Abstract
Why do some conflicts come to occupy an enormous space in public debate while others, involving comparable or even greater suffering, receive little attention?
One possible explanation begins by distinguishing three dimensions that do not always coincide: the moral relevance of a conflict—for example, how much suffering it causes—its practical relevance—the actual ability to intervene and alter its consequences—and its psychological and symbolic relevance.
Moral attention does not appear to be distributed necessarily according to the first two. Geographic proximity alone does not explain it either. Some conflicts become especially compelling because they allow values, identities, and disputes that already exist within a society to be projected onto them.
Several psychological mechanisms may contribute to this. Groups that are very close to one another can sometimes clash particularly intensely precisely because they share many of the same values. Social psychology has studied phenomena such as “horizontal hostility” and the “black sheep effect”: under certain conditions, transgressions may be judged more harshly when they are committed by someone perceived as close to one’s own group.
There is also a tendency to simplify conflicts by turning their participants into recognizable characters. If one child attacks another, two categories immediately appear: “the aggressor” and “the victim.” The description may be accurate for that particular episode, but it becomes problematic when those roles are transformed into permanent characteristics: “he is the aggressor,” “he is the victim,” and then, easily, “he is the bad one” and “he is the good one.” The same individual may have occupied different roles before and may do so again later. In a sense, reality becomes “novelized”: complex episodes are turned into stories with protagonists, antagonists, and victims. This makes them easier to understand, but it can obscure prior events, changing roles, and causal complexity.
Victimhood introduces another interesting phenomenon. Experimental research has found that a person presented as the victim of a wrongdoing may receive greater moral credit, even though having suffered does not necessarily imply possessing better moral qualities. In conflicts between groups, competition may therefore emerge over who counts as the true victim, because that position can also confer moral legitimacy.
Sacred values, historical memory, collective guilt, and the possibility of using a moral position as a signal of identity or status within one’s own group can further reinforce these dynamics.
Contemporary communication systems may intensify such mechanisms. Social media did not invent feedback in collective attention, but it greatly reduces the cost and time required for diffusion, makes social approval visible, and can favor certain emotionally charged forms of content and messages focused on adversaries. It can therefore accelerate the process. When several of these factors coincide, what might be called a “moral attractor” can emerge: a conflict whose ability to capture public attention is much greater than would be explained by its consequences, its physical proximity, or the actual ability to intervene in it.
This article explores a hypothesis: moral attention is not necessarily distributed in proportion to the magnitude of suffering or of the consequences regarded as important, nor does it simply follow the geographic proximity of a conflict or the actual ability to influence it. Some relatively distant conflicts—even those over which the capacity for intervention is limited—can occupy an extraordinary place in public debate when, in addition to involving recognizable victims and transgressions, they are sufficiently close to shared cultural categories to allow values to be projected, contested, and demonstrated through them.
The hypothesis is particularly relevant in societies that have developed a strongly universalist public language concerning rights, equality, protection of minorities, and the reduction of suffering. To the extent that such principles aspire to apply regardless of who is affected, the moral importance assigned to an event should not depend heavily on identity, distance, or cultural familiarity. The attention that an event actually receives is a different matter: these factors may play an important role there. Human moral concern does not appear to be distributed so impartially. Research on moral expansiveness shows differences in the scope of moral consideration, while other studies indicate that the identifiability and number of victims can influence affective responses and decisions to help (Crimston et al., 2016; Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007; Västfjäll et al., 2014).
It is therefore useful to distinguish at least three forms of relevance. One is the moral relevance attributed to the consequences of an event. From an ethical perspective that gives central importance to reducing suffering, for example, relevant considerations would include how much suffering is produced, how intense it is, how many sentient beings are affected, and for how long. Another is practical or instrumental relevance: geographic proximity, directly affected interests, and, above all, the actual capacity of the actors involved to intervene or alter the consequences. A third is psychological and symbolic relevance: the degree of identification that a conflict generates, the ease with which it can be incorporated into familiar moral categories, and the extent to which it can represent disputes that already exist within the society observing it. These dimensions may coincide, but they need not do so.
