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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Joseph Dillard's Simplification of the Middle East

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Joseph Dillard's “Simplifying the Israel/Palestine Conflict” (December 2023) is one of his more forceful interventions in the long-running debate about Israel, Palestine and the role of Integral Theory. It is also revealing because Dillard is attempting two things at once. He wants to make a substantive argument about Israel and Gaza, but he also wants to use the conflict as a case against Ken Wilber's integral framework itself.

There is much to appreciate in the first objective. Dillard is right to insist that moral language should not substitute for concrete political action, that power asymmetries matter, that international law cannot simply be invoked when convenient, and that developmental jargon is not a substitute for diplomacy, deterrence, sanctions or institutional accountability. His criticism of the tendency to respond to political atrocities with appeals to empathy, forgiveness, consciousness or “higher” developmental levels is particularly pertinent.

But Dillard's attempt to “simplify” the Middle East ultimately produces a different kind of reductionism. He replaces the excessive complexity of some integral accounts with an overly simple moral binary in which Israel increasingly becomes the explanatory variable for almost everything. His argument is strongest when he criticizes the inadequacy of Integral Theory as a political strategy. It becomes considerably weaker when he presents highly contested historical, legal and geopolitical claims as settled facts.

What Dillard gets right: power matters

The strongest part of the essay is its attack on what might be called “therapeutic geopolitics.”

Dillard begins by rejecting Wilber's suggestion that Hamas and Israel “need therapy,” arguing instead that what is required is accountability under international law. That is an important corrective. Psychotherapy may be useful for individuals and societies dealing with trauma, but it cannot substitute for political institutions capable of constraining state power.

Likewise, Dillard is correct that an analysis based exclusively on developmental stages can become politically evasive. Asking whether Israelis or Palestinians are “red,” “blue,” “green” or “second tier” tells us very little about whether a settlement is legally permissible, whether civilians are being protected, whether territory is being annexed or whether a military action is proportionate.

This is perhaps Dillard's most persuasive criticism of Integral Theory. Integralists can become so fascinated by maps of consciousness that they mistake the map for an instrument of political change. A sophisticated analysis of values does not automatically produce sophisticated political action.

Dillard's distinction between values and consequences is therefore valuable. Saying that one supports “human rights,” “dignity,” “security” and “freedom” is cheap. The real question is what one is prepared to do when those principles conflict with one's political loyalties.

That criticism applies not only to Israel's supporters. It applies equally to Western supporters of Ukraine, Russian opponents of NATO, American liberals, European conservatives, pro-Palestinian activists and, indeed, Dillard himself.

But “simple” and “complicated” are not opposites

Dillard's central rhetorical move is to distinguish between complexity and simplicity. The conflict is complicated when viewed through competing truth claims, economic interests and geopolitics, he argues, but comparatively simple when viewed through morality and international law.

There is an important truth here. Legal rules can indeed provide relatively clear standards even when historical circumstances are extraordinarily complicated.

But Dillard then makes an unwarranted leap: because certain acts can be evaluated according to legal principles, the entire conflict becomes morally and politically simple.

It does not.

International law can tell us that deliberately targeting civilians is unlawful. It can tell us that forcible transfer is prohibited, that occupation has legal consequences, that annexation is problematic and that states have obligations toward civilians. But law does not by itself resolve every question of proportionality, military necessity, attribution, intent, sovereignty, self-defence or the legal status of particular territories.

Most importantly, the legal classification of conduct is not identical to a complete historical explanation of the conflict.

Dillard's argument repeatedly slides between these levels.

The historical reductionism

One of the most problematic claims is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict essentially begins with the Nakba and the preceding history of Zionist settlement and displacement, while October 7 is treated as a later episode within that much longer conflict.

Historical context certainly matters. The Nakba is indispensable to understanding Palestinian historical consciousness, just as Jewish persecution in Europe, pogroms, the Holocaust and the history of Jewish statelessness are indispensable to understanding Zionism.

But explaining the conflict requires both histories.

Dillard's narrative is asymmetrical. Jewish historical experience appears primarily as an ideological justification subsequently exploited by Zionism, while Palestinian history appears primarily as the experience of dispossession and resistance. That is not a neutral historical framework. It is a particular interpretation of the conflict.

