Concessions for Concession’s Sake: Injustice, Indignation, and the Construction of Intractable Conflict in Israel–Palestine

Abstract

In intractable conflicts, what factors lead populations to accept negotiated outcomes? To examine these issues, we conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of the Jewish Israeli population and a companion experiment on a representative sample of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. We find that holding the negotiated settlement outcome constant, approval of the settlement is strongly influenced by whether it is framed as a negotiating defeat for one side—if and only if respondents are primed to be indignant—and that these effects are strongly mediated by perceptions of the fairness of the settlement outcome. Moral indignation produces a desire for concessions for concession’s sake. Such conflicts over political framing violate assumptions of the rationalist literature on conflict processes and suggest important new directions for conflict theorizing.