A wider Israel-Palestine solution requires breaking the blame cycle
Every news event in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank is interpreted through an infinite regression of blame that weaponises trauma and prevents an Israel-Palestine solution.
Dan Jacobs
The blame loop prevents any resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict (TJI).
Published: 14 October 2025
Last updated: 14 October 2025
For Israelis and Palestinians, history is not a guide but a battlefield.
Palestinians often situate their grievance in the Nakba — the 1948 catastrophe of displacement and dispossession — from which they see all subsequent injustices flow. Israelis invoke their precarious position in Europe and the Middle East over 1,000 years and the Holocaust as the ultimate moral lesson: never again can Jews afford to be vulnerable; never again can their security depend on the goodwill of others.
These memories are not just historical artefacts; they are powerful emotional and political currents. They shape identity, inform trauma, and animate the deepest fears and hopes of each people.
For many Palestinians, the memory of the Nakba is not abstract — it is personal, carried through stories of grandparents exiled, villages erased, and homes never returned to. For many Jews, the Holocaust is personal, as are the Arab-led massacres and pogroms during the Mandate year, the co-ordinated invasion of the new Israeli state by surrounding Arab armies, and the persecution of Jews in Arab countries that followed, resulting in the exodus of nearly a million Mizrahi Jews.
This web of memory feeds profound grief and distrust on both sides. But when these memories are not only remembered but weaponised, their moral resonance is amplified into political absolutism. Memory becomes less a means of understanding the past than a justification for pre-emptive fear, precluded dialogue, and intractable demands.
The weaponisation of memory takes legitimate trauma and sharpens it into anger. It narrows the range of acceptable moral responses. For Palestinians, it can turn historical injustice into an existential narrative of perpetual resistance. For Israelis, it can transform collective trauma into an unyielding ethos of self-preservation at all costs.
And so, every contemporary act is instantly framed not on its own terms, but as another iteration in an eternal pattern. An airstrike is not just an airstrike; it is a new Nakba. A bus bombing is not just a tragedy; it is another warning that Auschwitz — or Hebron — could happen again.
This dynamic makes every event more combustible. It renders political compromise suspect and moral ambiguity intolerable. When memory is a weapon, it is not wielded to clarify, but to harden — and the cycle continues.
Case study 1: The Nasser Hospital strike
Consider how this dynamic plays out in real-time: a single airstrike becomes not an event to process, but a narrative battlefield.
On March 22, 2025, an Israeli airstrike hit the surgery ward at Khan Younis’s Nasser Hospital, reportedly killing five civilians. Israel claimed it targeted Hamas leader Ismail Barhoum.
This became less a matter of fact and more a clash of meaning. The specific facts of the strike became secondary to the symbolic meaning imposed upon them, as each side absorbed the event into its pre-existing narrative.
Pro‑Israel framing: “They’ve built a terrorist state inside hospitals. It’s part of their strategy — and the world keeps falling for it” — Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, IDF spokesperson.
Pro‑Palestinian framing: “Israel’s targeting of hospitals is not new. This is part of a decades-long campaign to dismantle Palestinian life” — Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK).
Social media’s polarised tags: #HumanShields versus #GazaGenocide.
Case study 2: The Givat Shaul Interchange shooting
The same regression applies when violence emerges from the other side; the details dissolve into history before the bodies are even buried.
On November 30, 2023, during a fragile truce, two Hamas-linked assailants killed three civilians at a Jerusalem bus stop. Here again, the event was not processed on its own terms but was immediately absorbed into a historical framework that justified a predetermined conclusion.
Pro‑Israel framing: “This is terrorism by stealth — targeting civilians, always civilians. That’s the pattern. That’s who they are" — Israeli government official, quoted by Reuters.
Pro‑Palestinian framing: “Occupation dehumanises people. If you are shocked by the violence, ask what made it possible” — Mohammed El‑Kurd, Palestinian writer.
Social media’s polarised tags: #JerusalemTerror versus #ResistanceContinues and #75YearsOfNakba.
Self-perpetuating narratives
Both examples reveal a familiar — and damning — pattern. Each side processes present violence through the lens of historical grievance.
The hospital strike becomes evidence either of an Israeli campaign of elimination or of justified self-defence against an enemy embedded in civilian life. The bus stop shooting becomes either proof of innate Palestinian brutality or of the inevitable resistance born from cumulative oppression.
Neither narrative allows for moral fragility or shared responsibility. Each reaction recursively confirms the next conflict, extending the line of blame backwards — and anchoring the next round of violence forwards.
