Since the attacks by Hamas on October 7 started this new war between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, media and networks have been filled with all kinds of opinions, most of them showing more or less fervent support for one of both sides, while accusing the other of being solely responsible for the conflict. There have also been all kinds of more or less accurate analyzes of the origins of the conflict, going far back in time in the case of some, staying closer in others.
Perhaps for this reason it may seem unnecessary to add another with this article, but it is pertinent because it wants to provide a point of view quite different from most opinions and analyses: specifically here it is proposed to look at the conflict as a system in which Israelis and Palestinians are immersed in a spiral of actions and reactions that each side lives with great intensity, fully depending on what the other is doing and reacting to it at the slightest opportunity.
This implies that the identity of each of the two groups is determined by the conflict that they have been living for decades, that is to say, that they live in a mutual and destructive interdependence that has progressively gotten worse, and in which have been reinforced the more aggressive and radical tendencies on each of the two sides, Hamas on the part of the Palestinians, the ultra-nationalist settlers on the part of Israel.
THE CONCEPT OF SCHISMOGENESIS
There is a methodological tool that can help a lot to adopt and deepen this point of view: the concept of schismogenesis, proposed almost 90 years ago by the anthropologist and pioneer of the complex systems paradigm Gregory Bateson. The etymology of this concept is clear: the genesis of the schism, that is, the origin of the conflict, and it allows us to see the most serious human conflicts as loops in which a progressive escalation of action-reaction is generated.
It is a point of view that makes it possible to emphasize the importance of the loop of which both human groups are a part and to take out the two groups separately, because in fact they are slaves to a dynamic that surpasses and dominates them. Thus, in these processes, the «other» becomes an obsession, and things end up in situations that those affected surely may have considered in the past impossible and unimaginable.
And the motivations, no matter how much analysis is done afterwards, very often do not have a possible «rational» explanation, because what most defines the processes of schismogenesis is the feedback that each party finds in what the other does and says, and which leads to reacting to it, in an increasingly aggressive and more purely emotional chain of action/reaction.
DYNAMICS OF GRADUAL CHANGES THAT ACCUMULATE
The concept of schismogenesis allows us to see that these conflicts are gradual and sustained over time, so that there comes a time when it is not at all clear when it all started. In addition, parties tend to accuse each other of initiating and being solely responsible for the conflict, and do so by isolating and magnifying the facts and details that prove them right and ignoring or minimizing the importance of equivalent facts and arguments which the other party uses.
Due to the gradualness, it usually happens that, until the process is quite advanced, the people who are involved in it do not become aware of either the gravity to which it has reached or the profound changes that they are undergoing as subjects due to of this escalation in aggression. Adopting the point of view created by the concept makes it possible to realize that many types of serious individual and collective conflicts start like this, for example marital separations and also, of course, wars, especially civil ones.
ISRAEL HAS A DOMINANT POSITION OVER PALESTINE
It is a point of view that also allows the responsibilities of each party to be specified quite objectively. This is made possible by the variants of symmetric schismogenesis and complementary schismogenesis: the first is ideal for analyzing conflicts in which the parties have an equivalent position and strength, so that both can aspire to defeat the opponent; the second serves to visualize the dynamics that are generated when one of the parties has a dominant position, while the other is limited by this dominance.
In the case at hand it is clear that we are facing a complementary schismogenesis in which the state of Israel has a dominant position, especially due to the material and economic support it has received from abroad for decades, mainly from the United States, which has allowed it to militarily and economically control more and more territory to the detriment of the Palestinians and to establish an institutional, economic and social apparatus of a very successful Western pattern, despite the conditions that surround it.
For their part, the Palestinians, scattered in territories with no direct connection and with limited aid that can be described as care support, have been left at the mercy of the will of the state of Israel, without a future project equivalent to that of an adversary that, whenever it can, imposes its own to the detriment of the rights of the Palestinians, without the «international community» having been able to stop it.
IDENTIFYING THE WEAK POINTS OF THE CONFLICT
But aside from defining responsibilities, the concept of schismogenesis is an ideal starting point for analyzing the dynamic processes of conflict and identifying the points and moments in which positive feedback accelerates, in order to avoid them or mitigate them scope and, also, the others in which elements can be introduced that slow it down and even reverse it.
This should make it possible to build alternative methodologies to those used so far by international organizations, which have already shown to offer their limitations, and to concentrate efforts on key points, with the aim of taking center stage to the most radical factions of each side and give some to the less radical, always strategically taking advantage of the circumstances that arise to achieve this.
In any case, the concept also creates a point of view that makes it easier to perceive the loop that feeds the conflict and to understand that its dynamics have a very long course that gives it a lot of inertia, which shows that it is extraordinarily difficult to revert. That is to say, it is like a very tangled skein which, if it is to be undone, requires almost infinite patience.
Especially because the conflict we are dealing with is one of the most demonic that exists on the human planet right now, aggravated by the religious war dimension it has, with two confessions each with dimensions that far exceed the two human groups facing each other and that depend both from a single omnipotent and absolute God who bestows upon them both inalienable sacred rights and who, moreover, is supposed to magically defend them from enemies.
SCHISMOGENESIS OR POSITIVE FEEDBACK?
Finally, it must be said that Bateson coined the concept of schismogenesis before the theorists of cybernetics and complex systems focused this paradigm on the concept of feedback, and when this was consolidated, he himself left it side force, while replacing it with positive feedback, that is, feedback that has a tendency to run wild and that increases belligerence and aggression between the parties.
But positive feedback is a useful concept for analyzing any type of dynamic process, whether on the physical or chemical scale of matter, or in the functioning of living ecosystems, or in animal societies, among which, obviously, human. Having a specific concept available to analyze serious human conflicts with the aim of being able to develop it theoretically to apply it in conflict resolution processes is more than desirable.
From this blog it has long been proposed to recover it with this objective, and it has been done by applying it to the political conflict between the entities Spain and Catalonia in several articles, and more recently to the war generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you can read this one in the following link:
RUSSIA AND UKRAINE ARE EXPERIENCING A HUGE SCHISMOGENESIS
Josep Maria Camps Collet
cròniques subsidiàries 