POWERFUL VISIBLE HIGHLY 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.

This piece is being written more than a year after that attack, and we now have a very good sense of how both sides in that setting are dealing with the situation they face there.

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 and they are obviously going to trigger layers of additional behaviors and responses for the foreseeable future.

What actually happened on that day?

Terrorists from the Palestinian population of Gaza were inspired, led, and directed by the Hamas group to kill about 1200 Israeli residents on October 7 and they did their murders with obvious deep seated intergroup hatred that caused them to functionally and viciously damage, mutilate, torture, and even sexually assault some of the people who were attacked that day.

Some of the people who were doing the assault made visual records of what they did, and those records have inflamed and enraged both people in Israel and in other settings who've seen them since the attacks happened.

Video and visual evidence of those assaults was quickly made available fairly quickly to the world, and that video record served to enrage many viewers because it was clear that some of the people who were doing evil and who were doing damage in that time and that setting did it with joy, positive energy, personal support and obvious enthusiasm — and they did their damage as attackers with clearly targeted and focused hatred for the people they were attacking, and they then openly and collectively celebrated what they had done to those people.

Those video records of people doing evil things to those local people with joy and celebration have enraged and outraged many of the Israeli people whose tribe and people were attacked and damaged in that process, and some of the Israeli viewers who saw those videos have said that they will never forget the shock, anger and horror they felt at seeing and perceiving that joy from the people doing the attack on their people.

That’s a very normal reaction and response that can be and is triggered in those victims by those kinds of events when they see those behaviors relative to their own people directly and clearly in any setting.

Groups of people who see their own people attacked and damaged and who see the attacking people expressing joy and even happiness for hurting and damaging those people from their group have a natural and understandable tendency to deeply resent those emotions, reactions, and behaviors from the attacking group, and one of the responses we still have from that attack in Gaza is that many of those people who saw those behaviors continue to want to damage anyone who felt joy from attacking and damaging their group and the people with those feelings tend to believe that anything that can be done to hurt those people is the right and appropriate thing to do.

Collective group anger was triggered and reinforced in that Israeli group who were attacked by having the sense that other people were feeling joy by damaging your people, and we know that the likelihood that the people who were attacked will somehow forget or forgive what happened in those events and in those attacks is difficult and impossible for those sets of people to forget even with the passage of time, because the events were so real and so painful that they will channel those strong and negative reactions for those people forever.

We need to see, know  and understand how real and powerful those feelings can be.

People who see their own people being damaged by people who are showing glee in the damage process will always feel intense anger and will want those people to be damaged as well in perpetuity if that damage can possibly happen, and the fact that we actually have clear video records of that evil being done in that place and on that day means that it will continue to trigger those responses every time those records are experienced and seen by any relevant people from the Israeli group, and that visual record and experience will keep that sense of being damaged in place and will tie it to the people who were making the damage happen in a direct and permanent set of reactions.

Many of the Israelis on October 7 who had never been in any kind of similar situation before found that experience and that reality to be horrifying and they believed it was very much the wrong world to be in for all of those issues and all of those ugly inter group interactions and they hated the fact that it was now part of their experience and their lives.

We have extremely strong instincts that guide our behaviors at multiple levels in interactions with our group and with the world.

We Divide Into Us and Them

We instinctively divide the world into Us and Them, and we have very strong instincts to defend our Us and to resist and oppose anyone we perceive to be Them. Those instincts were activated with full force on October 7 in Gaza, and they're still channeling much of our interactions and our reactions in that setting to that day.

The day-one attacks created and activated intense and direct alignment inside the Palestinian group and there was a sense of connected physical presence for that interaction by many people that was overwhelmed almost immediately on day two, by the Israeli response that began killing the Gaza people in large numbers and that began to do extensive bombing and highly effective demolition of large portions of the actual areas where many of the Palestinians lived.

Israel has a well-staffed and well-armed army, and they begin killing the Gaza residents in large numbers with some of the most effective demolition bombs and weapons that have ever existed, to destroy property and to take lives at scale in populated settings.

