Initial questions and objective of the project “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone”

To our knowledge, “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” is the first major international project in transdisciplinary reconciliation studies. It generated innovative research and fruitful new perspectives for reconciliation studies. It was guided by the following theoretical frameworks:

• Arie Nadler’s “Needs-Based Model” of inter-group relations (Shnabel and Nadler 2008)

• Shifra Sagy’s narrative-oriented “Action-Research” (Sagy 2020)

• Amélie Mummendey’s “Ingroup-Projection Model” (Wenzel, Mummendey and Waldzus 2007), represented by her pupil and successor Thomas Kessler, member of the Jena-team

• Martin Leiner’s Hölderlin Perspective of transdisciplinary reconciliation research (Flämig and Leiner 2012)

• Mohammed Dajani Daoudi’s “Wasatia” concept of moderation in a challenging political climate (Dajani Daoudi 2009)

Development of the project “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone”

“Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” allowed transdisciplinary and multidirectional research to thrive. International conferences and workshops, such as Alternative Approaches in Conflict Resolution (Zürich, November 2015) and Transitional Justice: Contemporary Theories and Practices (Jerusalem, September 2016), investigated the relationship between reconciliation research, conflict resolution, and transitional justice. These conferences provided the best opportunity to share the obtained results and exchange and implement fruitful feedback by the “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” teams. Relevant topics received important impulses for their further developments, such as empathy and emotions in conflict and reconciliation, research on trauma and loyalties, narratology, and general reconciliation theory. This was also made possible thanks to workshops and conferences held by international experts, with whom intensive cooperation has been initiated thanks to “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone”, such as: Björn Krondörfer; Eran Halperin; Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela; Christo Thesnaar; Dagmar Kusa; Boyd Blundell; Richard Kearney; Fanie du Toit.

The field experiments ESO1 to ESO9 were a series of encounter experiences beginning in 2014 of approximately 30 persons for each experience. These were conducted together with empirical analyses as planned in the DFG-supported project despite delays and complications from violence-impacted tensions in the Holy Land (especially in 2014), unrest due to the relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem (announced 2017, completed 2018), and, at the end of the project, the COVID-19 pandemic (since late 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic required the transformation of ESO9 from a face-to-face encounter between Israeli and Palestinian participants of the preceding ESO into an exchange in epistolary form. Except for ESO9, the ESOs organized by Ben-Gurion University took place without postponements between February 2015 and July 2018.

The interim evaluation after the first three years of “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” already considered the changes in the trips of Palestinians that were needed. The first Auschwitz trip (ESO1) had a worldwide and very positive press echo (Haaretz, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Die Zeit, Die Welt, etc.) as the first group trip from the West Bank visited Auschwitz organized by Palestinians. A very positive article about the trip was reported in Haaretz (by Matthew Kalman, March 28, 2014), but that account was erroneously maligned in the online Al Quds News website, claiming that the trip was funded by Zionist organizations instead of by the DFG. The project leader of the Palestinian group, Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, subsequently faced threats to his life and scholarly occupation. His office at Al Quds University and his library were vandalized, and a little later, his car was torched. Some of the students as well as some organizers of the project had to cope with mixed emotions and with pressure from their respective societies. All this showed a tragic reality inherent in reconciliation research: resistance to reconciliatory processes often comes from one’s own in-group. As a result of these experiences, and in coordination with DFG officials, ESO field trips with Palestinian participants were postponed for a year and redesigned to provide safe and productive experiences. The intervention was designed to emphasize in-group experiences and avoid potential contact-intervention conditions. The destination was changed from Krakow and Auschwitz to an entirely German national context with visits to Berlin and Buchenwald instead of encountering Jewish historical suffering of the Holocaust. Also, Mohammed Dajani Daoudi transferred leadership of the field experiences to the coordinator of the Palestinian team, Zeina Barakat. The goal of modifying the study design was to optimize conditions for encountering the historical suffering of the outgroup “other”.

Presenting the outcomes of “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” at the conference Reparation, Recognition and Reconciliation (November 2018), hosted by Stellenbosch University (South Africa), also was not possible. The attendance of “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” team members had to be canceled at the last minute because the boycott movement against Israeli scholars made participating impossible (Weinthal 2020). From the beginning, “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” was aware that conflict events would impact its development and the results of its field experiments and was prepared to adjust.

Achievements of the project “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone”

Final Remarks

Reconciliation research began as a scholarly field in the 1990s. It is concerned with the question of how states, societies, organizations, groups, and individuals can come together again after serious incidents (Leiner, 2018). “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” was the first major interdisciplinary reconciliation research project in Germany, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories on this new field of studies.

“Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” dealt with the issue in conflicts that the suffering of the out-group is often unknown or actively minimized and denied - an issue especially challenging for Israelis and Palestinians. Most Israelis know little about, or even deny, Palestinians’ displacement from the Nakba (1948). For Palestinians, recognition of the Holocaust (1941–1945) is a topic often burdened with misinformation and denial. The “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” approach was based on the hope of encountering the suffering of the out-group through visits to the actual sites of memory like Auschwitz and Ramle. Such encounters required preparation through courses, workshops, attentive personal support, and debriefing afterward. All such project activities aimed to develop participants’ reflective awareness of in-group and out-group narratives and the ways such narratives impact the conflict.

Without exception, all participants in the ESOs organized by the “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” project acknowledged the reality and extent of the suffering of the out-group. The biggest additional step towards reconciliation was that many Israelis developed a reflective attitude towards their own history, which can be described as a position of Tragedy Sensitive Truthfulness (TST). It manifested itself in statements such as: “The Jews need a state in order to be safe. But the state was founded on the land of the Palestinians, and as a result, new injustice has occurred”. Among the Palestinians, a recurrent reaction was: “If the Jews experienced this terrible thing once, why are they doing to us now, what they are doing to us?” This position can be called Empowerment to Human Sensitive Communication with the Enemy (ESK). Both positions leave behind one-sided nationalist narratives and acknowledge the suffering of others. Both positions play a major role in the beginning of reconciliation processes, even before apologies in each other occur.

“Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” showed surprising characteristics in its ESOs, such as increased loyalty to one’s in-group and the development of a reflexive narrative. Whereby feelings of empathy, sympathy, and decreased fear toward the opposing group were noted, however, further processes toward reconciliation are blocked by contextual factors, such as the lack of a political partner that would convey trust and of a situation that would convey hope. Emotional effects were not as large, nor did they lead as clearly toward the willingness to reconcile as hypothesized at the beginning of the project. Reflexive recognition of reality led a relatively large proportion of participants to share their findings beyond the experiment and to want to find out more themselves.

In addition to the field experiments, laboratory experiments in Jena and Tel Aviv investigated the positive influence of respect on willingness to reconcile, agency as a basic need of victims, and the distinction between victimhood and victim identity. “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” made further studies possible as well, which have examined: the centrality of Auschwitz for the concept of reconciliation; the importance of religious and social resources for reconciliation; the particular experience of Palestinian refugee women, and their view of reconciliation and martyrdom; the importance of textbooks in transmitting images of the enemy; the possibilities of using social media to promote reconciliation. All these studies contribute to a better understanding of the field experiments.

The “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” project was invaluable for the still young research direction of reconciliation studies, It has developed a very efficient transdisciplinary approach to overcome Holocaust and Nakba denial. The most important project result is the description of reconciliation as a long-term process in which trust, forgiveness, and recognition of the truth, including the guilt (culpability) of one’s in-group, are often not achieved directly. As formulated by Israeli participants in the project, a tragedy-sensitive perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an essential step toward improving relations.

“Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” interventions provide insights relevant to other reconciliation processes, especially those where contested traumatic histories are relevant. Organized site visits or trips to sites of memory and places of suffering (Holocaust, Nakba) of the out-group, perhaps considered hostile, can also benefit from project results and experiences.

The scientific reconciliation research conducted in “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” is also economically relevant for peace-, encounter- and history projects carried out by governmental and non-governmental institutions. This applies to projects in contexts outside the Israel-Palestine conflict and in relation to other experiences of suffering than the Holocaust and the Nakba. The relatively large sums invested in such projects are still matched by a relatively low level of scientific evaluations of the respective interventions. There is often criticism of such projects (see: Engstrom 2009), but there is also a lack of empirical studies working with an appropriate variety of methods.

Although the results of “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” are commercially relevant, they are made available to the public as open access by parties involved in the project. Further studies can be initiated at numerous points. The two positions of Tragedy Sensitive Truthfulness and Empowerment to Human Sensitive Communication with the Opponent should be researched more closely. They are often at the beginning of reconciliatory processes and are also specific to how people deal with war experiences.

In addition, the significance of different forms of recognition for reconciliation processes is still a broad field that needs to be investigated in a much more differentiated way. What is the significance of the recognition of facts and-or narratives? What is the recognition of persons? For what and what do people in conflicts want to be recognized? For their suffering as victims? For their humanity? As persons who have rights? Or for a combination of all of the above? These are questions we would like to explore in later research.

References

Abstract

Francesco Ferrari’s paper raises his research question – the concept of reconciliation after Auschwitz – primarily in the domain of philosophy. He proceeds systematically, in dialogue with authors from the mid-twentieth century, particularly with the most important texts of the Jewish philosophy of that time. Given the many layers of the topic, his research adopts a transdisciplinary approach that benefits from the contributions of reconciliation studies, Jewish studies, intellectual history, psychology, and sociology. Its methodology can be defined as a hermeneutic phenomenology in the philosophical sense formulated by Ricœur 1974 [1969]. On the one hand, his work is structured as a phenomenological exploration, through which the concept of reconciliation faces that of irrevocable. From the other one, it is shaped through a hermeneutical stance, given the existential relevance of the topic, i. e., it concerns the world of the lived human experience. This paper introduces and summarizes Ferrari’s studies on the philosophical debate regarding the concept of reconciliation after Auschwitz he carried out in the course of the project “Hearts of Flesh – not Stone” and presents some of the post-doctoral research hypotheses he is currently working on.

Introduction

Auschwitz as Irrevocable. Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Wrongdoing

Questions of Reconciliation with Oneself after Auschwitz

Conclusions

The present research unfolds a hermeneutic phenomenology of the concept of reconciliation after Auschwitz by articulating a key moral-philosophical issue., i. e., the recognition of wrongdoing as irrevocable. It provides foundations for the irrevocable at a philosophical level, as well as it introduces the issue of coping with the irrevocable, by addressing its traumatic consequences in processes of reconciliation with oneself.

Interestingly, many philosophers, from Adorno to Lyotard, have set the moral imperative not to reconcile with the irrevocable. On the other side, psychotherapists, such as Kohut 1984, Spence 1982, Schafer 1992, intensively esteemed by Charles Taylor and Paul Ricœur, have endorsed the healing produced by meaning-making, as it takes place by reconciling the single traumatic occurrence into the broader frame of one’s life story.

We should not forget that reconciliatory processes have mostly to do with concrete scenarios, within which there is no option but togetherness, interconnectedness, even interdependence between victims and perpetrators (Du Toit 2018, 189–225). The question of relationships in reconciliation after violent wrongdoing cannot escape, hence, unsurmountable dialectics of physical proximity and metaphysical distance. By defining relatedness as an originating, unescapable, ontological a-priori, reconciliation studies hint at the web of human relationships and offer the theoretical framework for an embodied philosophy of relatedness.

