The Double-Edged Sword of Empathy: How Our Drive to Protect the Vulnerable Turns Violent — An Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience Perspective on the Israel- Palestine Conflict.

Abstract

Humans are adapted for care and coalition; the same neurocognitive systems that make us protect infants and invest in partners also coordinate threat defence and, under certain conditions, enable cruelty. According to Rhoads and colleagues, extraordinarily altruistic individuals show distinctive subcortical connectivity within caregiving circuits, underscoring how deeply our prosocial dispositions are instantiated in brain architecture (Rhoads et al., 2023). Yet, as Dal Monte and collaborators showed in Nature Neuroscience, valuation circuitry spanning medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and amygdala flexibly prioritises other-regarding preferences only under particular contexts (Dal Monte et al., 2020). Building on recent integrative reviews in social, affective, and intergroup neuroscience (Adolphs et al., 2021; Keysers & Gazzola, 2021; Lantos & Molenberghs, 2021), this article synthesises evolutionary psychology with contemporary neurobiology to explain why atrocities—here, with a focus on Palestine—occur despite an evolved capacity for empathy. We argue that selective altruism, parochial empathy, and dehumanisation narrow moral concern to the in-group, while chronic threat, obedience dynamics, and resource competition “hijack” caregiving systems toward violence.

Keywords: empathy; dehumanisation; rehumanisation;  intergroup conflict; neuroscience; evolutionary psychology; Israel–Palestine conflict and reconciliation.

Humans embody a striking ethical paradox. We cradle newborns with tenderness, risk our lives for strangers, and construct large-scale systems of mutual aid—yet we also perpetrate war, forced displacement, and mass killing. According to Rhoads and colleagues (2023), structural connectivity within amygdala–periaqueductal gray pathways helps explain “extraordinary altruism,” indicating that caregiving is not a thin cultural veneer but rooted in ancient mammalian circuitry. Further, Dal Monte and co-authors (2020) demonstrate that specialised mPFC–amygdala coordination scaffolds prosocial choice, providing a neural substrate for other-regarding valuation. Yet empathy’s architecture is double-edged: as Keysers and Gazzola (2021) review, the very mechanisms that enable vicarious feeling are context-sensitive, subject to top-down modulation by goals, norms, and group boundaries; Adolphs, Anderson, and Mobbs (2021) similarly emphasise that rapid threat appraisal in the amygdala can either facilitate compassionate responding to distress or amplify fear and aggression.

In the Israel–Palestine context, numerous observers have documented pervasive dehumanising rhetoric by Israeli officials during the current war (Kteily & Landry, 2022; Princeton Bridging Divides, 2024; National Communication Association, 2025), while UN bodies reiterate that settlement expansion and associated displacement violate international law and entrench structural harms to Palestinians (OHCHR, 2024; UNSCO, 2024; OHCHR, 2025). Meanwhile, according to recent congressional and executive summaries, the United States and other allies have provided substantial military and diplomatic support to Israel, including multi-billion-dollar appropriations and UN Security Council vetoes affecting ceasefire resolutions (Congress.gov, 2024; PBS/Associated Press, 2024; U.S. DoD, 2024; UN News, 2025). This combination—parochial empathy for one’s own, coupled with institutional power—offers a stark case study in how human prosociality can be narrowed and redirected.

The Double-Edged Nature of Empathy and the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Evolutionary Foundations of (Selective) Altruism. Further, Fakih and colleagues’ recent review concludes that generosity plausibly functions as a sexually selected signal of reliability, making visible one’s capacity for provisioning and prosocial intent (Fakih et al., 2022). Complementing this, Nowak’s latest overview reiterates that human success is better explained by repeated cooperative games than by pure competition (Nowak, 2020). Taken together, as Declerck and Boone’s integrative treatment emphasises, our prosocial architecture is powerful but partial: empathy and cooperation are strongest for kin and allies, weaker for strangers, and minimal toward those construed as hostile out-groups (Declerck & Boone, 2022). The same adaptations that motivate Israelis to protect “their own” (families, hostages, communities) can, under chronic threat and adversarial framing, constrict concern for Palestinian civilians—especially when leaders and media portray the latter as uniformly dangerous or less human (Kteily & Landry, 2022; Princeton Bridging Divides, 2024).

