The even numbered key to Middle East conflict

Ever wonder why Israel and the Palestinians/Arabs/Hezbollah have been at it since 1948? Why there's more intense bloodshed now? Why Northern Ireland was a place of near-constant strife for 150 years?

A psychology professor from Harvard recently published an article in the NY Times where he discusses the two principles of the legitimate use of force and how the human brain regularly short-circuits our ability to follow them.

The two principles of justifiable force are:
1) that your strike must be even numbered (i.e. you are hitting back, not striking first - unless it be an oil-laden country whose leader "hurt your daddy")
2) that your strike not exceed the first in force (proportionality)

However, human brains are poorly wired to follow these principles. The problem with the first principle is simply that people count differently. What seems like the first offense to me seems like a measured response to you, and thus we each perceive that we are dealing out even-numbered strikes.

Proportionality is also short-circuited by the human brain.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

The article illustrates this with a poking game, where two volunteers exchange pokes with instructions to poke back only as hard as they were poked. Despite the instructions, each person averaged 40% more force when returning a poke, quickly escalating the level of force.

In other words, these world-capturing conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere are simply large-scale human fallibility. Israel strikes at Hezbollah for capturing soldiers, while Hezbollah does that in retaliation for a previous offense. Each retaliation changes which strike is even-numbered, and no one remembers where it began.