The only thing I know about the experiment is what I've read in this thread, but from the detail we have, I don't think the conclusion about it being easy to indoctrinate children to accept genocide by using such stories is necessarily valid. I don't think that seeing horror in the Chinese army story and not in the Joshua one necessarily means the children's religious beliefs would be more likely to lead to them being persuaded that current-day genocide was a good idea if it was carried out for religious reasons, because it might not have been religious preference that made them more accepting of the story. An example that might have some relevance:
I remember that when I was at primary school, aged about 10, we were told Bible stories about things like the flood, Jericho, and the contest on Mount Carmel where the Bible says Elijah ended up killing the prophets of Baal. I didn't feel any horror at the stories, and I think that was because they had an other-worldly quality, with them containing supernatural things, as if they'd happened to beings far away and long ago in a parallel universe, who weren't much more real than the people we'd heard about in fairy stories. So we got habituated to hearing about them without feeling any unsettling emotions.
I think it would have been different if the stories had been more specific about time and place, especially if they'd said things like, "In the year 4000 BC, God sent a flood to destroy the world. There were a million people living in Britain at the time. All the British people died. Some tried to escape, but the flood got them in the end." I think more detail, such as the suffering of individuals affected, combined with the story being about people we could identify with, might have turned us overnight into rampant anti-theists! If I'd met someone who said they were a Christian after that, I might have said, "How can you worship a God that went out of his way to kill British people!"
With Israeli children, the fact that it was Israelis said to be doing the killing at Jericho might have made the stories come alive more, but they might still have contained an other-worldly quality for the children that detached them from reality a bit, so they weren't hit with a sense of horror at them and they got used to thinking of them as just something that happened a long time ago in the hazy past. Bear in mind that they may well have been taught the Jericho story for years before the experimentors told it to them along with stories of miracles at the Red Sea and in Egypt, so they might have seemed to have an element of unreality that a story of a Chinese general marching into a war of aggression against another country wouldn't have.
Also, it's possible that the children knew about the story of Jericho in sanitised form, so they were habituated to thinking about it, so a few extra details didn't have the impact on them that hearing the whole thing might have done if they'd never heard it before, as if it was a completely different story.
So their different reactions to the two stories might have had nothing to do with whether they could be persuaded that modern-day genocide for religious reasons could be a good thing if it was being done by their side.
It may be that more was done to try to ascertain the attitudes of the children before the survey concluded its results. But on the face of it, the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the experiment.
What might have been more revealing would have been if the children had been given a prophecy from Isaiah and told it referred to Israel getting back all its land, including the land now occupied by the Palestinians, and they'd been asked if they thought that if the prophecy had said the land would be taken by force, it was OK for the modern Israeli army to move the Palestinians off their land by force, and they'd said yes. But the thing that would really make it a cause for concern would be if they were asked the question ten years later when they were young adults and they still said yes. That would be more of a concern than it would be when they were only children, because it would then be in their power to try to do something about it.
Likewise, if the Bible story of the invasion of Canaan had instead been about the subjugation of a race that very obviously still exists, like the Syrians, for example, and the Bible had said the Israelites were to wipe them out, it's possible that the children could have been under the impression that the command still applied, and that would be worrying.
As it is, though, the Jericho Experiment might not show what it's been taken to purport to show.
It seems that results of experiments can easily be assumed to mean something when they might in reality mean something else. To give an example, which is unrelated, but it illustrates the point:
There was a television programme on the BBC recently where a well-known brand of painkillers was tested against a cheaper, "generic" brand, which actually contained exactly the same ingredients. They wanted to find out if the placebo effect would kick in if people took the more expensive, well-known brand, because they trusted it more. They asked a group of rugby players to take them and then put their hands in icy water to see how long they could bear to keep them in it for. They all took the expensive brand first. Some time later, they took the cheaper brand and put their hands in icy water again.
They couldn't keep their hands in it for as long the second time. It was concluded that that meant the more expensive brand was more effective because of its placebo effect. But what if it actually meant that what made them less able to bear their hands being in the icy water the second time was the anxiety and anticipation of knowing how much their hands were going to begin to hurt the longer they left them in it?
In order to draw a more accurate conclusion about the placebo effect, it would have been better to repeat the experiment with different people, only this time giving them the cheap brand of painkiller first, to see if when they later took the expensive one, they had equal trouble keeping their hands in the icy water for as long as they did the first time. If they did, the placebo effect could be ruled out.
Reading Bible stories about the activities of the ancients is very different to what happens in some mosques, where people are taught to hate present-day non-believers/Jews/Westerners. For instance, I mentioned in a post yesterday that there was a programme on the BBC recently where a Muslim was talking about how he was brought up in England, but got into drugs and went to Pakistan to try to get rehabilitated. His rehabilitation programme worked to get him off drugs, but they taught the people there to use guns and filled them with hatred. Some went to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban after that. He came back to the UK, and then started to question what he'd been taught, because he didn't think it was right that he should be hating his former friends and those he grew up with. See a write-up of the programme:
Pakistan madrassa mixes drugs rehab and fighter training.
So more questions would have to be asked before concluding that the children might be easily swayed to accept genocide by modern-day Israel. Even if they would be, might it not be to do with the general suggestibility of children, rather than any impact any one thing might have on them? After all, just think of the number of young adults who rushed into war at the outbreak of the First World War, without critically thinking about whether it was really a just war!
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