The people whose tribe had been obviously and directly attacked on October 7 started killing the other tribe at several levels immediately and they said they were responding to their death toll at the beginning of the process to defend their own people from anything like that day ever happening in the future for their group and for their tribe.

The death count for Palestinians in Gaza in year one after the attack probably exceeded 50,000 lives — and that death count continues to grow today.

Deaths still happen daily for that population a couple of years after the October 7 murders with no end in sight for that process of killing those people.

The local population surveys in that area now indicate that a majority of the Israelis living there now fear future echoes of the October 7 events, and they tend to support the programs that exist to drive Palestinians from their current space and to kill or damage the ones who still live there now, because they know and believe that the group that organized the October 7 attacks still exists and they believe that group continues to be clear about their animosity toward the Israeli residents of the area.

Nothing has calmed down for the people with those beliefs on both sides of the conflicts — and so we can expect people from both groups who are forced to live in that setting to believe that they have their enemy all around them who might do similar attacks at some future time and they tend to believe and plan for a future that will include similar events.

What can we expect for the future in that area and space?

We can see behavior patterns in multiple settings elsewhere that let us predict the future in Gaza for those realities and those behaviors.

Tribes Often Kill

One of the most painful things we need to recognize as humans on this planet is that we kill a lot of people and we generally do it as tribes.

Tribes hurt tribes in multiple places and spaces — and that's clearly and directly happening now in that setting.

When tribes go to war with their Us-Them instincts activated and in gear, they tend to hate each other and they believe in each tribe that any damage they do to the other tribe is good damage to do.

That's not a set of behaviors that was invented in Gaza.

Nigeria has Christian and Muslim tribes who are at war with each other today who also want to damage and massacre and purge the other tribes in that country, and they do it constantly at multiple levels and ways.

The death rate there in 2026 clearly exceeds 50,000 lives. Probably slightly exceeding the current death rate in Gaza.

Tribal groups in Somalia and Ethiopia and Sudan are all killing that many people today in those settings as well, and we see evil behavior happening in all of those settings where evil behaviors feel right to people with their tribal instincts in full gear.

Ethiopia has some Christian tribes that are suffering genocide by the tribes who hate them and who want them gone — and we have mass killings, mutilations, and sexual violence that has many Ethiopian settings today where evil is being done by people who clearly hate the other group and who want to kill and destroy them with a sense of collective victory that they can achieve when they make that damage happen.

The Hamas videos of joyful inter group damaging behaviors have parallels in Sudan and Somalia where people hate people and are recording the damage they're doing to reinforce their own sides in those ugly and damaging behaviors, and there are horror stories about joyful killings by some people in come settings.

We tend to kill each other by tribes in many settings.

Gaza is obviously one of them, but Gaza didn’t invent the behavior or the result.

Whenever those kinds of conflicts happen, the people hate each other by tribe and enter into the full set of inter groups distortions and attacks that absolutely suspend conscience and disbelief in each group until they've killed large numbers of whatever tribe they set as their enemy and target.

We also have many settings where the division is ugly and damaging and not fully armed at this point in time.

All of the major cities of Europe have tribal neighborhoods where people kill each other based on their group — and where the traditional ethnic group that ran the country no longer controls all of the major areas of their great cities.

Paris has neighborhoods where the police avoid some streets because the new local majority group is willing to damage people from other groups just for being on that turf and the French police say they no longer feel safe in those sites or settings.

Even Zurich has some neighborhoods where the police are no longer in full control — and in every country that has immigrants from Albania, the violence rate is higher than it was before that group took over those neighborhoods and settings. Most other groups say they fear the Albanian crime teams when they're relevant to a setting.

Great Britian is also having some additional divisions by their key tribal groups, which will continue as long as those groups exist in those settings and as long as the people who are Scottish or Welch or Irish don’t feel like they're either English or actually currently assimilated into that country as a whole.

South Africa currently has several major internal groups that each have their own political and tribal identities — and who periodically create their own political coalitions with the other tribes in the country to run the place at a governance level. They don't tend to shoot people from other tribes in South Africa or Switzerland, but they clearly govern with those tribal realities in place in those settings.

