During a meeting at the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu detailed how he believes negotiations with Hamas for a hostage deal should be conducted.
He said, "We must be tough in negotiations," and added, "We cannot give everything straight away because the enemy will just want more." He said, "We need to draw a clear line regarding the strained relations with the United States. We need to say 'no,' and whoever can't say 'no' to the US shouldn't be prime minister."
Netanyahu's approach to negotiations with Hamas, as well as relations with the US, speaks volumes about his mental state. The prime minister presents a militant, aggressive, and confrontational stance – firing in every possible direction. How someone expresses themselves says a lot about their emotions. His aggressiveness shows that he feels attacked and threatened and therefore needs to fend off attacks against him. He feels that he is constantly being attacked from all sides and has no choice but to respond by counterattacking, as he believes that the best strategy for him is to strike back.
When he says that one must be tough in negotiations and that it's impossible to give away everything at the beginning, he is actually reflecting the deep conflict in which he finds himself. This is supported by something else he said – "I don't think there was [ever] a government that had to deal with problems like this."
Netanyahu's words reflect an inner turmoil called "cognitive dissonance" in psychology. Cognitive dissonance is a state of internal tension that occurs when reality contradicts our beliefs about ourselves.
If we believe that we are fair and upright people, and we behave in a way that contradicts this perception, for example, by lying or acting unjustly towards someone, we tend to tell ourselves stories that justify our actions. The power of cognitive dissonance is very strong and does not happen consciously. It's not that we are aware that we are telling ourselves stories; it's a defense mechanism that ensures consistency between our actions and our beliefs about ourselves.
We have an inherent tendency to try to alleviate this tension between reality and our beliefs, especially when we really want our beliefs to be correct. In fact, there is a process in which our brains "fit" the facts to our beliefs. For Netanyahu, in the story he tells himself, there is a strong need to feel that he is doing everything for the country. It's part of his identity. He tries as much as possible to suppress the fact that personal interests are also involved here, as well as his need to remain in power. Therefore, instead of pointing an accusing finger inward, he deflects it outward.
To lie for a dollar?
In a closed political-security discussion, Netanyahu was asked if the explanation of Israel's policies (hasbara, or public diplomacy) in English was being handled well enough. "Clearly not," Netanyahu replied. One of the attendees responded: "It's a matter of money," to which Netanyahu said: "It's not about money. The problem is that there are no people. You are surrounded by people who can't connect words together [in English]."
Since the first explanation didn't work and has failed to achieve its goals, Netanyahu prefers to blame everyone for the failure, even though he himself has recruited Israel's speakers to the foreign media since the beginning of the war. So, instead of taking responsibility for the issue, he preferred to attack.
In a famous psychological experiment, participants took part in a tedious task – transferring an object from one place to another for an hour. After the experiment, one group of participants was offered a dollar in exchange for telling students who were next in line for the experiment that it was really interesting. The second group was offered $20 for the same request. All participants, without exception, agreed to lie to the next participants. When they asked the group that received $20 why they agreed to it, the answer was that for $20, they were willing to lie. When they asked the participants who received one dollar, they claimed they did so because the experiment was interesting.
We have a drive to maintain a consistent self-perception, providing a barrier between our beliefs about ourselves and our actual behavior – a concept called cognitive consistency. When dealing with a situation where there is a gap between my self-perception (am I someone willing to lie for a dollar?) and my behavior (I lied for a dollar) – we act to remove the dissonance by changing either our belief or our behavior, which is easier at that moment.
'The Seekers'
The exciting thing about this cognitive dissonance phenomenon is how much power our beliefs have to ignore facts and reality. This also explains the recent events that have been affecting our country. Why is each side entrenched in its position and not open to hearing the other side's views? Not only is there no openness to listen – but as events escalate, each side becomes more and more confident in its righteousness. The question is how to respond when cognitive dissonance is so strong that it threatens to destroy our belief system.
This is what Leon Festinger, a professor of social psychology, wanted to investigate. In the 1950s, a woman named Dorothy Martin, under the name Marian Keech, published in a newspaper that according to messages she received from aliens– the end of the world was imminent, with a specific date: the world was to end on December 21, 1954. Marian gathered around her a group of believers called "The Seekers," who fervently believed in these messages. As their belief strengthened, they abandoned their work and families, and their lives revolved around the needs and goals of the group. Members of the group, as told to Keech by the aliens, would be the only ones to receive salvation when the rest of the world would perish – and all this would happen through spacecraft that would take them to a safe place.
The social psychologist Festinger decided to establish contact with the members of the cult to document how they would react when the flying saucers did not appear in the sky. Of course, no spaceship came to collect the cult members on the appointed day. Moreover, to their surprise, there were no signs indicating that the world's end was coming. The cult members sat in silence at Keech's house for hours.
When the disappointment of the group members, who had sacrificed so much to reach this moment, was about to break them, Keech unexpectedly received another message from the planet Clarion: The world was saved at the last moment thanks to the faith of the cult members. This message gave new meaning to the cult members – their faith and commitment had saved the world. Although some of them were disappointed to the depths of their souls and left, pay attention to the following phenomenon: Those who remained – their faith strengthened. They showed a much higher level of commitment and began to protect their ideas and act vigorously to spread them.
The more people want to believe in something, the stronger the cognitive dissonance. The more people have already gone down a particular path, giving up significant things, and sacrificing important things, the greater the chance that their belief in that same thing will only strengthen. The brain devotes supreme effort to fitting reality to align with their beliefs. We tend to stick much more to our positions, not because they have better proven reality, but because of the efforts made in the past to uphold these beliefs.
The writer is a researcher of behavior in the digital age at Reichman University in Herzliya.