Can Abraham bring peace? The relationship between acknowledging shared religious roots and intergroup conflict.

The paper, in plain language

Testing what interfaith work assumes

Organizations like the Abraham Fund premise their work on shared religious ancestry, largely untested in a live conflict. With Sasha Kimel, Maor Shani, Rasha Alayan and Lotte Thomsen, I measured how acknowledging the Abrahamic family — dual Jewish–Muslim or triple with Christians — relates to peacemaking attitudes among American Jews, Israeli Jews, and Palestinian Muslims in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

An inclusive category that mostly delivers

Among American and Israeli Jews, acknowledging shared lineage tracked warmer feelings toward Muslims, fairer resource allocation, more support for compromise and two-state solutions, and less support for excluding Arab citizens. Reassuringly, the triple category did not trigger the classic in-group projection problem — acknowledgers saw Muslims as more prototypical of the shared category, not less. For Israeli Jews the category worked as a hierarchy-attenuating idea, embraced least by those preferring group dominance. Among Palestinian Muslims the sign flipped: those higher in dominance orientation embraced the category, which paired with warmth toward Jews but colder feelings toward the competing Christian minority — a coalition with the powerful at a subordinate group's expense.

Why it matters

Shared-identity interventions are not one-size-fits-all: the same category can attenuate hierarchy from above and enhance it from below. Interfaith initiatives should watch for exactly the horizontal exclusion we observed. All four studies are correlational — the causal groundwork lies in our earlier experiments — and the Palestinian sample was modest, so the sign-flip needs replication before it hardens into advice.