When a case combines identity-based proximity, moral transgression, identifiable victims, sacred values, historical memory, sufficient ambiguity to sustain competing narratives, and a communication environment that facilitates diffusion and feedback, it may become what will be called here a moral attractor: an issue capable of absorbing attention that cannot be explained solely by the magnitude of its consequences, its geographic proximity, or the material ability to influence it.
The question considered here is therefore not why certain conflicts generate concern. There are often excellent reasons for such concern. The question is why some acquire an extraordinary capacity to organize internal moral divisions, while others—even those with very serious consequences or in which greater capacity for action exists—may occupy a much smaller place in public debate.
The Enemy Who Is Similar Enough
Vegetarianism provides a revealing example. From the outside, vegetarians and vegans appear to belong to the same moral family. They share much of the same diagnosis, many of the same concerns, and many of the same practices. It might therefore be expected that the most intense frictions would arise with those defending practices located at the opposite extreme, such as certain forms of livestock farming or bullfighting. Yet especially critical judgments can also arise between positions that are much closer to one another.
This is not merely anecdotal. Social psychology has used the term horizontal hostility to describe particularly negative judgments between closely related minority groups, sometimes linked to the need to preserve a distinctive identity. Rothgerber (2014) found patterns consistent with this idea among subgroups of vegetarians and vegans, although the results varied depending on participants’ reasons for avoiding meat and on the salience of the majority group.
A related phenomenon is known as the black sheep effect. Under certain conditions, a person who violates a norm of their own group may be judged more harshly than an outsider who commits a similar violation. The phenomenon has been linked to the relevance that the behavior of in-group members has for the social identity of the person making the judgment (Marques, Yzerbyt, & Leyens, 1988).
Distance, therefore, does not necessarily generate greater hostility; it may also reduce involvement. Proximity, by contrast, can create more ground for conflict when there is a shared language, common expectations, and enough mutual knowledge to interpret the other side’s actions. A couple, for example, may argue for years about matters that would hardly arise between two strangers, not necessarily because there is greater hostility between them, but because there are more expectations, more shared history, and more elements open to interpretation.
The same logic may apply, at least as a hypothesis, to ideologies, religions, and political movements. Groups that share much of the same frame of reference may turn a limited number of differences into central markers of identity. Similarity, therefore, does not necessarily eliminate conflict; under certain conditions, it may make the remaining differences more significant.
Beyond the Facts
When an issue acquires moral significance, discussion may gradually cease to focus solely on what happened or which policy would work best. The position adopted can begin to say something about the identity of the person holding it.
Research on moral convictions shows that people tend to experience such beliefs as objectively true and universally applicable. Stronger moral conviction has been associated, among other things, with greater political engagement, greater intolerance toward opposing positions, and greater resistance to procedural solutions in certain conflicts (Skitka, Hanson, Morgan, & Wisneski, 2021).
This changes the nature of the discussion. The question is no longer simply whether a claim is correct. An implicit question may arise about what kind of person could possibly defend it. A political disagreement can then begin to function as a moral test, in which certain answers are perceived not merely as mistaken but as morally wrong.
Aggressors, Victims, and Characters
Human moral perception appears to organize many events around an extraordinarily simple structure: someone does something and someone suffers it. Research on moral typecasting distinguishes precisely between moral agents—those to whom the capacity to do good or evil is attributed—and moral patients—those perceived primarily as capable of having good or evil done to them. Once someone becomes strongly associated with one of these roles, it may become psychologically more difficult to perceive that person simultaneously in the other role (Gray & Wegner, 2009).
Consider a simple case of bullying between children. When one child attacks another, two immediately understandable categories appear: the aggressor and the victim. It is easy to side with the victim and condemn the aggressor. For understanding that particular episode, the classification may be entirely correct. The problem begins when the description of what has just happened gives way to treating these temporary roles as permanent qualities of the characters involved. The child who now appears as the victim may previously have attacked someone else, while the child who now appears as the aggressor may previously have been a victim. None of this justifies the aggression being observed; it simply changes the nature of the categories being used. “Aggressor” initially describes the role someone occupies in a particular interaction, not necessarily what that person is.