The danger is that historical explanation becomes moral genealogy: one side's violence is explained by its history, while the other side's history becomes evidence of its culpability.

That is precisely the kind of one-sided narrative that Dillard criticizes in his opponents.

The treatment of Zionism is especially problematic

Dillard repeatedly treats “Israel,” “Zionism,” “Zionists,” “Jewish exceptionalism” and sometimes Jews themselves as practically interchangeable categories.

This is most obvious when he writes that exceptionalism is “fundamental to Zionism and, truth be told, the fundamental ethnic/religious narrative of Judaism,” and subsequently describes Zionism as “Jewish exceptionalism on steroids.”

This is a major conceptual problem.

Judaism is a religion and civilization with enormous internal diversity. Zionism is a modern political movement containing liberal, socialist, revisionist, religious and other traditions. Israel is a state with competing political parties, institutions and ideological currents. None of these categories can simply be collapsed into one another.

Moreover, the theological idea of Jews as a “chosen people” is not equivalent to the political claim that Jews should possess a sovereign nation-state. Nor does Jewish religious exceptionalism automatically entail the dispossession of Palestinians.

One can make a powerful critique of ethnonationalism without turning Judaism itself into the explanatory culprit.

Dillard's formulation therefore undermines his own argument. He wants to expose collective stereotyping, yet he occasionally reproduces it on an enormous scale.

The “dhimmi” problem

There is an especially revealing asymmetry in Dillard's treatment of Jewish history under Muslim rule.

In a footnote he cites the conventional observation that Jews under Islamic rule were classified as dhimmis and received protection and certain rights as “People of the Book.”

That is historically relevant, but Dillard presents it as evidence that Islam had a “very long, well documented history of sharing Palestine with both Jews and Christians.”

This is too rosy.

The dhimmi system was not modern religious equality. Jews and Christians could enjoy protection and considerable communal autonomy, but they were subordinate to Muslims within a legally differentiated social order. The precise rules and their enforcement varied enormously across periods and places. There were long periods of coexistence and relative tolerance, but also episodes of persecution, forced conversion, discriminatory taxation, restrictions and violence.

This matters because Dillard's larger argument is explicitly about equality and domination. He cannot simultaneously condemn Israel for institutionalized hierarchy while presenting historical Muslim-Jewish relations through the much softer vocabulary of “sharing.”

The historical comparison needs more precision.

The genocide question

Dillard's most consequential claim is that Israel was committing genocide. He invokes the UN Genocide Convention and quotes Israeli and Jewish scholars who made that accusation.

There was, and remains, a serious legal and scholarly debate over whether Israeli conduct in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. The allegation is not frivolous, and the enormous civilian suffering makes it morally comprehensible why Dillard adopts such language.

But Dillard often writes as though the legal question has already been settled.

That is problematic because genocide is not simply a synonym for mass killing, devastation or atrocity. Under the Genocide Convention, the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group is central.

Dillard cites statements by Israeli officials as evidence of genocidal intent. That evidence can be relevant. But a serious legal argument must distinguish between inflammatory political rhetoric, military policy, individual criminal acts, systematic conduct and the specific organizational intent required for genocide.

Dillard's essay frequently moves too quickly from horrifying conduct to the most severe possible legal classification.

That weakens rather than strengthens the argument.

“Apartheid” also requires precision

The same problem appears in his treatment of apartheid.

There is a serious basis for discussing Israeli rule over Palestinians in terms of institutionalized domination and racial or ethnic discrimination. Human-rights organizations and scholars have developed substantial arguments for this classification.

But Dillard sometimes treats the word as though its meaning were self-evident and universally applicable to the entire Israeli political system.

The Israeli state is not identical to the occupied West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel proper. The legal and political status of these territories differs substantially. Palestinian citizens of Israel have formal citizenship and voting rights, despite documented discrimination and inequalities. Palestinians living under occupation are in an entirely different legal and political position.

A serious analysis should therefore distinguish among these systems rather than treating “Israel” as one homogeneous apparatus.

Dillard's tendency to collapse these distinctions is one of the central weaknesses of the essay.