References

Abstract

In the Jewish tradition, reconciliation with the divine was unimaginable without previous reconciliation with the other human being. Throughout the centuries, rabbis and Jewish intellectuals had to think, debate, and adapt the concept of reconciliation within the horizon of their changing reality over time. This frame introduces André Zempelburg’s Rabbinic Jewish Perspectives on Interpersonal Reconciliation and the Reconciliation With Oneself in the Context of Yōm Kippūr. The paper is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, which recently appeared as a book (2019), which aimed to cover the meaning and major trends of the concepts of reconciliation and atonement within the Jewish tradition, starting in the days of Ancient Israel and ending the early twenty-first century by focusing on central insights of traditional and modern understanding of reconciliation in the inter-personal level and with oneself. Although the concept of reconciliation or atonement (in Hebrew, they are just a single word) has its roots in the God-man-relation, the paper argues how and why a constant “ethizising” took place over time.

Introduction

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​Intending to enterprise a religious studies’ perspective on the concept of reconciliation in rabbinic Judaism, Zempelburg 2019 assumes that, according also to Adele Reinhartz (Reinhartz 2011), Versöhnung or reconciliation is poly-dimensional within rabbinic Judaism. Concretely, reconciliation appears in three types of relation: namely the God-man relationship, the man-man relationship, and the relation of man to oneself. Whether the Jewish rabbinic tradition distinguishes between the Jewish fellow or neighbor (חבר) and a non-Jewish other (Ibid., p. 9), it has to be examined in detail in the case of the man-man relationship.

In contrast to the first part of Zempelburg 2019, which is about reconciliation in the God-man relationship from Lev 16 through mYom to the liturgy of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), which is still being performed nowadays, the second part of the book focuses on reconciliation in the man-man relationship in the context of Yom Kippur in rabbinic Judaism (interpersonal reconciliation). Finally, its third part deals with man’s reconciliation with oneself. By omitting the excursuses done in this study on Shnejur Zalman of Liady’s (the founder of Ḥabad-Lubavitch Ḥassidism), on an understanding of interpersonal reconciliation and the problem of forgiveness in the victim’s name, raised by Simon Wiesenthal, only the key results of these last two sub-studies (interpersonal reconciliation, reconciliation with oneself) are given below.

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​The ethical core of mYom 8:9 (see: Baneth 1986, p. 331; Weinreb 2013, p. 428) was the starting point for the entire investigation: עברות שבין אדם להברו אין יום הכפרים מכפר עד שירצה את חברו [“Transgressions, which are between a man and his fellow, the Day of Atonement (reconciliation) is not reconciling/atoning until he appeases his fellow.” (All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.)] Considering the Hebrew verbal root kpr as the concept of reconciliation and Yom Kippur as the spatiotemporal ‘place’ of reconciliation helps to understand the meaning of reconciliation on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the extent of reconciliation (kpr), existentially necessary for the (human) subject. Reconciliation is always done by God even if a mediator seems to work reconciliation even if in purely phenomenological terms, such as Aaron in Ancient Israel or the high priests following him.

The human being whose “individual […] existence is forfeited” because of his transgressions/sins, offenses, and/or insurgencies and who “stands between life and death” (Janowski 2000, p. 176) on the Day of Atonement arises based on reconciliation effected by God. This is symbolically represented in the temple cult of the Day of Atonement with the High Priest as his agent “as an atoned one, not as a punished one” (Ibid., p. 5). In the words of Janowski, the reconciliation requested and aimed for by man and granted by God is thus intended to result in a “salvation from fallenness to death” and the “enabling of new life” (Ibid., p. 176).

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​In parallel with the relationship between God and man, which was examined in detail in Part I of Zempelburg 2019 in terms of its content of reconciliation, there is also the man-man relationship, in which man, as a social being, finds himself exposed daily. This relationship, too, can be fatally disturbed due to man-made “transgressions” (עברות) – a term that summarizes the sins, offenses, and/or insurgencies – and therefore requires reconciliation. However, such a phenomenon, namely interpersonal reconciliation in the context of Yom Kippur, was not yet existent in the Priestly source (P). Testified in written form, this changes only with the abovementioned ethical core of mYom 8:9.

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​It is possible to speculate on the particular reasons for such a development, that is, the emphasis on the interpersonal relationship by the rabbis to be reconciled with God before the reconciliation with God. In my opinion, Galley (2003) aptly grasped the motivation of the rabbis, a practice that also existed in the early Jesus movement or was even quoted by Jesus (cf. Mt 5:23). According to Galley, Yom Kippur “should not become a cheap pretext for behaving carelessly towards his fellow human beings for the rest of the year and careless against the Torah (Galley 2003, p. 74).” Of course, the explicit connection of the interpersonal relationship with Yom Kippur cannot prevent the individual (אדם) from carrying out “transgressions” against his fellow (חבר) in a calendar year. However, it urges the restoration of an interpersonal relationship, which otherwise would remain disturbed. According to mYom 8:9, it should be unmistakably clear to the transgressor that interpersonal reconciliation is a necessary prerequisite for the reconciliation of the God-man relationship. However, this also presupposes that the one who has committed the “transgressions” hopes to be saved from the “fallenness to death” which threatens him as a consequence of divine judgement on the first of the two “Judgement Days” (i. e., Rosh ha-Shanah) and thus being “inscribed and sealed” (bT RH 16b: נכתבין ונחתמין) into the book of life on the second “Judgement Day,” i. e., Yom Kippur (cf. Scherman 2008, p. 706; cf. bT RH 16b).