The same simplification appears constantly in other settings. In an argument between partners, it may seem easy to determine who is attacking and who is defending if only the last thirty seconds are observed, but the interpretation might change if the previous hour, week, or several years of the relationship were considered. Something similar can occur in disputes between neighbors, between a consumer and a company, or between political groups. Each snapshot may contain a clearly identifiable aggressor and victim, while the full film reveals changing roles, provocations, responses, reprisals, and antecedents that make any stable assignment of those categories considerably more difficult.
Even in nature, if “aggressor” and “victim” are used only descriptively rather than morally, an isolated scene may be misleading. An animal may be observed attacking another without it being known that the first animal has just been attacked, is defending territory or offspring, or that the animal now fleeing was involved in another aggressive interaction shortly beforehand. The scene is real, but the narrative constructed from it may be extraordinarily incomplete.
There may be a more general tendency here that could be described as “novelizing reality.” Complex sequences of events are turned into stories with recognizable characters, protagonists, victims, antagonists, causes, and outcomes. This transformation can greatly reduce complexity and make events easier to understand and remember, but it comes at a cost: stable properties may be attributed to people and groups on the basis of roles they occupied only in the fragment of reality being observed.
In this way, “committed an act of aggression” can become “is the aggressor”; “suffered this action” can become “is the victim”; and from there it is easy to move still further toward “is the bad one” and “is the good one.” The step seems small, but it changes the analysis completely. Behavior is no longer being described; essences are.
This does not mean that all conflicts are symmetrical, that all participants have caused the same amount of harm, or that persistent victims and recurrent aggressors do not exist. Nor does it mean that knowledge of preceding events excuses a particular act. The claim is more limited: the moral classification of an episode should not automatically become a complete theory about the people or groups involved in it.
In prolonged conflicts, this problem multiplies. The same groups may be aggressors in one episode, victims in another, responsible for certain decisions, and powerless in other circumstances. If a narrative requires a stable aggressor and a stable victim, it may tend to select events that preserve that division and treat contradictory episodes as secondary.
Two people can therefore look at decades of the same history and construct morally incompatible narratives simply by selecting different starting points, central events, and timescales. The disagreement then ceases to be purely factual. It also becomes a dispute over which fragment of reality constitutes the relevant story and over who should occupy each role within that story.
Competition for Victimhood
There are also situations in which groups do not merely remember their suffering but compare it. Social psychology uses the term competitive victimhood to describe the tendency to present one’s own group as having suffered more than the opposing group. The literature links this mechanism, particularly in prolonged conflicts, with difficulties in recognizing the suffering of others, building trust, and achieving reconciliation (Young & Sullivan, 2016).
There is also a reason why victimhood can acquire moral weight beyond the harm suffered. In a series of seventeen experiments involving 9,676 participants, Jordan and Kouchaki (2021) found that people presented as victims of a transgression were perceived as morally better than otherwise equivalent people who had not been victimized, even when both were described as behaving in the same way. The authors call this the Virtuous Victim effect. The finding does not show that victims are actually more virtuous, nor that people deliberately seek to become victims. It shows something more limited: victimization can confer moral credit in the eyes of third parties.
A second step is thus added to the simplification described earlier. “Has suffered an injustice” can become “is the victim,” and from there “is morally better.” Suffering, which describes something that happened to a person or group, can end up being interpreted as a property of character.
A peculiar moral economy may then emerge. Recognizing the suffering of the other side can feel as though it diminishes one’s own, even though there is no logical reason why this should be the case. Two groups may both have suffered enormously. Yet if victim status provides not only grounds for claiming redress but also legitimacy, perceived innocence, or moral credit, competition for that role may arise. Competitive victimhood can therefore contribute not only to a dispute over who suffered more, but also over who has greater legitimacy to interpret the conflict.
