Critical review of Article 11 in the New England Journal of Public Policy, 37, 1, 2025

Dear editors,

in June 2025, your journal New England Journal of Public Policy published an article by Scott Atran, Ángel Gómez et al. entitled How Gaza Sees the 2023–2025 War and the Future of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. The article comprises an analysis of the results of a opinion survey carried out in Gaza earlier this year. I am writing to alert you to the methodological errors, reproducibility issues and possible falsification / fabrication of data or results that it contains which, in my opinion and that of my colleagues, are serious enough to warrant its retraction from the Special Issue: Ending Wars.  

In this review, I examine the serious shortcomings of this publication and their consequences: casting suspicion on the Gazan civilian population for not wanting peace and holding them responsible for their massacre. On such a highly sensitive issue, rigorous analysis is essential to the prestige of our community of social scientists.

The first deficiency is the failure to define the terms used, as no distinction is made between war and genocide. Over the last year and a half, the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and human rights NGOs have published reports containing multiple indications of genocide against the civilian population of Gaza by the State of Israel, resulting in approximately 84,000 deaths, more than half of whom are women, children, and people over 65, according to the UN. This is not a war between two armies, but a military attack and siege by the armed forces of a state against the civilian population, declared by the State of Israel to be a response to attacks carried out by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023.  Such a response has been qualified by international jurists as totally disproportionate and contrary to international law. Is an article that does not clearly define concepts and does not contextualize the situation being analyzed scientific?

Secondly, there is no technical data sheet, methodological section, or link to the details of the supposedly representative survey on which the analysis is based. The article simply states that the survey was conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in January 2025. On the PSR website, we find a report on a survey conducted in May 2025 with the required methodological note and a description of the difficulties in conducting a representative survey among displaced persons. The New England Journal of Public Policy article merely informs that 500 personal interviews were conducted, with a margin of error of 4% in the responses, and that "insincere" responses were ignored. Is an analysis without a methodological section and with the elimination of those interviewees that the interviewers claim without justification to be lacking sincerity scientific? In any serious study based on opinion surveys, questions are carefully designed to detect inconsistencies and then these cases are included in the analysis or, if they are excluded, the selection bias this entails is reported, but such interviewees are not eliminated at the information gathering stage without any control over representativeness.

The sixth paragraph states that Gazans strongly value their religious and national identity and are very attached to their territory, values that make them endure great sacrifices and distance them from a negotiated solution. How can Gazans not endure great sacrifices when they have been under blockade for 18 years, during the last two of which they have been totally confined and have been bombed, besieged, deprived of food, water, and medical care? The PSR survey of May 2025 also shows the continuous displacement from one refuge to another imposed on them by the Israeli army: 47% responded that they had to move between two and three times, 34% between four and six times, 4% between seven and ten times, and 6% only once. The Palestinian “right of return” is identified as a “sacred value” and is explicitly compared to the longing of diaspora Jews for Zion. The right of living Palestinians, and that of their children and grandchildren, to return to the houses and land from which they were violently expelled only 77 years ago in the context of a series of massacres and destruction of towns and villages by Israeli forces described in official Israeli documents declassified in the 1990s is explicitly recognized in United Nations resolution 194. Qualifying this right as a “sacred value” and comparing it to the attachment of the Jewish people to the region of origin of their religion thousands of years ago, accompanied by almost-impossible-to-substantiate claims of genetic descendancy from the ancient inhabitants of this region, clearly calls into question the validity of the rather nebulous notion of “sacred value” adopted by the authors. What are the limits of this concept? Could the right to life also be classified as a “sacred value” by the authors? The comparison described points to the authors’ definitions and research being unscientifically shaped by having an axe to grind, increasing the suspicion of fabrication or falsification of data.

On that note, the article states that 47% of Gazans support the “dissolution of Israel” while 48% support the two-state solution. The latter percentage is confirmed by the subsequent PSR survey, in which it is notable that none of the interviewees are said to advocate the “dissolution of Israel”; rather, 24% prefer a confederation between two states, 18% support the establishment of a single state with equality for all citizens, and the rest do not know or did not answer. It should be noted that many respondents believe that the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank is making the two-state solution increasingly difficult. Who designed the questionnaire, with what intention, and how was it constructed?

Figure 2 of the article states that 33% of Gazans do not feel represented by any Palestinian political party, while in the PSR survey only 15% say they do not support any party. How can these inconsistencies between the two surveys be explained?

Figure 3 shows that the more a value is sacralized and the more one feels fused with one's nation or reference group, the more sacrifices one is willing to make to defend those values. Are we comparing 20% of Gazans who feel Palestinian and support Sharia law with Moroccan fundamentalists and Spanish nationalists to insinuate that Gazans, and by implication all Palestinians, are by nature undemocratic? Is it reasonable to ask some people about their support for Sharia law and others about their support for democracy and then compare their answers on two different political concepts? Is it technically correct to compare the survey data on Gazans with that of several studies, one in two fundamentalist Moroccan neighborhoods and another with volunteers in Spain?

In the following paragraphs, the Gazan civilian population is again confused and compared with people from armed groups (the US army) and radicalized groups (ISIS and the Kurdish PKK) to suggest that the victims of the Israeli massacre are religious fanatics who do not care about sacrificing their lives and those of their loved ones because they sanctify Sharia law. Is it rigorous and scientific to compare civilians with militiamen?

Finally, it is claimed that only 10% of Gazans humanize Israelis, and a multivariate statistical analysis model is used to show that there is a positive correlation between humanizing the "enemy," trusting Israel, sanctifying Palestinian-Israeli peace, supporting contacts and interaction between the two peoples, and the goal of being willing to make sacrifices for peace. Is it appropriate to draw conclusions about the possibilities of a peace process by analyzing only one side of the conflict? Is it rigorous to ignore the results of a representative survey in Israel, in which 82% of Israeli Jews support the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries?

Finally, a very poorly substantiated claim is made: "When seemingly indivisible and non-negotiable 'sacred values' are at stake, we find cross-cultural evidence of protracted and seemingly intractable conflicts, such as the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the nuclear standoff with Iran, and the fight against the Islamic State, in which agreements are not accepted if they require abandoning those values." There are several agreements of mutual recognition and cooperation between Israel and various Arab states, such as Sudan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, for whom Sharia law is a "sacred value," which does not prevent them from reaching agreements with the State of Israel. How do the authors assess this inconsistency or exception?

In summary, the article "How Gaza sees the 2023-2025 war and the future of the conflict between Israel and Palestine" does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the possibilities of a successful peace process based on empirical evidence or rigorous scientific analysis due to the fact that this article does not meet the criteria of a scientific study, and its analysis is partial and inconsistent with other empirical evidence. In the interest of this recently-relaunched journal not bringing itself into disrepute, I request that you seriously consider retracting this article from the journal.

Yours sincerely,

Teresa Jurado Guerrero, Professor of Sociology (UNED, Madrid, Spain), August 2025