The absence of responsibility
Notice this conspicuous silence: neither side claims responsibility. Each insists their action was forced or defensive. Unilateral responsibility is reflexively rejected as moral weakness or betrayal.
This deflection often takes the form of inherited victimhood — where trauma becomes both shield and sword, and agency is outsourced to history.
To pause and say, “We may bear some part of this,” feels like defeat. Yet until someone claims even a share of causality, the regression has no escape hatch. History remains less a tutor than a prison.
Within both societies, brave dissenting voices do exist — Israeli human rights lawyers, Palestinian civil society advocates — who call for reckoning rather than righteousness. But they are often silenced, marginalised, or accused of betrayal.
The myth of moral equivalence
To observe mutual narrative entrenchment is not to suggest equal guilt — it is to explain why unilateral virtue and unilateral blame are both inadequate tools for peace.
Violence on both sides is devastating, but not symmetrical. Terrorist attacks targeting civilians cannot be equated with state retaliation or occupation — but each occurs within a framework where every act becomes a reaction, justified by the last.
That’s the trap of infinite regression: it doesn’t clarify, it just digs us in deeper. Every act becomes a reaction to something else, and in that logic, anything can be justified—until nothing ever changes. It replaces moral clarity with moral placation. It makes violence seem not only necessary but inevitable.
Moral complexity invites responsibility; moral equivalence avoids it.
Interrupting the cycle means stopping the question “Who started it?” and starting with “Who ends it?”
- Recognising trauma without letting it dictate response.
- Holding leaders, not peoples, responsible.
- Prioritising restraint and moral agency above historical exhaustion.
This does not mean denying security or sovereignty. It means creating parallel narratives of legitimacy — through shared institutions, inclusive education, and brave political leadership — that can disrupt the feedback loop.
It demands moral imagination — the willingness to step outside of narrative fatalism and envision a future not dictated by the past.
Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were borne of valid hopes and injustices. Their clash was not preordained — but chosen, again and again, through rhetoric and policy.
Acknowledging the infinite regression of blame isn’t about taking sides. It’s about recognising how the stories we tell ourselves keep us locked into cycles of violence. If we want a way out, an Israel-Palestine solution, we have to change the script. It’s a survival manual — for change, for responsibility, for peace.
There are already grassroots movements trying to change the dynamic from the ground up.
Standing Together is a Jewish-Arab movement in Israel that brings people together across ethnic and political divides to campaign jointly for peace, equality, and social justice. Instead of choosing between Jewish or Palestinian safety and rights, they argue these goals must be achieved together. Their work is rooted in community organising and shared civic life, showing that coexistence is not only possible but already happening.
A Land For All advocates for an innovative confederation model, envisioning two states with open borders and joint institutions. It aims to secure both national identities while recognising the deep intertwinement of the two peoples. This model resists zero-sum thinking and offers a credible framework for mutual recognition and coexistence.
These aren’t utopias. They are works in progress — fragile, imperfect, but vital. They remind us that alternatives exist, and that the future is not written in stone.
About the author
Dan Jacobs is a London-based writer and technologist with a background in engineering leadership. He writes on history, politics, and Jewish identity, with a particular interest in moral complexity and conflict narratives. He was a founding writer and co-founder of JewThink, a platform for new Jewish ideas and voices.
Comments3
Stephen Games17 October at 02:18 am
The crucial issue is indeed to visualise a future and not let it be dictated by the past, in which case it doesn’t help to say that “until someone claims even a share of causality, the regression has no escape hatch.” The object lesson that we’ve all just witnessed is that an unprecedented road to peace and prosperity has been plotted by one man who doesn’t have a clue about history and doesn’t have the slightest interest in who did what. All he cares about is what the interested parties might do in the future. That’s an example of historical illiteracy, of course, but never has such illiteracy been more needed.
Ron15 October at 04:50 pm
Thank you for this! Some years back, I wrote a piece with a similar theme, “In Israel/Palestine, Beware the Weaponization of History” – if you’re interested. It included this: “we must also make sure to reject the instrumentalization of history and the weaponization of the past, which end up prolonging the suffering of those living today and tomorrow.” Thanks again for your nuance! https://jewishcurrents.org/beware-the-weaponization-of-history
Bex Herman14 October at 06:27 am
Thank you so much for this thoughtful and thought-provoking piece – the nuance and complexity you highlight are so needed. Thank you!