Who Is Preventing Peace? Reading the Parties’ Own Conditions, the Recorded Votes and the Conflict Datasets

No conflict dataset and no official body publishes a ranking of which parties obstruct peace: the World Bank and United Nations’ Pathways for Peace (2018) places primary responsibility for prevention on states, states that effective prevention also requires civil society, the private sector, regional bodies and international organizations, and issues no list of obstructing actors. What the record does hold is dated, signed documents: an Israeli Basic Law enacted in 2018 that reserves national self-determination to the Jewish people, upheld by Israel’s Supreme Court on 8 July 2021; a United States security-assistance memorandum signed on 14 September 2016 setting $38 billion across fiscal years 2019 to 2028, subject to appropriation; and four recorded congressional votes between 2021 and 2024 on that assistance, passing by margins from 420 to 9 down to 226 to 196. The question underneath the search is a plain one: if every party says it wants the fighting to end, who is holding it open? The answer available in the record is a set of stated conditions, enacted texts and appropriations, not a name.

Key Findings

• The World Bank and United Nations’ Pathways for Peace (2018) assigns primary responsibility for conflict prevention to states and names four further categories of actor whose participation it says prevention requires; it publishes no ranking of parties that obstruct it.
• Israel’s Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (2018) states that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People,” and the Israeli Supreme Court dismissed the petitions against it on 8 July 2021 while holding that the Knesset could not deny the state’s core democratic identity.
• The United States has provided $174 billion in bilateral assistance and missile-defense funding to Israel since the Second World War, per Congressional Research Service report RL33222, and the 2016 memorandum of understanding sets $38 billion for fiscal years 2019 to 2028, of which $33 billion is Foreign Military Financing.
• The Uppsala Conflict Data Program has coded armed conflicts since 1946 and ACLED has coded political violence and protest events since its founding in 2005; none of the three publishes an actor-level measure of obstruction.
• In antisemitic comments coded under leading British media Facebook pages, 27.9% assigned Israel sole guilt for the May 2021 escalation, out of 1,504 UK comments of which 26.9% were coded antisemitic (Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022, peer-reviewed).

Which conditions do the parties’ own documents state?

Israel’s Foreign Ministry, in a position statement last updated 17 September 2025, puts one of its conditions in countable form: 48 hostages, living and deceased, remained in captivity as of 14 September 2025, 712 days after the abduction, on Israel’s own reported count.

The founding text is older and shorter. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read on 14 May 1948 and published in Official Gazette Number 1, appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” The two official English translations differ on one word in the adjacent equality clause: the Knesset publishes “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex,” while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the same sentence with “all its inhabitants.” The Hebrew is the original; both English texts are translations of it.

The most recent enacted text is narrower. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted in 2018, addresses self-determination, Jerusalem, the status of Hebrew and Arabic, Jewish immigration and Jewish settlement, in the Knesset’s own English translation, which it labels unofficial. Clause 7 states: “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” None of the published clauses provides for a second state, and none contains an equality clause.

Movement during the current ceasefire is documented only by one side. The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories dates the ceasefire’s start to 10 October 2025 and reports 18,000 tons of medical supplies and medicines entering Gaza since then, its own count, published by a party to the events and not independently verified.

Is one government the principal obstacle to peace?

It is often said that Israel’s government is the principal obstacle because it opposes Palestinian statehood, and equally often said that Hamas and allied armed factions are, because they reject a settlement. The documentable part of the first claim is a single clause: the 2018 Basic Law states that national self-determination in Israel “is exclusive to the Jewish People,” and Israel’s highest court left that clause standing.

That ruling is worth reading in both halves. In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, heard by an eleven-justice panel on 22 December 2020 and decided on 8 July 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed fifteen petitions and upheld the Basic Law. In the same judgment it held that the Knesset as constituent authority is “not all powerful” and has no authority, even by Basic Law, to deny or facially contradict the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic, a limit the Court derived from the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and its own case law. The law stands, and the Court set a constitutional ceiling above it.

On the other side of the claim, what this record holds is counts rather than declarations. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a research institute, reports 1,184 Israelis confirmed killed on the single day of 7 October 2023, with 1,664 confirmed killed and 17,809 wounded cumulatively as of 5 September 2024; no official body is credited for the cumulative figures. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, in a 2025 essay, derives a ceiling of at most 41,000 civilian war-related deaths in Gaza by its own arithmetic, and states on the same page that neither the Gaza Ministry of Health total nor Israel’s count of fighters killed “has been independently confirmed.”

