Changing minds is a fight against human nature

If you’ve found yourself frustrated by the recalcitrance of those who are persistently anti-Israel no matter what you say to them or no matter what happens in the world, you are among good company.

The commentators who spill much ink defending Israel against an unending barrage of scurrilous claims express constant incredulity at the hypocrisy, one-sidedness and dishonesty of so many of the critics — the critics who use boss-level hyperbole in the bandying about of terms like “war crimes”, “genocide” and “apartheid” while ignoring every other tragedy in the region. 

Let me paint a picture: a starving Gazan baby is discovered to have cerebral palsy and journalists admit to having neglected their due diligence by omitting this fact. Israel is blamed for failing to deliver aid, but it turned out to be sitting in Gaza where the UN refused to deliver it. A photo of Gazans holding out empty containers desperate for food turned out to be staged. UN aid chief Tom Fletcher tells Piers Morgan “the vast, vast majority of aid that we get in gets to civilians”, but the UN’s own data notes that 87 per cent of aid trucks have been intercepted by armed groups or crowds. The BBC claimed a Palestinian woman with leukemia had died from malnutrition, then stated they were “not initially aware” of her condition after they were corrected. Finally, the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) declare a famine in Gaza, yet the threshold to declare famine in Gaza should be around 400 adults or 800 children starving to death per day, and even Hamas’s Gaza Health Ministry claim the total number of deaths by starvation is only 212 in total from Jan to early August 2025. 

Six lies on a single topic all told within a couple of months, yet this is mostly brushed off with “Sure, but the suffering is still real” and the finger remains fully pointed at Israel. A thousand lies exposed seems to get nothing better than a thousand “Yeah but”s. So why, in the face of an undeniable propaganda war, are the haters so unmovable, so immune to persuasion? 

The answer, if we take away bad faith (e.g. racism or intentional propaganda), lies not so much in the details on the ground in Gaza but the way in which belief works. Belief is resistant to change at the best of times, but when coupled with strong emotion and group identity, it becomes an immoveable force. 

Let’s look at some of the mechanisms that explain why changing minds is such an uphill battle.

A failure to appreciate complexity

During the COVID pandemic, half of the internet did their own research and become overnight medical experts. The other half rightly panned these plonks, noting that going down a YouTube rabbit hole doesn’t qualify you to give medical advice since you lack the fundamental knowledge to assess the information you’re consuming. Ironically, much of the latter group has now become “that guy on the internet” in terms of geopolitics, forming deep opinions on international law after reading media articles that quote cherry-picked legal experts, or becoming a Middle East historian after reading a few newspaper articles from sources on the other side of the world to the conflict. 

To spell out the complexity we’re dealing with here, this is a multi-front proxy war driven by the Islamic Republic of Iran whose openly stated goal is to destroy the Jewish state, with major influencing factors including but definitely not limited to geography, topography, technology, religion (in particular Sunni and Shia Islam), history, the ever-changing diplomatic alliances of scores of countries, UNWRA’s unique treatment of Palestinian refugee status, education in UNWRA schools, the particulars of nuclear science, and the Abraham Accords. 

Some argue that none of this matters given Israel’s clear expansionist aims, but can they explain why Israel voluntarily withdrew from Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon if they’re an expansionist state? Is there any reason why these critics are not just as outraged at Iran’s expansion throughout the region via its proxies, or Turkey’s longstanding occupation of Cyprus and its current push into a fragile Syria? 

Those who oversimplify this incredibly complex issue tend to be victims of the following phenomenon:

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where those with the lowest capabilities in a particular domain tend to overrate their abilities — when we are inexpert at something, we are bad at assessing our abilities in regard to that thing. As researcher David Dunning points out, there are “known unknowns” in any domain, referring to the things we know we don’t know about something, but also “unknown unknowns”, where we don’t even realise we have blind spots. The more skilled we become at a thing, the more “known unknowns” become knowns, but also the more “unknown unknowns” we are able to identify. As an interesting aside, part of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that the most capable people in a particular domain tend to underrate their abilities. 