Interpersonal Reconciliation in the Context of Yom Kippur

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​“Hominem homini Deum esse”

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​Baruch de Spinoza

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​The Gemara (i. e., in the broadest sense, the amoraic-rabbinic commentary to the Mishnah) of the Palestinian or Jerusalemite Talmud (pT/yT) to the Mishnaic tractate Yoma (see yT Yom 56a (8:7))¹1

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​The folio pages are counted according to the yT Yom edition of Malinowitz/Schorr/Marcus (Eds.),
מסכת יומא/Tractate Yoma, in: Talmud Yerushalmi. The Schottenstein Edition, Vol. 21, New York 2011.

offers the first tangible discussion of the ethical content of mYom 8:9 by the rabbis. It was the acknowledgment of the truth by the transgressor (“sinner”) to one’s fellow (חביר), namely, that the former had sinned against the latter. Thus, truthfulness is a necessary prerequisite for interpersonal reconciliation. However, the transgressed may reject the confession as an implicit request of the “sinner” for pardon. To prove his seriousness, the “sinner” only has the option of gathering a group of people of indeterminate size in order to confess while they are present to his being-a-sinner to his fellow and to pacify or appease him (מפייס). The salvation of the “sinner” by God is the consequence, according to the Gemara of yT Yom. The publicization of interpersonal reconciliation was interpreted as a pedagogical measure. However, the guilt of the “sinner” extends beyond the death of the one against whom he sinned. Therefore, the need to appease him beyond his death remains. Consequently, the act of appeasement takes place at the fellow’s grave.

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​Something similar was found in the study of the Gemara of mYom 8:9 in the Babylonian Talmud (bT Yom 87a), claiming that the fellow (חביר) must be appeased by the “sinner” (צריך לפייסו), incurred material damage must be repaired and likewise pardon must be requested at the grave in the case the fellow already died. In the Gemara of the bT on the tractate Yoma, the protocol for interpersonal reconciliation is more detailed than that of the Gemara of yT Yom. Above all, the Gemara of bT Yom transcends that of yT Yom with the ethical content of the formula which is to be spoken at the grave of the fellow whom man (אדם) had transgressed: חטאתי לה’ אלהי ישראל ולפלוני שחבלתי בו [“I have failed/sinned against h[a-Shem] (i. e., JHWH), God of Israel, and against a so-and-so²2

Cf. Jastrow 1946, p. 1178: “a specified person or thing, such and such, name ‘blank’”.

to, which I inflicted pain.”] From this, it could be deduced that the transgressions (sins) against man are always to be understood as transgressions against God and, therefore, in the nature of their severity, must also be considered equal to the transgressions against God. By no means it can be said that, from a rabbinic perspective, the significance of the man-man relationship and thus, also, its reconciliation is simply to be subordinated to that of the God-man relationship and, again, its reconciliation. Consequently, the transgressions against one’s fellow man are no less severe and thus no less significant – quite the contrary seems to be the case.

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​The discussion of the proceedings of reconciliation in the Gemara of yT Yom and bT Yom was followed by the discussion of Maimonides’ (1135/38–1204) Hilkhot Teshuvah (HT) 2:9ff. in the Sefer ha-Madda, which is the first part of his halakhic (legal) masterpiece Mishneh Torah (completed 1177/78). In this work, he postulates that transgressions of man against his fellow (חבר) will not be “pardoned” (נמחל)³3

A qualitative difference to kpr has been identified, because, in contrast to mḥl, kpr is constantly worked by God.

“forever” (לעולם).

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​Of course, Maimonides’ apodictic statement applies only if the “sinner” does not seek pardon from his fellow. Reconciliation or a reconciling event (מכפרין) occurs in the context of Yom Kippur only in the event of previous forgiveness/סליחה and pardon/מחילה (cf. HT 2:7.9). For Maimonides, too, the ultimately hoped-for reconciliation, but mostly the fellow’s and God’s pardon, is subject to certain conditions. Maimonides starts with mYom 8:9 in consultation with the corresponding Gemara (bT Yom)⁴4

Material damage is to be reimbursed, even if the fellow (the victim) has already died, and it has to be asked for forgiveness. If the fellow indeed died, the material reparation shall go to the heirs of the fellow or to court, insofar as he has no offspring.

but goes beyond the latter. Maimonides understands the group of people to be gathered insofar as the two parties that have been divided due to transgressions do not reunite as passive witnesses to the interpersonal act of reconciliation, but as active participants. According to Maimonides, if two people come into conflict this affects the community. Therefore, interpersonal reconciliation is also a community concern. The motivation behind HT 2:9 probably is the desire to strive for harmony and the benefit of interpersonal relationships and the community, whose members always have to be just. This aspiration for harmony must elicit the active support of the one against whom has been sinned. This person is the victim of the transgressions because he is forced to pardon “with a whole heart and soul of will (בלב שלם ובנפש חפצה)”. The one against whom was sinned must not remain in his victim role. If he chooses to remain immured in this role, he acts unjustly against the person who willingly asks for pardon and ultimately not in the interests of the whole community, which is not allowed to be cruel (אסור לאדם להיות אכזרי) and (cf. HT: 2:10) “easy to pacify and difficult to anger (יהא נוח לרצות וקשה לכעס)”. Interpersonal reconciliation in the context of Yom Kippur is, according to Maimonides, the desired and almost enforced goal which becomes possible insofar as each of the Jewish people involved in the proceedings of reconciliation acts and reacts according to an ideal defined by him.