The one framework here that assigns responsibility assigns it structurally. Pathways for Peace (World Bank and United Nations, 2018) places primary responsibility for prevention on states and holds that effective prevention also requires civil society, the private sector, regional bodies and international organizations. It names no obstructing party and publishes no ranking.

What does Israel’s own record state about ending the fighting?

Israel’s own published counts are the largest body of figures either party has put on this record. The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories reports 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering Gaza between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, its own count, resting on self-declaration by humanitarian organizations and private-sector suppliers rather than on weighing at the crossings.

The investigation figure cannot be read without the threshold that produced it. The Military Advocate General’s Corps states that in armed conflict, “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” Against that standard, the Corps reports over 1,000 incidents referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, with hundreds still undergoing assessment at the time of writing. The 74 are investigations opened, not findings, indictments or convictions, and the Corps states that the Military Advocate General “is subject only to the law on professional matters and operates with full independence,” with decisions appealable to Israel’s Attorney General and the Supreme Court.

The doctrine sits alongside the machinery. The IDF’s ethical code requires that a soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners.” That records the standard the force sets for itself; it is not evidence about conduct in any particular incident.

What do outside backers commit to in writing?

The United States commitment is a signed instrument with a number in it. The memorandum of understanding signed at Washington on 14 September 2016 sets $38 billion in security assistance across fiscal years 2019 to 2028, and its own text makes the levels “subject to the appropriation and availability of funds,” so the memorandum fixes a schedule rather than obligating money.

Congressional Research Service report RL33222 states the composition: $33 billion in Foreign Military Financing plus $5 billion in missile-defense appropriations, requested as $3.3 billion and $500 million a year. The same report puts cumulative bilateral assistance and missile-defense funding to Israel at $174 billion in current dollars, the largest cumulative total of any recipient since the Second World War, and records $8.7 billion in combined Foreign Military Financing and missile-defense funding appropriated in fiscal 2024. The accompanying letter to the 2016 memorandum records Israel’s commitment not to seek Foreign Military Financing above the agreed levels for the framework’s duration.

The appropriations themselves are on the recorded votes. H.R. 5323, a $1 billion standalone Iron Dome appropriation, passed the House 420 to 9 with 2 voting present on 23 September 2021; 420 of the 431 members recording a position is 97.4%. H.R. 8034, the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024, passed 366 to 58 on 20 April 2024, or 86.3% of the 424 voting, with Republicans 193 to 21 and Democrats 173 to 37. The Senate agreed to H.R. 815, the national security supplemental carrying Israel, Ukraine and Indo-Pacific assistance, 79 to 18 on 23 April 2024.

One comparison inside the series is instructive. H.R. 6126, substantively the same Israel assistance paired with a rescission of IRS funding as its offset, passed 226 to 196 on 2 November 2023, near party lines. The two House votes differ by 140 votes, and the variable between them is the offset, not the assistance.

Does outside support make settlements more or less durable?

Prevention, in the one framework here that assigns responsibility, is distributed across five categories of actor: Pathways for Peace (World Bank and United Nations, 2018) places primary responsibility on states and holds that effective prevention also requires civil society, the private sector, regional bodies and international organizations, which is the operational machinery it describes.

The measured version of the question is about recurrence rather than blame. “How International Support Can Help Prevent Conflict Recurrence,” published in International Studies Quarterly volume 66, issue 1 (2022), takes external support after a settlement as its subject and asks whether it changes the odds that fighting resumes. The unit of analysis is the settlement, not a named power, and the finding is framed as an association between forms of support and recurrence.

That distinction is what separates the measured literature from the circulating claim. A claim that the United States, Russia, China, the European Union or the United Nations frustrates a settlement is a claim about an actor’s effect; the peer-reviewed work here measures the direction of external involvement across cases, and no measured finding in this evidence base attributes obstruction to a named external power. The instruments in the previous section record what one backer committed and what its legislature appropriated, and those records document money and margins, not effect.

Can conflict datasets identify who blocks peace?

The longest-running conflict dataset reaches back eight decades and codes deaths, not obstruction: the Uppsala Conflict Data Program covers armed conflicts since 1946, with battle-related deaths manually coded from news sources into an event-year dataset, as the World Bank’s How Much Is Prevention Worth? (2018) describes its construction.

