Shifting away from a monolithic narrative on conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans in conversation.

Abstract

Jewish Americans' opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict influence both the Israeli and the U.S. governments. Consequently, the Jewish American diaspora can act to promote or inhibit the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Several different sociopsychological beliefs have been postulated to lead individuals to support the perpetuation of conflict. Among these beliefs are a sense of collective victimhood, dehumanization and delegitimization of the other side, a zero-sum view on the conflict, and a monolithic narrative about the conflict. In this exploratory study we examined the role of these beliefs in predicting Jewish Americans' rejection or support of compromise solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A survey study of 176 Jewish Americans shows that a monolithic view on the conflict, dehumanizing and delegitimizing of the other side, and a zero-sum view on the conflict played an important role in predicting opposition to compromise solutions for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Beliefs about collective victimhood did not predict support for compromise solutions. Findings are discussed in terms of the centrality of narrative misrecognition in preventing agreement to concessions toward the other side.

Interrogating the Process and Meaning of Intergroup Contact: Contrasting Theoretical Approaches

“…Rouhana & Korper, ) or facilitating intergroup dialogue (e.g. Ben Hagai et al, ; Ross, ), we are unaware of any previous research that documents the experiential process of third‐party groups during contact. Our findings suggest that, counter to presumed ideas about the potential beneficial role of a third party that pervades much of the literature in conflict and dispute resolution, the experience of American youth in intergroup contact with Palestinians and Israelis is characterized by a pattern of negative psychological experience and disengagement.…”

“…Such perspectives stem from the idea that third parties often serve conciliatory or legitimizing functions in settings of conflict or aggression (e.g. Ben Hagai et al, ; Levine, Taylor, & Best, ). The role of the third party has been extensively discussed in the literature on interactive problem‐solving, but in those instances, the third party serves an explicit mediational role (e.g.…”

“…Second, what is the process and experience of an intergroup encounter that includes a third party? Limited research suggests that the presence of a third party influences the process of intergroup encounters (Ben Hagai, Hammack, Pilecki, & Aresta, ; Rouhana, ; Rouhana & Korper, ). However, systematic empirical work on the tri‐group encounter among Israeli, Palestinian and American youth is virtually non‐existent.…”

Beliefs Predicting Peace, Beliefs Predicting War: Jewish Americans and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

“…The understanding of identity and national conflict in terms of competing narratives has been explored in several qualitative studies (Ayalon & Sagy;Bekerman & Zembylas, 2011;(Ben Hagai, Hammack, Pilecki, & Aresta, in press); Hammack, 2006Hammack, , 2008Hammack, , 2011. For example, a discourse analysis of conversations among Israeli and Palestinian adolescents suggests that Jewish Israeli adolescents tend to base their understandings of the conflict on a narrative schema in which Jews have good intentions to live in peace but because of Arab attacks they must continually defend themselves.…”

Intergroup Dialogue as a Just Dialogue: Challenging and Preventing Normalization in Campus Dialogues

“…Multipartial facilitation is a facilitation approach that has been described in varied ways by dialogue practitioners (Korza, Assaf, & Bacon, ; Pruitt & Thomas, ; Routenberg & Sclafani, ). In contrast to neutral or impartial facilitation, which does not take any position on a particular issue, multipartial facilitation means establishing trust with and engaging all sides and participants (Pruitt & Thomas, ; Korza et al, ), while paying special attention to the power imbalances that exist among different social identities (Ben Hagai et al, ; Zuniga et al, ). Multipartial facilitation recognizes the dominant narratives in society that promote the experiences of people who hold more dominant social positions (Wing & Rifkin, ), challenges these narratives, invites in the counter narratives of people from less heard positions, and encourages all dialogue participants to critically analyze these dominant or master narratives (Takaki, ).…”