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​Since the last written testimony of rabbinic learning discusses the concept of interpersonal reconciliation in the context of Yom Kippur, I analysed Shlomoh ben Josef Ganzfried’s (1804–1886) magnum opus Kitzur Shulchan Aruch (QŠA), published in 1864. His original idea was not to involve several people in the process of reconciliation, as was the case in yT Yom, bT Yom and HT, but to use only a single “mediator” (אמצעי, literally: “a means”), who seems to be a kind of Zweckgegenstand (item of purpose), is ignored. Thus, two points, in particular, stand out because of their ethical salience:

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​1. Ganzfried (2001) explicitly emphasizes that dealing with one’s own transgressions in the context of Yom Kippur⁵5

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​One should not wait until the evening of Yom Kippur (לא ימתין עד ערב יום הכפורים); the occupation with one’s own transgressions or sins should already take place at Rosh ha-Shanah.

is even more urgent than dealing with the Torah. The transgressor should not waste any time in asking the person against whom he has transgressed for pardon (לבקש [...] מחילה). Thus, the task of interpersonal reconciliation precedes the human effort of reconciliation with God. In other words, Ganzfried places reconciliation of the man-man relationship over the usually most highly valued occupation with the Torah. Therefore, he prioritizes interpersonal reconciliation over the engagement with the divine and the reconciliation of the God-man relationship. This explicit decision of Ganzfried undoubtedly has its origin in the ethical content of mYom 8:9. Concerning the attainment of reconciliation in the context of Yom Kippur, already mYom prioritized the man-man relationship over the one with God. However, Ganzfried explicitly expresses this by referring to the study of the Torah as the ideal of rabbinic Jewish piety and learning. At the same time, he uses it as a cipher for the God-man relationship – both interwoven and inseparable – but subordinates it to the necessity of interpersonal reconciliation.

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​2. Following the example⁶6

“It is custom to go to visit one’s friends on the eve of Yom Kippur to beseech their forgiveness […]. Even if it is the other person who has sinned, one ought to go to that person and make peace with him” (Agnon 1995, p. 162f).

of the eighteenth-century rabbi Josef Juzpa Hahn, the other outstanding phenomenon of the passages examined here is the instruction for the fellow to actively promote the process of reconciliation, even if the “sinner” (החוטא) has not yet requested pardon (cf. QŠA 131:4). Therefore, the QŠA radically changed the realization of interpersonal reconciliation’s fairly clear role (perpetrator: active, must appease; victim: mostly passive, eventually pardons/forgives). The victim of the transgression(s) must neither be caught up in victimhood (cf. Maimonides 1994, p. 427) nor remain passive until the “sinner” requests pardon of him. However, the active role within the act of reconciliation is not transformed into a passive one. These two roles are not simply reversed. In contrast, the active role is extended to all involved and thus replaces the passive in its entirety. According to Ganzfried, interpersonal reconciliation in the context of Yom Kippur demands to take the first step from all participants to promote reconciliation actively.

Finally, I examined Emmanuel Levinas’ (1906–1995) Talmudic reading of Envers autrui (engl.: Toward the Other, Levinas 2005). Compared to the previous examples, Levinas is the only non-rabbinic but philosophical scholar I reference in this paper who dealt with mYom 8:9 (bT Yom 85b) and bT Yom 87a-b in detail. Using the terms “pardon” and “expiation makes it clear how strongly rabbinic Jewish thinking affects Levinas’ philosophical mindset and how an understanding of his philosophical terminology is indispensable to appreciate the depth of his discussion of this Talmudic reading.

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​In the center of Levinassian thinking stands the other (autrui), the other human being (l’homme autrui). Although the Hebrew term of the other (אחר) was already embedded in the collective of others (אחרים) in Ganzfried’s QŠA, no generalization of the fellow (חביר) in the sense of the other human being, regardless of his ethnic and/or religious identity, could be identified. While in the QŠA, the other must only be understood as the other Jewish person, Levinas invariably means another human being by using the term autrui. Applying this understanding to mYom 8:9, it could mean that Yom Kippur does not reconcile transgressions against the other, i. e., the other human being, until the perpetrator has appeased him. According to Levinas, the transgressor has to admit his guilt and must appease the other, even if the conflict has not yet been resolved. Only a judge as the third between the I (the transgressor) and the other (the victim) creates justice, which is founded by the divine. For Levinas, God is the other who remains different, who in his “epiphany” in the other pledges the I to take responsibility for the other human being (Levinas 2008, p. 107). God is “this permanent refusal of a history which would come to terms with our private tears” (Levinas 1990, p. 20).

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​In the consistent application of his concept of the other (autrui) to the Hebrew term Chaver/חביר (fellow), Levinas achieves something previously unknown. With this reinterpretation of Chaver in mYom 8:9 (bT Yom 85b), he opens the consciousness of (Jewish) recipients of the Mishnah or the Talmud in terms of reconciliation for the human being in general. The claim to appease, which the mentioned rabbinic passage directs to the Jewish individual, is no longer limited to the fellow belonging to the in-group by birth or conversion. This demand concerns a man in general, towards whom the I is obligated to take responsibility by the divine even before his birth and with whom the transgressor has to reconcile. At any rate, the ethical reception of bT Yom 85b.87a–b by Levinas represents an inner-Jewish and, at the same time, explicit rejection of the thesis of Sfard (2016). The latter argued that the rabbinic Jewish religion could not name a “tradition of public contrition” or a “culture in which one apologizes” and “confesses” guilt. Therefore, it must be foreign to implement “truth and reconciliation committees”.

Consequently, reconciliation must be remote from rabbinic Judaism. Such a thesis cannot be maintained in the overall picture of this study. It is important to remember the concept of Teshuvah (turning back), which is often understood as a form of repentance as well as the confession of the transgressions by the perpetrator, the inclusion of parts of the public in the process of reconciliation, the use of a mediating person or institution, the material reparation, and the generally expected appeasement (rṣh) or pacification (pjs) of the fellow, who is inconceivable without “encountering the suffering of the other”. Of course, it should be emphasized that not all Jewish scholars at all times thought and wrote as inclusively as Levinas did in the twentieth century despite or even because of the greatest catastrophe (Shoah/Holocaust) that has ever befallen the Jewish people in Europe and beyond.

If, as Galley says, the rabbis were intensely thinking about “making atonement for the sins of the people” in the face of human wrongdoing against their fellows, then Levinas has undoubtedly given much thought to how the transgressions against other human beings will not be forgotten or pass unnoticed.

