The Infinite Regression of Blame: Rethinking the Origins of a Never‑Ending Conflict

By Dan Jacobs

A shortened version of this article appeared in The Jewish Independent.

Author's Note: This article is written from the perspective of June 2025 to analyze the tragic trajectory of the conflict.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants launched a brutal, coordinated assault across southern Israel—breaching border fences, attacking civilians, army bases, and a music festival. Nearly 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed; around 250 hostages were taken into Gaza. It was the deadliest single-day atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.

In response, Israel launched a large-scale military operation in Gaza. As I write this in June 2025, Gaza's Hamas run Health Ministry reports more than 54,000 Palestinians killed, predominantly civilians—including thousands of children. Approximately 56 hostages remain in captivity. The war grinds on, locked in a devastating stalemate.

Each time the violence flares, the world demands moral clarity. But it's rarely that simple. The debate is flooded with slogans, each claiming to settle the matter. But these labels don't illuminate; they entrench. The conflict is quickly reduced to binary labels—terrorism or resistance, genocide or self-defence. Invariably, the question becomes: Who started it? But this is a conflict without a clear beginning—only a chain of grievances stretching back generations. We lose sight of the present in our search for the origin. This is the infinite regression of blame—a logic that stops being informative and starts being corrosive.

The Founding Paradox

Early Zionism was diverse—ranging from state-focused nationalists to cultural Zionists, socialist pioneers, and binationalists like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes. It emerged not as a classical colonial ambition, but as a survival response to European persecution and evolved in response to the horrors of the Holocaust. With Western nations restricting Jewish immigration, a sovereign state was deemed essential for security.

At the same time, some scholars have argued that Zionism shared certain features with settler colonialism—analyses that label it "refugee colonialism" or "surrogate colonialism." These should be seen as frameworks, not judgments, and they exist in tension with Zionism's roots in refuge and survival. Scholars have used these terms to explore how a movement rooted in survival also played out in a land already inhabited.

In contrast, Palestinian Arabs initially identified with broader Arab nationalism, only later forming a distinct national identity in reaction to Zionism and the Balfour mandate.

The point is not to equate them morally—only to recognise that both emerged from legitimate historical roots. Their trajectories, however, converged tragically—not because of destiny, but due to a series of failed decisions that narrowed pathways to coexistence.

A Legacy of Mutual Fear

Violence erupted early. The Nebi Musa riots (April 1920) marked the first major outbreak of anti-Zionist violence, rooted in fears over land and political domination. In response, Jewish defence groups like Hashomer and Haganah emerged, even as voices of coexistence led by Buber, Magnes, and Brit Shalom were marginalised. Britain's inconsistent policies, combined with Western reluctance to accept Jewish refugees and ineffective Arab support for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, entrenched zero-sum nationalisms.

This cycle intensified during the Mandate years. The 1929 Western Wall riots claimed 133 Jewish and 116 Arab lives. Official British inquiries, like the Shaw and Peel commissions, consistently attributed this violence to mutual fear: Zionist immigration upset Arab demographic interests, while Arab resistance threatened the viability of Jewish settlement.

Memory as Weapon

Today, history is not a guide but a battlefield. Palestinians often situate their grievance in the Nakba—the 1948 catastrophe of displacement and dispossession—from which they see all subsequent injustices flow. Israelis invoke their precarious position in Europe and the Middle East over 1000 years and the Holocaust as the ultimate moral lesson: never again can Jews afford to be vulnerable, never again can their security depend on the goodwill of others.

These memories are not just historical artefacts; they are powerful emotional and political currents. They shape identity, inform trauma, and animate the deepest fears and hopes of each people.

For many Palestinians, the memory of the Nakba is not abstract—it is personal, carried through stories of grandparents exiled, villages erased, and homes never returned to. For many Jews—particularly those whose families were in Palestine before 1948—there is also the memory of Arab-led massacres and pogroms: the 1929 Hebron massacre, the 1936–39 Arab revolt, and the targeted attacks on Jewish civilians during the Mandate years. After independence, these memories were reinforced by the coordinated invasion of the new Israeli state by surrounding Arab armies and the persecution of Jews in Arab countries that followed, resulting in the exodus of nearly a million Mizrahi Jews.

This web of memory feeds profound grief and distrust on both sides. But when these memories are not only remembered but weaponised, their moral resonance is amplified into political absolutism. Memory becomes less a means of understanding the past than a justification for preemptive fear, precluded dialogue, and intractable demands.

The weaponisation of memory takes legitimate trauma and sharpens it into anger. It narrows the range of acceptable moral responses. For Palestinians, it can turn historical injustice into an existential narrative of perpetual resistance. For Israelis, it can transform collective trauma into an unyielding ethos of self-preservation at all costs.

And so, every contemporary act is instantly framed not on its own terms, but as another iteration in an eternal pattern. An airstrike is not just an airstrike; it is a new Nakba. A bus bombing is not just a tragedy; it is another warning that Auschwitz—or Hebron—could happen again.

This dynamic makes every event more combustible. It renders political compromise suspect and moral ambiguity intolerable. When memory is a weapon, it is not wielded to clarify, but to harden—and the cycle continues.

Case Study I: The Nasser Hospital Strike—The Battle to Frame an Airstrike

Consider how this dynamic plays out in real-time: a single airstrike becomes not an event to process, but a narrative battlefield.

