International Dialogue Initiative Meeting
May 23, 2021
Discussion of the Situation in Israel/Palestine
The International Dialogue Initiative is an interdisciplinary, international group that studies the psychology of societal conflict. We met in May, 2021, to discuss psycho-political issues related to the current situation in Israel/Palestine. We also wanted to support our colleagues there and to hear their perspectives about what was happening on the ground.
Observations:
The picture that emerged was of a “frozen domestic political situation” on both sides. Palestinian sentiment was at a “boiling point” because of President Abbas’ cancelling the Palestinian election. Those feelings erupted in response to efforts by the Israeli religious right, supported by the government, to evict Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Hamas responded to the unrest by attacking Israel, thereby asserting its power in relation to Fatah. Prime Minister Netanyahu responded militarily, again taking up his declared role as Israel’s protector, while also staving off corruption charges. Meanwhile, after four elections, Israel’s government was at a stalemate.
(Addendum: A coalition of parties across the political spectrum that had hoped to come together to oust Netanyahu disbanded during the violence. As of this writing (June 5), it has re-emerged, with the goal of basic governance – e.g., passing a budget – and also of ending the government of Netanyahu. Coalition leaders have said that their alliance is too fragile to address the Israel/Palestine situation in the near future.)
Discussion:
The IDI discussion touched on a number of geopolitical considerations related to the larger international context. Some members also felt that the Covid situation was a major example of poor governance. Israel missed a humanitarian and political opportunity by not leading a vaccination effort for the whole Palestinian population. Palestinian leadership did not competently provide for its people, leading to much unnecessary suffering and death. Indeed, it seemed to some that “nobody is planning the future” in Palestine, another sign of which was its failure to have a serious reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas for the sake of the national interest or even to gain any benefits from the Abraham Accords. On the Israeli side, its government could not effectively use its authority to protect its people from Covid outbreaks in the schools of the religious right. Among the Palestinian people, there is a sense of isolation – from its leadership and also as the result of the Abraham Accords; on the Israeli side, democracy is seen by some as a secular threat to religious authority and by others as an exercise in futility.
(Addendum: In this context, the Bennett-Lapid coalition, unlikely as it seems to actually be able to move things forward, raises enormous hopes that differences within Israel can be overcome enough to make at least limited government work again. It thereby also risks the potential for great disappointment and frustration.)
IDI members close to the situation were not optimistic that anything could change under current leadership on both sides. Achieving national unity within Palestinian groups faces many obstacles. One is the geographic separation between the West Bank and Gaza, which plays into the power Hamas exercises over Gaza and makes them, from a distance, a potentially attractive alternative to ineffective leadership in the West Bank. The geographic split in Palestine furthers the governmental split and thereby prevents a negotiating partnership with Israel.
Another obstacle is that, because Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by the international community, “it will need to change,” as one member put it, in order to participate in any sort of talks. Right now, however, the rhetoric – and at times the deadly conviction – is that any talking with the other side is betrayal.
A somewhat similar consideration and a similar rhetoric applies to the extreme right in Israel. Integrating the religious right into the larger Israeli society – e.g., into compulsory military service – has been only partially successful, and the accidental deaths of more than forty orthodox Jews at a recent religious celebration on Mount Meron speaks to that group’s indifference to government guidelines. In Israel, the religious-secular split prevents a negotiating partnership.
We noted that, in the Western press, a new term has entered the discourse: the word “equal.” This reflects a shift toward an emphasis on values related to basic human rights. Whereas, from the Israeli side, the Sheikh Jarrah controversy could be seen as a “real estate dispute,” from the Palestinian side, it is a matter of equal treatment under the law. Specifically, Israelis may legally claim land they owned before 1948; Palestinians cannot. This dispute is not about “two states”, but about what seems like two justice systems within one state. Some Palestinian and Israeli/Jewish positions about “land” share the same extreme elements: the feeling that the other side cannot purchase or sell an “inch of land”, and if it does, it “contaminates” those lands. Both sides hold to an extreme position about “territorial hegemony”.
We also noted the triggering potential related to the holy sites, especially around religious holidays and anniversaries. This was exemplified by the Israeli police intervention at the Al Aqsa Mosque, coinciding with the first day of Ramadan. A more active role for Jordan as the manager of these sites might be important as a “third” more benign authority and source of inter-group relatedness. The handling of these difficult moments plays a major part in whether threatened religious large group identity leads to overt group conflict. Such conflicts, tragic in themselves, interfere with mourning processes that are necessary to living peacefully with other groups.
A Group Analysis:
A spontaneous comment from one IDI member captured a major theme of the discussion: “Can we come to terms with ourselves?” From a psychological perspective, this comment speaks to the way that major problems of large group identity exist within the Israeli and Palestinian populations, which prevent them from addressing conflicts between these large groups. To the degree that these within-group identity conflicts are not acknowledged and discussed, they actively sabotage between-group work. Unilateral actions by Israel’s religious right, on the one hand, and Hamas, on the other, undermine centrist efforts on both sides. They implicitly reject their governing authority’s ability to speak with one voice, thus preventing each large group from becoming “the other party” to any negotiation. Good-enough “national unity” is rendered out-of-reach, not by the “enemy” group but by one’s own group.
