POWERFUL VISIBLE PATTERNED EVENTS
There are more than 150 ethnic and tribal wars happening and damaging people in various settings in the world today. One of the worst and ugliest examples of those inter group encounters just happened on October 7, 2023, in Israel and in Gaza.
We need to understand why that happened.
Those very powerful and damaging events in Gaza that were triggered on that day have been highly visible to the world. The response to those attacks by both parties in that setting continues to attract world attention today. The consequences resulting from those first days of inter tribal conflict continues to shape the interactions in that area in damaging ways and the total deaths now exceed 46,000 lives in that community and the death rate is growing.
People who don't understand and appreciate the kinds of instinctive inter group behavior that we see in a wide range of inter group settings across the planet, tend to see the Gaza situation as a standalone event and don’t understand either why it happened or what will happen now in that place and setting for the people who will live there for the foreseeable future.
We know the patterns and why they happen in so many settings and why they will continue to happen there to those sets of people.
Tribes often kill tribes.
We have inter tribal conflict, where people hate each other and damage each other in tribal ways, in many settings across the planet. Most people don’t know why or how those behaviors exist, and a high percentage of people who are looking at that situation today think of Gaza as being a standalone event.
We have people from a couple of tribes doing damage to each other in that setting, and they're following a normal and frequent pattern for those kinds of events that makes it look today like there’s no end in sight for the damage being done to and by the people and by the groups involved in that place and that conflict.
If the conflict in Gaza follows patterns that we see regularly and normally in more than 100 other inter group conflict settings that are happening in the world today, we can expect to see long times of conflict that will continue as long as we have two groups of people who hate each other living in that setting and who are forced to live together by the realities of their lives and who also have the resources to do damage to one another in various ways into the indefinite future because each group will continue to be themselves in that setting and will support their own people.
The power levels are very different for the people in that particular setting. The Israeli Army is on one side in that setting, and they're one of the most powerful armies in the world.
The Israeli Army is currently killing people from the other Gaza tribe in large numbers, and the people in that army feel justified in doing those deaths because they believe the other tribe there explicitly hates and wants to damage the Israeli tribe, and the leaders of those people actually have doing that work and they have the explicit goal to damage the Israelis as part of their mission and their identity as a group.
Hamas has an explicit mission to do that damage to the other tribe and they're very open about their intentions and their beliefs for those outcomes and behaviors.
What most people in the world do not understand today is that the negative behaviors of both of those groups in Gaza is actually a normal set of events for large numbers of other inter group settings across the planet.
That pattern of negative and damaging behavior has existed for all of recorded history on every continent on the planet that has multiple groups and tribes living in their settings.
The Jews who are now the lead and most powerful tribe in that area actually first took control over that exact space and that turf more than several centuries ago, according to Biblical records, by killing members of the Canaanite tribe who lived there before the people of Israel claimed the land for the first time and took control over that land for the first time as a group.
This isn’t a new behavior.
And absolutely also it is not an isolated behavior for just that setting.
TRIBAL LINES AND DAMAGING INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOR
Tribes kill people from other tribes in many settings today. Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Chechnya, Ukraine, Tibet, Nigeria, Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, several parts of India, and most of Northern Ireland all have people from other tribes who've been killing each other for as long as they've had those levels of contact and proximity in each of those settings.
Gaza has taken many lives since that initial attack, and the people there are now in a state of ceasefire, but they have not achieved any level of long-term truce between the groups in that setting. Bombs are being dropped today — and people are trying to figure out some way of having the killings cease at least temporarily for those settings.
They are clearly not leaning toward any level of long-term or even temporary inter group Peace for that setting now. There’s a major fragility for the truce efforts that we see today that will work it’s way out in very situational ways for the foreseeable future because there’s’ no long-term solution possible until the people in command of the area decide to make it happen in arbitrary ways and enforce it by force of arms in some way.
For a number of reasons, the Gaza events are currently very visible, today to the entire world and we can expect that visibility to continue for the immediate future for that setting.
Their location and that area will continue to get the attention of the world until the levels of deaths and damage reduce themselves in some way and we have people living in that area who are not killing each other on a daily basis.
Gaza is not an outlier situation when we look at all of the other conflicts between groups happening in other settings today.
The situation we see in Gaza is one that exists at currently less visible, but equally relevant levels in multiple settings around the world today. We actually have a myriad of equivalent and even larger conflicts in other settings that make it clear that Gaza is part of a pattern and it's not an inter group situational anomaly in the world today.
Those conflicts are extremely obvious, clear, and visible when we understand that they exist and then look to see where and what they are.
The conflicted settings that we see today include all of the states that border Israel and Gaza.
Each of the countries that border on Gaza have their own internal tribal challenges and issues now that make it unlikely that they will be able to be a safety valve or relief strategy for the violence that defines Gaza today.
Egypt has its own internal tribal conflicts, and Jordon has its own internal divisions that also have patterns of tribal and ethnic behavior at their core. Those countries that are very close to Gaza would not be well served for their own levels of internal peace if they extended those conflicts by adding people from any of those groups in Gaza to their country.
Iran has major internal tribal tensions, conflicts, and divisions, and Syria and Pakistan and Lebanon all have their own bloody and angry inter group conflicts happening today people being killed now for those sets of issues.
Lebanon has major internal conflicts that have taken many inter group lives for an extended number of years. Anyone looking at Lebanon today can see who is killing and who is damaging other tribes and groups in long-term conflicts for that specific national space.
Those patterns of behavior are too often highly relevant to us all in a wide range of inter group settings — in both predictable and easily recognizable ways.
People from other settings and the people in our news media venues and in our American population awareness levels too often only see the current events that create crises in various settings, and we too often don’t see the patterns of behavior that created and triggered those events.
Those patterns are extremely clear once you learn to see them, and they have long-term relevance that will sustain the behaviors of the people in each of those settings for the foreseeable future — in predictable, and often highly negative ways.
When you understand the patterns of instinctive inter group behavior in all of those settings, then we can see and know that history both repeats itself and rhymes.
Instincts steer those behavior patterns for people and groups in all of those settings.
Our instincts to divide the world into Us and Them — and to have very different reactions, behaviors, values, and emotions for whoever we define in any setting to be Them — are clear, powerful, and absolutely consistent whenever they’re in gear.
We create this division at a low level within groups, and we — too often — instinctively create this division at a very high, and sometimes violent and even evil, level between groups.
In our modern multi ethnic and multi tribal world, we need to understand that we far too often can, and do, damage each other in direct and intentional ways when those sets of instinctive interactions and those Us-Them differentiations happen between groups in any setting.
We should understand today what actually happened in Gaza so that we can avoid doing similar damage in other settings that we don’t expect and understand — but end up doing because we have underlying instincts that create the context and the interactions that make those events, emotions, and values between groups happen. They make us feel that those behaviors are absolutely the right thing to do because they are so in line with who we are in that setting and moment.
The truth about us, as human beings affected by various patterns of instinctive behavior, is that we have the possibility and probability of having damaging inter group interactions happening in any place where multiple groups exist. We should be aware of how easily it is to go down the slippery, and sometimes seductive, slope to inter group anger and conflict — in any setting where we allow those differentiations in our thinking to occur — and then change the way we think about the people in each setting.
We actually have more than 150 active inter group conflicts going on today in the world. We need to see and know why that’s true and we need to appreciate how extremely difficult it is for people in those intergroup settings to both avoid and mitigate some of the conflicts that exist and occur.
Gaza is visible, but it's not even the biggest source of inter group damage today.
Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Chechnya — and a dozen other areas where groups of people have drawn those Us-Them definitions into place — have actually been killing as many or more people as the current death levels in Gaza.
The killings in Ethiopia for many months in these recent painful years have been invisible to the world and they actually have almost been clones of what we see happening this week and this month in Gaza.
There was nothing about what is happening in Gaza that should surprise or confuse anyone who has looked at the behaviors of the tribal groups in that setting for the past decade.
Both our news media and our political leaders refuse to see, understand, and explain tribal behavior, and they act as though every set of damaging behavior is situational and circumstantial rather than obviously programed and patterned behavior.
Gaza can, and should, be part of the learning process for anyone living in absolutely divided and conflicted tribal settings, because those levels of interactions with people on both sides hating the other tribe is highly likely to lead to extremely negative and damaging behaviors. And people in groups feel very right doing wrong things when those instincts are activated in any setting.
We should be more than a little worried about the potential for some subsets of that Gaza situation happening in our states and our settings today because we are increasingly at risk ourselves as Americans in some areas.