On March 22, 2025, an Israeli airstrike hit the surgery ward at Khan Younis's Nasser Hospital, reportedly killing five civilians. Israel claimed it targeted Hamas leader Ismail Barhoum.

This became less a matter of fact and more a clash of meaning. The specific facts of the strike became secondary to the symbolic meaning imposed upon them, as each side absorbed the event into its pre-existing narrative.

Pro‑Israel framing: "They've built a terrorist state inside hospitals. It's part of their strategy—and the world keeps falling for it." — Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, IDF spokesperson

Pro‑Palestinian response: "Israel's targeting of hospitals is not new. This is part of a decades-long campaign to dismantle Palestinian life." — Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK)

Social media swiftly polarized: #HumanShields versus #GazaGenocide. Each narrative appropriated the event to confirm systemic claims: either persistent Palestinian terror or sustained Israeli aggression.

Case Study II: The Givat Shaul Interchange Shooting—Violence, Narratives & Historical Blame

The same regression applies when violence emerges from the other side; the details dissolve into history before the bodies are even buried.

On November 30, 2023, during a fragile truce, two Hamas-linked assailants killed three civilians at a Jerusalem bus stop. Here again, the event was not processed on its own terms but was immediately absorbed into a historical framework that justified a predetermined conclusion.

Pro‑Israel statement: "This is terrorism by stealth—targeting civilians, always civilians. That's the pattern. That's who they are." — Israeli government official, Reuters

Pro‑Palestinian viewpoint: "Occupation dehumanises people. If you are shocked by the violence, ask what made it possible." — Mohammed El‑Kurd

Social media again grabbed polarized tags: #JerusalemTerror versus #ResistanceContinues, #75YearsOfNakba. The event was absorbed into historical frameworks just as swiftly—reinforcing narratives rather than prompting pause.

Shared Coda: The Blame Loop

Both examples reveal a familiar—and damning—pattern. Each side processes present violence through the lens of historical grievance:

• The hospital strike becomes evidence either of an Israeli campaign of elimination or of justified self-defence against an enemy embedded in civilian life.

• The bus stop shooting becomes either proof of innate Palestinian brutality or of the inevitable resistance born from cumulative oppression.

Neither narrative allows for moral fragility or shared responsibility. Each reaction recursively confirms the next conflict, extending the line of blame backwards—and anchoring the next round of violence forwards.

The Absence of Responsibility

Notice this conspicuous silence: neither side claims responsibility. Each insists their action was forced or defensive. Unilateral responsibility is reflexively rejected as moral weakness or betrayal.

This deflection often takes the form of inherited victimhood—where trauma becomes both shield and sword, and agency is outsourced to history.

To pause and say, "We may bear some part of this," feels like defeat. Yet until someone claims even a share of causality, the regression has no escape hatch. History remains less a tutor than a prison.

Within both societies, brave dissenting voices do exist—Israeli human rights lawyers, Palestinian civil society advocates—who call for reckoning rather than righteousness. But they are often silenced, marginalised, or accused of betrayal.

Moral Complexity vs. Moral Equivalence

To observe mutual narrative entrenchment is not to suggest equal guilt—it is to explain why unilateral virtue and unilateral blame are both inadequate tools for peace.

Violence on both sides is devastating, but not symmetrical. Terrorist attacks targeting civilians cannot be equated with state retaliation or occupation—but each occurs within a framework where every act becomes a reaction, justified by the last.

That's the trap of infinite regression: it doesn't clarify, it just digs us in deeper. Every act becomes a reaction to something else, and in that logic, anything can be justified—until nothing ever changes. It replaces moral clarity with moral placation. It makes violence seem not only necessary but inevitable.

Moral complexity invites responsibility; moral equivalence avoids it.

Breaking the Loop

Interrupting the cycle means stopping the question "Who started it?" and starting with "Who ends it?"

It requires:

• Recognising trauma without letting it dictate response.

• Holding leaders, not peoples, responsible.

• Prioritising restraint and moral agency above historical exhaustion.

This does not mean denying security or sovereignty. It means creating parallel narratives of legitimacy—through shared institutions, inclusive education, and brave political leadership—that can disrupt the feedback loop.

It demands moral imagination—the willingness to step outside of narrative fatalism and envision a future not dictated by the past.

Toward a Shared Future

Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were borne of valid hopes and injustices. Their clash was not preordained—but chosen, again and again, through rhetoric and policy.

Acknowledging the infinite regression of blame isn't about taking sides. It's about recognising how the stories we tell ourselves keep us locked into cycles of violence. If we want a way out, we have to change the script. It's a survival manual—for change, for responsibility, for peace.

There are already grassroots movements trying to change the dynamic from the ground up. Two organisations I support—Standing Together and A Land For All—represent that kind of moral and political imagination we desperately need.

Standing Together is a Jewish-Arab movement in Israel that brings people together across ethnic and political divides to campaign jointly for peace, equality, and social justice. Instead of choosing between Jewish or Palestinian safety and rights, they argue these goals must be achieved together. Their work is rooted in community organising and shared civic life, showing that coexistence is not only possible but already happening.

A Land For All advocates for an innovative confederation model, envisioning two states with open borders and joint institutions. It aims to secure both national identities while recognising the deep intertwinement of the two peoples. This model resists zero-sum thinking and offers a credible framework for mutual recognition and coexistence.

These aren't utopias. They are works in progress—fragile, imperfect, but vital. They remind us that alternatives exist, and that the future is not written in stone.