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​If the God-man reconciliation on Yom Kippur is at the same time the creator of the world, it is not plausible to claim that only transgressions against the Jewish fellows will be reconciled if the prerequisites are fulfilled. From the rabbinic and Levinassian perspective, the God of the fathers is also the God of the world, who created all humans and pledged them to take responsibility for the other human being. Thus, the phrase “until he has appeased his fellow” (עד שירצה את חברו) must by no means be understood as restricted to the in-group’s fellow man. Therefore, a summary of the thinking and language of Levinas, mYom 8:9 should be phrased as follows:

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​עברות שבין אדם למקום יום הכפרים מכפר

עברות שבין אדם לאחר (לעצמו) אין יום הכפרים מכפר עד שירצה את האחר (לעצמו)

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​[“Transgressions which are between a man and the place (i. e., God), the Day of Atonement is reconciling. Transgressions which are between man and the other (for himself), the Day of Atonement is not reconciling until he has appeased the other (for himself”.] No matter which of those interpretations of mYom 8:9 one might follow, interpersonal reconciliation in rabbinic Judaism in the context of Yom Kippur is a normative claim to the (Jewish) man. In particular, the one who transgressed against his fellow (חבר) or the other (אחר) cannot escape it insofar; the transgressor hopes for reconciliation on that very day.

As for the concept of reconciliation, expressed as such by the Hebrew root kpr, it can be seen from the works used here that the root kpr is hardly used for interpersonal reconciliation. Once the task to appease is excluded, mYom 8:9 does not list another way of reconciliation, forgiveness, or a pardon-related word (root). Instead, bT Yom (cf. parallel texts: mBQ 8:7; yT BQ 6c) frequently uses the root mḥl (to pardon). A particularly extreme form of the phenomenon is found in Levinas’ Envers autrui because terms such as “expiation” or “reconciliation,” do not play any role there but “pardon” and its verbal derivatives of “pardonner” do. In the context mentioned above, interpersonal reconciliation requires a previous human, sometimes divine, forgiveness. Alternatively, the concept of reconciliation (kpr) seems to be replaced by the term “pardon,” as in the case of Maimonides HT 2:9 and Levinas’ Envers autrui, where both terms are used synonymously (cf. Goldberg 2011, col. 51).

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​If the opportunity of interpersonal reconciliation has become a reality, the transgressor can hope for reconciliation with the divine. From the perspective of the Jewish homo religious, that is “salvation from fallenness to death” and thus for the return into an order of life or “social order that defines the Israelite individual and Israel as a corporate community” (Neusner 2002, p. XVIII) given by the divine. In the language of bT RH 16b and orthodox liturgy, this means being “inscribed and sealed” (נכתבין ונחתמין) in the Book of Life (ספר חיים). To this end, the divine judgment was given on Rosh ha-Shanah, the first “Judgement Day”, which in the case of performed transgressions means to be inscribed to death immediately (נכתבין ונחתמין לאלתר למיתה). These transgressions must be altered on Yom Kippur, the second “Judgement Day” (cf. Scherman 2008, p. 706; cf. bT RH 16b). That is the reason why the individual confesses his transgressions to show his sincere will to turn (תשובה) from wrong, just like the people of Israel during Widduj (ודוי) when they repeatedly beseech the sealing in the Book of Life⁷7

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​Cf. Trepp 2004, p. 147f.; the wish to be sealed is found especially in ʾĀḇīnū Malkēnū/אבינו מלכנו (wörtl.: “our father, our king”) shortly before the end of Nəʿīlāh (Scherman 2008, p. 758f.).

during Ne’ilah (נעילה)⁸8

The beginning of Nəʿīlāh initiates the end of the service, which goes hand in hand with the closing, that is, the sealing of the books for another year with the names given to life or death (Galley 2003, p. 67).

:

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​זכרנו לחיים מלך חפץ בחיים

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​⁹9

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​Scherman 2008, p. 712, 726; comparable formulas occur during Nəʿīlāh also in two ʿAmīdōt/עמידות or Šǝmōnæh ʿÆśreh (Ibid., p. 720, 758).

וחתמנו בספר החיים למענך אלהים חיים

[“Remember us to life, king of zestfulness in life. And seal us into the Book of Life, in your favour, living God.”]

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​With the sounding of the Shofar, the worshipers call “next year in Jerusalem” (לשנה הבאה בירושלים) and express their joy at the end of Ne’ilah, which arises from the confidence “that God has accepted our prayers, fast, and repentance and has responded with His merciful forgiveness (Scherman 2008, p. 764f.).” This exclamation is more than just joy; it also expresses the certainty that the redemption that has taken place will not last and that in the new year, the individual will again be exposed to temptations and will eventually transgress the social order mentioned above. Therefore, the phrase “next year in Jerusalem” symbolizes the hope for the dawn of messianic times, times of lasting redemption, and a better future in the here and now (cf. Scherman 2008, p. 765f.). However, until then, the existence of Yom Kippur as an institution offers the person who got through the day, as well as the Jewish people, the chance to experience another year, which may be free from transgressions. Thus, the event provides an opportunity that would not have existed without a previously achieved interpersonal reconciliation.

Reconciliation of Man with Oneself

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​“Mit wem hatte ich mich zu versöhnen?”¹⁰10

Translation: “With whom I had to reconcile?” Haber 2006, p. 136. Haber uses the diary entries of Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) to illustrate how, in the context of Yom Kippur, Goldziher’s inner disruption becomes evident due to the unresolved conflicts with his own Jewish and especially rabbinical tradition and identity.