We're becoming an increasingly tribalized country, and we're far from the levels of sins that just happened Gaza, but we're getting some people in growing numbers who now think of some of our people as Them rather than Us and who will do negative things to other people and feel good about doing them when they build those beliefs into their lives.
We need to keep those most unfortunate behaviors from happening more powerfully in some of our own settings, because all of those evil and damaging behaviors will feel very right to anyone in our country with those instincts activated — and we have strong instincts to be warriors and heroes for our family and tribes and we feel totally legitimate in doing violent and damaging things when we have that hero programming in gear.
We need to rise above the temptation to go down that slippery slope to damaging behavior that have hurt people so badly in Gaza, and that feels very right to the people who have those instincts in gear.
We Americans should be able to perform an intellectual exorcism from those particular set of evil behaviors and beliefs once we understand more clearly what underlies them when they’re activated, and then we should refuse to activate them in any version anywhere in our country going forward from today.
We have some political divisions today in our country that have the ability to deteriorate and degenerate to pure tribal Us-Them thinking that could make us dislike and even hate each other as Americans in several of our settings today.
And we could far too easily have people hurting other people in some settings with the same sends of entitlement and legitimacy that we see on both sides today in Gaza
We need to be very perceptive about how slippery the slope can be to that level of thinking that could make us deeply divisive as a country today.
Let’s not go down that road.
We should look at what that kind of division has was done for the people of Gaza and not have it triggered in Chicago or Des Moines, or San Diego — because the people who live everywhere tend to be people in every setting at some key instinctive thinking levels.
Gaza gives us an excellent and very real and immediate context to understand that set of issues and behaviors. We should all see and understand why those events happened in Gaza. We should look carefully at that setting to see why they happened there now at this point in the history of that area.
We should all see, know, and understand what just happened there so that we can steer away from similar outcomes, events, and interactions in other settings where we have multi tribal realities and future patterns of interactions between the relevant local groups.
NEGATIVE AND DAMAGING BEHAVIOR
We’re at risk of various kinds of negative and damaging inter group behavior in every setting where we have relevant groups and where the groups interact with one another in ways that far too often can lead to damaging outcomes, behaviors, and events and that, sadly, too often feel right to the people doing the wrong and damaging things to other people in those settings.
We should also all know, think about, and understand what will probably happen next in that particular setting for the people and for the groups of people who are involved there, because those people in Gaza will continue to be there interacting with each other in very predictable and foreseeable ways, long after the current events are out of the eyes of the world and that setting is beyond people’s focus and attention.
The Israeli army clearly has their full set of Us-Them instincts activated and empowered against many of the Gaza people.
Reactions at deep and important levels to the first days of conflict there will continue for the indefinite future if the Israeli military forces and civilian leadership can’t break the spell of that programming that we all have.
The number of deaths there continue to grow. We now have the responses in place that happened and were created by the military that currently controls that area and that turf.
They’re continuing to take lives in that area today.
The full death rate there now probably exceeds 46,000 lives.
The Israeli army has their Us-Them instincts in full gear, and some members of that military force hates and fears the Hamas group. They might try to damage members of that Hamas group as much as they can for as long as possible and they will feel extremely entitled to those beliefs and those negative behaviors as they do that damage.
Other Palestinians have become collateral damage to the battleground as a result of that hatred. The people from that group will clearly have long-range hatred for whoever wins this immediate set of battles, which will make long-term Peace in that setting, and in other parts of Israel, extremely difficult and almost impossible.
The two-state solution that almost everyone outside of Israel wants to happen — which is the politically correct context for the long-term future of that setting — will be extremely difficult to achieve. Some powerful tribal forces inside the Israeli group with current political power even want to take even more Palestinian land and they want to turn that land into additional settlements for their tribe.
That taking of that land is absolutely enraging for those Palestinians who believe it's their land by right and group entitlement. They’ll be extremely unhappy with any two-state solution that continues to let those behaviors be ‘the norm’ for interactions between the groups.
The patterns of behavior that happened there between the groups before October 7 were sadly predictable and entirely expectable and we now need them to put in place new interactions and new agreements that will not lead us back to that same exact spot for future interactions in that setting.
We need everyone to understand the extreme power that our inter group instincts have over our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors as they try to rebuild Gaza and the country that it needs to be part of.
THERE ARE CORE TOOLS THAT CAN CREATE PEACE AND A SENSE OF US
It’s possible to have the intention of creating, maintaining, and sustaining Peace in those inter group settings, and even in Gaza as it emerges from this highly conflicted setting and aspires to a future of inter tribal Peace.
That needs to be very intentional behavior if it’s going to work. It must meet the needs of each group in each setting to function as an Us with their group.
There are some core tools and approaches to creating inter group Peace that we can use almost everywhere to reduce risk and damage if we know what they are. We almost never use those tools in strategic or even tactical ways, even when they’re directly relevant to the situation at hand. We almost always react to those triggers and we're often surprised when those events happen in our inter group settings.
We shouldn’t be surprised. We should very intentionally build plans, strategies, approaches, and even tactics for getting the people in a setting to not slip into conflicted behavior that puts areas into dangerous and damaging trajectories and behaviors.
We need to understand the extreme value and high impact of being Us.
The instincts triggered by being Us in any setting can be extremely useful to us. We need to learn how to do a much better job of very intentionally, skillfully, and explicitly creating a sense of Us in all of our inter group settings for the people who live there.
No one running Gaza has been trying to create a sense of Us for the people living there.
The people who’ve been running that territory and that setting have done absolutely nothing to create a sense of Us at any functional or perceptual level for the people living there before the conflict.
The people with power over that setting for the past decades didn’t actually have Peace as a goal. They didn’t do the kinds of things you need to do in a setting to make it a Peaceful and trusted place to be, or to give the people who live there a sense of being Us or even friends with each other.
Gaza has gone to a very understandable consequence from that negative approach to oversight and governance. It has just exploded, and those explosions happened in very visible ways that give us very clear context for the next things that need to happen there.
Ugly things happened in Gaza.
We all need to see, know and understand how ugly those particular sets of ugly things were and why they had such an impact on the people living there in both of the tribes living in that space.
Those ugly behaviors done in those first days of the backlash events were very real and they made it clear to people on both sides how much hatred, anger, and pure anti group energy existed in that setting at that moment of time.
The recorded and clear ugly behaviors and actions by the people on the ground in that setting emotionally that made it explicitly clear to people on both sides how bad the intergroup hatred was — and that clear perception of those emotions in those moments created inter group hatred that triggered the need for some of the people in that setting for inter group revenge.
We need to see and understand what those people from those groups have done to each other in very visible and extremely intentional ways as they reacted to those horrible events and so we can create the context for what will happen there now and, in the future, to everyone in that setting who has been involved and affected by those events and understand why some of the reactions have felt to some people to be disproportionate to the event.
INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOR WAS TRIGGERED IN GAZA
We need to better understand some basic (and sometimes dangerous) patterns of inter group interactions that are part of the instinctive group behaviors that we see everywhere groups exist and interact with one another. We need to keep the worst of them from steering our groups to bad places.
They can be very dangerous behaviors.
Gaza gives us an extremely clear opportunity to see those patterns hurting people immediately, intentionally, directly, and badly in that setting. Gaza helps us understand what those behaviors actually were for the people who were part of that situation and those processes.
The resultant behaviors on October 7 that shocked and horrified the world on that day were so obvious, public, and widely shared and seen by the media and communities of the world that they give us a base template for knowing what we should fear when those sets of instincts are triggered in any multi group setting.
The thing that makes the Gaza situation particularly powerful and that has given long-term momentum for the damage that continues to be done have been the videos of the actual attacks on October 7 that both show the Israelis being attacked, murdered, abused, and mutilated, and the attackers showing glee and joy and personal celebration for the damaging things they did to the people they attacked.
People from Israel who've seen those videos have no doubt about the hatred that existed and about the joy and glee that defined the behaviors of many attackers.
That sense of celebration for doing evil things have made it very clear to the Israeli people that a significant number of the attackers have the very worst and most powerful Us-Them instincts in gear and that the Israeli’s are Them in that set of emotions and behaviors and continue to be at risk from those people who have that mindset and belief in gear because they're still living in that area.
Hamas says very clearly in their mission statements that they want to kill and expel Jews from that entire area. They don’t need to wonder about their motivations, because they make them extremely explicit and clear.
The people who believe that to be true for Hamas justify killing thousands of non-Hamas members to kill each Hamas member because they've defined all of the Palestinians to be a Them and feel no guilt for anything bad done to them.