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains a lot. If you are well educated on the Middle East and read arguments from laypeople, the gap between even a passable level of knowledge and conspiracy theory-riddled ignorance can be quite shocking to witness. It also explains the credulity of those who wholeheartedly believe what’s said by the Western media: these readers have no yardstick to measure the information against, and in fact, biased or even inaccurate reports are often the only sources of information they are consuming. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains why those who wouldn’t score 15 out of 100 on a quiz on the Middle East are unembarrassed to opine publicly after reviewing nothing more than such sources. 

The problem with giving a relevant example of the Dunning-Kruger at play here is that, by definition, the victims of the effect are unable to recognise that you’ve proven anything. Without any real knowledge, they will consider a UN lie or BBC polemic to be a smoking gun against Israel. I’ll nonetheless attempt a demonstration. 

After Israel’s recent strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar, the ABC published an analysis that is almost comically bad. Other than a thoroughly anti-Israel framing, contentious statements include claiming Israel attacked targets in Iran to take out Hezbollah’s leadership (Hezbollah are based in Lebanon, and the attacks in Iran were against the Iranian nuclear program and military leadership), describing Qatar as US’s “closest ally” in the region after Israel (“closest” is a huge stretch given the US’s positive relationship with Saudi Arabia, not to mention others), describing the relationship between Qatar and Hamas as “uneasy and uncomfortable” and claiming Qatar’s hosting of Hamas leaders “could be justified” “while it was also facilitating peace negotiations” (Qatar has hosted Hamas leaders for more than a decade, rendering this justification as utterly absurd), claiming Israel’s strike on Qatar was an attack “on the peace negotiations themselves” (Hamas refused peace deals for almost two years and do not negotiate in good faith), claiming Trump has walked away from the conflict in Ukraine (Trump has had ongoing direct negotiations with Putin and even reversed a pause by the Pentagon on weapons shipments to Ukraine), and, most bizarrely, claiming that the US has a “lack of influence” in the region because the author believes that Israel struck Qatar without the US’s knowledge, highlighting just how effective plausible deniability can be. 

If you aren’t familiar with the Middle East, you won’t have any way of knowing whether or not analysis like the above is high quality or poor quality, yet the Dunning-Kruger effect explains why those who lack the knowledge to dissect such a report will consider themselves informed after reading it and its likes.

Confirmation bias

This is the tendency to give more weight to information that confirms your beliefs than to information that contradicts them. It often manifests as an uneven application of standards: anything that confirms your beliefs is accepted instantly, whereas anything that challenges them is dismissed as propaganda or has to go through a fifty-step review process before any part of it is believed. 

To give a common example, confirmation bias explains a belief in mediums and astrology: larger numbers of inaccurate predictions are simply ignored and smaller numbers of correct guesses look miraculous when we only scrutinise them in isolation. If we give equal weight to failed predictions, however, it becomes much harder to think of the successful ones as anything but flukes. 

Confirmation bias makes it easy to double down on an incorrect position. Instead of truly considering a strong counterargument like, “How can Israel be an apartheid state when 20 per cent of its population are Arabs with equal rights?”, you can simply find one of hundreds of claims that it is indeed an apartheid state and leave it at that. Whether or not the person making the claim has an agenda or used the actual definition of apartheid as per the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid isn’t important, because in your mind, your belief that Israel is an apartheid state has been confirmed by an expert and that’s the end of the matter. Given the density of anti-Israel information you can find in the media, social media or plastered throughout the internet in general, it’s easy to post five links in response to any defence of Israel and think you’ve responded intelligently. 

We can tie this in to the following logical fallacy:

The Argumentum ad Populum fallacy

An argumentum ad populum is a fallacious argument that claims that something is true because many people believe it to be true. Human history proves that “volume of believers” isn’t a great measure of what’s real in the world. We were wrong about the shape of the Earth, witchcraft, the medicinal value of tobacco, and the fact of masturbation causing blindness. The popular opinion about Israel might be wrong too.

The Burden of Proof fallacy

Lying is effortless and can be done in seconds. Debunking a lie can take hours, days, or may simply be impossible. Hence, the burden of proof must be on the person making a claim, not the person hearing it. 