The Swiss may have the width of their railroads change at some of the language change borders, but they aren’t killing anyone today because of tribal issues.

But, Sudan has its own genocidal behaviors, and people there who do mass killings far too often and there is zero chance and it would require some serious magical thinking to believe that tribes who have fought each other there for hundreds of years are going to create some alignment now that causes the inter group hatred to disappear and for peace and a multi-state governance model to be the basic context for the area instead of periodic ethnic cleansing for areas.

Gaza follows that pattern. The tribes there both have slogans that say, "From the River to the Sea," and they both mean that the other tribe isn’t running that country at major levels and they're very tribal for their piece of the turf.

Some people have an old model that called for a 'Two State Solution' for Israel.

There’s no reason to believe that magical thinking or fortuitous events at some level will cause a 'Two State Solution' to be possible in that space with future peace built around that model, because that two-state model never works in any setting and because the people in Gaza on both sides now are so angry now that they can’t possibly get close to that level of interaction in the immediate future.

The 'Two State Solution' cannot happen.

So how do we stop the killing?

The people who run Israel need to figure out how to split by tribe into some governance alignment or approach that can at least stop the short-term killing from being so massive and ugly for so many people in the Gaza space.

We need to accept the reality of what we have now.

Those groups hate each other now. The social media of the world has strong sets of supporters and followers for each of the groups. There’s no social media-linked approach or generic governance model or communication process that can change that reality for those people, but we should try to get people to think of cease fires and truce approaches that can actually save lives because they at least temporarily stop the killing.

The social media information flow about Gaza is extremely active and has wildly differing sets of advocates and participants. Since the attack, the social media world has built up a large number of responses and pieces that take many different positions, and many of those responses that are running today are heavily critical of Isreal for what's happening there now in the time since the attack.

Having more than 100,000 people die since that first attack creates a high level of energy at the social media level.

The original response from Israel had its own anger reinforced by the fact that the people who were part of the Hamas group who did the attacks couldn't be more clear in their dislike and their hatred for the Jewish group, and everyone in that setting on both sides of the conflict knows that the Hamas group has clearly stated their very explicit agenda — a goal of hurting and damaging Israelis and somehow forcing them out of their current country into the sea and destroying Israel in the process — and that doesn’t have much chance of happening in the ways that they wish it could happen.

There's no practical or logical way for the original Hamas goals to happen now, because Israel isn't going away as a country and because both tribes have now damaged the other group so extensively that they hate each other to the core, and they can’t somehow move on from there to a new context for their relationship.

The Israeli army and related military forces have done massive damage to Gaza since that attack. They're clearly trying to make the land functionally uninhabitable for the Gaza folks, and they're succeeding at a significant level.

The Israeli army is one of the most powerful, well-equipped, and effective military forces on the planet, so the Hamas militia and the military in Gaza have zero chance of success in any exchange of fire involving both sets of armed people.

They need to be willing to have some number of people living there in some level of grace, dignity, and peace in order to create some semblance of a two-state approach — and they don’t seem to be open to that being a very large number.

That’s exactly how Us-Them instincts work.

We have very different standards for our Us, and we're willing to have extremely damaging actions happening relative to our Them.

The total number of Palestinian people killed and counted now runs about 40,000 people. Additional deaths happen regularly, and the Israeli army who creates the deaths says that Hamas is still in charge of the area — and that means that those are not actually civilian deaths, but military operation's casualties, because the people living there are a military threat as long as Hamas is in charge of the area.

The Israeli army is one of the strongest armies in the world and it's clearly not at any risk of being defeated or deterred in any military sense by Hamas or any other set of Palestinian alignments that might occur.

The Israeli army is positioning itself to have control over all of the land currently included in the state of Isreal as a nation and will be able to keep the internal opposition, resistance, and protests of any kind permanently in a militarily weak position for that community and those areas. They'll probably be pressured by other nations to create some semblance of survival reality for their Palestinians, and we'll need the world to look at what they decide to do and report on it with some clarity to give some space to those people.