It’s extremely difficult to understand how that thinking works for that situation and setting, and we should stand back and look at how that same set of beliefs actually is creating the same inter group outcomes that has created similar thinking historically in many settings and is actually creating similar death rates in several other settings even today.
The Israeli Army’s behavior (which destroyed communities and has possibly now killed more than 100,000 people) in Gaza looks just like the areas of Ethiopia and Syria today that have recently been ethnically cleansed by local tribes and who also have tens of thousands of lost lives in each of those settings.
The horror stories that we can see easily today in Ethiopia have much in common with what we're seeing in Gaza today.
Somalia has done mass violence at the tribal level in that setting, and those people hate each other with the same levels of hatred we see for some people in Gaza today.
Some of the Somalia settings will return to prior populations and many will never return to the contexts that existed before the recent damage done by the groups in those settings.
We have our own history that has parallel behaviors.
It’s the kind of learning that we should achieve for ourselves when we look at issues like the Tulsa Massacre. We can also see the obvious patterns of lynchings for long periods of time in too many settings in our own deep south — where people were dehumanized, hated, and then damaged based directly and explicitly on the group they were in.
We obviously displaced millions of Native Americans from their ancestral lands for a couple of centuries, and one of the reasons that it was possible to do clear ethnic cleansing and displace some of those tribes from their lands was that the American tribes did what tribes everywhere on the planet do and were at war with each other in a number of settings before the Euro Americans invaded their turf and they were more susceptible to being displaced because they didn't present a common front against the Euro American invaders.
The one visible time that the tribes here banded together in our country to fight the Euro Americans, they killed General Custer and they defeated his invaders because they were much stronger as a group than they were as separate tribes.
After that battle, those tribes didn’t have the logistical resources to maintain their group identity and they were all ethnically purged from their traditional spaces.
So what does that tell us about Gaza today?
Look very directly and specifically at what just happened in Gaza.
It was very tribal.
Each of the parties there were directly involved in tribal behaviors.
Some of the Palestinians who live in Gaza and who are ethnically, tribally, organizationally, historically, functionally, and politically linked to the Hamas group who just very intentionally attacked, damaged, and killed Israeli people who lived next to the Gaza territory in a very explicitly tribal way.
Hamas exists and has a strong tribal alignment identity, and it clearly and explicitly did evil things to the other tribe as part of that process.
Hamas is a clearly, directly, and explicitly tribally aligned organization and group of people that has their own worst tribal instincts activated and shaping their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions relative to the other tribe in their area.
They have leaders for Hamas who intentionally and deliberately use the worst components of those tribal instincts to damage other people from the other tribe.
They clearly had the most dehumanizing components of our worst Us-Them instincts activated in very visible ways and steering their behaviors as they did those attacks.
The people from Hamas functioned very intentionally as terrorists for that time and for that setting.
Being a terrorist is clearly part of that set of tribal behaviors and beliefs in many settings today. It was clearly a key part of what happened in Gaza on that day.
That level of terrorist behavior can happen in a setting when people are deeply angry and when those behaviors feel right to the people involved. Terrorist behavior also happens in many settings where it’s just used because one group hates the other group and wants damage to happen.
ISIS also does terrorist things as part of its basic patterns of behavior. They do many clearly intentionally evil things to people in many settings in terrorist ways. They don’t do it because they’re angry at those people in any direct and personal way. ISIS simply dehumanizes other groups of people and then does evil to them and kills, rapes, and enslaves them for their own tribal alignments and situations in each setting.
We have terrorists in multiple settings around the globe who are almost all aimed at hurting people from another tribe or group in their terrorist behavior, and who aren’t doing it for any personal alignment or behavior.
Some of the most obvious Gaza damage was based on anger. It was clearly directed at people from the Israeli tribe who lived there next to Gaza. We can see from the video evidence that was created on that October day how that violence happened.
We don’t need to guess about what happened to people there.
We have video of what they did.
We saw very clearly what the Hamas group did as terrorists to people from the other group because of their inter group anger and inter group hatred — and because of deeply felt and openly expressed inter group animosity that openly existed between the actual groups who lived there who were there, involved, and available to be included and attacked on that evil, damaging, and horrible day.
We need everyone who is wondering about the reaction from Israel to that setting to recognize, and know, and see and understand what actually just happened on October 7 there. People often try to describe different behavior after the fact, when evil is done in a setting and the people who deny the evil behavior are often believed by other people if there is no proof that they’re wrong, and no proof that evil happened.
Fortunately, we actually recorded the events from those attacks on video. It’s very much like the killings we sometimes see in inter group settings in our own country, where someone with a video camera uses it at that extremely important moment and then shows us all exactly what really happened to the person who was killed in those settings.
Video has brought significant levels of exposure and documentation, and very useful and important verification to some sets of events in our country that has helped remove the doubt about whether those events happened. It’s given us a perspective for dealing with future events. That video reinforced verification component was extremely true and important for Gaza and what happened there.
We don’t need to guess, hypothesize, theorize, speculate, or debate in unrelated settings after the fact about the major components of those attacks or about the explicit behaviors involved for those people in Gaza on that day. We can see on that video what actually happened for too many of the people there. We can see who did it. We can see what they were clearly intending to do as they did what they did.
The facts are clear and beyond debate.
The events on that day were clearly recorded so that no one can say later in other distant settings that those behaviors by that set of terrorists were either misunderstood, exaggerated, or falsified for the people involved.
We know what happened and we know who it happened to.
A large number of people were involved.
More than 1500 terrorists from the Palestinian group in Gaza broke through the barriers there into the Israeli neighborhoods and the Israeli living areas adjacent to Gaza.
Those attackers murdered more than 1400 people who lived there in direct attacks on those settings and those people.
They also kidnapped over 200 people and took them into Gaza as hostages. Some of those hostages have not been released even today and are being used as factors in those current inter tribal behaviors.
So that gives us very important context for those events.
We know exactly what happened.
It was actually recorded as it happened, and we have the recordings.
It was ugly.
It was evil.
It was recorded.
The videos and the photographs from the assault very clearly show beatings, beheadings, mutilations, rapes and intentional, planned, explicit and malicious sexual abuses; and collective, organized, mass targeted gunfire and attacks by multiple vehicles that were done, by celebrating assailants into crowds and into the homes of unarmed people.
Some of the videos and photographs clearly show gleeful, joyful, exuberant, and even jubilant murders and killings that were done by people on that day and in that setting who clearly had a deep and intense hatred for the people they were killing — and who had a shared and collective group joy in doing some key parts of the damage that was done there, and who obviously felt collectively energized and even emotionally rewarded and mutually reinforced by the damage they were doing.
The murders were clearly done by people from one group to those from another. There was nothing in that day and in that situation and that setting that was about any personal behaviors and motivations or personal and individual responses by the attackers to the people on the other side of that killing process.
People from one group killed people from the other group. They did it based on the group they were in and they felt entirely justified, and even enabled, at some level for achieving those deaths.
The Israeli army reacted to the Hamas attack and immediately began killing people who they believed were relevant to that group. Their sense of Us and Them that has now extended for many months has caused the Israelis to kill more than 46,000 Palestinians who lived in Gaza. And they were willing to kill large numbers of people in order to do damage and get revenge on the estimated 10,000 Hamas fighters who were living there in the caves and hidden forts of that city when that part of the conflict began.
Their Us-Them instincts in their purest and most impactful form couldn’t be more visible and more powerful.
Components of the Israeli Army now consider the immediate deaths of more than 10,000 Palestinian children to be a small price to pay for getting revenge on that particular and explicit group of Them who they've killed since those attacks.
Their Us-Them instincts are still in full gear in Gaza. They’ve created starvation situations for Palestinian civilians and they’re now going to bomb more than 30,000 additional unarmed women and children who they view as Them, in order to keep the future safer for Israel and their local Us and the total Palestinian death count might now be more than 100,000 people.
The Prime Minister of Israel recently said that there are three brigades of Hamas solders still alive in that area. He believes that his people must kill them all to create security for Israel. He said clearly in a couple of settings that those Hamas fighters will attack Israel in the future if they aren’t killed now.
The prime minister of Israel very articulately, clearly, and explicitly blames the upcoming many 1000s of civilian deaths on Hamas itself. He says their soldiers are now in the same areas as their civilians, and that makes Hamas guilty of the civilian deaths.
What does that tell us about Gaza?
What does that also tell us about who we are as people in the world we live in today?
We should be very honest with ourselves about the world we live in.
We should be very honest with ourselves about who and what we are as human beings living among other groups of human beings.