For example, a troubling new development in the recent conflict was street fighting between Israeli Arabs, some of it provoked by Hamas members, and Israeli Jews, led to some degree by the religious right. Extremist groups escalated a fraught relationship between Jews and Arabs within Israeli society. No doubt that latent feelings of being discriminated against already existed within Israeli Arabs, and perhaps the eruption of those feelings – taken out on Jewish citizens though probably meant for leadership on both sides – was inevitable. Perhaps too, the anger of Israeli Arabs may reflect a new sense of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. But the violence between Israeli Arabs and Jews – tragic as that is simply at the level of community – also represents an extremist achievement. Parts of each society succeeded in tearing away the social fabric that another part of that same society had tentatively stitched together.
Conclusion:
IDI colleagues on the ground noted the increasing number of voices, from different parts of society, saying that “This time, we must do something.” Increasingly, the strategy of simply managing the conflict without seriously addressing it is seen as guaranteeing violence in the near future and as an existential threat over time. This moment of recognition is extremely important; to this point, the Israeli government – and to some extent, its people as well – have lived with the conflict so unremittingly that they seem to have lost sight of how unsustainable the status quo really is. In this current moment, the democratic system is not working, and Palestinians have said, in action, that they cannot live within the system as it is. Leadership on both sides is failing to address this, leaving a huge number of people – many of them Israeli citizens – isolated, helpless and potentially violent.
This is not a problem that can be solved by the legal system because it is a problem of disturbed relationships between groups of people. It requires attention to that relationship disturbance, both within Israeli and Palestinian society and among international stakeholders. While, as one member put it, there are “points of light” – like the cooperation between Israeli Arabs and Jews in the medical system – there are enormous dangers as well, and much will depend on the quality of leadership that emerges. In this regard, it is extremely important to recognize how the personality organization of a political leader plays a very significant role in inflaming large group conflicts or in containing them. The historical traumas of the Holocaust and the Nakba lay just under the surface; the Sheikh Jarrah evictions are felt as a literal reenactment of the latter, stimulating powerful feelings and memories. Leadership can exacerbate these feelings for its own purposes or it can acknowledge them and approach issues more collaboratively in the service of better inter-group relationships.
(Addendum: The incongruity of the Bennett-Lapid coalition – the fact that it comprises parties with seemingly irreconcilable views – may be a source of strength. That potential strength lies in the fact that the coalition offers a deeper opportunity than simply the political one: the opportunity to bring together people representing the difficult-to-integrate large group identity elements that underlie Israeli society. Large group identity is a psychological, developmental phenomenon, comprised of feelings and fantasies about one’s own group and the other, formed in early family life and consolidated during the adolescent identity phase. Profoundly influenced by inter-generational trauma, large group identity drives group and inter-group processes. Psychologically-informed intervention can mitigate the power of those processes and turn that energy toward constructive purposes. A similar process might help emerging leadership within the Palestinian community recognize and explore what they carry emotionally from their society’s history.)
(Additional Comments by Robi Friedman, IDI Fellow and Group Analyst):
Another major reason for the war was Hamas’ wish not to allow a first ever joining of an Arab party to the governing coalition. Bibi had the same wish; such a coalition has been a taboo for more than 70 years of Jewish governance, and personally, he had a fear that this kind of co-operation would push him into the opposition. Thus, the war had a kind of “joint venture” quality to it between Hamas and Bibi. The dynamics of such a cooperation between political parties are the source of much of the paranoia between the Jewish and the Arab “Matrices” or Large Groups. The fact of co-operation between an Arab party and a predominantly Jewish coalition is a sign that something in this dynamic of more “equality” is working in Israel over a long period of time, and that the forces wanting to end Bibi’s regime and Likud’s hegemony are stronger than we think.
In the war, Hamas broke every norm, and without the Iron Dome, there would have been thousands of casualties. Why this dangerous play, which would have brought with it an IDF ground attack on Gaza? The answer is not clear to me but may have to do with the religious fundamentalism of the present leadership of Hamas. Sheikh Jarrah itself has unconscious meanings which are quite rooted in the Jewish consciousness as well as in Palestinian consciousness. The transgenerational transmission of existential threats is only part of the politics. It must be understood that the here-and-now threats of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, no matter what their source or motivation, have an enormous impact on the psychology of the Jewish and the Arab mentality of the respective large groups. It mainly pushes the already right-wing positions further right.
When we worked with median and large groups in the mixed cities in order to cope with local conflicts between Jews and Arabs, we were surprised at how much this conflict had two sides: it opened up deep wounds, but the violence seemed very short lived. Thus, if handled well and continuously taken care of, these groups have a chance to represent an opening and an opportunity to work, rather than only a splitting crisis. But it can’t be taken for granted that it will be well enough taken care off.
Last week in the University in Jaffa, where I conducted a series of small and large groups, a surprising number of Arab students turned up for a dialogue. Their partners, Jewish students in even bigger numbers, were surprised by their openness and understanding, which I have never felt from my generation, nor the next, and certainly not from the generation before me. It made me a bit more optimistic, as the mere fact of the meeting itself did. What makes me pessimistic is the fact that Hamas seems so much stronger than Fattah, and that so many young Palestinians move toward the more religiously extreme groups. Unfortunately, this is true on the Israeli side too.)