Classic US-Them instinctive thoughts and behaviors are also in full gear for the Israeli army today.

Members of the Israeli military clearly feel as an Us that they've been attacked as a nation and a group by an evil Them and the people in that army believe and think with those instincts fully activated that anything they can do to hurt and damage Them is a legitimate and appropriate thing to do.

We need a more humane approach for Gaza — and it's actually something that could be possible to do if Israel gets pressure from other countries in some way.

We need to understand that similar sets of instincts are currently activated in a number of other sites in the world today, and most of them are doomed to keep killing each other until circumstances force them into a change of direction.

Sudan, Ethiopia, and Gaza Share Trajectories

Sudan has military forces with those same instincts activated and thousands of people die every month there because people with a different language and a different tribal name are fully armed and are in place to kill each other in that setting.

Ethiopia has the same instincts in gear. The armies and armed forces in Ethiopia have been doing extremely damaging attacks on people who speak different languages and different group names now, and those conflicts will continue and will kill and displace millions of people there as long as those groups continue to have their own identity and sense of shared destiny as a group.

Myanmar has highly armed ethnic military forces whose focus and energy is directed at fighting the main army of the country and creating deaths and displacements in what seems to be the longest running civil war existing today, and has people hating each other with great skill, energy, and commitment that's tied entirely to the fact that they have absolutely clear underlying instinct-guided differences at the tribal level.

Gaza is on that same path today and the Israeli army is feeling those instincts now and is openly killing tens of thousands of Palestinians with no sense of guilt or ethical or moral concern, because people killing Them in those settings don’t activate those values or those levels of civilized or enlightened behavior for the other people living there while those instincts are in gear.

The Israeli media team that does social media work for them blamed Hamas yesterday for the most recent civilian deaths on the grounds that Hamas had an obligation to move civilians out of harm’s way and didn’t move them, so they said their murders were caused by Hamas even though both the guns and the bombs were manned by Israeli tribal forces and the Israeli army.

We suspend conscience and ethical commitment at such a complete level that at least some of the spokespeople who blamed the deaths probably believed what they were saying and they didn’t feel the deaths were their fault because they had warned the other side to act differently for those people.

We have a remarkable ability to believe extremely unlikely things when we have our tribal hearing instincts in place and we hear those unlikely things said by people we trust because we perceive them to be Us.

The long-range situation for Israel and Gaza will require those parties in that setting to evolve into a different set of interactions over time, but 40,000 people are dead now because that evolution to those interactions has not occurred and Israeli forces in Gaza still have those instincts in gear and they were killing people recently by bombing hospitals where wounded warriors and children were receiving care.

The vulnerability that exists for Isreal over time is that it's destined and doomed to function and exist long term as a multi tribal nation where one of the tribes is much weaker than the other tribe and where the weaker tribe is permanently unhappy about that reality and relative position for their condition and behavior, and will always be angry about that situation.

Israel is clearly doomed to forever be a multi tribal country and that's always an extremely difficult thing to be whenever it happens and creates the world that people in a setting have as the reality of their world.

That context needs to be understood clearly by everyone in that space to create a future for Gaza that has some chance of succeeding.

Almost every multi tribe country on the planet is at war with itself now, and many are doing more damage internally today than Gaza is now doing to Israel. Sudan has thousands of people hurting and killing each other and those warring tribes are damaging and killing more people over time than we see dying now in Gaza.

Nigeria is killing large numbers of people — and that's likely to continue for the indefinite future.

is a country with major internal divisions that make no sense as a national entity, but they continue to have levels of relative peace and extreme long-term dysfunctionality as a country. Nigeria would be far better off breaking into pieces, but our territorial instincts everywhere are so powerful that that's almost impossible to do and not likely to happen there.

Ethiopia has millions of people in conflicted tribes, and they're perpetually doing major damage to one another and killing more people than Gaza.

Syria has millions of people in conflicted tribes, and they've also been doing more murders and displacements over the past decade than we see now in Gaza.