The Gaza conflict is not an isolated, stand-alone set of behaviors or set of results. It’s ugly.
It’s horrible and it’s evil.
And it’s not alone.
We have more than 150 actual inter group conflicts going on in the world today. The vast majority of those conflicts have people from one tribe, with its own language and its own sense of tribal turf, who are killing and damaging people from the tribe they hate in their setting.
Ethnic cleansing happens with some regularity at a very local level in many multi tribal counties.
Why does that happen?
Instincts.
Inter group instincts steer us in those directions and those instincts exist in all of us. They can be activated in any setting by people from our own tribe who want to lead us in tribal directions and have those interactions with the other groups in our setting.
We’re all creatures of instincts.
We’re all hugely influenced and guided and motivated by our basic instincts.
We each have deep seated and deeply embedded instincts that guide major portions of our lives. We build cultures to help us achieve our instinctive behaviors and we tend to be deeply committed at an intellectual and emotional level to achieving and actualizing the cultures we create in every setting.
We have instincts to be territorial and hierarchical — and to protect, support, and defend our families and our groups in our own settings.
Every group has a hierarchy. We can feel significant discomfort, anxiety, and even stress if we don’t have a hierarchy in place for our setting or our group. We feel that it’s emotionally and ethically right to support the hierarchy we create for each setting.
We also have a sense of family and group territory, and even group turf. We all tend to feel that our own turf is the rightful and legitimate turf for our group, and that we should defend, protect, and relate to our territory and our turf as a group.
WE DIVIDE THE WORLD INSTINCTIVELY INTO US AND THEM
We divide the world into Us and Them at a deeply instinctive level. Those are extremely powerful instincts. They affect our thinking and behaviors constantly because they exist and they’re frequently and consistently activated.
We think very differently about who we define as Us versus who we define as Them.
We tend to be supportive and protective of our Us in any setting. We tend to be distrustful, suspicious, wary, and generally hostile to whoever we define to be Them in any setting.
We tend to be willing to fight for our Us. That willingness to fight for our Us defines and divides major portions of our world today, and that couldn’t have been more obvious during the events in Israel and Gaza.
That’s a pattern of behavior we all need to recognize and see wherever it affects our behaviors.
Far too many people think that those wars and conflicts are political, or economic, or ideological, or historical, or circumstantial, or even somehow entirely situational. The truth is — almost without exception — there are tribal instincts causing people in each of those settings to want to protect their own tribe, damage the other tribe, and be warriors and heroes for the tribe that they’re part of as a core part of who they are.
That happens with great regularity.
More than 150 settings in the world currently clearly have ethnic and tribal groups now existing in a state of conflict with one another that resemble and echo what we see now in Gaza.
People in all of those settings are doing damage to each other with those sets of differentiations in place and the people doing damage in all of those settings feel entirely legitimate, appropriate, and justified in those actions and behaviors.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the impact of those behaviors in the world. We need to be realistic with ourselves and each other about the future that we’re destined to join and create for ourselves with those instincts in gear.
We have a strong tendency to want to pretend that those behaviors don’t exist. We tend to perceive and we almost unanimously want to believe that each situation happens of its own accord.
That would not be true.
Every multi tribal nation is at war with itself at some level.
That’s a powerful, almost painful, clear, and very accurate thing to say. It’s very easy to see that behavior in all of those settings once you learn to see it and then look at each setting where those kinds of differentiations exist to see what is actually happening there.
The proof isn’t hard to point out or see.
Syria has three major ethnic groups who’ve been disliking each other since the beginning of time. That dislike and those inter group conflicts will be there as long as those groups occupy that space and as long as Syria exists as a nation.
People who say the troubles in Syria are political or ideological, or situational or circumstantial or even economic, are clearly not looking explicitly and directly at who is killing whom in that country.
Nigeria has several very clear ethnic groups who all dislike each other. They do battle with each other as a permanent and defining part of who they are. They all have people in their group who believe they are heroes for having those positions and for that conflicted behavior, on their part, relative to the other groups there.
Turkey has the Kurds who feel like they are a captive tribe in the context of that country. The Kurds have strong reasons to hold that opinion of their status of being a captive tribe, because the government of Turkey wants to ban their language and take away their self-governance status in all the places within Turkey where they’ve managed to achieve any level of autonomy for their group over time.
Kurds have similar issues in Syria and Iraq. They fight to maintain their tribal culture and tribal positioning. They’re always and often in opposition to the dominant ethnic group or tribe in each of those settings.
Anyone who refers to the Kurdish issues in each of those countries as being political or ideological, or even situational, clearly doesn’t have a sense of what is actually happening in any of those settings.
Great Britain has Irish, Scottish, and Welsh groups who all have a sense of separate identity from the English tribe that’s been based in London — and who’s been the dominant group there in that setting for a number of years. That long-standing positional dominance by the English tribe in London hasn’t caused the Irish to stop being Irish, or the Welsh to stop being Welsh, or the Scottish tribes to stop being Scotts. There hasn’t been any history of those separate groups to disappear or to lose identity as a culture and as a group in any of those settings because of that long-standing dominant status by the English tribe over Great Britain.
Over the years, those tribes on the British islands have managed to work together to create a governance umbrella for the entire area, but each of the tribes has their full set of Us-Them instincts in place. They’ll have their collective interactions governed as an alignment and functional alliance rather than a merger of those groups.
The tribal instincts are currently most strongly activated in Northern Ireland. The tribes there tend to hate each other, insult each other, periodically kill each other, and absolutely do not share schools or political agendas — or even intermarry without the people in that marriage facing major anger, conflict, and rejection by their own family when that happens.
There are more than 50,000 guns still hidden in Ulster because those tribes feel that they aren’t fully an Us for that setting.
Bangladesh has groups who are so negative toward one another that a girl marrying into another group can permanently destroy the functional future for her siblings in that setting.
Those marriages don’t occur in that setting.
We live in a very tribal world on that issue everywhere. Intermarriages in Gaza have about the same likelihood of happening as inter tribal weddings in Bangladesh.
That doesn’t mean that the future is hopeless for that entire set of issues everywhere.
Peace is possible. Truces happen. Some areas work out longer-term arrangements that minimize current conflict in those areas for decades at a time.
Inter tribal settings can be at peace with themselves. Peace can happen for long periods of time. It's obviously possible to be functionally multi tribal inside a country and not be at war or in a state of conflict inside those boundaries at this moment in time. But, being at peace in any permanent way is actually extremely rare and unlikely to happen in most multi tribal countries.
People who say that level of long-term inter group conflict with instinctive underpinnings isn’t true should just look at the evidence that shows that it is true and see it all around us.
The conflicts in many settings extend for centuries for those groups. All of the groups in those settings tend to identify themselves, in part, as being in contrast with the other local groups and to want the other group to lose and do badly, and even fail.
We need to understand all of those behaviors to have a working sense of the world we live in today.
Groups everywhere have those same patterns of behavior toward other groups. They all have group members who feel like heroes and who feel like they’re warriors of rightful and legitimate group destiny when they damage the warriors from the other group, and when they do conflicted and negative things to the other group in those settings.
The tribes of Syria include the currently dominant Alawite tribe that has done constant and intentional ethnic cleansing against the local Arab and Kurdish tribes in that country.
That Alawite tribe has very intentionally sent millions of Syrians into unhappy exile in both the Middle East and Europe on a purely tribal basis. The dominant army in Syria never drops their well known, destructive, ugly, damaging, and highly lethal and explosive barrel bombs into the Alawite tribe neighborhoods in that country, but they shamelessly, and with no sense of guilt, drop bombs into the settings that include the homes of the other tribes who live there. They try to drive those people out of the country.
China has absolutely clear inter group tribal conflict with Tibet, where they do a form of perpetual ethnic cleansing; with Inner Mongolia, where they do another version of ethnic cleansing that includes making the language of the other group disappear; and with the Uyghur people, who also have significant religious differences and alliances as a group and who face constant pressure to disappear into the central Han Ethnic group with their own multi level ethnic cleansing agenda.
The Uighurs might have more than a million people in Chinese prisons today for purely tribal reasons.
China is an extremely tribal country. It’s very directly and explicitly clear about the winning tribe in all of those settings.
Ethiopia has multiple local tribal groups at perpetual and clearly anti-tribal war with each other. Somalia has had some of the bloodiest intertribal wars in the world.
Those settings have very low chances of their groups somehow blending into peaceful alignment of their own accord. They hate each other at the group level and the leaders and the warriors who exist for each group feel very motivated to damage the people they hate and to achieve wins of various kinds for their group that often involve killing people from the other group.