When Some Values Have No Price
Some conflicts allow land, taxes, resources, or institutional powers to be negotiated. Others concern elements that people regard as morally incommensurable: a homeland, a sacred place, the memory of the dead, the identity of a people, or the right to exist.
When a value becomes sacred, offering more money or material benefits does not necessarily facilitate agreement. It may even provoke indignation because the offer itself is interpreted as evidence that the other side does not understand what is being negotiated. Research on sacred values has found that, in certain conflicts, material incentives can increase rather than reduce resistance to compromise, while some symbolic gestures may prove more effective (Atran & Axelrod, 2008; Ginges & Atran, 2013).
This may help explain why some disputes persist for long periods. The parties are not negotiating only over goods or resources, but also over matters they believe should not be negotiable at all.
Morality Also Has a Memory
Societies do not begin every conflict from zero. They inherit memories, guilt, narratives of heroism, atrocities, humiliations, and responsibilities.
There is a substantial literature on collective guilt: people who did not personally participate in historical injustices can nevertheless experience moral emotions connected with acts committed by a group with which they identify. Such emotions can influence current attitudes and willingness to support reparative measures, although their emergence depends on how group responsibility and the legitimacy of the harm are interpreted (Wohl, Branscombe, & Klar, 2006).
This does not mean that every society is tormented by its past or that every policy can be explained by guilt. It means something more modest and probably more interesting: history can modify present moral sensitivity. A society may react with particular intensity to something it recognizes as resembling a transgression that forms part of its collective memory.
An external conflict can then become an arena in which a society argues with itself. Attention is no longer directed solely toward distant others but also toward the observing society itself: its history, its values, what it did or should have done, and ultimately what kind of society it aspires to demonstrate that it is.
The More Universal the Standard, the More Opportunities to Violate It
There is another apparent paradox here. The broader and more explicit the universal principles proclaimed by a society, the more opportunities there are to compare particular conduct against those principles and identify possible inconsistencies.
This is not an argument against such standards. On the contrary, their existence makes it possible to formulate criticisms that might otherwise never arise. But it also expands the space for accusations of hypocrisy and for disputes over who represents shared values more faithfully.
A dynamic may therefore emerge in which part of political conflict concerns not only which policies are better but also who embodies shared values more purely. The expansion of moral standards also facilitates moral criticism, and that criticism can serve both to correct genuine injustices and to compete for prestige, influence, or identity. These functions are not mutually exclusive.
Morality Can Also Confer Status
There is another social incentive that may reinforce this dynamic. Moral discourse does not merely express convictions; in certain contexts it can also be used to seek status. The literature on moral grandstanding examines precisely the motivation to use moral discourse for that purpose. In several studies conducted in the United States, this motivation was associated with status-seeking traits and with greater political and moral conflict; subsequent work found associations between its prestige-oriented dimension, more ideologically extreme positions, and greater affective polarization (Grubbs et al., 2019, 2020).
The reasoning should not be reversed. These findings are primarily correlational and do not justify concluding that someone who denounces an injustice is doing so to gain status, nor do they allow a person’s motivation to be inferred from the position defended. They do, however, introduce another relevant element: a moral controversy can also become an arena of competition within a group, where displaying sensitivity, commitment, or firmness may reinforce belonging and position within that group.
Attention Feeds Back on Itself
Social feedback in attention predates the Internet. Newspapers, radio, television, and ordinary conversation already allowed prior visibility to generate further discussion and additional coverage.
Social media did not create this phenomenon, but it changed some of its conditions. It dramatically reduces the cost and time required to retransmit a message, makes many reactions from other people visible, and provides continuous information about which types of content generate attention.
Two studies illustrate an important feature of this environment. Moral and emotional language was associated with greater diffusion in a sample of 563,312 Twitter messages (Brady et al., 2017), while references to the political out-group were particularly strong predictors of diffusion in 2,730,215 political posts on Facebook and Twitter (Rathje, Van Bavel, & van der Linden, 2021). These findings do not demonstrate that social media itself creates polarization, but they suggest that certain kinds of moralized and adversary-focused content may encounter particularly favorable conditions for circulation.
