When battles are waged over values and ideologies, you can’t
bribe or reason your way to peace. That’s the stark message from
a new psychological study of people in the heart of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. The fight over the land of
Israel/Palestine has raged for over a century and the peace
process has been difficult, lengthy and often stagnant. All the
while, lives continue to be lost in skirmishes and suicide
attacks, as the past weeks have painfully demonstrated. Perhaps
it’s time to put the situation under some scientific scrutiny. A
huge number of modern conflicts are fuelled by differences in
opinions and beliefs, rather than grabs for power or land (at
least on the ground level). Even if the foundation of a dispute
is not initially a moral issue, it can quickly become one. Land,
for example, is a solid resource that can be completely
transformed into something much more by adding the word ‘holy’
in front of it. In these situations, people tend to forgo a
rational weighing up of pros and cons in