Ignaz Goldziher

The preceding sub-study has shown that by transgressing the social order, fractures have been caused between a man and his fellow, respectively the people, and between man and the divine (social order); those fractures had necessarily to be reconciled. Otherwise, life would become impossible according to bT RH 16b. Following the sub-study, it was argued that based on certain decisions, actions, or externally added phenomena, fractures or separations within the I can be caused. At the moment of the genesis of this fracture/separation, the I sees itself confronted with the other declared as one-self, which, however, is not an ontological other.

At-one-ment, i. e., becoming-one again after the separation, would be the actual goal of internal-personal reconciliation, namely the reconciliation of the I within oneself, or as I call it: one-self. Both examples being used here assumed that reconciliation with the self could work by self-acceptance. In the case of the orthodox rabbi and psychiatrist Abraham J. Twerski’s publication Happiness and the Human Spirit, this means for the I to accept its own inherent, but by no means fatalistically negatively connoted, “imperfection” (Twerski 2008, p. 27). Only when the I is aware of its actual state it can become one and whole by overcoming the already existing separation between the self and what it considers that belongs to itself. Only a self-reconciled person, i. e., a person that is reconciled with oneself, can strive to be the best one possible to gain “true happiness,” according to Twerski (cf. Twerski 2008, p. 27f.). Only in the state of being reconciled with oneself, a person is capable of asking his fellow in “true penitence” for forgiveness if the former has transgressed against the latter (cf. Twerski 2008, p. 41f.). The latter corresponds closely to the prescribed rule in mYom 8:9 that man should appease his fellow. Otherwise, no life of maintaining reconciliation on Yom Kippur (with the divine) is to be expected. Based on the correlation of the dimension of reconciliation, the following definition could be made: No reconciliation with the other without reconciling with oneself and the one-self. If interpersonal reconciliation is directly dependent on internal-personal reconciliation, at least in the case of Twerski’s work, it is inevitably to aim for reconciliation with the divine on Yom Kippur. Consequently, in a sense, the psychic (internal-personal), ethical-social (inter-personal), and transcendent (divine) spheres to which man, however, appears to have access form a causal unity. When the I is reconciled with the one-self, it can potentially reconcile with the fellow or the other person in general. As soon as this became a reality, reconciliation with the divine is potentially possible.

Unlike the analysis of Twerski, rabbi Karyn D. Kedar’s narrative Tug-of-War (published in a book of collected writings: The Bridge to Forgiveness, 2007) on the struggle of a terminally ill friend of hers is conceptually and contextually even closer to mYom 8:9. The process of reconciliation described by Kedar in this narrative takes place on Yom Kippur. Even if Kedar does not use the term “reconciliation,” forgiveness is essential to her throughout the entire work, particularly regarding the relationship of the I with oneself or the one-self. In other words, for Kedar, forgiveness is the cure for all that creates a separation within the human being. Even though the event described by Kedar, which occurred during the Yom Kippur liturgy and was understood as a reconciliation of the I within oneself or oneself, cannot be objectified, it provides at least an idea of the immense spiritual significance that the Day of Atonement still has for the Jewish individual.

According to Kedar’s description, what was happening during the liturgy shortly before the “closing” (Ne’ilah) of the gates – that is, moments before the end of Yom Kippur, and thus the last opportunity to turn back to the divine, standing before him dressed in white, sometimes in the burial shroud as a sign of repentance, like on Rosh ha-Shanah (cf. Galley 2003, p. 55) – is the regaining of one’s own “faith,” as well as the attainment of a state of “inner peace” (Kedar 2007, p. 75). The quasi-new condition befalls the terminally ill person due to an act of (one-)self-forgiveness. In this context, forgiveness means the acceptance of the one-self by the subject, the I. What was split off by the I had to be conceived and accepted as belonging to the I. Consequently, the inner separation has to be overcome. Overcoming the internal- and interpersonal “tug-of-war” (Ibid., p. 74f.),¹¹11

Certain separations within the I may possibly be generated by an external counterpart, that is, another person. “The day I met you, you declared, ‘I am not very spiritual, you know.’ From then on, we played a friendly game of thug-of-war. Sometimes gentle. Sometimes fierce. Always high stakes—eternity versus oblivion” (Kedar 2007, p. 74). Thus, Kedar herself is this other person, the opposite, which challenges the terminally ill person because of what she represents. At the same time, she is the addressee of the questions of meaning articulated by that person; the inner disruption only penetrates outward through the confrontation with the human counterpart (Ibid.).

which gives the narrative its name and describes the releasing or letting go of the manifold inner conflict, provided a space for reconciliation, occurring on the Day of Atonement for that particular person.

Overcoming the internal separation of the I with something that it did not regard as belonging to itself, the so-called one-self, is understood as becoming one, which semantically corresponds to the abstract atonement (at-one-ment). As a consequence of (one) self-forgiveness, a state of being reconciled with the other, who is actually a part of the self, follows the state of being separated. This can also be understood as a state of not-being-reconciled and does not necessarily have to be considered the result of transgressions. Something separating can also befall the I from the outside (e. g., a disease). Therefore, reconciliation with the oneself could be understood as a particular form of interpersonal reconciliation.

Following Kedar’s account of how internal reconciliation in the context of Yom Kippur suddenly happened, it could also be concluded that due to the events that occurred, the terminally ill person achieves reconciliation with God, which Lev 16 at least implicitly and mYom 8:9 explicitly determine as the goal of that very day. Because of the reconciliation process, the person does not plunge into “oblivion” but has attained “eternity”¹²12

“As it turned out, eternity won” (Kedar 2007, p. 75).

