsch is the confusion of the ethical category with the aesthetic category.” When it is emotionalized, progressive politics becomes psychologized kitsch. To recall Milan Kundera’s blunt definition of kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” we can understand why people-to-people encounters are so politically pointless: they try to erect a façade where life under injustice and violent conflict isn’t shit.
About two years ago, I crossed the hanging bridge in Derry that crosses the River Foyle in Northern Ireland. Walking its 235 meters takes you from the eastern bank, where most of the Protestant minority resides, to the Catholic-majority area in the west. The pricey bridge, bombastically named the Peace Bridge, opened in 2011 after receiving enthusiastic funding from the European Union. The small city it crosses suffered some of the roughest violence during the Troubles. In the early 1970s, Catholics in the city founded Free Derry, a barricaded autonomous zone where British forces and police dared not tread. In July 1972, the British government made the unprecedented decision to send in tanks to reclaim the area. The result was bloodshed: those killed in Derry alone accounted for 227 of the 3,532 deaths between 1969 and 1998.
All this came to an official end in April 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement came into effect after decades of political wrangling. The buildup saw the involvement of most Northern Irish parties in the peace talks. This approach sidestepped mass-level politics to seek a workable agreement between elites; the overcoming of sectarian divisions and popular animosities was conceived of as at best the outcome of a political settlement, not its precondition. The clearest sign that the agreement was a good one was that no one was entirely satisfied with it.
The Good Friday Agreement was a feat of political acrobatics, reconciling radically different demands within a single framework. It established the new Northern Ireland Assembly and the principle of power-sharing that now guides politics in the region; it also entailed releasing all prisoners, disbanding the Royal Ulster Constabulary and establishing a new police force with cross-community representation in its place, demilitarizing the major paramilitary groups, and enabling all citizens to hold both Irish and British passports. Although Northern Ireland is politically unstable and its parliament is often paralyzed, the numbers don’t lie: the number of killings and violent incidents has dropped dramatically since the agreement came into effect.
Yet if you visit Derry hoping to find a wonderful example of personal peace, you’re in for disappointment. The Protestants remain huddled, in every sense, on the eastern bank, while the Catholic majority lives on the west bank. Protestant militia flags with the Red Hand of Ulster hang on street cables in the east; the walls are filled with graffiti of the Catholic militias in the west. Derry is famous for the huge murals painted on its homes—on both sides—glorifying paramilitary fighters. The schools remain defiantly segregated; Catholic and Protestant children rarely meet and do not make friends across the river. The communities have not forgiven each other or relinquished their ethos and grievances. Once a conflicted city, Derry is now two cities that barely come into contact. Even the name is contested; the Protestants in the east still call it Londonderry.
In short, a political peace was achieved, but the walls between individuals and communities remain high. Derry is a living example of a successful “cold peace”—a political arrangement grounded in equality but without reconciliation between peoples. That may sound dispiriting, but the most important goal was achieved: ending the killing and suffering. Cold peace, unlike a mere cessation of violence, aims to achieve precisely this goal: facilitating the permanent cessation of violence via institutional arrangements that will answer to enough of the different sides’ concerns and interests.
After Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak hung the peace process out to dry by stating there was “no partner” on the Palestinian side following the failed 2000 Camp David summit, political efforts to resolve the conflict lost momentum. In the absence of a viable political horizon, parts of the Israeli left continued to demand peace talks but paid little attention to their actual content. We, too, grew complacent when we saw Hamas behaving pragmatically after taking power.
But the many patchwork ad hoc ceasefire deals with Hamas since 2006 were never political solutions for long-term equality and peace. This cannot be the vision of Israel’s political left. Even with last month’s ceasefire, we must reframe our understanding of the conflict and possible resolutions. We must face up to the fact that the future of the “peace camp,” as we are known, does not lie in person-to-person peace and emotional healing. Most Israelis, already so reluctant to acknowledge Palestinian suffering, are certainly not going to respond to humanitarian arguments we might make now—over a year of war engulfing the entire Middle East has generated little empathy and mountains of suspicion. We on the left must shift from the language of bridging the divide to practical solutions and once again focus on concrete policy plans to end the conflict in perpetuity. Instead of trying to build bridges for peace, we must focus on laying the foundations for peace.
This challenge has increased tenfold with the recent re-election of Donald Trump. Netanyahu and Israel’s far-right government now see a historical opportunity to annex parts of the West Bank and Gaza and cleanse parts of them of Palestinians, putting the entire region on a chaotic path; the fragile ceasefire might soon collapse. We must present an alternative for Israelis. This alternative cannot take empathy with Palestinians as its point of departure nor view it as a terminus of politics. Palestinians and Israelis may not grow to love one another, but we might grow to stop hurting each other. It is our role to think of the institutional way toward that goal.
In particular, we must rebuild our political parties and institutions after years of decline. Politics is primarily conducted in the halls of power; the role of NGOs is to put us there. Our second crucial aim must be to reinvigorate our ideas and policies. For too long, we took peace for granted as an inevitable future. The past fifteen years have shown us that history is not an endless march forward—its tides can turn. While we were complacent, the right reinvented itself, blending its traditional warmongering with libertarian and populist policies. Our resources as a political camp should be redirected away from social efforts aimed at reconciliation, toward winning both power and the war of ideas in order to achieve a lasting peace.
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