Empathy and Multiple Perspectives

Seeing Humanity Behind the Conflict

Empathy in the context of the Israel Palestine conflict is not about choosing a side. It is about recognizing that people on all sides experience fear, grief, hope, and dignity. Thinking critically means holding multiple truths at once. It means understanding that someone can be both a victim and, in some contexts, an oppressor, that communities carry deep historical traumas, and that these traumas shape how they see the present.

To approach the conflict with empathy, you do not need to agree with every claim or political demand. You do need to accept that people’s emotions and experiences are real for them, even when you question their interpretations or conclusions. This chapter explores practical ways to hold multiple perspectives together without losing your moral or analytical clarity.

The Difference Between Understanding and Agreeing

A common fear is that if you “understand” one side’s experience, you are automatically justifying their actions. Critical thinking requires separating three layers.

First, there are experiences. These include memories of violence, displacement, military service, poverty, loss of relatives, or daily humiliation. Experiences are not “right” or “wrong.” They simply are.

Second, there are interpretations of those experiences. For instance, one person may describe an event as “self defense,” while another sees it as “unprovoked aggression.” Interpretations can be more or less accurate and can be questioned and examined.

Third, there are political or moral conclusions. From their interpretations, people develop views about what should happen next, such as supporting a particular law, movement, or strategy of resistance.

Empathy focuses first on experiences and then seeks to understand interpretations, without immediately endorsing the conclusions. You can say, “I see why, given what you lived through, you feel this way,” and still later say, “I disagree that this justifies policy X or tactic Y.”

Keeping these layers distinct helps you stay open to multiple perspectives while still exercising moral and analytical judgment.

Multiple Truths, Partial Views

Each side in this conflict, and each subgroup within those sides, holds part of the overall story. No single narrative contains the entire truth. A critical, empathetic approach will treat different perspectives like partial maps of a territory. Each map highlights certain landmarks and leaves out others.

For example, some Israelis may focus on the vulnerability of living in a small state surrounded by perceived threats, while some Palestinians may focus on the daily realities of occupation, displacement, or blockade. Both sets of experiences are real. They describe different parts of the same landscape.

This does not mean that all claims are equally supported by evidence. Some statements are factually wrong, exaggerated, or selectively framed. Empathy does not require suspending your critical evaluation of facts. Instead, it asks you to try to see what fears, hopes, and memories lie behind any particular claim, and how those deeper elements shape what people notice and what they ignore.

When you encounter an account that seems one sided, ask yourself two questions. First, what genuine experiences or historical events might be behind this narrative. Second, what is missing from this picture, and why might it be difficult or painful for this narrator to acknowledge those missing parts.

Emotional Logic and Historical Trauma

The conflict is not only about land, security, and rights. It is also about emotional legacies. Collective memories of persecution, dispossession, war, and betrayal create what we might call an “emotional logic.” This logic is not always aligned with rational risk calculations or legal arguments, but it powerfully shapes behavior.

For many Jewish Israelis, historical trauma related to antisemitism and genocide can create an intense fear of vulnerability and a deep mistrust of outside guarantees. For many Palestinians, memories of loss of homeland, forced displacement, and life under occupation can create a strong sense that promises and negotiations are used to delay or deny justice.

Empathy here means recognizing that when someone reacts strongly, they may be responding not only to an immediate event, but to a long chain of remembered harms. This does not settle who is right about current policies, nor does it justify any specific act of violence. It does help explain why certain compromises look intolerable to one side, even if they seem reasonable to an outside observer.

Critical thinking requires holding both levels at once. You can say, “Given this history, I understand the fear and anger,” and also say, “Even so, some responses are unacceptable or counterproductive.” Rejecting harmful actions does not require dismissing the pain from which those actions emerge.

Practicing Perspective Taking

Perspective taking is a deliberate exercise in imagining the world as another person might see it. It is an active skill, not a passive feeling. In this conflict, perspective taking can be especially challenging, because each side often sees the other primarily through the lens of threat.

One simple practice is to work through a series of questions when you encounter a statement or story.

Ask who is speaking. Consider their likely background, where they live, what generation they belong to, and what they may have witnessed in their lifetime.