Many of the complaints against Israel first come from the mouths of Jihadi propagandists, like anything from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Instead of treating with suspicion the claims of an entity (Hamas) which openly calls for the annihilation of the Jews, films themselves intentionally massacring civilians, and states they will commit more massacres against civilians in the future, the burden of proof gets placed on Israel to disprove the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers. 

Unproven claims made by terrorists really shouldn’t underpin the information landscape, yet here we are. I can recall at least a dozen occasions where the IDF has been blamed for a Gazan civilian found murdered, even though Hamas has openly admitted on multiple occasions to using or endorsing the use of human shields. Again, the burden of proof is placed on Israel’s shoulders to prove it wasn’t them. 

This leads us to a related problem: the genetic fallacy:

The Genetic fallacy

The genetic fallacy is where you accept or dismiss a claim based on its source rather than on its merits. 

Herein lies one of the greatest problems with discourse involving Israel. NGOs, the United Nations and the media are perceived as being credible. The genetic fallacy makes most people accept what they say due to this perceived credibility. The burden of proof is thus reversed and these sources’ claims are considered true until proven otherwise. 

This has given rise to a setting where most of the defenders of Israel spend a considerable amount of their public-facing effort debunking falsehoods. Those of us who follow the discourse around Gaza are exposed to an endless cycle of “Israel did this horrible thing”, “No they didn’t and here’s the proof”, “Yeah but Israel did this other horrible thing”, “No they didn’t and here’s the proof” etcetera ad nauseum. Sources like the UN and the media, who are quick to level accusations based on weak data, also create a boy-who-cried-wolf effect, own-goaling their credibility and making it harder to know when criticism of Israel is actually valid. The net effect is polarisation and a growing unwillingness for either side to grant concessions to the other. 

The genetic fallacy goes both ways. Not only does it make us more likely to accept a claim due to a source being deemed credible, it also makes us reject information from sources we deem untrustworthy. Donald Trump lies pathologically and is strongly disliked by many, for example, so anything he says will be mistrusted and anything he does will be considered malicious. Trump’s June bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities must therefore be motivated by assisting Israel with their expansionist aims, not due to a genuine concern about Iran being months away from reaching weapons grade levels of enrichment as cautioned by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi. 

Adjacent to the genetic fallacy is the illusory truth effect: 

The illusory truth effect

Guilty or not, no one looks good when they are endlessly accused of horrible things. The illusory truth effect is why. 

The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias wherein we are more likely to believe repeated information irrespective of its accuracy. Research shows that repetition increases the fluency with which we process information, and people use processing fluency as an indicator of truthfulness. It is most impactful the first time information is repeated, but the effect increases with further repetitions (with diminishing effect). It even occurs when people are explicitly told that an information source is unreliable.

In practice, the illusory truth effect will shape the views of ordinary people who don’t have strong opinions on Israel or the Gaza conflict. The way the issue is framed by the media will determine most people’s opinions, so it’s worth asking, “What is that framing?” 

The Asserson Report shows that, in regard to reporting on Gaza, the BBC had strong anti-Israel bias and breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times in a 4-month period, a staggering statistic if even 10 per cent accurate. An analysis of over 340,000 articles from 376 media sources showed an overwhelming bias towards Palestine: “Sympathy towards Palestine dramatically outweighed that towards Israel, by 3/6-fold on average in the English and Arabic websites, respectively.” 

The Asserson Report clearly shows which way the illusory truth effect will push a dispassionate observer reading up on Israel in the news for the first time. 

The primacy effect

The primacy effect impacts both our memory and our evaluation of information. The first thing we hear on a topic is not only better remembered, it also acts as the reference point to measure future information against. What this effect means is that whoever “gets to you first” has an unfair advantage in the battle for your beliefs – the information most readily available, and therefore accessed first, will create in people an enduring initial understanding of a topic.

A biased media is one place where anti-Israel sentiment will come from thanks to the primacy effect, a biased Wikipedia is another. 

