The Israel–Palestine conflict is not, at its root, an exceptional story. It’s a very human one — painfully, predictably human. Two populations, each armed with their own deeply rehearsed stories of victimhood, survival, and entitlement, locked into a tragic loop that has replayed itself for generations. If you strip away the politics, the history, and the flags, what remains is something far simpler: two groups running the same defective brain software at full volume.
Each side holds a narrative they consider obvious, self-evident, and irrefutable. The Israeli story is built on historical trauma, exile, survival, and security. The Palestinian story rests on dispossession, occupation, loss, and struggle for dignity. Both contain real suffering. Both contain real distortions. Both have become self-reinforcing mental fortresses where any contradiction is reinterpreted rather than absorbed.
At the heart of it sits confirmation bias, doing its predictable work. Each side hunts for stories that confirm their version of the world and rejects those that challenge it. When innocent people suffer, it’s framed as the inevitable consequence of the other’s aggression. Every tragedy becomes fuel for deeper moral certainty. The pattern has hardened over decades — like two mirrors facing each other, endlessly reflecting blame back and forth.
Projection thrives here too. The very qualities each side despises in the other — aggression, dishonesty, victimhood, intransigence — are often present in their own behaviour, but more comfortably attributed outward. “We are defending ourselves; they are attacking. We seek peace; they sabotage. We respond proportionally; they escalate.” The mind projects its worst anxieties onto the opponent while preserving a self-image of reluctant righteousness.
Tribalism functions exactly as you would expect. It divides the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, leaving no room for complexity. Individuals who attempt to step outside the tribe’s narrative are often treated as traitors or idealists who ‘don’t understand how things really work.’ This isn’t unique to Israel or Palestine — it’s how humans defend identity. The Nincompoop mind is far more comfortable with loyalty than with truth.
Naïve realism — the assumption that anyone who disagrees must simply be blind, stupid, or evil — infects both sides. The idea that there might be competing truths, painful trade-offs, or unsolvable contradictions is dismissed as weakness or betrayal. After all, “if they saw things clearly, they would obviously agree with us.”
Cognitive dissonance takes care of the rest. Every failed negotiation is someone else’s fault. Every injustice committed is either justified or ignored. The Nincompoop mind rewrites events after the fact to protect itself from discomfort. The longer the conflict continues, the more entrenched these narratives become, until each generation inherits not just a war, but a ready-made script explaining why they’re right and why the other side cannot be trusted.
And beneath it all sits the most predictable Nincompoop function of all: lazy thinking. Not because the people involved are unintelligent — quite the opposite — but because the human brain instinctively prefers certainty over ambiguity, loyalty over objectivity, simple stories over complex ones. “They started it.” “They hate us.” “We have no choice.” These are the cognitive shortcuts that keep the conflict alive.
From the inside, each side feels like they’re under siege, constantly defending against existential threat. Fear becomes the currency. Violence becomes the punctuation mark in a conversation neither side knows how to end. Even those who want peace feel trapped by the momentum of the machine they’ve inherited.
The uncomfortable truth, viewed through the Nincompoop lens, is that this conflict isn’t driven by evil as much as by very ordinary mental mechanics: projection, bias, identity, and fear doing exactly what they always do when left unexamined. It’s not that these two groups are uniquely irrational. It’s that they are, tragically, entirely human.
The solution isn’t simple because the problem isn’t technical — it’s psychological. As long as both sides remain convinced that only one truth can exist, the machinery keeps grinding. What is needed isn’t another summit or ceasefire, but the courage — on both sides — to finally question their own stories rather than each other’s.
But of course, that’s the hardest step for any Nincompoop to take. Especially when everyone else around you insists they’re not the Nincompoop — you are.