How to Talk to Pro-Palestinians — A Guide

Facts alone rarely penetrate this structure because facts are processed through the identity they threaten. The more politically useful the belief, the more psychologically defended it becomes.

photo: Janne Leimola/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The best advice when talking to a pro-Palestinian supporter is not to bother unless time has no value to you.

If you have no choice, then the first rule is the same rule therapists use when a client says something astonishing: Control your face.

Do not recoil, smirk, or perform the little moral seizure in which your eyebrows fly upward and your soul briefly leaves your body. A therapist who flinches at every ugly thought will learn little. The same applies when someone announces, with the serene confidence of an Instagram junkie, that Israel is committing “genocide,” “colonialism,” “apartheid,” and that nasty wind that brings pollen in from the north.

It is more than arguments that sustain the modern pro-Palestinian movement. It is an entire emotional architecture: identity, belonging, “moral” status, “grievance,” fear, guilt, and the intoxicating sensation of being one of history’s good guys. Facts alone rarely penetrate this structure because facts are processed through the identity they threaten. The more politically useful the belief, the more psychologically defended it becomes.

This is where therapy methods become useful — not because political activists are crazy, though some are manifestly as crazy as bedbugs, but because psychotherapy has spent decades studying what happens when people become fused with a narrative, threatened by contradiction, and emotionally incapable of examining the meanings they have attached to events. That is precisely what happens in many conversations about Israel.

Begin, therefore, with regulation.

When a person shouts, “Israel is a settler-colonial state,” the temptation is to answer in the same emotional pitch. This is a mistake. Nervous systems are contagious. Escalation narrows cognition, activates threat responses, and turns conversation into combat. Once someone leaves what psychologists call the “window of tolerance,” nuance becomes neurologically extravagant. The brain is no longer evaluating evidence. It is scanning for enemies.

Your first task is not to win but to keep the conversation cognitively alive. Lower your voice, slow your speech, and do not mirror hysteria. Calmness is dominance without theater. You are communicating that the subject can be examined without emotional collapse.

Then use reflective listening, but remove the artificial sweetener. Reflective listening does not mean saying, “I hear your truth,” while mentally applying for political asylum. It means accurately restating the claim so the speaker cannot evade its implications.

“So your position is that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state?” “So when you say ‘resistance by any means necessary,’ you are including the murder of civilians?”

This is reflection with moral traction. It forces abstraction into specificity. Political extremism flourishes in euphemism. “Resistance” sounds romantic. A child murdered in her bedroom does not. “Decolonization” sounds scholarly. The murder or ethnic cleansing of seven million Jews sounds less so.

Therapists often help clients move from global statements to concrete experience. Do the same. Ask for operational definitions.

“What would ‘free Palestine’ look like in practice?” “Who governs?” “What happens to Hamas?” “What happens to Israeli Jews?” “What borders are you proposing?”

Do not let slogans remain vaporous. A slogan is often a psychological shelter from the consequences of one’s own position. Once translated into policy, many fashionable certainties begin to resemble plans drawn up during a fever.

Next comes Socratic questioning. This is structured curiosity designed to expose contradictions without triggering immediate retreat.

“What evidence would change your mind?” “Do you apply this standard to any other country?” “Why is Jewish self-determination uniquely illegitimate?” “Do Palestinians have agency, or are all their decisions merely reactions to Israel?”

The last question matters. Much pro-Palestinian rhetoric presents Palestinians as morally weightless beings, incapable of choice, and therefore responsibility. This is colonial condescension in a keffiyeh. It strips adults of agency while granting their leaders infinite indulgence.

Therapists encounter a similar dynamic when someone explains every harmful act through childhood wounds. The wound may explain the behavior. It does not absolve it. Explanation is not exoneration. Trauma is not diplomatic immunity. You can validate emotion without validating falsehood.

“Yes, Palestinian suffering is real.” “Yes, civilians deserve protection.”

Then add the sentence the movement so often refuses to add: “And none of that makes the murder of Israeli civilians acceptable.”

This is dialectical thinking: two truths held simultaneously. Palestinian suffering is real. Israeli self-defense is legitimate. Settler violence can be condemned. Palestinian terrorism can still be the larger and more organized threat. A person can oppose an Israeli policy without joining a movement that launders Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s regime.