According to Keysers and Gazzola (2021), embodied empathy depends on distributed networks, somatosensory and premotor mirroring for resonance; anterior insula and anterior cingulate as salience nodes for others’ pain; and mPFC–temporoparietal junction for mentalising. Adolphs, Anderson, and Mobbs (2021) add that the amygdala orchestrates rapid significance detection, flagging distress cues but also amplifying defensive aggression when threat appraisals dominate. Gu and colleagues’ recent meta-analytic work indicates that compassionate responses consistently recruit anterior insula and periaqueductal gray linking empathic concern to autonomic readiness for care (Gu et al., 2021). In parallel, Shamay-Tsoory and Abu-Akel (2022) stress that oxytocin is context-dependent: it can increase trust and empathy within the in-group yet sharpen defensive parochialism toward out-groups. Higher-order control by the prefrontal cortex integrates empathic impulses with norms and long-term goals, constraining aggression and enabling costly helping (Decety & Yoder, 2021). As Molenberghs (2022) reviews, intergroup contexts gate these same circuits: dehumanisation reduces mPFC and insula responses to out-group suffering, whereas rehumanisation restores them.

Neural Mechanisms of In-Group Bias

Dehumanising language from Israeli officials (e.g., characterising Palestinians as “human animals”)—catalogued by academic and professional bodies—predictably dampens neural empathy for Palestinian civilians and facilitates punitive policies (Kteily & Landry, 2022; National Communication Association, 2025). Chronic threat and traumatic stress further bias amygdala-centric processing, weakening prefrontal inhibition and fueling cycles of retaliation (Adolphs et al., 2021; Lantos & Molenberghs, 2021).

In-group vs. out-group bias. As Van Bavel and Packer (2021) argue, social identities powerfully shape perception and moral judgment; under conflict, parochial empathy intensifies. Lantos and Molenberghs (2021) review convergent evidence that perceived intergroup threat amplifies hostility and moral exclusion. In the current conflict, widespread dehumanising rhetoric and threat narratives in Israel have been documented by researchers and monitoring organisations, with measurable downstream harm to Palestinian civilians (Kteily & Landry, 2022; Princeton Bridging Divides, 2024; National Communication Association, 2025).

Institutionalised dehumanisation and structural violence. According to OHCHR reports and UN Security Council monitoring, accelerated settlement expansion, demolitions, and movement restrictions in the occupied West Bank violate international law and entrench dispossession (OHCHR, 2024; UNSCO, 2024; OHCHR, 2025). Reuters’ 2025 briefing underscores that a large settler population now lives amid millions of Palestinians, with escalating friction and impunity (Reuters, 2025). Such structures normalise harm to out-group civilians and reinforce narratives of lesser moral status.

Authority, obedience, and engaged followership. As Caspar and Pech (2024) show in Social Neuroscience, obeying authority reduces pre-action conflict signals (mid-frontal theta), illuminating how deference can short-circuit moral hesitation in real time. Haslam and Reicher’s “engaged followership” model emphasises that identification with leaders and their cause—not blind conformity—drives participation in harm (Haslam & Reicher, 2024). In high-threat contexts, military, political, and religious authorities can thus mobilise ordinary people to perpetrate or justify violence against out-groups.

Resource competition and coalitionary psychology. Recent cross-disciplinary syntheses propose that perceived social threats increase coalitionary signalling, manipulate cooperation, and shift tolerance for aggression (Barclay et al., 2021; see also commentaries summarised in Behavioural and Brain Sciences). Under siege narratives and scarcity (land, water, security), evolved survival heuristics prioritise “us” over “them.”

External assistance and impunity. According to U.S. and international records, Israel has received major military appropriations since 2024 (Congress.gov, 2024; PBS/Associated Press, 2024; U.S. DoD, 2024). Diplomatic protection—most notably U.S. Security Council vetoes of permanent ceasefire proposals—has shaped the conflict’s trajectory and accountability environment (UN News, 2025). According to UN human rights reporting, this international context coexists with soaring Palestinian civilian casualties and extensive infrastructure destruction (OHCHR, 2024; HRW, 2024).

As Kteily and Landry (2022) review, dehumanisation is not merely rhetoric—it is a psychological mechanism that licenses harm. Coupled with authority processes (Caspar & Pech, 2024), parochial oxytocinergic bonding (Shamay-Tsoory & Abu-Akel, 2022), and structural incentives, the same caregiving systems that evolved to protect one’s vulnerable can be narrowed and redirected against another vulnerable population.