The Nazi analogy crosses an important line

The essay becomes particularly problematic when Dillard embraces comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. He reproduces a list of 52 supposed similarities between Zionist Israel and Nazi Germany and concludes that the comparison raises grave ethical questions.

There are legitimate comparisons between different systems of ethnic domination. Historical comparison can illuminate mechanisms of dehumanization, segregation, forced displacement and mass violence.

But “Israel resembles Nazi Germany” is an extraordinarily strong historical claim. The Holocaust was an industrialized project of racial extermination carried out by a totalitarian regime whose central objective was the biological destruction of European Jewry. Israel is a parliamentary state with an authoritarian occupation regime in some territories, a powerful military and serious allegations of war crimes and other violations. These realities can be condemned without pretending that they are historically identical.

Dillard's argument would be much stronger if he resisted the temptation to escalate every comparison to Nazism.

Once everything becomes “genocide,” “Nazi,” “apartheid,” “fascist” and “racist,” the analytical vocabulary begins to lose discriminatory power. Moral outrage becomes rhetorically maximalist.

His treatment of Hamas is also too forgiving

This is perhaps the most striking omission in the essay.

Dillard is absolutely right that Hamas's October 7 attack cannot be used to erase decades of Palestinian history. But the reverse is also true: Palestinian dispossession cannot be used to erase the crimes committed by Hamas.

Dillard objects to what he calls “equivalent responsibility,” correctly observing that Israel and Hamas possess radically unequal military capabilities. But unequal power does not imply unequal moral status in every individual act.

The murder of civilians, hostage-taking and sexual violence cannot become morally secondary simply because the perpetrators are the weaker party.

There is a crucial distinction between explaining terrorism and excusing it.

Dillard is much better at explaining Israeli conduct than Hamas conduct. Consequently, his “power analysis” risks becoming a moral asymmetry in which Israeli violence is subjected to elaborate structural explanation while Palestinian violence is principally explained as resistance to oppression.

A genuinely integral analysis should be capable of holding both propositions simultaneously:

Israel can be the overwhelmingly more powerful actor and therefore bear greater responsibility for the structure of the conflict, while Hamas can nevertheless bear full responsibility for deliberate attacks on civilians.

Those statements are not contradictory.

The argument about self-defence is too categorical

Dillard states that “occupying states do not have a right to self-defense under international law.”

This is an area in which legal doctrine is considerably more complicated than Dillard suggests.

There are serious arguments that the law governing occupation imposes strict limits on how an occupying power may use force and that occupation cannot be used as a permanent justification for suppressing an occupied population. But the proposition that an occupying state simply has no right of self-defence is not an adequate summary of the contemporary legal debate.

Again, Dillard's basic moral intuition is stronger than his formulation.

He does not need an absolute proposition to make his case. The much more defensible claim is that Israel's right to protect its population does not give it unlimited authority to destroy civilian infrastructure, permanently displace civilians, annex territory or disregard the laws of armed conflict.

That is already a formidable argument.

The South Africa analogy is useful—but simplified

Dillard's comparison with South Africa is one of the more productive parts of the essay. He correctly emphasizes that the end of apartheid did not result merely from white South Africans suddenly becoming more enlightened. International pressure, economic sanctions, political mobilization and changing geopolitical circumstances mattered enormously.

This is a valuable lesson for Integral Theory.

Political systems do not necessarily transform because individuals reach higher consciousness. Institutions respond to incentives, constraints and distributions of power.

But Dillard again simplifies the historical record when he reduces the South African transition essentially to an “economic choke-chain.” The end of apartheid involved internal resistance, strikes, mass mobilization, armed struggle, international sanctions, diplomatic pressure, changing business calculations, negotiations, constitutional reform and the collapse of Cold War conditions.

The lesson is therefore not that “sticks” work and “carrots” do not.

The lesson is that political transformation normally requires a combination of pressure, negotiation, institutional redesign and credible guarantees for the interests and security of competing groups.

That is a much more integral conclusion.

Dillard's best critique of Integral Theory

Ironically, the strongest part of Dillard's essay has relatively little to do with Israel.

His fundamental criticism is that integralists sometimes confuse psychological development with political development.