Ukraine Could Not Be More Tribal

Ukraine has a clearly tribal war and the Ukrainian tribe in the last couple of years has been killing more members of the Russian speaking tribe than the death rates we have recently seen in Gaza.

Ukraine is clearly another setting where people from two different tribes kill one another and will probably continue to hurt each other for as long as both sets of people are forced to remain in the confines of a single country run by either tribe.

Russia is actually attacking Ukraine now in a very tribal way. They're trying to get the Russian speaking members of that nation to spin off into a tribe and a territory that speaks Russian instead of Ukrainian and becomes part of Russia rather than continuing to be a territory of Ukraine.

The United Nations was set up to protect and maintain the current status of the member nations, and tends to hate and oppose any inter group interactions and territorial control realities that don't strictly honor, maintain, and protect the traditional and existing national boundaries of each nation.

The people in leadership roles from each of the various nations who currently run the United Nations tend to believe that national boundaries are far more important than ethnic linkages and ethnic and tribal loyalties, so Russia isn't getting support today from most leadership people at the UN for its current effort to spin off and control the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine.

The United Nations tends to be run at the senior level by the people whose history is that they've won the local tribal wars in each nation, so those leaders tend to support existing national boundaries and not support or encourage ethnic or cultural linkages for people.

Many nations have those kinds of internal divisions, at the ethnic level and the United Nations doesn't tend to encourage them to exist or to support them in any way.

Spain insists at their leadership level that the United Nations should not support either Barcelona or the Basque in their ethnic alignments and their separatist identities and agendas within Spain. So when those kinds of separatist issues of any kind become part of the political reality for other nations, Spain always supports national boundaries and never supports any ethnic divisions or separatist activities within other countries.

Russia will argue that splitting Ukraine into two tribal territories is a simple continuation and recognition of the ethnic separation that has historically existed there, and they will argue that it doesn’t violate any national boundary sanctity issues to have that transfer to Russian control for that piece of turf to happen now.

The Ukraine situation will also be playing out with some visibility in the immediate future, and we'll probably see the land of that Russian speaking tribal unit move to the Russian nation as part of the peace settlement they're working on now.

Most people who write about Ukraine refer to that action by Russia to get control over that turf as a possible extension and reinstatement of the old Soviet Union.

That would be wrong.

That particular approach is actually an extension of the old Russia, and it will be an easy fit for those people after it happens.

The Ukrainian people in government who currently control that country have the standard national leader reaction always hate to have any loss of geographic control and they believe that move of that territory to Russia is at least possibly a violation of national integrity for their tribe.

That would be an easier argument for that particular government to make if they hadn't recently passed laws making use of the Russian language either difficult or illegal on that portion of their turf and in the schools occupied by the Russian tribe. This approach to having Russian be the language in the schools and in the government setting is actually what self determination for those people would create if we allow self-determination for the people who live there to happen in those settings.

People who control countries everywhere tend not to want self-determination at any level for local people anywhere.

Self-determination is a more respectful and more supportive level of functional democracy that most people who believe strongly in current and rigid national boundaries strongly oppose.

The Ukraine outcome that's being negotiated now can be very respectful of the ethnic identities of the two key tribes who live in that area and space. Gaza is the exact opposite — because the Gaza reality puts both of the tribes who live there into perpetual stress, conflict, and into negative interactions that neither tribe wants to be in.

Gaza is a very different and difficult situation, because it isn’t an extension of Israel as much as it's an uncomfortable extension of Israeli power over territory occupied by one of the local tribes from Palestine and it's an approach that isn’t welcomed or accepted by the people who live there from that tribe.

The situation in Gaza has triggered some concerns from people in other settings who worry about the future damage likely to be done there with those instinctive behaviors running the area and by people who are perceived to be Them by the tribe running the country to be damaged over time by the behavior of that lead tribe.

Israel is a highly visible country for a number of reasons and the Gaza activity has received a significant amount of visibility in other countries because it happened there and clearly has some Us-Them instincts activated and in full gear.

People tend to look at Gaza as though it was somehow an outlier event relative to the the world realities we face today.