According to the hypothesis proposed here, social media therefore does not create the moral attractor. It can act as an accelerator of pre-existing social mechanisms. Attention can acquire a certain inertia and depend not only on the severity of an event but also on its ability to generate content that people want to comment on, share, and use within their own disputes. Severity and public visibility may be related, but they are not the same thing.
The Moral Attractor
The pieces can now be brought together. According to the hypothesis proposed here, an issue would be more likely to dominate public debate when several conditions coincide: sufficient psychological proximity to make it intelligible, enough difference to allow moral judgment, identifiable victims, events capable of sustaining competing narratives, values regarded as sacred, relevant historical memories, and the possibility of projecting internal political divisions onto the conflict. The use of positions as signals of identity or moral status may contribute as well.
If, in addition, the issue encounters a communication environment capable of rapidly circulating morally charged images, stories, and accusations, these factors may reinforce one another. The result would be a possible divergence between consequential relevance, practical relevance, and psychological relevance: an external conflict may acquire public centrality that cannot be explained solely by the severity of its consequences, its geographic proximity, or the actual ability to intervene in it.
A Conflict That Combines Many of the Ingredients
One contemporary case that appears to combine many of these conditions is the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Applying the hypothesis does not require claiming that this conflict receives “too much” attention. The question is different: to what extent can its symbolic centrality in parts of Western public debate be explained solely by the number of victims, the territorial scale, the duration of the conflict, or any other simple measure of severity? Other conflicts involve enormous numbers of victims, prolonged displacement, repression, long-term refugee populations, and unresolved territorial disputes. Comparing them does not diminish the importance of Israel and Palestine; it allows consideration of which additional factors contribute to the conflict’s salience.
The conflict is especially legible through several Western categories. Israel may be perceived as close because of its political and electoral institutions, universities, companies, media, internal debates, and close links with Europe and the United States. At the same time, the Palestinian experience can readily be incorporated into contemporary Western frameworks involving self-determination, colonialism, inequality, refugees, and human rights. For different reasons, both sides provide familiar elements for Western moral disputes.
For those who perceive Israel as belonging to a nearby political and moral sphere, that proximity may raise expectations. A transgression attributed to an actor regarded as close may be psychologically more significant than a similar transgression attributed to an actor perceived as outside the relevant reference group. The analogy with the black sheep effect does not demonstrate that this occurs in every case, but it offers a plausible mechanism.
At the same time, the conflict provides a powerful narrative structure. At the state and military level, Israel, as a state with an army, air force, and considerable technological capacity, can easily be represented as the agent, while a Palestinian population without a sovereign state and with far less military power can easily be represented as the patient. That structure can change, however, when terrorist attacks, kidnappings, or killings of Israeli civilians are considered. The roles of agent and patient vary according to the episode and timescale chosen as the frame of reference.
Competing narratives may privilege different starting points: 1948, 1967, a negotiation, an intifada, a withdrawal, an attack, a bombing, October 7, or the war that followed. Changing the starting point can profoundly alter the perceived moral structure. This is not because all starting points are equally appropriate, but because the timescale selected influences which actions appear as cause, response, aggression, or retaliation.
Sacred or difficult-to-negotiate values are also involved: Jerusalem, land, holy sites, the right of return, security, and self-determination. There are also two historical memories of victimization carrying enormous identity significance. The Holocaust occupies a central place in contemporary European moral memory and in modern Jewish history. The Nakba and the subsequent decades of displacement and conflict, in turn, play a central role in Palestinian national identity. Both memories are readily recognizable within contemporary moral language, although they lead to very different political interpretations.
The conflict thus combines cultural proximity, sacred values, memories of victimization, narrative shifts between the roles of agent and patient, involvement by Western powers, and a frequent flow of morally charged images and events. According to the hypothesis developed here, this combination may help it function as a moral attractor.