The other two widely used sources are built the same way, around events rather than actors’ intentions. ACLED, founded in 2005, codes political violence and protest events.

What follows from their design is a plain absence. An event-year dataset records who was party to a conflict, where, and how many died; it does not record which party declined which settlement, and none of the three publishes an actor-level obstruction ranking. A ranked list of parties preventing peace is therefore not a finding any of these series produces, and any such list rests on case-specific documents of the kind the earlier sections cite.

Where do measured public sympathies sit now?

Gallup’s February 2025 reading puts 46% of US adults sympathizing more with the Israelis, the lowest in the 25 years of its trend (n = 1,004, fielded 3 to 16 February 2025, margin of error ±4 points).

The comparison points come from the same series. In February 2010, 63% sympathized more with the Israelis, the highest reading since 1991 (n = 1,025, ±4 points). In February 2025, 33% sympathized more with the Palestinians, the highest in the trend by two points. The partisan split moved first: Gallup’s February 2023 reading was the first in which Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians (49%) than the Israelis (38%), and by 2025 Republicans stood at 75% with the Israelis and Democrats at 59% with the Palestinians. On a separate question, 55% of US adults in 2025 favored establishing an independent Palestinian state, in line with readings since 2020. Gallup’s question is a forced choice between two named parties, so it measures relative sympathy and not any view on assistance or conditions, and Gallup’s own 2018 methodology work documents that the question’s placement within a survey changes the shares it produces.

Among the youngest cohort, a separate academic poll measured attitudes rather than sympathies. The Fall 2025 Yale Youth Poll, a national survey of US registered voters, found two-thirds of voters rejected all three antisemitic statements it tested, while 10% of voters aged 18 to 34 agreed with all three against 2% of voters 65 and older, and about one in five young respondents supported boycotting Jewish American-owned businesses over the war in Gaza. Younger voters in that poll were more likely both to hold these attitudes and to hold anti-Israel views. How measured opinion relates to legislative behavior is the subject of a separate report on congressional support and public opinion.

How does the blame question appear in online discourse?

Where the blame question is answered inside antisemitic comment corpora, one framing leads: 27.9% of the antisemitic comments coded by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed) under leading British media Facebook pages assigned Israel sole guilt for the May 2021 escalation, out of 1,504 UK comments of which 26.9% were coded antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme.

The same study reports that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, so the framing is often carried by the conversation rather than by the sentence. Prevalence in unmoderated spaces is measured on different corpora: Zannettou and colleagues (2020, peer-reviewed) found the word “jew” in 1,993,432 posts on 4chan’s /pol/ board (3.0% of 67.4 million posts) and, in random samples of 100 posts containing it, judged 42% hateful on both /pol/ and Gab.

Coordination in the wartime conversation has been measured and bounded. Elmas and colleagues (2026, preprint) analyzed 4,570,633 tweets from 1,521,433 users between 1 September and 15 December 2023 and identified 11 coordinated groups involving 541 accounts; of 191 highly amplified coordinated posts, 12 were assessed as misleading, concentrated in 3 of the 11 groups, while the remaining groups primarily engaged in advocacy, religious solidarity or humanitarian mobilization. The authors document amplification and make no finding of centralized or external financing.

Attitudes measured in a backing state during the war ran along two separate paths. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025, peer-reviewed) primed British samples with war-in-Gaza material in two experiments (N = 354 and N = 490) and report that political orientation was positively associated with anti-Jewish hostility through social dominance orientation, and that conservative orientation was negatively associated with antisemitism through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people, an identity-based pathway the authors describe as conflating attitudes toward Israel with prejudice toward Jews. Both are correlational associations from experimental samples, as the authors state.

Methodology and limitations

This report draws on five source types, each labelled where it is used: enacted legislation and founding instruments (Knesset, 2018; Provisional Government of Israel, 1948); a domestic court judgment (Israeli Supreme Court, HCJ 5555/18, 2021); official records of the United States government (the 2016 memorandum of understanding, Congressional Research Service report RL33222, and four recorded congressional votes); parties’ own published counts (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Israel Defense Forces, the Military Advocate General’s Corps, and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories); and peer-reviewed research plus one preprint on discourse and attitudes.

Where the question is contested, what is measured here is the documentary record and the discourse around it, not the merits of the underlying dispute.

