Amir Nehari, PhDMapping Conflict:Narrative, Collective Psychology, and Israeli Politics

Why do societies remain entrenched in destructive conflict, and why can peace initiatives intensify anxiety and resistance? This article develops a psychoanalytic model of large-group processing within the socio-psychological infrastructure of conflict. Threats to group needs—security, connectedness, recognition, action, and meaning—evoke anxiety and, under perceived humiliation or moral injury, rage. Where public holding and containment are weaker, groups may seek relief through a defensive pathway of omnipotent fantasy; where these functions are stronger, an adaptive pathway of work-group functioning and optimal hope can sustain commitment while remaining open to evidence, limitation, and failure.

The Oslo process remains the most ambitious and sustained attempt to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through negotiation. This essay identifies eight major interpretations of why it failed — from betrayal and strategic deception to relational overload and fragile state-building — and frames them analytically, showing how each assigns causality, responsibility, and agency in a different way. It then moves from competing explanations toward an integrative synthesis, using a framework informed by peacebuilding, organizational theory, change management, and adaptive leadership to reconstruct how collective anxieties, narratives, and systemic misalignment shaped the process, and what future peace efforts would need to address.

An account of reserve soldiers' challenges, fears, burdens, and hopes during the Iron Swords war, as they emerged in my work facilitating military groups.

A deep dive into the 'Israeli psyche' : the social and structural elements that led to the current situation, examining systemic failures and potential recovery