Expanding the in-group. According to Van Bavel and Packer (2021), human social identities are not rigid but malleable; they can be stretched or reconfigured through shared goals, common threats, or overarching civic frameworks. Neuroscientific evidence shows that such expansions alter activity in neural circuits that regulate empathy and bias, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and temporoparietal junction, which support social perspective-taking. When group boundaries are cognitively broadened, these regions treat former “others” as part of the self-concept, making prosocial concern more automatic. In the Palestinian context, initiatives that frame both Israelis and Palestinians within broader humanitarian, ecological, or civic identities (e.g., shared commitments to child safety, environmental stewardship, or global justice) can attenuate parochial empathy that otherwise remains locked within ethnonational boundaries.

Rehumanisation and Pathways to Peace

Cikara and Van Bavel’s programmatic work demonstrates that personal storytelling, narrative exposure, and testimonial exchange reliably restore neural responses that are typically muted during dehumanisation. Convergent neuroimaging evidence (Keysers & Gazzola, 2021; Molenberghs, 2022) confirms that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior insula, circuits essential for empathic resonance, become responsive when individuals encounter out-group experiences through emotionally rich forms such as testimony, art, or film. Bruneau, Szekeres, and Kteily (2020) provide behavioural evidence that such narrative-based contact reduces blatant dehumanisation, lowers hostility, and increases willingness to cooperate across divides. More recently, Kteily and Landry (2022) show that counteracting dehumanising metaphors (e.g., “animals,” “vermin”) restores moral regard toward out-groups. In the Palestinian context, platforms for sharing family stories, artistic collaborations, or joint memorialisations of civilian victims can resist state-driven narratives that depict Palestinians as existential threats, thereby re-opening empathic channels.

These restorative processes align with broader neuro-social pathways to reconciliation. Structured, equal-status cooperation reduces prejudice and fosters affiliative neurochemistry, as seen in binational education and infrastructure projects (Bruneau et al., 2020; Shamay-Tsoory & Abu-Akel, 2022). Justice and fairness mechanisms, including truth-telling, reparations, and credible accountability- activate reward systems while dampening anger responses, grounding them in neurobiology rather than moral aspiration alone (Decety & Yoder, 2021). Ritual synchrony, through coordinated movement, music, or collective mourning, strengthens trust and reshapes group boundaries via oxytocinergic bonding (Frontiers Review, 2021; van Mulukom, 2024). Mindfulness- and compassion-based interventions likewise enhance prefrontal–limbic regulation, reducing amygdala reactivity and offering scalable trauma-healing strategies for civilians and practitioners (Hernández-Seoane et al., 2022; Biomedicines, 2024; SCAN, 2021). Cooperative interdependence makes peace materially rewarding, for example, through binational health or water-sharing agreements (Nowak, 2020). Finally, cross-group youth exchanges that combine narrative learning with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) collaboration reduce threat biases and foster durable empathy expansion (Bruneau, Szekeres, & Kteily, 2020; Shamay-Tsoory & Abu-Akel, 2022).

Conclusion

The tragedy of Palestine does not reveal innate human cruelty so much as the selectivity and malleability of human altruism. According to Declerck and Boone (2022) and Van Bavel and Packer (2021), evolved prosociality is strongest for one’s own; under fear and threat, this parochial empathy can be narrowed further by dehumanisation and obedience dynamics (Kteily & Landry, 2022; Caspar & Pech, 2024). Neuroscience clarifies both hazard and hope: sustained threat tilts amygdala-centric processing and suppresses empathy-related cortex (Adolphs et al., 2021; Molenberghs, 2022), while targeted interventions—rehumanising contact, fairness-based justice, ritual synchrony, and compassion training—re-engage prosocial circuits and strengthen regulatory pathways (Decety & Yoder, 2021; Bruneau et al., 2020; Frontiers Review, 2021; SCAN, 2021; Hernández-Seoane et al., 2022). Historically, as Nowak (2020) argues, cooperation—not domination—explains the long-run success of our species. The empirical question, then, is not whether humans are altruistic; it is whether we will build cultural, institutional, and neuropsychological conditions that expand that altruism across boundaries. UN findings on illegality of settlement expansion and the documented use of dehumanising rhetoric (OHCHR, 2024–2025; Kteily & Landry, 2022; National Communication Association, 2025), alongside records of external military and diplomatic support to Israel (Congress.gov, 2024; PBS/AP, 2024; UN News, 2025), underscore the catastrophic costs of failing to broaden empathy—and the urgency of evidence-based pathways to transformation.

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