The Ukraine issues have clearly tribal alignments for the conflicted forces. Anyone who can’t see what the tribal issues in Ukraine are, and who does not understand how they affect the fighting and the underlying behaviors and goals in that country, clearly doesn’t understand what is happening there as well.
CANTONS CAN WORK
We’re not at war everywhere and all of the time. Some areas have learned how to be multi tribal in functional and peaceful ways and people in those settings are not pointing guns at one another most of the time.
There’s a lesson for Gaza from some of those settings.
Switzerland has probably done the best job of dealing with those multi ethnic and multi tribal issues over long periods of time in a structured and civilized way within its boundaries as a nation, and they’ve done it while maintaining separate identities for each group by making the group identity and the group turf a tool, as well as a trigger, for instinctive behavior.
The Swiss couldn’t be more multi and separately tribal. There is no Swiss language or any actual Swiss tribe. The Swiss don’t exist as a group, but they’ve managed to exist and function as a nation by aligning rather than fighting with the other groups in their setting.
The country has three major tribes and they each maintain their own tribal language, their own tribal culture, and tribal control over their own turf.
This particular and very intentional tribal turf approach created for Switzerland is known as “Cantons.”
Cantons can be a very useful organizational model for ethnic groups who want to maintain their tribal functionality and identity and still function in the context of a country.
The Swiss have German, French, and Italian speaking cantons. They each have major levels of self-governance and they each maintain clear cultural expectations for their own group.
The Swiss don’t pretend that they’re identical, integrated, melded, or cloned sets of people in that national structure or model. They celebrate and fully support their differences as groups. They celebrate their Peaceful alignment in very civilized, well-structured, and intentional ways.
They’ve managed to create a functioning nation at some useful levels with a national name, and a collective political national functionality, that includes all of those clearly separate groups existing as separate groups within that national status.
The Swiss don’t feel a need to be (or pretend to be) something they aren’t. They’ve used that model of aligned cantons for a very long time in very effective national and tribal ways. They believe that it gives each of their groups a better chance of long-term success and survival as individual groups if they’re aligned in those particular ways inside the purported context of being a country.
A few years ago, a minister of health for the entire country of Switzerland decided to have a shared care experience that included all three groups at a full level of blending and full internal alignment. He decided to create a national children’s hospital that he thought could be one of the best care sites in the world.
He lost enthusiasm for the idea when one of the very first speakers, a mother, at one of the very first meetings, told him and told the group that she “would let her son die” before being treated by a German-speaking doctor.
She was clear and she was persuasive.
That particular hospital didn’t happen.
The beauty of the Swiss Canton model is that they didn’t need to stop providing world-class care for their people in any of their care sites, but they can provide that care without changing the language issues or priorities for any of the care sites.
It’s a very practical and well-organized model for running the country without giving up tribal status for any tribe. The cantons each got to choose their own language for their settings, and the care sites live peacefully and cooperatively with that reality and approach — with separate cultures for those issues in each setting.
Canada has done something similar, which also had a language and a fully tribal component driving the thought processes and creating an interaction process and set of expectations for the country.
The French language issues resemble the Swiss language patterns in parts of Quebec. The Canadians follow and reflect a similar multi tribal, instinctive pathway approach for Canadians, with the exception that the Canadians actually expect everyone in each and all of their sites to know and use both languages.
The Swiss only insist on each person in each setting knowing the one language relevant to that particular piece of turf. Canada expects that political correctness and cultural equity requires full equality for each language everywhere.
Anyone wondering how strong the tribal instincts are in Canada should suggest that having two fully mandated side-by-lside languages seems a bit challenging — and then suggest in any Canadian political or governance setting that they should just use one language and see what reaction you get from Canadians.
That reaction happens along very predictable tribal lines.
There are some railroad lines in Switzerland where the distance between the tracks changes when the line crosses into a different canton jurisdiction and different turf. They say they didn’t want to be invaded by trains from the other groups when they built those particular tracks. They made it very hard to do that by changing the track placement at that point in the journey.
DIVIDING INTO SEPARATE NATIONS ALSO CAN WORK WELL IN SOME SETTINGS
It’s also possible to deal with the long-standing patterns of internal divisions within a country by simply and actually splitting the country into parts that allow separate tribal identity and direct tribal control at a national level for each piece of the multi ethnic division.
They need to create separate nations to make that happen in those settings. That sometimes is the right thing for those conflicted settings to do.
That happened in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
That very direct approach of splitting into separate nations has worked well for those settings.
The people in those often-conflicted settings who had major internal tribal instinct issues that frequently created conflict and negative experiences for many of the people simply split the tribes into their historic nations and made them independent of one another as nations.
The Czechs and the Slovaks each kept their own language when they split the old multi group country into now very peaceful parts by tribe. The tribes in Yugoslavia who’d been in conflict for a very long time stopped killing each other when they divided into separate countries and then had each country run their own territory and their own turf after the division.
Each of those countries had their own alpha leadership in place for each group with their ancestorial languages and cultures used in each setting. Those alpha leaders all needed to support the process as a pathway to Peace, instead of using it as an opportunity to continue to fight as groups, because all groups look to their leaders to see what they should be doing in any setting relative to all of these issues.
When formerly captive nations and tribes achieve their own status as the owner and leader of a setting, they have a strong tendency to be extremely supportive of their new identity and tribal culture, and they have a very low interest in reopening old tribal battles when their turf is no longer under what they believe to be foreign leadership and control.
Very small nations can prosper and thrive when they achieve tribal independence, and their group morale tends to be strengthened by having what they believe to be rightful control.
Syria would blossom if each of the major tribal units could run their own territory and space — and it really does make sense to have minority tribes running the country today.
ALPHA INSTINCTS ARE PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT FOR GROUP TRAJECTORIES
Alpha instincts can be extremely important in inter group settings.
Alpha instincts have a major impact on inter group behavior everywhere. People often don’t understand how much impact those particular instincts have on our settings.
Our hierarchy instincts can create, trigger, support, and even exacerbate some of the very worst inter group conflicts. Alpha leaders in every setting tend to have the full set of alpha instincts in gear and they far too often create conflicts with other groups to maintain and strengthen their own power within their own group.
That pattern of behavior happens in multiple settings.
When we look at the specifics of the current set of inter group conflicts, we can often see an alpha leader gaining support with their own group by exacerbating the conflict.
It’s sometimes useful for our own context to see and understand very similar behaviors (and patterns of behavior) with other settings and other living groups who also have hierarchical instincts when we think about our own behaviors on those issues.
Lion prides and wolf packs both have alpha instincts that clearly steer their group’s behavior. Alpha lions very much want to be Alpha, and they sometimes fight to the death to maintain that status with their group.
That same pattern exists in human hierarchies.
When you look at actual patterns of behavior — including the current situation in Israel — it’s very uncommon for political, business, and academic leaders with alpha status and alpha power in any setting to ever simply give up that status and surrender their often highly addictive alpha power very easily.
The alpha leader instincts also tie in some key ways to turf instincts. It’s obvious, in multiple settings, that alpha leaders don’t like to give up group turf that they perceive to be theirs. Alpha leaders often use defending their group turf as an emotional trigger to gain increased support from their group.
One of the reasons that the United Nations does a bad and unenthusiastic job of helping all of the existing nations that don’t make ethnic sense at any level in their current form to break into pieces that make more sense from the destiny and the functional agendas and alignments of the groups of people in each setting — is that when you look at who’s actually deciding the policy for the United Nations — it’s the current heads of the countries who make those decisions and those current leaders in all of those settings all have their alpha and territorial instincts in full gear. They don’t want to give up any turf.
It’s hard to get the President of Spain to support, and believe at a generic, intellectual, or worldwide conceptual and ethical level; in actual territorial self-determination status for the local people in every setting when that’s just exactly what the people of Barcelona want very badly today in his country. No President of Spain is ever likely to think that’s a good idea and simply allow those people from the Catalan tribe to have and control their own turf and to pull it away from Spain. Those two sets of instinctive thought processes have been in play for the groups there for a very long time.
Those patterns are easy to understand and very easy to see when you know they exist. They exist in most countries where a minority ethnic group finds itself governed by a local majority group who doesn’t want to extend or surrender any control over their turf.
The most famous antiwar piece of art in the world might be Pablo Picasso’s Guernica painting. Most people who see the horror, sadness, disagreement, dismay, pain, and sorrow that he built brilliantly into that work of art don’t recognize or know that he was actually painting a tribal conflict for those people.