A report by the Anti-Defamation League shows compelling evidence of bias against Israel on Wikipedia. The study revealed a group of editors with anti-Israel bias worked with high levels of coordination and demonstrated editing hours similar to that of employment (editing in 6-8h blocks, for example). It shows specific examples of edits made that minimise Palestinian violence against Israelis by removing key details or important citations. 

At the time of writing, the Wikipedia entry for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, arguably the world’s greatest champion of terrorism, reads like the biography of an anti-colonialist hero. “…Khamenei promoted scientific progress in Iran, making considerable advances through education and training, despite international sanctions”, it states, showing how a leader who executes an average of two citizens per day has overcome barriers to battle for the advancement of his citizens. The article cites khamenei.ir multiple times, the Supreme Leader’s own website. One might question the wisdom of including a source akin to “mussoliniofficial.com” in an encyclopedia, yet – I’ll say it again – here we are. 

When you google “Palestine” and visit the Wikipedia entry on it, you will quickly see a map of “Occupied Palestinian territories.” Gaza is highlighted as occupied, despite Israel’s total withdrawal in 2005. Yet, thanks to the primacy effect, those with no prior knowledge of the matter will see this and consider Palestine to be occupied until proven otherwise. They are much more likely to give credence to claims like “Gaza is an open-air prison” since their baseline assumption is that the territory is, at least in some manner, occupied by Israel. 

Even if our test subject comes across enough information to shake the beliefs that were instilled in them thanks to the primacy effect, they now have a sunk cost to worry about:

The sunk cost effect

The sunk cost effect is where you make a decision based mostly on a past investment rather than what’s in your best interest now. Examples include finishing a terrible book just because you’ve sunk your time into reading the first part, staying in a filthy hotel because you’ve already spent money on it, or continuing to believe something untrue because you’ve believed it for a long time. 

The sunk cost on beliefs is actually huge. What we believe can shape our identity, our social group, our tribe. We can organise our lives around beliefs and spend considerable amounts of time and money on them. When we change our minds about something important, we can lose respect, social standing, friends or even family. It’s not a simple matter of changing our minds, dusting off our hands and getting on with our day. 

Imagine you’ve gone to multiple protests, have a watermelon emoji in your social media bio and follow a bunch of pro-Palestine influencers. You say things like, “No one is free until Palestine is free.” Then you come across a group like Honest Reporting and discover important context you were previously missing. You wonder if anything else you’ve been told about Israel’s war crimes is also a bending of the truth and start to discover more and more exculpatory information. After a few weeks of digging, you change your mind on the whole matter. 

Now what? Swap the watermelon for “Am Israel chai” and go out for brunch with your protestor buddies? You know that many of them will hate you if you abandon the cause, so you might be pretty resistant to believing those Honest Reporting posts in the first place. 

Changing your mind on something this big means not only the embarrassment of telling people you were wrong, but risking expulsion from your social circles and finding yourself despised as a traitor. That’s a huge cost to bear, so resistance seems rational.

The Personal Incredulity fallacy

The personal incredulity fallacy is where you mistake something that is hard to believe or understand as being false simply because it is hard to believe or understand. 

Given the enormous number of politicians, academics, legal experts, historians and even celebrities that decry Israel, it sure seems unlikely that this many experts (and celebrities) could be wrong. Trusting in experts is a very reasonable thing to do given we can’t become experts on most things ourselves, so this volume of critics makes Israel’s awfulness feel pretty “case closed” for many. 

But other than referring to the argumentum ad populum fallacy again or noting how wrong the whole of society has been about certain things in the past, I’d like to point out two things in particular to the incredulous. 

One: support for Palestine isn’t as overwhelming as you would assume after reading the media. There are many impressive people who defend Israel such as Douglas Murray (journalist), Elica le Bon (Iranian lawyer and activist), John Spencer (urban warfare academic), Sam Harris (public intellectual), Mosab Hassan Youssef (son of a Hamas co-founder) and Natasha Hausdorff (international law expert), all of whom are worth listening to.