Several limits bind specific figures. Every Israeli count cited is the publishing party’s own reporting, not an independently verified or neutral tally; the aid tonnages rest on self-declaration rather than weighing at crossings, and figures written as “over” or “approximately” are floors and approximations. The Military Advocate General’s 74 investigations are a function of the threshold quoted in the body and are investigations opened, not findings or convictions. The Begin-Sadat Center’s cumulative casualty figures credit no official body, and the Jerusalem Center’s 41,000 is that publisher’s own arithmetic on inputs supplied by parties to the conflict, stated as a ceiling. The Knesset labels its English translation of the Basic Law unofficial, and the two official English texts of the 1948 Declaration differ on one word in the equality clause, as noted where they are quoted.

On the survey and discourse evidence: Gallup’s sympathies question is a forced choice between two named parties, and Gallup’s own methodology work documents that its placement within a survey changes the resulting shares. Becker and colleagues’ sub-shares are shares of the antisemitic comments coded, not of all comments, and its categories are not mutually exclusive. Elmas and colleagues (2026) is a preprint. Zannettou and colleagues describe their meme counts as a conservative lower bound.

One structural limit shapes the whole question. No dataset in the field publishes an actor-level measure of obstruction: the Uppsala Conflict Data Program codes battle-related deaths and ACLED codes events, so a ranked list of parties preventing peace has no dataset behind it and rests on the documents named above.

Conclusion

So if every party says it wants the fighting to end, who is holding it open? The record answers with paperwork rather than a name. The one framework that assigns responsibility, Pathways for Peace (2018), gives it to states and to four further categories of actor and stops; the three datasets that cover armed conflict from 1946, from 1990 to 2022, and from 2005 code deaths, conflicts and events, and none of them codes obstruction.

What is specific is specific. Israel’s 2018 Basic Law reserves national self-determination to the Jewish people and none of its published clauses provides for a second state, and Israel’s own Supreme Court left that text standing on 8 July 2021 while holding that the Knesset could not deny the state’s democratic core. The Israeli government publishes its conditions and its counts in volume, 48 hostages held as of 14 September 2025 and 1,778,363 tons of food across the ceiliving period to 7 June 2026, and publishes them as its own. The principal outside backer’s commitment is a signed $38 billion schedule expressly subject to appropriation, and its legislature has appropriated on margins of 420 to 9, 366 to 58 and 79 to 18, with the one near-party-line vote turning on an IRS offset rather than on the assistance. Meanwhile the sympathies of that backer’s public moved from 63% in 2010 to 46% in 2025. Every one of those is checkable, and not one of them is a culprit.

The discourse does not stop there. In the antisemitic comments coded under British media pages in 2022, 27.9% answered the same blame question by assigning one party sole guilt, and 42% of sampled posts containing “jew” on two unmoderated platforms were judged hateful. A question whose honest answer is a stack of statutes, filings and roll calls is a question with an unsatisfying answer, and the unsatisfying answer is exactly the gap into which a single hidden culprit fits. Whether the appetite for one name, in a dispute the record answers only in documents, is itself among the inputs that feed the oldest of those culprit stories is a question worth putting to anyone who has watched the feed answer faster than the record can.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which body assigns responsibility for preventing violent conflict?

The World Bank and United Nations’ Pathways for Peace (2018) states that states hold the primary responsibility for prevention, and that effective prevention also requires civil society, the private sector, regional bodies and international organizations. It is a framework for who acts, and it publishes no ranking of who obstructs.

Does the 2016 memorandum of understanding obligate the money?

No. The text signed at Washington on 14 September 2016 states that the funding levels are “subject to the appropriation and availability of funds,” so it sets a level and a schedule that Congress must still appropriate. The accompanying letter records Israel’s commitment not to seek Foreign Military Financing above the agreed levels for the framework’s duration.

Why did two House votes on the same Israel assistance differ by 140 votes?

H.R. 6126, which paired the assistance with a rescission of IRS funding as its offset, passed 226 to 196 on 2 November 2023; H.R. 8034, without the offset, passed 366 to 58 on 20 April 2024, per the recorded votes at congress.gov. The variable between them was the legislative packaging, not the assistance.

If conflict datasets do not code obstruction, what do they code?

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program codes battle-related deaths manually from news sources into an event-year dataset covering armed conflicts since 1946, as the World Bank’s How Much Is Prevention Worth? (2018) describes. ACLED, founded in 2005, codes political violence and protest events.