The dispute over the roles of aggressor and victim acquires additional importance in this context. If, under certain conditions, identifying someone as a victim can confer moral credit, determining who occupies that position becomes more than a descriptive matter and may also influence the general evaluation of each side. The choice of starting point, timescale, or central episodes can therefore alter not only the causal explanation of the conflict but also the intuitive distribution of innocence, blame, and legitimacy.
Israel and Palestine as a Western Battleground
This makes it possible to consider a possibility that can be overlooked when the question is reduced to which side is right: part of the Western debate about Israel and Palestine may not be exclusively about Israel and Palestine.
The conflict can become an arena for debates about colonialism, nationalism, religion, terrorism, racism, the West, the United States, immigration, minorities, human rights, the Holocaust, Europe’s colonial legacy, capitalism, left and right, what it means to be progressive, what it means to defend a democracy, and who can be considered a victim. In this sense, events occurring thousands of kilometers away can be incorporated into political and moral disputes that already existed within Western societies.
If the conflict also functions as an identity marker, participating in the debate can fulfill functions beyond understanding the Middle East accurately: it may also help locate a person within Western moral disputes. This possibility does not allow the motivations of any particular individual to be inferred, but it broadens the range of mechanisms that may contribute to the intensity of the debate.
An Explanation That Requires No Conspiracy
The hypothesis has another advantage: it does not require assuming that millions of people are antisemitic, that millions of people hate Palestinians, or that the media are being centrally manipulated. Nor does it require assuming that the attention devoted to the conflict is necessarily unjustified.
The hypothesis instead relies on a combination of relatively ordinary mechanisms: psychological proximity, identity, guilt, moralization, competition between closely related groups, competitive victimhood, sacred values, the search for coherence, and communication systems that favor certain kinds of content. None of these mechanisms needs to be sufficient on its own, and their relative importance may vary across individuals, groups, and historical moments. The aggregate result may nevertheless appear designed even when no one designed it.
This does not exclude the possibility that antisemitism, Islamophobia, political interests, propaganda, genuine solidarity, humanitarian concern, religious commitments, or geopolitical calculations may also operate in particular individuals, organizations, or movements. A general explanation need not deny these specific causes. It seeks instead to explore why this conflict appears especially capable of activating many of them simultaneously.
When an External Conflict Becomes an Internal Dispute
For this reason, simply asking why the West pays so much attention to Israel and Palestine may yield an incomplete answer. A more interesting question concerns the conditions under which an external conflict, in addition to mattering because of its consequences, begins to function as an arena for internal disputes: which values should prevail, to whom the roles of victim and aggressor are assigned, how a society interprets its own history, and what kind of society it considers desirable.
According to the hypothesis proposed here, such a transformation would be more likely when a conflict is sufficiently close in psychological and cultural terms to be intelligible, even if it is geographically distant or not especially susceptible to intervention from the West. Other contributing conditions may include recognizable victims and responsible actors, enough complexity to sustain competing narratives, significant historical memories and values, pre-existing political divisions into which the conflict can be incorporated, and a continuous flow of events capable of reactivating the discussion. Under such conditions, psychological relevance may grow through mechanisms that are partly independent of moral or practical relevance.
Israel and Palestine may therefore occupy so much space in the Western consciousness not only because of the real severity of the consequences or the Western interests involved, but also because the conflict provides an especially fertile arena in which disagreements already present within the West can be represented. In looking there, the West also debates itself. This capacity to transform psychological and symbolic relevance into public centrality, partly independently of consequential or practical relevance, is what has been called here a moral attractor.
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Methodology
This article was produced through a model of human conceptual leadership and AI-delegated editorial execution. The author provided the thesis, examples, objections, revision criteria, and editorial decisions. The AI developed the prose, proposed reorganizations and alternative formulations, searched for and checked references, and maintained the master version of the text—that is, the documentary reference against which successive changes were applied. The author critically reviewed successive versions and approved the final version.
Method summary: conceptual leadership, human; drafting and master version, AI; reference search and checking, AI; critical review and final approval, human.
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