The people with that view of Gaza as an outlier event or a pure anomaly are actually missing an extremely important point about what's actually happening there is typical and normal inter tribal conflict levels that happen in multi tribal settings and multi ethnic countries across the planet.

People who don't see, know 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.

When you study instinctive behaviors, we actually know those very definite and consistent patterns and we know why they happen in so many settings and we know why they will continue to happen there in perpetuity to those sets of people in Gaza

Tribes are key to those conflicts.

Tribes Protect and Defend and Sometimes Kill People

Tribes often kill people from the context of 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 Israeli tribe and they're very open about their intentions and their beliefs for those outcomes and future 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 and it will play out as those settings have played out hundreds of times.

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 as a group 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.

For most settings and most times in the world today, being Jewish is an identity. In Israel, it’s also a tribe.

Being an actual Jewish tribe isn’t a new behavior in Gaza and for this set of events.

Moses clearly led a tribe when he steered his people and their identity into that space.

TRIBAL LINES AND DAMAGING INSTINCTIVE INTERGROUP BEHAVIOR

Tribes fight and even sometimes 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 inter group proximity in each of those settings.

Gaza has taken many lives since that initial attack. Conflict is extremely real and it's happening now. The people there are now in a state of ceasefire, but they have not even achieved any level of official and functional 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 the Gaza settings for some period of time so that longer term stability can by safely put in place by the people living there.

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 for Gaza until the people in command of the area decide to make it happen in arbitrary ways and enforce it by force of arms on the people who live there.

We will all see what they decide to do.

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 because we've started down that road and we're highly likely to continue because it's so visible now.

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.

We all need to see, recognize and understand that Gaza is not an outlier situation when we look at all of the other similar conflicts between groups happening in other settings today. And it's not our worst problem with inter group conflicts 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 long-standing internal tribal tensions, conflicts, and divisions, and Syria and Pakistan and Lebanon all have their own bloody and angry inter group conflicts happening today with people being killed now in those settings 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.

Shiite and Sunni Muslim tribes exist in all multiple settings, and they tend to add that definition of who they are to their tribal identity and then have people with guns aiming them at people with different sects as part of their sense of who they should kill and why.

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 have underlying instincts that create the context and the interactions that make those events, emotions, and values between groups happen. The instincts 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 and they believe that they're legitimate reasons to dislike, hate, and even damage the other groups within those settings.

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, Somalia, 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 current inter group killings in Ethiopia that have been happening 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 today that should surprise or confuse anyone who has looked at the behaviors of the tribal groups in that setting for the past couple of decades.

Both our news media and our political leaders refuse to recognize, understand, and explain tribal behavior, and they act as though every set of damaging behavior is situational and circumstantial rather than obviously programed and a standard set of group instinct 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 and violence that just happened in 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 need to figure out the best next steps today for that setting.

They’re continuing to take lives in that area today.

The full death rate there now in post-attack Gaza probably exceeds 200,000 lives.

The Israeli army has had their Us-Them instincts in full gear, and some members of that military force obviously hates and fears the Hamas group. They might try to damage significant numbers 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 with those instincts in gear.

Other Palestinians have become collateral damage to that battleground as a result of that hatred. The people from that group on both sides of the battle line will probably 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 now the politically correct context for the long-term future of that setting has absolutely no possibility of happening as people want it to happen in that setting with the forces in play there now.

Some powerful tribal forces inside the Israeli group who have current political power are making the challenge even more difficult by actually very intentionally taking more Palestinian land today and by turning 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 by group entitlement, and that land acquisition process is getting significant attention outside the area and has created many negative responses in the social media settings where it's increasingly visible as the reality for those current interactions.

If we want any semblance of even temporary peace in those settings, we need to have someone to steer the Israelis not to take any more land today and now.

The internet processes make those behaviors available and visible to many people in the world, and there's increasing awareness of that reality.

THERE ARE CORE TOOLS THAT CAN CREATE PEACE AND A SENSE OF US

Someone needs to persuade the Israeli’s that their long-term role and status in the world could be enhanced if they did actual positive things to stop the killing and the demolition happening in Gaza today.