Extremist politics relies on splitting: one side all victim, the other all aggressor; one side pure, the other demonic. In psychodynamic language, splitting protects the psyche from ambivalence. In activist language, it produces placards.

Do not reward splitting. When someone says, “You either support Palestine or genocide,” refuse the frame. “No. Those are not the only moral positions available.” When they say, “Silence is violence,” answer: “No. Sometimes silence is caution. Sometimes speech is ignorance. Sometimes slogans are violence with good graphic design.”

Another useful tool is motivational interviewing. Its central insight is that people are more persuaded by arguments they articulate themselves than by arguments imposed on them. Instead of battering the person with evidence, ask questions that make them hear their own dissonance.

“What matters most to you here?”

“Human rights.”

“Do Israeli civilians have human rights?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do hostages?”

“Yes.”

“Should rape be condemned regardless of the perpetrator?”

“Of course.”

“Then why does your movement struggle to say so without qualification?”

The point is not the “gotcha” but the discrepancy between professed values and actual behavior. A movement that claims universal human rights but becomes linguistically paralyzed when Jews are raped has a discrepancy problem larger than my ego.

Expect resistance. Psychological resistance is not proof that you have failed. It often means you have touched the protected core.

Do not over-pursue. Pushing too hard can strengthen defenses. A person confronted aggressively may retreat into identity-protective cognition: rejecting information because accepting it would threaten their tribe, status, or self-conception.

Say less.

“I am not asking you to agree now. I am asking whether you apply your morality consistently.”

Silence can be useful. Most activists are trained for confrontation, not reflection. They expect slogans to collide. They are less prepared for a pause in which their contradictions remain audible.

Watch for transference and countertransference. In therapy, transference occurs when someone projects old relationships and emotions onto the present. In Israel debates, the Jewish state is frequently made to play whatever villain the speaker already hates: empire, “whiteness,” capitalism, nationalism, militarism, Europe, America, masculinity, borders, or history. Israel becomes less a country than a psychological screen.

Countertransference is your reaction to them. You may feel rage, contempt, or the desire to humiliate. Notice it. Do not let it drive. Contempt can be accurate and still strategically useless. The aim is not to demonstrate that you are smarter, though this will occasionally be unavoidable. The aim is to expose the claim’s moral and factual architecture.

Public humiliation rarely produces intellectual conversion. It produces defensive doubling down. Give the person a path out. People abandon bad beliefs more readily when they are not required to confess stupidity.

“You may have been given incomplete information.” “That slogan conceals more than it explains.”

This preserves dignity without preserving nonsense.

But therapy also teaches boundaries. Not every conversation should continue. If someone celebrates atrocities, denies rape, mocks hostages, or tells Jews they deserved October 7th, you are not obliged to become their unpaid clinical supervisor. Curiosity has limits. Empathy is not moral surrender.

You can say: “I will discuss policy. I will not debate whether Jewish civilians are legitimate targets.” “I will hear criticism of Israel. I will not participate in antisemitic conspiracy.” “If terrorism is your moral exception, the conversation is over.”

The boundary matters because endless engagement can become its own pathology: the fantasy that every fanatic is one exquisitely phrased question away from sanity. Some people are not confused. They are committed.

The final technique is mentalization: the capacity to perceive other people as minds with histories, fears, motives, and limited knowledge. Ask the pro-Palestinian supporter to imagine the Israeli mind not as a cartoon colonist but as a citizen shaped by suicide bombings, rockets, kidnappings, massacres, failed peace offers, and neighbors whose leaders openly promise annihilation.

“What would security mean if your children had 15 seconds to reach a bomb shelter?” “What risks would you accept after civilians were slaughtered during a ceasefire?” “What would withdrawal mean if the territory became another launchpad?”

Mentalization does not demand agreement, just adulthood. That, ultimately, is the objective: to move the conversation from moral theater to moral adulthood, from slogans to consequences, from selective empathy to universal standards.

Speak calmly. Define terms. Reflect claims. Test values. Hold contradictions. Refuse euphemisms. Preserve dignity where possible and boundaries where necessary. And always control your face.

The person opposite you may say something so historically illiterate, morally inverted, and psychologically revealing that every muscle in your body will wish to resign. Do not let them. The conversation has only just become interesting.

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