The local people of Barcelona — with their own language and their own history — wanted to be free from Spain and the Spanish tribe who ran the Spanish army as an extension of their dominant tribe that were actually using German bombs to kill civilians in that setting for the very first time in our history as attacks from the air on unarmed civilians and on nonmilitary people.
The use of those bombs to kill civilians in that setting was meant to keep those civilians from achieving the tribal goals that their alpha leaders had set for them and their group and that the alpha leader in Spain was totally against and the Alpha leader in Germany who controlled the war planes supported.
The people from the Spanish tribe who ran the army were willing to drop bombs on the Catalan tribe — and it’s extremely unlikely that those bombs would’ve been dropped anywhere in Spain if the army leaders had felt that their own people and their own tribe would be bombed.
We can see those patterns everywhere we look at multi tribal conflicted settings.
We see groups of people who identify with their own tribe and group opposed to other tribes in their setting who want to be the ones to control the turf and structure, and who are willing to kill each other to achieve their group goal.
So: What does that all tell us about Gaza and Israel?
THEY NEED TO CREATE AN 'US' IN GAZA
The Us-Them issues were very clear.
In the Us-Them context, the Israeli people were clearly, completely, utterly, totally, and functionally Them to the Hamas people who entered that space with weapons in hand and then did that damage.
The Gaza attacks definitely tell us that the people of Israel can know that those behaviors and those emotions can happen again. They knew that they were a Them to Hamas. They can be assured and confident that perception isn’t going to change for those people.
We know that those two groups have a hatred level that isn’t going away after Hamas is through with the current conflict, attacks, and battles.
The Israeli army now has their own set of Us-Them instincts in gear. They hate Hamas and they’re doing extremely damaging things to the people who live in that area who they believe are assets to Hamas.
They’re dropping bombs, blowing up buildings, and damaging areas of that city in a variety of ways. The number of children being killed now is uncertain, but it’s a large and painful number and it continues to grow.
Some people who are leading that attack from that army have referred to the deaths of those children as collateral damage in a war zone during a time of war. That’s clearly not the right behavior for those people. It’s not the right thing to happen next for that space and people. It’s clearly not the right way to think about those children and civilians being killed in that setting today.
The people leading that force should be looking at the long-term effect of what they’re doing. They should humanize the children of Palestine and stop doing the killings that are happening now in that setting.
We clearly all know that there are many Palestinians living there who aren’t going away and who will be part of the future for that area and that setting. If we’re thinking about Peace of some functional kind for that setting over time, we need to recognize and understand that those sets of people are a permanent part of the reality for that area and turf. The actions taken now by the Israeli forces could be extremely important for that process over time, as both proof of intent and goodwill toward fellow human beings in that setting.
We know that any long-term solution for that area and those people has to reflect that reality. The long-term solution for Gaza and Israel needs to reflect the basic set of inter group thought processes and the very clear and powerful instincts that they trigger now and going forward — regardless of what happens today for those sets of people.
We clearly know what those instinctive inter group behaviors are that they need to try to set up for a long-term impact and possibility.
We know what the various inter group alignments and interactions can be. We can see them clearly and directly in 150 settings. We should choose the best set of those approaches and use it now in Israel.
We need to build those sets of instincts and behaviors into our solutions and our approaches for that area going forward. We need to figure out solutions that will create some level of inter group Peace for that setting knowing exactly what the long-term context will be for people living there.
It’s a multi tribal setting. It clearly needs some level of a multi tribal solution.
The Israelis are going to punish and harm the Hamas people that they can reach and affect, and even kill, but that’s an immediate and current time frame and activity that’s doomed to fail. They’re creating additional support for that group with their current hostile behaviors.
That particular immediate response doesn’t create safety and it doesn’t deliver and ensure security for either group over time.
The basic issue now for those instincts is that there are people who have the Israeli military at their command who have an absolute feeling and belief that there is a Them there that needs to be damaged and destroyed.
They’re feeling the same sets of basic instincts about those people and are now angry and enabled to do similar damage in return. They had the support of the world on their side immediately after the attacks, because of the evil of those initial attacks but that world-support is now melting away.
The rest of the world is unhappy and even angry about the damage being done in Gaza. Israel has very few friends on the world stage at this moment in time.
The majority of public protests in the world today are now running against the Israeli positions and opposed to their current actions in Gaza. The videos of the children of Israel being killed are being replaced by videos showing even larger numbers of Palestinian children damaged and dying. The evidence is extremely credible to the world because it’s accurate and visible information.
The initial attacks on the Hamas military are going to be accepted by the world. Having as many as 10,000 of those people with a seemingly military component to that population killed now in response would have seemed like a legitimate and just retribution.
But as the counter-attack process drags on, and as the world sees Israel killing what seems to be too many Palestinian people this late into the process, that has now triggered some very negative responses at too many levels to the Israeli behavior. Israel is in deep danger of becoming the villain that’s evil at relatively high levels, and that particular national branding will create future pain for Israel at a number of levels.
We need people who lead Israel to stand back and look at the long-term and try to put things in place now that can create a Gaza that is both peaceful and prosperous in a decade from now.
They need a Gaza that won’t be a functional threat to Israel again, but gives the Palestinians who live there some level of at least partial autonomy on some relevant issues and functions.
They need to persuade the Palestinians that Israel wants that to be the future status of that area. They need to do some honest and clear things to create the opportunity for that to happen.
The people who continue to live in those areas and who want a future that gives Palestinians more control over their territory and over their destiny should be encouraged in having that goal and supported in that agenda.
The basic set of issues that relate to basic inter group instinctive behaviors and thinking will spring up in various ways in that setting. We need to come up with safe, trusted, and respectful ways of making that future happen.
We need a larger picture perspective and long-range solution that reflects both the horror of what just happened and the long-term goal of having the Palestinian residents with some functional level of self-governance for major parts of that territory and turf.
It should be a right for people from every group to be safe and secure. We need people to have a future for where they choose to live that that allows them to be safe, acknowledged, respected, and accepted for living there.
No other nation is going to accept significant numbers of Palestinian refugees, because those same sets of tribal instincts obviously apply to every tribe.
Those are all very tribal nations.
The other tribes and the other tribal nations in that area of the world want to control their own destiny and to control their own turf. They don’t want their destiny and their future success levels undermined by large numbers of refugees from any setting.
They definitely don’t want to be functionally and politically the new Palestine.
Iran is currently awash in its own very real internal tribal conflicts and angers. Those issues keep Iran from being at Peace with itself now, and there is no way for them to add another tribe to the mix by having an influx from Gaza.
Afghanistan couldn’t be more tribal. No part of that country wants the Palestinians from Gaza or Israel to live there. Pakistan is also currently run pretty directly by local tribes who also don’t want any influx of people from Gaza or Israel moving there.
Most neighboring countries also don’t want Hamas as a revolutionary organization as their major new internal settlement group of people. Egypt has natural and obvious geographic proximity. They’re willing to help, but they also don’t want large influxes of people who don’t fit their own tribal alignments or their current tribal agenda at any level.
Jordan is located right there, but they already had some earlier experiences where people from the Palestinian tribes tried to depose the King and take over the country. They aren’t likely to want to go down that path again and have that path led this time by Hamas with all of the issues they create on so many levels.
Europe is currently full of refugees who are often very unhappy with the places they are now living.
Each of those countries in Europe with angry refugees is going to have to build their own pathway to local inter group Peace that reflects that full package of instincts for all of those sets of people in each and all of those countries who are now living unhappily in those settings, and who don’t feel like they’re part of the country where they now reside.
Europe isn’t going to take refugees from Gaza.
Most European leaders with those sets of issues now don’t have a clue about what they’re facing, or how hard the path to Peace will be in each of those settings. They need to recognize the realities they’re now in and the trajectories of instinctive and cultural behaviors they’re actually on.
Europe is deeply embedded today in those levels of tribal division. It needs a new generation of leaders in their own countries who will recognize and be honest about how difficult the instinctive inter group behaviors and emotions are, and who will create situational peace in all of their cities and settings, based on a reflection of who actually lives there now and what their own sets of group issues will be and are today with those instincts in gear in all of those settings.
All of the countries in Europe need to create their own pathways to inter group Peace, but most are too locked into old definitions of who they are, and locked into politically correct, but failed beliefs about inter group equity and alignment at enlightened ideological levels, and they tend to be a bad fit for the reality they actually each face today.
That won’t solve the Gaza situation and problem to have Europe part of the solution.
So, the truth is that we need a solution and an approach for the Gaza issues that are heavily (and probably exclusively) linked to Israel as a nation and tied in open, direct, logical, and realistic ways to a set of their own tribes and to the actual turf issues that exist for each portion of that country.
