When the Framework Is the Problem: Religious Extremism and the Limits of Western Analysis

Haviv Rettig Gur recently published a video responding to Ezra Klein's podcast on what Klein calls the "one-state reality" between the river and the sea. Gur's response articulates a frustration that many Israelis feel but rarely hear expressed this clearly in English: that Western commentary on this conflict, however morally serious, consistently refuses to engage with what the relevant actors actually are. Watching it, I found myself thinking not just about Klein specifically, but about a broader pattern, a systematic analytical failure that goes deeper than any single podcast or op-ed. This piece is my attempt to name that failure and think through what a more honest engagement might look like.

The Wrong Tool for the Job

There is a conversation happening in Western media about this conflict, in newspapers, on podcasts, in long-form essays by serious, well-intentioned intellectuals, and much of it misses the point so completely that engaging with it becomes almost impossible. Not because it lacks moral seriousness. Not because it ignores the suffering. But because it applies the wrong analytical framework to a significant part of what is actually happening, and then draws conclusions from that misapplication with great confidence.

The framework is the rational actor model: the assumption that people, movements, and states make decisions based on a calculation of costs and benefits. That if the costs are raised high enough, behavior changes. That if the incentives are right, negotiation becomes possible. That what people want, ultimately, is security, prosperity, dignity, and that if those things are offered, conflict can be resolved.

This is a reasonable framework for many conflicts. It is the wrong framework for this one, or at least for the part of it that is now driving events.

What It Feels Like From the Inside

I know something about this that most Western commentators do not, because I have lived inside a religious framework in which this world was genuinely, not rhetorically, secondary to the next. I am not speaking abstractly. There was a period of my life when my continued existence on this earth was not something I valued for its own sake. I stayed alive because I believed God required it of me, because death was his decision to make and not mine, and because I understood my life here as instrumental to a purpose I did not fully know. The world beyond this one was more real, more permanent, more important than anything happening in it.

I say this not as confession but as evidence. Because when I look at the ideological framework of Hamas, at the martyrdom culture, at the eschatological vision, at the willingness to expend Palestinian lives in pursuit of a goal explicitly framed as divinely ordained, I recognize something. Not the same thing, but the same structure. A world in which the calculus of this life is subordinate to the demands of the next. A world in which suffering and death are not simply costs to be minimized, but potentially meaningful, even necessary, steps toward a transcendent end.

You cannot understand that from the outside. And if you cannot understand it, you cannot analyze the conflict that has grown from it.

What the Research Shows

This is not merely a personal impression. The anthropologist Scott Atran has spent decades studying what he calls "devoted actors," individuals and movements whose commitment to sacred values generates behavior that rational-actor models cannot predict or explain. His research, conducted with captured ISIS fighters, Kurdish combatants, and communities across the Muslim world, reaches a striking empirical conclusion: sacred values are immune to material trade-offs. Offer someone more land, more money, more security in exchange for something they hold sacred, and they do not become more likely to accept. They become more likely to refuse, and more likely to support violence in defense of what you have just tried to purchase.

Atran documented this directly in the context of this conflict. When Palestinian respondents were offered substantial economic benefits in exchange for concessions on Jerusalem and the right of return, support for the deal did not increase. It decreased. The financial sweetener was experienced not as an incentive but as an insult, proof that the other side did not understand what was actually at stake. His framework, the Devoted Actor model, is developed across multiple peer-reviewed studies and has been presented to the UN Security Council and the US Department of Defense, among others.

This is not irrationality. It is a different rationality, operating within a different framework. The devoted actor is not miscalculating. He is calculating correctly within a set of premises that the rational-actor model does not recognize as legitimate inputs. Sacred values, the divine ownership of land, the duty of martyrdom, the redemptive meaning of collective suffering, are not positions in a negotiation. They are the premises from which all positions flow. You cannot negotiate them away with incentives, because from inside the framework, accepting such a trade would itself be a profound moral failure.

Atran notes further that deradicalization is particularly difficult when the ideology is rooted in a major world religion, because the tenets of the ideology are not merely political preferences. They are experienced as religious obligations. To abandon them is not to change your mind. It is to apostatize.