This is important.

A person can meditate deeply and remain politically authoritarian. A society can contain highly educated people while practicing structural injustice. A government can employ sophisticated diplomats while violating international law. A politician can use the language of compassion while pursuing brutal policies.

There is no automatic pipeline from consciousness to justice.

Dillard's attack on “trickle-down spirituality” is therefore quite effective. The assumption that enough enlightened individuals will eventually transform society is indeed not a substitute for institutional analysis.

But Dillard makes the opposite mistake when he implies that consciousness and development are almost irrelevant to political transformation.

They are not.

Institutions are created, defended and transformed by human beings. Political arrangements depend partly on collective beliefs, norms, identities and moral imagination. The abolition of slavery, expansion of democracy, civil-rights movements and international human-rights institutions all involved changes in moral consciousness as well as changes in material power.

The better conclusion is that consciousness is neither sufficient nor irrelevant.

It is one causal factor among many.

The deepest irony

There is an interesting irony at the heart of Dillard's essay.

He accuses Integral Theory of reductionism, but his own account increasingly reduces the conflict to a single explanatory framework: domination by Israel and its Western supporters.

He criticizes integralists for stereotyping populations through developmental categories, yet he describes “Israelis,” “Zionists,” “integralists,” “Western elites” and sometimes “Jews” in similarly broad collective terms.

He criticizes exceptionalism while occasionally treating the Palestinian side primarily as the victim of history rather than as an actor with its own internal divisions, ideologies and political responsibilities.

He criticizes moral certainty in integral circles while displaying considerable certainty about contested historical and legal questions.

And he criticizes Wilber for insufficient attention to complexity while entitling his own essay “Simplifying the Israel/Palestine Conflict.”

That title ultimately describes the central problem of the essay better than Dillard intended.

What would a genuinely integral approach look like?

Dillard is right that Integral Theory should not be used as an excuse for moral neutrality. But the alternative is not to abandon complexity.

A genuinely integral approach would begin with the recognition that several levels of analysis must operate simultaneously.

• At the factual level: What happened?

• At the historical level: How did Zionism, the Holocaust, the Nakba, the occupation, Palestinian nationalism, Hamas, Israeli security doctrine and regional geopolitics produce the present situation?

• At the legal level: Which actions violate international law?

• At the moral level: What obligations do states and non-state actors have toward civilians?

• At the psychological level: How do trauma, fear, humiliation, collective memory and dehumanization perpetuate the conflict?

• At the geopolitical level: How do the United States, Iran, Arab states, Russia, Europe and other powers shape the incentives of the protagonists?

• At the institutional level: What arrangements could actually produce security, political representation and equal rights?

• And finally, at the developmental level: How do identity, nationalism, religion and political ideology shape the capacity of individuals and groups to recognize the legitimacy of the other?

That is not “both-sidesism.” It is simply refusing to let one explanatory level swallow all the others.

Conclusion: a powerful polemic, but not an adequate analysis

Dillard's essay deserves to be taken seriously because its central challenge to Integral Theory is substantial. He is right that developmental jargon does not stop bombs. He is right that meditation does not substitute for law. He is right that appeals to empathy without mechanisms of accountability can become politically impotent. And he is right that an integral worldview should not become a sophisticated way of avoiding difficult moral choices.

But his own analysis ultimately demonstrates the danger at the other extreme.

He replaces developmental reductionism with geopolitical reductionism; “everything is consciousness” becomes “everything is power.” He replaces excessive relativism with excessive certainty. He attacks group stereotyping while occasionally employing collective categories of his own. And by treating highly contested historical and legal interpretations as settled facts, he weakens the very case for accountability that he wants to strengthen.

The most useful lesson to take from Dillard is therefore not his particular verdict on Israel.

It is his challenge to Integral Theory:

if higher consciousness does not translate into concrete concern for law, power, human rights and material suffering, what exactly is its political value?

That is a question integralists should take seriously.

But the corresponding question Dillard needs to answer is equally important:

if moral clarity requires us to simplify a conflict this radically, how do we prevent moral clarity itself from becoming another form of ideological blindness?

That is where Dillard's “simplification” becomes less convincing than the complexity he is trying to escape.