The general public are also not as strongly against Israel as they may appear; for example, a March 2024 YouGov poll in the UK showed that more than half (56 per cent) of 4,000+ adults surveyed sympathised with both Israel and Palestine equally or were unsure who to sympathise with more, whereas the same cohort sided 82 per cent with Ukraine and only 2 per cent with Russia (a true example of consensus). YouGov also shows that people sympathised with Palestine over Israel more in Feb 2022 (27 per cent VS 11 per cent – a gap of 16 per cent) than in June 2025 (30 per cent VS 17 per cent – a gap of only 13 per cent). Not the yardstick for the whole world, of course, but it’s interesting to see that ambivalence and uncertainty is the prevailing viewpoint in a major Western nation. 

Two: have a look at what the critics you listen to say about other atrocities in the region that are analogous to Gaza. Were they crying “Genocide!” when Alawites, Christians and Druze were massacred in Syria? Do they claim “Apartheid!” against the Lebanese, whose Taif Agreement explicitly forbids Palestinian refugees from being permanently resettled in Lebanon? There’s no shortage of war crimes and colonialism in the Middle East – do Israel’s critics also talk about other nations’ wrongdoings or are they fixated on just the one state? If they don’t mention any crimes other than those of the Jewish state, could it be because they are not especially well educated on the region or not equally concerned about everyone’s human rights? Could their motivation be hatred of Israel rather than concern for Palestinians, and might that lead to them being biased? 

Personal incredulity can be exacerbated by a failure to employ empathy where certain people’s motives seem impossible to accept.

A failure of empathy

Hamas talks a lot about resistance and freeing the Palestinian people from their oppressors. At a superficial level, this seems much more plausible than their motive being an explicit hatred of Jews – not Israelis – based on their Jihadi ethos. 

You can read the Hamas charter if you want to find out what their true motivation is (spoiler alert: it’s Jew hatred). But if you want to test your empathy, I recommend you watch assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s reaction to the news that his sons and four of his grandchildren have been killed in an airstrike. He looks sombre for a moment, then, when his aide asks if they should suspend the visit they were in the middle of, Haniyeh says (in Arabic), “No, why? Let’s continue.” 

While this might appear psychopathic, I don’t think it is at all. Imagine that you have a sincere belief in martyrdom – that if you are killed “in the path of God” you will achieve the highest aim you can hope to achieve on Earth and gain immediate entry into Paradise. This news for Haniyeh isn’t tragic: it’s wonderful. He is quoted as saying, “I thank God for bestowing upon us the honor of their martyrdom.” Under his belief system, these deaths are a spiritual triumph and a cause for rejoice, not despair. 

Terrorists killing people on October 7 yelled “God is great”, not “free Palestine.” As hard as it might be to accept, there’s strong evidence to suggest that a desire to kill their neighbours has more to do with a radical religious belief than wanting freedom from the so-called oppressors. Not all Palestinians think like this, of course, but Hamas makes more sense when viewed as an ideological movement rather than a political one. You only need to compare the beliefs and the behaviour and see how cleanly they line up. 

Conclusion

To conclude, these are just a few of many cognitive biases and failures of reasoning that make us humans resistant to changing our views. They are not unique to the Israel-Palestine conflict, though strong emotion does tend to exacerbate many of these effects and this is certainly an emotional issue for many. You will find people on the pro-Israel side affected by these phenomena, too, and if you are brutally honest and look closely at some of the arguments used in defence of Israel, you will find bad reasoning there as well. 

Changing minds isn’t about simply providing information, it’s about fighting our very nature. If you have an interest in persuading people that Israel isn’t the monster it’s made out to be, let me give you one key takeaway – and pardon what might read as sanctimonious but know that I don’t consider myself especially good at this in conversation. 

Focus on the outcome. Being factually correct achieves nothing if it doesn’t change the person’s mind. Think of how receptive you yourself are to an argument when it is vitriolic, attacks your pride, or is otherwise insulting. This kind of approach rarely works, so ask yourself if you want to achieve your goal of persuading someone or if you’re happy screaming into the wind for a pyrrhic victory. Even if you take the gentlest approach with the most reasonable arguments, it won’t work with everyone. Some people’s minds are never going to change and you might just have to accept that and move on to the next person.

Pete Malicki is an Australian playwright, producer and business leader. He is not Jewish.