What does Israel’s Military Advocate General’s Corps say about its own independence?

In its own words, “The MAG is subject only to the law on professional matters and operates with full independence,” with decisions “subject to civilian oversight” and challengeable before Israel’s Attorney General and the Supreme Court. That is the Corps’ own description of its position, published in 2024 by a party to the events it examines.

How is antisemitism in the wartime online conversation measured?

Expert annotation against the IHRA definition is the common method: Jikeli and colleagues (2022, peer-reviewed) coded 4,016 English-language tweets and found 11.2% of conversations containing “Jews” antisemitic between January 2019 and August 2020, and 13.1% of tweets containing “Israel” in 2020. Ron and colleagues (2023, preprint) annotated a 1,050-tweet sample from 2,923,129 tweets across five multi-label discourse categories, with abuse the most common and Holocaust denial the least.

Sources

• ACLED, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, founded 2005. Conflict-event dataset covering political violence and protest events. acleddata.com. Monitoring and data organization.
• Becker, M., Ascone, L., and Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French, and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
• Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, 2025. The Gaza Terror Offensive, 1 August to 5 September 2024. besacenter.org. Research institute.
• Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), 2026. Humanitarian Situation Report During the Ceasefire. gaza-aid-data.gov.il. Official record, the party’s own reported counts.
• Elmas, T., Silva, M., Pote, M., Dey, S., Chang, H., Ye, S., Luceri, L., Buntain, C., Ferrara, E., Flammini, A., and Menczer, F., 2026. Israel-Hamas War on X: A Case Study of Coordinated Campaigns and Information Integrity. arXiv:2604.10566. Preprint.
• Gallup, 2010 and 2025. Middle East sympathies trend series. news.gallup.com/poll/1639. Survey organization.
• How International Support Can Help Prevent Conflict Recurrence, 2022. International Studies Quarterly, 66(1), article sqab091. academic.oup.com/isq/article/66/1/sqab091/6454667. Peer-reviewed.
• Israel Defense Forces, 2025. Clearing Up the Misconceptions: Everything You Need to Know About the Humanitarian Aid Situation in Gaza. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own reported counts.
• Israel Defense Forces. The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces (ethical code). idf.il. Official record, the party’s own published doctrine.
• Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own reported counts.
• Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, 2025. Israel’s Objectives and Current Operation. embassies.gov.il. Official record, the party’s own reported counts.
• Israeli Supreme Court, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. versa.cardozo.yu.edu. Official record, court judgment.
• Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute.
• Jikeli, G., Axelrod, D., Fischer, R., Forouzesh, E., Jeong, W., Miehling, D., and Soemer, K., 2022. Differences Between Antisemitic and Non-Antisemitic English Language Tweets. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. DOI 10.1007/s10588-022-09363-2. Peer-reviewed.
• Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, official (unofficial-labelled) English translation. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record, enacted legislation.
• Ozer, S., Obaidi, M., and Bergh, R., 2025. The Impact of Globalized Conflicts: Examining Attitudes Toward Jews Among Britons in the Political Context of the War in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 107. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record, founding instrument.
• Ron, G., Levi, E., Oshri, O., and Shenhav, S., 2023. Factoring Hate Speech: A New Annotation Framework to Study Hate Speech in Social Media. arXiv:2311.03969. Preprint.
• US Congress, 2021 to 2024. Recorded votes on Israel security assistance: House Roll Call 275 (23 September 2021), House Roll Calls 577 (2023) and 152 (2024), Senate Record Vote 154 (23 April 2024). congress.gov. Official record, recorded votes.
• US Congressional Research Service. U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments, report RL33222. congress.gov. Official record, nonpartisan report to Congress.
• US Department of State, 2016. Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and Israel on Security Assistance, signed 14 September 2016. 2009-2017.state.gov. Official record, bilateral executive agreement.
• World Bank, 2018. How Much Is Prevention Worth? documents1.worldbank.org. Official record, institutional research report.
• World Bank and United Nations, 2018. Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict. openknowledge.worldbank.org. Official record, institutional report.
• Yale Youth Poll, 2025. Fall 2025 Poll on Antisemitic Attitudes and Israel-Palestine. youthpoll.yale.edu. Academic poll.
• Zannettou, S., Finkelstein, J., Bradlyn, B., and Blackburn, J., 2020. A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism. ICWSM 2020 (AAAI). DOI 10.1609/icwsm.v14i1.7343. Peer-reviewed.