Monologic Results of Dialogue: Jewish-Palestinian Encounter Groups as Sites of Essentialization

Abstract

Since the 1980s, many scholars have focused on the promise that dialogue holds to get beyond essentializing discourses. Based on the observation of a yearlong dialogue intergroup encounter between two groups of Israeli citizens, Jewish and Palestinian, this article shows that dialogic encounters between groups in a situation of structural inequality and domination may solidify essentialist discourses of culture and identity. The interpretative analysis of specific moments of the intergroup dialogue shows that throughout the dialogue process, self and other essentializing strategies recurred. The attempt of the Palestinian students to clear a space that would enable them to talk about their status as second class citizens while simultaneously presenting claims for equal access to citizenship was met with declarations about "Arab" culture by the Jewish students. In this process, both groups, albeit for different reasons, reinforced their monological conceptions of culture and identity.

Negotiating the past, imagining the future: Israeli and Palestinian narratives in intergroup dialog

“…Our design and analysis moves beyond the individual as unit of analysis to consider the dialog process itself. Our study thus adds to a growing literature documenting the process of intergroup contact, particularly within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (e.g., Abu-Nimer, 1999;Bekerman, 2002;Helman, 2002;Maoz, 2000b;Maoz et al, 2002Maoz et al, , 2004. Given that the structural conditions that create conflict and prejudice rely upon narratives for maintenance, meaning, and adherence, it stands to reason the research that can directly study narratives as they are deployed in interaction is needed.…”

“…Our ethnographic and observational notes informed the interpretive approach (Tappan, 1997) we used to analyze dialog session transcripts. The use of an interpretive analytical approach is common in research examining the process of intergroup contact (e.g., Bekerman, 2002;Helman, 2002;Maoz, 2000b). Our interpretive lens was informed by discursive analytical frameworks (Hammack & Pilecki, 2014;Potter & Wetherell, 1995) that views text and talk as forms of social action employed for the purpose of constructing social categories and framing the nature of the relations among them (Edwards, 1991).…”

“…On the one hand, given the inextricable link between history and national identity, discussing history may facilitate the emergence of discourses featuring essentialized, exclusivist narratives (e.g., Bekerman, 2002;Helman, 2002). Discussing history may thus betray contact interventions, like those informed by the coexistence model (Maoz, 2011), that seek to develop a common ingroup identity.…”

“…Following a similar epistemological and methodological approach to other research on existing intergroup encounters in the field (e.g., Bekerman, 2002;Helman, 2002;Maoz et al, 2002;Maoz, Bar-On, Bekerman, & Jaber-Massawa, 2004), we employed an inductive, hermeneutic strategy in which the goal was to describe actual dialogic content as it emerged. Unique to our study, however, was an experimental design that allowed us to examine variability in dialog content based on the way in emerged across different facilitation models (coexistence versus confrontational) and topics (history versus future).…”

“…Using an interpretive, hermeneutic approach to discourse analysis common in narrative research and other studies of intergroup interaction (e.g., Bekerman, 2002Bekerman, , 2009bHelman, 2002;, we sought to discover whether the reproduction of divergent historical narratives could be arrested within the intergroup contact setting. Our study thus addressed two research questions.…”