Ask what they are afraid of losing. This could be physical safety, land, cultural identity, political power, or international support.

Ask what past events their community remembers most strongly. These memories may be mentioned explicitly or assumed in the background.

Ask what they do not mention. Missing elements can indicate blind spots, taboo subjects, or simply things that feel less central to them.

You are not trying to “become” that person or to abandon your own viewpoint. You are attempting to temporarily widen your mental lens so you can see more of the picture. Later, you return to your own standpoint with new information and a better sense of how others understand the conflict.

Disentangling Identities and Governments

One barrier to empathy is the tendency to merge people, governments, and armed groups into one undifferentiated “side.” Critical thinking requires distinguishing among individuals, communities, and authorities.

Ordinary people, whether Israeli or Palestinian, do not control all the actions carried out in their name. Many are struggling to meet basic needs, raise families, or simply survive. Their political leaders may or may not represent their wishes. Their options may be constrained by fear, repression, or limited information.

Empathy means resisting the impulse to treat all members of a group as if they personally authored every policy or attack that you condemn. It also means recognizing internal diversity. Within Israeli society and within Palestinian society there are differences of class, religion, ethnicity, ideology, and geography, and the conflict touches them in unequal ways.

When you practice this distinction, you can criticize specific decisions or structures while still keeping space for the dignity and complexity of people who live under them. This allows you to say “I oppose this policy” without slipping into “these people are my enemies.”

Listening Across Painful Divides

Listening is central to empathy, but it can be emotionally costly. Narratives about this conflict often include stories of extreme suffering, as well as accusations against the other side. When listening to someone whose perspective clashes with your own, consider a few guidelines for maintaining both empathy and critical distance.

First, let the person finish their account before rushing to correct them. Interrupting to present counter facts often shuts down genuine communication and reinforces their sense of being unheard.

Second, silently note where you disagree or feel skeptical, but store these reactions for later. Use the listening stage to gather information about how they see causality and responsibility.

Third, after listening, you can gently ask clarifying questions rather than immediately debating. Questions like “How did you come to that conclusion” or “What experiences led you to feel this way” invite deeper reflection and may reveal more nuance.

Fourth, recognize your own emotional limits. It is acceptable to step back from a conversation that becomes overwhelming. Critical engagement does not require you to expose yourself endlessly to distressing material without care for your own well being.

Effective listening across divides is not about persuading the other person in that moment. It is about understanding more fully how different narratives are built and sustained.

Holding Empathy in Tension with Accountability

Empathy can be misunderstood as a call to “understand everyone equally” and never make judgments. In reality, moral and legal accountability remain crucial. Wrongdoing does not become acceptable because it grows out of real pain. Violating the rights of others remains wrong even when the violator has also suffered.

The challenge is to keep empathy and accountability in productive tension. If you focus only on empathy, you may slide into excusing harmful actions. If you focus only on blame, you may reduce people to the worst thing they or their leaders have done, and close off paths to change.

One way to balance this is to make separate, explicit statements. For example, “I recognize that this community has been through serious trauma and marginalization,” and “I still believe that targeting civilians is morally unacceptable and damaging to their own cause.” By articulating both, you resist the false choice between compassion and principle.

This approach also protects against selective empathy. It is tempting to empathize only with those who resemble you politically, culturally, or emotionally. A critical approach insists that you extend at least a basic level of human concern to all civilians and to all individuals caught in the conflict, regardless of their identity.

Avoiding Competitive Victimhood

A recurring pattern in the conflict is “competitive victimhood,” in which each side seeks to prove that it has suffered more and therefore deserves more sympathy, rights, or international support. Conversations can quickly turn into comparisons of whose trauma is greater.

Empathy and multiple perspectives require stepping out of this competition. Suffering is not a finite resource. Recognizing the pain of one group does not cancel the pain of another, and there is no mathematical formula that converts trauma into political entitlement.

When you notice a discussion moving toward “who started it” or “who has lost more,” you can gently redirect your own thinking with questions like, “What would it mean to take all of this suffering seriously, without ranking it” or “How does focusing on comparison affect possibilities for change.”

