The Power of Place

But Rozin and Wolf, who released these findings last spring, wanted to sort out the psychology underlying such strong land attachments. So they asked some hypothetical questions about Har Herzl. First, they told the volunteers to imagine that an earthquake hit Jerusalem, destroying the cemetery and removing 50 feet of earth; all of the bodies have been moved to a different burial site. Would you now trade Har Herzl? Then they added another wrinkle: Imagine that, after the earthquake, a prison was built on the site of Har Herzl, specifically for Palestinian political prisoners. The prison has existed for a decade. Would you now trade the land?

The idea was to see what it is about the land that Jews are really attached to emotionally—and what it would take to sever those attachments. And it appears it's the soil that contains the ancestral essences. Following the hypothetical earthquake, significantly fewer were rigidly opposed to trading the land (39 percent of Israelis, compared to 85 percent before the earthquake). Even fewer were opposed to trading after the land had been "contaminated" by the enemy presence in the imaginary prison.

But not all. A significant number of participants held steadfastly to their no-trade views even following the presence of a perceived enemy for 10 years. Land that has long been occupied by an "enemy"—not only in Gaza, but various Mideast regions—should be infused with negative associations and the subjects of the study should not be attached to it. Indeed, if the Hitler-Mother Teresa finding holds true, the negative associations should overpower the positive ones for both groups. Yet many Jews remain attached to enemy-occupied land, just as many Arabs have strong emotional ties to parts of Israel. One possible explanation, the psychologists say, is that original positive associations establish priority, trumping negative essences that come later.

There are of course a lot of other issues at work in the current Gaza conflict, but the scientists controlled for many of them—feelings of vulnerability, political views about Israel, and so forth. They didn't diminish the positive, primal attachment to the land itself. It seems the ancient magic stakes a psychological claim that is hard to shake.

—Wray Herbert writes The We're Only Human blog at www.Psychologicalscience.Org/Onlyhuman .

© 2009