That needs to be very intentional and visible behavior by Israel 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 that steers peace in each setting for each relevant set of people.

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 by what we need to do to build peace.

We would need a break in the conflict, and we would need a new leader for Israel who tells everyone that he or she wants a collaborative approach to succeed. We don’t have that now, but leadership changes and it's possible that someone will go into that job who wants to make peace for the country and is willing to do some things to make peace happen.

People in every setting, at their core, generally want peace. People don’t’ want to fight. People very much tend to prefer peace.

If we get a new leader for Israel who sees that his or her future should be to create internal peace for that country, that could happen because it's so much better than hurting people as a behavior reality — and people very consistently prefer being in peaceful settings when they have that option.

No one running Gaza now from either side has been trying to create a sense of Us for the people living there.

People who've had 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.

Ugly things happened in Gaza.

We all need to remember, 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 negative anti group energy already 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 has 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 and created a powerful long-term group memory that a significant number of the attackers had 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 anyone to wonder or speculate about their motivations behind those behaviors, because they make them extremely explicit and clear.

Some people who believe that to be true for Hamas currently 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 because they 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 damaged more than 200,000 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 and badly damaged 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, and they involve damaging behaviors at several levels. Genocide against Ethiopian Christian tribes has been very real and it's killing significant numbers of people today.

Somalia has also done mass violence at the tribal level in that setting, and those people in Somalia 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 instinct triggered 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 also 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 here  and displace some of those tribes from their lands was that the original American tribes did what tribes everywhere on the planet do and they were at war with each other in a number of settings before the Euro Americans invaded their turf and they were more susceptible and vulnerable 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 for that brief period of time and in that one setting.

After that battle, those tribes didn’t have the logistical resources to maintain their new group identity and they were all ethnically purged from their traditional spaces by the military forces of the United States who cleared their ground.

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 organized aligned organization and it's a group of people that has their own worst tribal instincts activated and shaping their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions relative to and against the other tribe in their area.

They have leaders for Hamas who intentionally,  deliberately and effectively use the worst components of those tribal instincts to damage other people from the other tribe.

They clearly had some of 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 and they very clearly wanted to do damage to their Israeli people in each 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 electronic visual evidence 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.

We Have Videos of Evil Behavior

Fortunately, some of the people involved actually recorded the events from those October 7 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 that camera 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.

We continue to do retributive damage for months and even years after that event, in part because the video evidence from that day created a permanent sense about that relationship and those groups of people who were in that event.

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 were kept prisoner for a very long time, and that entire hostage process created great anger with the hostage families that kept the two sides hating each other in powerful ways after the actual day of deaths had long passed.

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, mutilations, rapes and intentional, planned, explicit and malicious sexual abuses; and collective, organized, mass targeted gunfire and attacks from multiple vehicles that were done by the celebrating assailants.

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.

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 in just the first year. 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 they believed 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.

Each Palestinian seems to be included in the thinking as a Them.

Components of the Israeli Army now consider the immediate deaths of more than 20,000 Palestinian children to be a reasonable and legitimate 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 200,000 people.

The Prime Minister of Israel  said a month after the attach that there were three brigades of Hamas soldiers still alive in that area. He believed that his people should kill them all to create security for Israel. He said clearly in a number of settings that those Hamas fighters would 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 thousands of civilian deaths on Hamas itself. He says their soldiers are now in the same areas as their civilians, and that proximity to civilians makes Hamas guilty of the civilian deaths, rather than Israel.

One earlier prime minister of Israel said that the thing she hated most about the Palestinians is that they forced her to kill their kids.

That’s a complicated but important way of thinking about the future of people living in that space.

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 who have their own language and who have their own sense of territorial alignment.

Ethnic cleansing happens with some regularity at a very local level in many multi tribal counties, and millions of deaths result because we suspend conscience when we kill and displace them.

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 own 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.

Most people hate to think that we're so nonmoral and unethical that we damage and kill people just for various inter group differences, but that morality issue and ethics deficiency is obviously real and causes death constantly in all of those settings.