This does not mean ignoring history or causality. It means refusing to use human pain as a weapon in debate. Instead, you treat each account of harm as important on its own terms, and then separately consider what kinds of remedies, protections, or structural changes are needed to prevent further harm.

Recognizing Dehumanization and Its Effects

Dehumanization is the process of denying the full humanity of others. It can be explicit, through openly hateful rhetoric, or subtle, through language that treats people only as numbers, obstacles, or abstract threats. In this conflict, dehumanizing language appears on all sides and often intensifies during escalations.

From a critical perspective, noticing dehumanization is a warning sign. When people are described only as “terrorists,” “settlers,” “invaders,” or “animals,” it becomes easier to ignore their suffering or to justify harm against them. Dehumanization also narrows your own understanding, because it blinds you to how policies and violence affect real lives.

Practicing empathy means actively re humanizing your mental images of those involved. When you encounter a statistic, such as a number of casualties, pause and remind yourself that each number represents a person with relationships, dreams, and fears. When you read about actions you find abhorrent, you can still acknowledge that the people involved likely did not see themselves as villains, but as protectors, victims, or heroes.

Recognizing dehumanization does not require you to downplay danger or wrongdoing. It does require you to resist any discourse that erases human complexity. This resistance is part of what makes critical thinking ethical rather than purely analytical.

Using Stories and Art to Broaden Perspective

Factual information is essential, but it is often not enough to cultivate genuine empathy. Stories, literature, film, and art can provide access to interior worlds that statistics and policy analyses cannot reach. They allow you to experience different viewpoints from the inside, at least temporarily.

When you engage with cultural works from Israeli and Palestinian creators, you are exposed to everyday concerns and emotions that do not always fit into political slogans. You may see how people fall in love, argue with family, dream about careers, or struggle with identity in the shadow of the conflict.

From a critical standpoint, these works also reflect particular perspectives and should be interpreted as such. They are not neutral windows. Yet precisely because they are partial and personal, they help counteract the flattening effect of viewing groups only as symbols of a larger struggle.

If you choose to use stories and art this way, it can help to alternate between works from different communities and viewpoints. Notice both the similarities in human experience and the differences in context, memory, and emphasis. This kind of engagement is one practical path toward holding multiple perspectives without collapsing them into one.

Applying Empathy to Your Own Position

Empathy and multiple perspectives are not only about “them.” They also apply to you and to people who share your own views. Often, individuals adopt strong positions on the conflict because of their own identities, family histories, or moral frameworks. Being honest about these influences is part of critical thinking.

Ask yourself how your background shapes which stories you find believable, which images move you most, and which arguments you tend to dismiss. Recognizing your own emotional investments does not invalidate your views, but it makes you more aware of your blind spots.

It can also be helpful to practice self empathy. If you discover that you have been one sided in the past, you may feel guilt or shame. Instead of getting stuck in these feelings or becoming defensive, acknowledge that learning to see more fully is a process. The aim is not to achieve perfect neutrality, but to become more reflective and responsible in how you form and express your opinions.

When you apply empathy both outward and inward, you become better able to remain open to new information, to revise your understanding, and to engage in dialogue without needing to win every argument.

Living With Complexity

The Israel Palestine conflict does not lend itself to simple stories with clear heroes and villains. Empathy and attention to multiple perspectives will complicate your view. You may find that as you learn more, it becomes harder rather than easier to assign blame in neat proportions or to support any solution without reservations.

Living with this complexity is part of mature critical engagement. You can still form judgments about who bears more responsibility in particular events, which policies are more unjust, or which proposals are more promising. The difference is that you make these judgments with an awareness of human depth and of the limits of any single narrative.

In practice, this means accepting that your understanding will always be partial, that others may see aspects you have missed, and that even deeply held views should remain open to refinement. Empathy is not a destination but an ongoing stance, one that keeps you attuned to the suffering, dignity, and agency of all people entangled in the conflict.

By cultivating this stance, you make it more likely that your opinions, advocacy, or scholarship will contribute not only to sharper analysis, but also to a more humane conversation about a conflict that profoundly shapes many lives.