A Conflict Being Theologized

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not begin as a religious war. It began, and in many of its dimensions remains, a conflict about territory, national identity, and sovereignty. Two peoples, one land, competing claims. That framing is real and important, and abandoning it entirely would be a mistake.

But something has changed. Hamas has forced a significant part of this conflict into an eschatological register, a framework in which the destruction of Israel is not merely a political goal but a step in a divinely ordained process, the redemption of Islam and the restoration of sacred land. The word mukawama, usually translated as "resistance," does not carry its full weight in English. In its ideological depth it encompasses not just tactical opposition but a theology of sacred struggle, suffering as purification, and martyrdom as arrival rather than loss. This is not a negotiating position. It is a cosmology.

What is less often acknowledged is that this theologizing has not remained one-sided. On the Israeli right, particularly within Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionism movement, the framing of this war has also shifted from the national to the divine. MK Limor Son Har-Melech, speaking of fallen soldiers, said they do not fall: "הם מתעלים", they ascend. The language is not military. It is not even national. It is eschatological: death in this war is a metaphysical elevation, not a tragedy to be mourned. As one Israeli commentator wrote in response: what is being attempted here is the systematic conversion of national tragedy into theological proof. October 7 not as catastrophe, but as revelation. The messiah is coming, and he rides a tractor from Nahal Oz.

Bezalel Smotrich operates from a similar premise, though more intellectually formulated. As the Israel Policy Forum has noted, his claim that Israel is the most moral country on earth is not a behavioral claim. It does not rest on what Israel does. It rests on what Israel is: the fulfillment of divine will in history. Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel requires no further justification, because it is itself the justification. From within this framework, no action taken in pursuit of that sovereignty can be fundamentally illegitimate.

This is the mirror image of Hamas's position. And this is the point that Western analysis consistently fails to grasp: these two frameworks need each other. Hamas's religious framing of the conflict strengthens the Israeli religious right, which in turn confirms Hamas's narrative of an inherently religious enemy. Each feeds the other's base. Each makes the other's most extreme positions seem like the necessary response to an existential threat. The conflict escalates not despite the theology but through it, because for devoted actors on both sides, escalation is not failure. It may be the point.

What Sympathy Cannot Do, and What Might

Western intellectuals who engage with this conflict are not, in the main, stupid or malicious. Many are genuinely troubled by what they see. But being troubled is not the same as understanding. And sympathy, that word Gur rightly dismisses as worthless, is not analysis.

The rational-actor framework produces a particular kind of commentary: focused on incentives, on leverage, on what pressure applied from outside might change on the inside. It produces recommendations, cut military aid, apply sanctions, condition support, that assume the relevant actors will respond to changed incentives by changing their behavior. This may be true of some actors in this conflict. It is not true of devoted actors operating within an eschatological framework, for whom external pressure can become further evidence of sacred necessity.

Consider one concrete example. Prominent voices in the American Democratic Party, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have questioned why the United States should support even Israel's missile defense systems. I understand the political logic behind that position. But I want to be clear about how it lands here, among ordinary Israelis across the political spectrum: it sounds like indifference to whether we live or die. Not opposition to a particular military operation. Not a principled objection to offensive capabilities. Indifference to our survival. And the effect of that perception is not to weaken the Israeli religious right. It is to strengthen it, because it confirms precisely what they have always argued: that when it comes down to it, the world does not care about Jewish lives, and the only answer is to hold the land and hold the guns and trust no one.

Those of us in Israel who want something different, who want a government that takes Palestinian rights seriously, that stops the settlement expansion, that creates conditions for a genuine political horizon, need Western partners who understand this dynamic. We need partners who can distinguish between opposition to specific Israeli policies and opposition to Israeli security, because we live with the consequences of that confusion every day.

What genuine engagement might look like is harder to define than what it is not. But it starts with listening more than talking. It starts with understanding that a win for one side at the expense of the other is not a solution, it is a continuation of the conflict by other means. It requires active support for the forces on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, that are trying to build something rather than sanctify the destruction. And it requires the intellectual honesty to engage with what the actors actually are, their frameworks, their sacred values, their eschatologies, rather than the rational negotiating partners that Western analysis keeps hoping to find.

That is not a comfortable position. It does not produce clean policy recommendations. But it is what the situation actually requires. Everything else, however morally serious, remains commentary on the commentator's own conscience rather than on the conflict itself.