People who say that level of long-term inter group damage and conflict with instinctive underpinnings isn’t true should just look at the evidence that shows that it is true and we can 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.

SWISS CANTONS CAN WORK OFTEN

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-side 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 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.

No One Will Take Refugees from Gaza

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 be 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.

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 as a plan and who will work to make it happen in order to give peace a chance for the people who live in that country.

That attack on October 7 completely changed the balance of the reality of the setting for the next steps and for the foreseeable future for the government of Israel.

Israel Needs Credible and Competent Leaders

The situation in Israel could get to the point that the Israelis decide that they want a leader who can achieve peace — and it would be a good thing for the country and the world if the selection process distills out some level of leader who can do that job. That doesn’t exist today, but it could happen, and if that does happen, we should try to help them achieve that goal.

We clearly need the people  living there to be willing to create peaceful pathways going forward.

People of good faith 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 potentially for one another, if we make peace their assignment and goal.

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 could've 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.

There's no possibility of creating a politically correct full-power 'Two State Solution' for Israel because the two groups hate each other and the governance issues of having authority and safety will need to happen in a highly compromised approach that gives some level of dignity and respectful behavior for the people from Gaza who would put the process together and who would need to accept limited power for some portions of the solution and process in order to get safety for their children.

It will take local leadership to make that happen.

We'll 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 possibly 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.

We Need Artificial Intelligence to Create Win-Win Solutions and Approaches

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 to use the very best artificial intelligence tool kits, and we need to have the artificial intelligence tools we use asked to help us design win-win solutions.

They can come up with a wide array of wins and approaches that we'll never be able to invent or create on our own. A win-win review from our Artificial Intelligence tool might provide us with a very successful future that we could make very real because we want it to happen.

We need to ban Evil.

Hamas seems to have some evil goals now, and long-term peace will require some modification of those goals for some parts of what they do.

To create actual peace, we need the Hamas worst and most clearly evil and most hateful elements to be eliminated and removed from the expectations, values, and beliefs of the population who will live there now going into the decades ahead in whatever gets created as the population distribution plan for the West Bank and Gaza parts of the country.

We need the people who live there in that part of Isreal to believe that safety is possible for them going forward, and that respectful behavior will happen for them in future years in that setting.

The two sides have done so many hateful things to each other that the safety issues will need to be built into whatever infrastructure and living approach happens for the millions of Israelis who will be Palestinian by ancestry and birth, and should have full dignity as the residents of that territory and space and have highly functional and effective support for their farms, homes, and living settings that make a good life possible in that setting and context.

Honesty Will Be Key

Honesty should be key.

We should ask all sides in Israel to make honesty a personal commitment, practice, and priority.

We should ask all settings and cultures to agree on key issues to not say anything that we know is not true when we say it.

We don’t need to monitor truth, but we can expect people to personally create a high level of truth for our settings and for our interactions and our cultures by not saying anything in important settings that we know isn't true when we say it.

Not saying things that we know aren't true when we say them creates a very strong reality of truth for our settings — and it’s something we each can do because we're each in control of our own words and our own reality. We can self-monitor that process to get to a very high level of effectiveness and accuracy on the communications we have and the things we know and understand.

We don’t need to debate anything because we each manage our own communications and we each know what we believe to be true in our own lives and that's good enough to make the process work.

We once were a truthful culture, and this again makes truth a cultural expectation and behavioral practice instead of simply deceiving and misleading people and believing in that approach to honesty to be our community practice.

We can reintroduce truth as a cultural expectation.

It would be a good thing for us to ask the people who will run Israel going forward, from both sides of the ethnic reality in that country, to commit at that point in time to honesty as a behavioral expectation for key interactions at the direct level.

We should also agree that each group should be entitled to its own governance and functional geography, and we shouldn't interfere with the property rights of any sets of people.

We need Israeli leadership on all sides that shows good faith, good will, good intentions, and high levels of ethical 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 could be very effective for us to 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 new folks in government need to have those subtribes not allowed to do those same 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 and are working on that 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.

150 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 in those cities.

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 an obvious tribal conflict situation 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.

Now is a good time to do it.