Switching the poles.
What if today's Israel were Muslim and today's Gaza Jewish?
"Confirmation bias" happens where a belief that carries a strong emotional investment is preserved because the person who holds it does not bother to seek out, or honestly consider, any evidence that might challenge it. The belief in question feels emotionally compelling, and one's own sense of ego might even be invested in it, so that any challenge to it might feel like a challenge to one's own identity and good judgment. Counter-evidence thus becomes something dangerous and potentially painful: something to be guarded against.
One antidote to confirmation bias that is sometimes successful is the consideration of an analogy that is similar enough to the matter at issue to be relevant to its analysis, but where the element that is triggering the confirmation bias is replaced by something different. This can be effective enough to get people unstuck and to begin the process of cognitive restructuring.
Confirmation bias has ensnared reporting on, and interpretation of, the current Israeli military action against fascist Hamas in Gaza. Whether the emotional charge that supports this confirmation bias is attributable to prejudice against Israel or prejudice against Jewish people in general, would depend on the individual who harbours the bias. Israel is being called upon to stop its military action against Hamas in Gaza, which is very tragically leading to the deaths of hundreds of Gazan citizens alongside the Hamas militants and the destruction of the Hamas ordnance that the Israel Defence Force is targeting: deaths that are being encouraged by Hamas deploying the strategy of human shields, and strongly encouraging Gazans to stay put when they have been forewarned by Israel that their neighbourhood would be targeted in a forthcoming strike.
If Israel were to allow the Gazan policy of using human shields to be successful, it would have to continue to suffer Hamas missile attacks against its citizens with impunity, at least 10% of which penetrate the Iron Dome. And this, for as long as Hamas decide to continue with them. The Israeli people have clearly had enough of being terrorised with Hamas missiles, given that 90% of their population, which includes the bulk of their left wing, support the current Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that 90% of our own population would not feel the same if we were in similar circumstances. How many anti-Israel commentators would honestly and seriously expect the UK to exercise similar long-suffering restraint in the face of missile attacks by a genocidal fascist enemy government against our citizens? Would we be voting for politicians who failed to protect us from that? Would we have been able to fight against Hitler on that basis?
Imagining the reversal of cultural religious polarity in the Israel/ Hamas conflict might be instructive in exposing the current confirmation bias against Israel. Imagine that Israel was a Muslim state and that Gaza was densely populated by Jews. Imagine that Jewish Gaza had elected an extremist religious administration whose charter called for the genocide of all Muslims worldwide and the annihilation of Islamic Israel. Imagine that this Jewish Gazan administration was firing thousands of missiles into Islamic Israel with the purpose of killing Islamic Israeli citizens, and refused to desist from doing so, even though it was the key to stopping the Islamic Israeli military action; that the Jewish Gazan administration was concealing weapons in or under synagogues, schools and hospitals, and launching them from densely-populated areas; that they were forcing Gazans to stay where they were to act as human shields after receiving warnings from Islamic Israel that their neighbourhood would be targeted. Imagine the Jewish Gazan administration was using international aid to build tunnels into Islamic Israel in order to kill citizens and kidnap soldiers: tunnels that had claimed the lives of many Gazan children building them and that civilians were not allowed to use as shelters.
Where would international sympathies lie then? Would any Islamic state, surrounded by countries that wanted its complete annihilation, be expected to suffer missile attacks in perpetuity and with impunity from a neighbouring genocidal regime? Would the western media be as indifferent to the antecedent causes of the bloodshed - the firing of missiles to kill random civilians by genocidal religious extremists, and their refusal to desist - when the pictures on our TV screens were of Jewish human shield casualties caused by the weapons of an Islamic state trying to stop terrorist missile and tunnel attacks? Or are evaluation and reporting being influenced by the cultural religious background of the parties in this conflict?
It is, of course, the intentions and actions of the conflicting parties involved that are of relevance here, and not whether they identify themselves as culturally "Jewish" or culturally "Muslim". Any state has a duty to stop a neighbouring genocidal regime trying to kill its citizens with missiles, and other terrorist activities. Tragically, there can be no just wars against genocidal oppressors without civilian casualties, as Britain itself experienced in World War Two. A state defending itself against a genocidal aggressor does not merit being singled out for condemnation in the international community simply because it identifies as Jewish.
© Gary Powell, 2014