In Israel, the people there need leaders now who clearly have some short-term decisions to make that can tee up the long-term trajectory and long-term status for that country. Israeli leadership should begin that process now with those longer-term goals in mind with this immediate crisis in full gear and getting more difficult every day.
They need to start soon, in that setting, to have any chance of future success and to actually give Israel a short-term solution for the growing crisis that’s happening there.
They need a plan.
They’re currently very legitimately in a state of anger and shock based on those events.
They’re responding to the immediate situation rather than steering to any long-term goal.
That needs to be reflected in the next steps they take relative to the people from the Palestinian tribe who live in their country and who are not leaving or diminishing in size.
These are extremely difficult times.
Israel has been doing multiple levels of extremely negative behavior toward both Gaza and the Palestinians. There are some members of the Israeli government who've allowed the most militant of the Israeli power structure going into west bank territory and actually stealing additional land from the Palestinians for settlements. That behavior will outrage the Palestinian people and create hatred against Israel.
To have any chance of peace over time, Israel needs a new government and it needs the new government to say that they want Peace and respectful treatment for the Palestinians. And then they need that government to back off the newest of the new settlements and to make a commitment from the political leader that there will be absolutely zero new settlements and the most recent thefts will be returned.
The Palestinians won’t trust the Israelis, and the Israeli leaders will need to earn their trust one step at a time and do it by both making and keeping commitments.
The world opinion sees today and tomorrow — and not yesterday on those issues. Israel needs to create a credible plan for Gaza and the overall Palestinian sets of issues. They need to at least give the world a sense of long-term direction now.
They need to build trust.
They need to figure out how to build trust with the residents of Gaza or they're doomed to perpetual conflict and animosity.
They need to build that trust in very intentional ways with the Palestinians by making some relevant and believable commitments on a couple of issues and behaviors, and then absolutely honoring the commitments they make.
They don’t need agreements on a number of issues, but they need a commitment to some relevant and believable behavior levels that they honor.
Creating some trust at this point in time is heavy lifting and seems impossible — but it’s actually essential at some basic level to keep the situation from getting worse. It creates the context for future agreements and alignments.
Some people who are thinking about some longer-term issues and some equity considerations think that Israel should very intentionally and clearly have interactions, make commitments, and send messages now that give the Palestinian people who live there the sense that the long-term goal is to have the country be Peaceful and respectful for everyone who lives there, and to have the government of Israel very directly do the right things to make that future a possibility.
That message about future interactions and future peaceful intent is the right thing to do. It should involve making some commitments on some key issues, like additional settlements, and then absolutely and clearly keeping them.
It will take leadership in Israel who believes it, and who will work to make it happen to give Peace a chance for the people who live in that country.
That attack completely changed the balance of the reality of the setting for the next steps and for the foreseeable future for the government of Israel.
There’s no way that any answer or any approach now that Israel can or will accept to the intertribal issues in their country won’t require iron clad and absolute guarantees and very real and highly functional protection for the members of the Israeli group who live there against that same risk ever happening for the future of that country and to the people who will live there.
Israel needs leaders who want a safe and mutually respectful future to happen.
Some people looking at the political situation long-term have been suggesting that some form of the long proposed and often stated “Two-State Solution” needs to be part of the solution set at this moment in time.
There has been some serious work done over time by many people and many parties to think about those sets of solutions for a number of years. A number of people were evolving their thinking in that direction over the past two decades. We had presidents of our country committed to that approach as part of the solution set and future for Israel.
That can’t happen from where we are now. But we could get a part of the way there.
A fully functional two-state solution is very heavy lifting from this moment in time. It’s functionally impossible at the most complete level.
It would be suicidal in very real and immediate ways for one of the groups to agree to be governed by people who’ve very clearly said they want that group to be destroyed and dead.
However — some level of joint governance or at least geographically separated governance could possibly be achieved if it was structured in safe and adequate ways and allowed people to wake up each morning feeling included, respected, safe, and even prosperous as people.
We need to think about what a partial two-state trajectory might look like from where we are now with what we know now. We need to design a safe version of that approach that would give the Palestinian tribe a win at some relevant and believable levels without putting Israel at risk either as a nation or as a tribe.
As we look at the world around us — and as we learn from the options for inter group interaction and inter group Peace for that setting that are available to us from the world around us — it seems that there might be some version of a Swiss Canton-like element of respectful local governance to create some of that approach for at least some of the land now held and occupied by the Palestinian people inside that macro set of boundaries for Israel.
That canton-like solution for some settings inside those larger boundaries could meet our long-term needs for that space and for those sets of people in a way that could be accepted by both tribes. The Swiss don’t feel diminished by having some relevant governance happening at the canton level instead of at the full level of a country.
Some safe level of the two-state solution agenda and approach that people have been generically proposing for both Israel and the Palestinians for the past two decades probably needs to be proposed and then ultimately happen as the place we steer to now with our inter group thinking and our agreements between the sets of people currently living there.
Hamas did significant, fatal, and permanent damage to some earlier versions of two-state approaches with their terrorist approach, but there could well be a gentle version that would reflect the rights of the people from the Palestinian group to live (and even prosper) in parts of that setting that could be acceptable as a respectful approach for that tribe in that setting.
The Hamas mission, approach, purpose, and absolutely clear reason to exist that we saw activated in those attacks by those terrorists from Gaza are evil and hateful. The threat and the danger to the other people living there from Hamas couldn’t be more clear.
That evil mission on those issues and those negative goals from Hamas very clearly needs to be explicitly and directly rejected, and clearly and explicitly unacceptable to the various local people of Palestine alignment who do decide to live in that space long term and, who we need to be part of that two-state governance solution for the long term for Israel for both of the relevant tribes who will live there.
We would need the Palestinians who continue to live in Israel going into future years to have enlightened humanitarian values, and to want Peace to exist there for themselves and everyone else who lives in that setting.
We want and need Palestinians who live there to be willing to create Peace for that setting. And we need them to protect Peace for that setting to give it a chance of success.
We need those Palestinians to believe that their future, and the future of their children and grandchildren, should have Peace as a major component part of their belief system, culture, and commitment to one another for that nation, for that setting, and their own tribe.
Israel needs a trusted Prime Minister who has the vision of functional cantons and for fully respected and respectful status for the Palestinian residents of his or her country, and who has the skill set and the personal credibility and leadership levels to make that happen.
Israel needs residents from both groups to believe that it’s the right thing to do to create and support some level of Israel version of Cantons for all of the people there so that there is a legitimate and respectful role for those sets of people in those settings — and so that Israel itself is absolutely safe because the people who live there going forward from this point explicitly support that set of agreements and clearly support those approaches to inter group Peace and will work to make it happen.
We clearly need the people who will be living there to not hate each other if we actually create Peace for Israel and for all of the people who live there.
People can be good to one another and can trust one another. People have the ability to make trust a behavior that everyone earns by doing trustworthy things for one another.
We need friendships to happen between people from each group. We need people to not feel that extremely strong traitor instinct activated in their hearts and heads when friendships happen.
We need some amity to happen in the process.
We’re all saints and we are all sinners. We need the people who will live there to be committed to activating the saint part of who they are, and to make the saint part of who they are very real and relevant as the future for that setting and their lives.
People from many inter group conflicts around the world have had the ability to create alignments that have and build a trust that allows the ability for liking and trusting the other group in their setting to happen and succeed.
That strategy requires people to have a goal, strategy, skill set, tool kit, and explicit commitment to build and sustain win-win solutions for everyone in the setting.
Trust must be earned. It’s possible to learn it and to earn it if we start with that as our values and our goal — and then each act accordingly in our interactions with each other.
WIN-WIN IS POSSIBLE AND NEEDED IN GAZA
Win-win should be our clear and explicit functional strategy, commitment, and goal as a Peace strategy for Israel and Gaza.
We need Israel to select an honest leader who has good ethical standards and is a trusted person as a human being, and who clearly understands that a win-win approach that is skillfully implemented and then used well is their only chance to succeed as a country.
We need very creative people to get together with people from both tribes in Gaza to identify what could possible happen to situationally and locally create and sustain some win-win solutions for everyone and then we need to make those solutions believable and real in the actual Gaza settings.
We need to make win-win our goal, our skill set, our strategy, our tool kit, our agenda, and our commitment for all inter group settings — and for Gaza in particular. We need to do that in credible and effective ways that can and will (and should) succeed if we do them well, because every group in the setting wins if we do it well.
We need to believe in a peaceful and beneficial future for Israel and both groups living there even though that's an extreme leap of faith for the people living there now and will need to be implemented with high levels of competence to become credible as a strategy for the country.
No key part of that agenda and no part of the necessary safeguards for Israel can be built today on trust or implemented based only on good will as a direction, but we need to have Israel making the commitment to go down that road and then doing it in effective and intentional ways, which could have very positive results and give the country their only chance for Peace.
We know what the underlying and very direct motives, emotions, values, and behaviors were in Gaza for some of those people who stormed through those barricades and who raped, mutilated, and massacred people in that setting. We have no reason to believe that the exact and individual people who did those deeds and who acted in those ways don’t feel basically that same way today. So, those people can’t be part of the solution set for that win-win future as part of this strategy for that piece of the planet.
We need a completely different belief and commitment from real people in the real world who decide to use win-win approaches to create Peace in Israel and who agree to live there with the more enlightened and mutually supportive values in mind.
We need a win-win solution for the entire process that has that safety goal for everyone from both tribes as one of the key and essential wins.
That’s possible.
Win-win can actually be extremely powerful and extremely effective when we do it well. It actually tends to reinforce itself. People who are winning, and who know that they’re winning, tend to prefer the trajectory that they’re on, rather than losing in any way.
Understanding is a key part of that process.
To do win-win competently and well, we each need to learn and understand what a win is for the other people in each setting. We also need to understand what a win is for us. We need to learn to understand the other people in the setting well, so we can define what an actual win is for them, and then help them achieve it.
Prosperity should be a clear and important goal.
Win-win should very explicitly and directly include great economic success for the Palestinian people who will live in that safe and respectful place within that extended nation.
That is entirely possible to do. We live in a world of great wealth, great potential, great resources, great opportunity, and great capability. We should build on that reality, and we should use those ample and extensive resources to create economic success for everyone who will live there.
Everyone should win if we do this right. The opportunity exists.
We need the Hamas worst and clearly evil and hateful elements to be completely eliminated and removed from the expectations, values, and beliefs of the population who will live there now going into the decades ahead.
We need the people who live there to believe and know that they can, in fact, prosper and thrive in that setting if we do this as well as it can be done.
We want everyone to do well.
The world is a better place for everyone when we all win.
We need the people of Palestine who will be living in that area to commit to a future that creates win-win outcomes and prosperity for everyone as a nation and two aligned tribes.
We also need to commit to a win-win future that respects each of the winners and makes them equal parts of our agenda in ethical and functional ways.
Honesty will be key.
Honesty needs to start now when we get the right leaders to the Peace table for Israel and have them be credible, ethical, honorable, and honest people, chosen for their integrity, wisdom, and good heart.
People don’t trust each other between those groups now. We need to know what issues should trigger trust. We should put steps in place on those issues to create trust as soon as we have the right leaders in place to make that goal possible to do.
We will need the people who run Israel to commit at that point in time to absolute honesty.
We also need those leaders of Israel to commit now to clear and heartfelt good intentions and to good will for the Palestinians who will go down this path.
We need people in Israel in some important leadership functions to start now by refusing to do a number of things to Palestinians that are just not right in the various settings where some negative interactions with both settings and people happen now.
That’s an easy and important list to make. We need Israeli leadership who shows good faith, good will, good intentions, and high levels of etherical behavior at a group and individual level by doing a number of morally right things now.
We don’t need to go back to correct some points, but it’s absolutely essential that we start now and get the behaviors right on all of the key points. Like taking land and turning it into settlements — and just plain have that not happen again.
There are some subtribes within Israel who are extremely Us-Them at a deeply instinctive level on a number of issues. The government needs to have those subtribes not allowed to do those things to Palestinians at this point and moment in time and for the future if the Palestinians have committed to Peace as part of the process.
Those negative actions and approaches by those Israelis on those issues in those settings tell Palestinians that their intentions aren’t being respected and supported and enabled as we start from this very deep hole to build mutual trust and shared Peace in every Israeli and shared Palestinian setting — and to have all of the behaviors clearly pointing in those directions.
It’s a very small and highly visible space.
We need everyone to be doing the right things in visible ways to build credibility, momentum, and trust from now on for both groups.
We need the two groups of people to live peacefully and safely in that same proximity for a very long time. We should want (and need) all of the people who live there to prosper by being there and to trust each other as joint aspirants for inter group success.
We need to start with good behaviors now before any settlements of any kind are reached on those other points. We need the government of Israel to act in the right way on all of those issues. They need to start now.
We can achieve the goal of inter group trust if we’re very honest about what we’re doing at every level, and if we accept that there’s a new baseline for the interactions and if we believe it can work if we make it work by doing the right things to make it work.
We need a working solution to those issues.
We need a level of honesty and visibility about what everyone is doing. We need leaders from both groups acting with obvious and visible ‘good will’ to have it succeed.
We know how bad it can be if that doesn’t happen — so it should be the new normal for those people and that setting.
Let’s make it better by doing the right thing and making sure it never gets that bad again in that setting.
That peaceful set of interactions isn’t the outcome and the future that will happen if we don’t manage the current situation well. That level of inter group peace isn’t the pattern that the world is on if we don’t intervene and steer toward the right places in more settings.
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY CURRENT CONFLICTS EXIST IN THE WORLD TODAY AND NOW
There are more than 150 inter group and intertribal settings in the world today where the people are damaging each other by group and tribe. We should have the people who lead the setting in Israel to understand why all of those other conflicts are happening in all of those places and why they don’t want those patterns of behavior as their future as a country from here.
We should take different and clear approaches that steer Israel away from the path of inter group conflict that it’s so obviously on today. We need to create legitimate inter group Peace in the basic Israeli settings. That can be done if we do it together.
We will probably need some help for Israel from outside the country to help make this happen.
The government in America could and should be a key ally for the process of steering toward win-win future interactions and trying to create success and trust for all groups that will survive over time.
The American government should look at this plan and at these goals and should bless them and agree to make it happen with the starting point we have now as the place we will begin.
Our government should lead the truth culture and support the truth process for Israel. It shouldn’t support anyone who violates that trust for the people who live in that country.
The world needs a model. America can help be a part of the solution in multiple other conflicted inter group settings if we can create successful win-win outcomes here — and if we then use those same tools to help people all over the world achieve intergroup mutually beneficial behaviors that allow smaller groups in various national settings to self-govern in ways that they strongly want to be governed.
That set of outcomes isn’t the path we’re on as a world today for multiple settings and for the very obvious reasons that trigger those instincts and reactions in too many places today.
Paris has streets where there is so much inter group and heavily tribal anger that the police are reluctant to enter the areas. Brussels and even Bonn have settings where local neighborhoods aren’t under police control.
People hate each other by group.
The people who run those countries need to understand what can be done in those settings if they decide to create peaceful inter group interactions there and ultimately get to peace for their people by understanding why they have so many settings where inter group anger is their current status (and their probable destiny), and then create win-win strategies for those settings and situations.
The world is in a state of inter group conflict.
We need people to understand what is happening in those settings. We need the people who run those countries to make the right decisions on those paths and create a future where peace is possible and enlightened behavior can be a value and a cultural expectation. It’s the right thing to do and people believe it to be the right path.
Win-win can work in many settings if we give it a try.
Ukraine is a possibility because the conflicts there are so clearly tribal and have people with different cultures, languages, and histories pointing guns at one another across the tribal divides who should not be firing those guns today.
We need Israel and Gaza to steer in that direction of win win results now. It’s been so horrible in the recent past. It would be wrong not to rise above what just happened and move to safer and saner ground in enlightened and intellectually grounded ways. The alternative to safe ground is the wrong place to be.
The picture of the armored vehicle on the cover of Cusp of Chaos is actually a photo from Ferguson, Missouri. It was taken during a significant set of instinctive inter group negative interactions that happened in America. Those conflicts, the George Floyd event, and the Black Lives Matter community reactions set up some very important and powerful learning experiences for us in our own country that put us in a far better place on some key issues compared to where we were only a short time ago.
The “Me Too” movement has given us powerful insights into some gender issues in our own country, which has given us better and more enlightened behavior in many settings. Our protests on a number of inter group issues have also given us context to create Peace agendas for our own cities that are important for the world.
We’re all in need of getting these thoughts, agendas, and strategies into peaceful trajectories in every inter group setting in the world.
We need to help the children from every group get the right start for their lives by having neurons connect in the first years of life. That should be a national priority for us that we succeed in doing in the immediate future.
Peace. In our time.
Let’s make it happen.