. According to Kedar’s account, “eternity won”, which must be understood as a result of reconciliation with oneself, just like the regaining of “faith” and “inner peace.” Thus, if reconciliation with oneself or the one-self can be associated with interpersonal reconciliation and thus represents a subdimension of this and interpersonal reconciliation, it is again a necessary condition for the reconciliation of the God-man relationship. The process of reconciliation in Kedar’s Tug-of-War coheres with the inherent causality of mYom 8:9, namely the causality of the dimensions of reconciliation set forth therein (reconciliation of the man-man relationship as a prerequisite of the reconciliation of the God-man relationship)¹³13

In my opinion, Albertini 2003, p. 182 has felicitously argued in her analysis that Cohen in his philosophy of religion shows that reconciliation with oneself is an indispensable prerequisite for the reconciliation of the I with the divine, still only the latter grants reconciliation (Cohen 1924/2002, p. 143/517: “Kein anderer kann die Versöhnung bewirken als nur Gott allein”), but that reconciliation with oneself in its necessity becomes evident only as soon as man has attained “the knowledge of injustice in the relationship between men” (Cohen 2008, p. 242).

.

References

Abstract

The Arabic term wasatia lies at the core of the Wasatia movement, whose creation and development are analyzed in Zeina M. Barakat’s From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh. The paper is based on her doctoral dissertation at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, which appeared as a same-titled book in 2017. It will provide an account of the lifelong journey of the Jerusalem-born educator and peace activist Mohammed Dajani Daoudi from extremism to moderation. Barakat points out the key agents in Dajani’s life that caused such transformation by examining his family background, his personal and national narrative, changing attitude by behavior and the ethical point of reference influencing his thinking. Her paper analyzes the deep-rooted ethical teaching that moved Dajani to become committed to seeking moderation, reconciliation, and democracy. Those values inspired the creation of the Wasatia Movement, aimed by Dajani as a platform to transform Palestinian public opinion positively by recognizing them as necessary educative components in a peace strategy for the next generations of Israelis and Palestinians.

***

The book From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh. Evolutionary Journey from Extremism to Moderation, published in 2017 (Barakat 2017), borrows its title from the trilateral project “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone.” This metaphor refers to an image in the book of the Prophet Ezekiel: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel XXXVI:26, ESV). This image is significant also in Muslim culture since the Holy Quran says: {“Then your hearts became hardened after that, being like stones or even harder. For indeed, there are stones from which rivers burst forth, and there are some of them that split open, and water comes out, and there are some of them that fall for fear of God. Moreover, God is not unaware of what you do.”} (Quran 2:74).

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​ثُمَّ قَسَتْ قُلُوبُكُم مِّن بَعْدِ ذَٰلِكَ فَهِيَ كَالْحِجَارَةِ أَوْ أَشَدُّ قَسْوَةً ۚ وَإِنَّ مِنَ الْحِجَارَةِ لَمَا يَتَفَجَّرُ مِنْهُ الْأَنْهَارُ ۚ وَإِنَّ مِنْهَا لَمَا يَشَّقَّقُ فَيَخْرُجُ مِنْهُ الْمَاءُ ۚ وَإِنَّ مِنْهَا لَمَا يَهْبِطُ مِنْ خَشْيَةِ اللَّهِ ۗ وَمَا اللَّهُ بِغَافِلٍ عَمَّا تَعْمَلُونَ

[ البقرة: 74] 

The book’s central question, similar to that of the project, seeks to explain and study the transformation of individuals and groups from extremism to moderation and from lesser to a more significant willingness for reconciliation. It addresses what explains such a shift in human behavior and what role empathy plays in such transformation. The book, inspired by the project’s central theme, describes an individual’s journey from a closed mindset of “us or them” to an open mindset of “us and them” by taking as its case study Palestinian intellectual and peace activist Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi. The primary focus of the publication is experiencing the “suffering of the other” as a means of understanding how and why individuals may become more open to reconciliation.

The book has five main objectives. First, it seeks to identify and examine the agents of change that contributed to the performance of the reconciliation process. Second, it explores whether such a transformation is a unique individual case or can be generalized. Third, it evaluates the role of moderation and middle ground in paving the way for reconciliation, coexistence, and peace. Fourth, it assesses how encountering “the humanity of the other” (as was the case with Dajani when his parents received critical healthcare attention from Israeli medics) can have an independent influence on the general reconciliation process, in particular, its impact on the likelihood of consolidating a group transition from a culture of conflict to a culture of peace. Fifth, it considers the role of the Wasatia movement¹1

The Wasatia Movement derives its name from the term ​wasatia which appears in verse 143 in The Cow (​Al Baqarat) Surah in the Holy Quran which says: [“And thus We have created you Ummatan Wasatan [a middle ground (moderate) nation/ a centrist ummah (community)]”. The term ​wasatia in Arabic means center and middle. In the Quranic text it means justice, moderation, balance and temperance. Verse 143 of the second chapter falls exactly in the midst of the 286 verses composing the surat. The passage demonstrates that the need to be moderate and temperate is a central code of Islamic doctrine.

as a trusted Muslim religious entity capable of engaging in the midst of conflict (what Martin Leiner calls the “Hölderlin Perspective”) of people-to-people public engagement to generate new forms of soft dialogue to bridge the gap between both clashing ideologies to warm attitudes towards reconciliation.²2

The Hölderlin Perspective (Leiner 2012, pp. 8–16) derives its name from the German poet, theologian, and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) who in the end of his novel Hyperion calls for reconciliation in the midst of strife: “Versöhnung ist mitten im Streit und alles Getrennte findet sich wieder” [“Reconciliation is in the middle of dispute and all things separated find each other again.”]. The Hölderlin maxim is deeply rooted in the New Testament. The principle is inspired by Hölderlin’s (1797) argument that elements of peace and reconciliation are already found in the midst of conflict (Barakat 2018).

In combination with the needs-based model of reconciliation, developed by Tel Aviv University psychologist Arie Nadler, the Hölderlin perspective demands that the needs of people in the process of reconciliation amid conflict must be respected (Nadler et al. 2008). According to his pyramid of needs, Abraham Maslow, especially basic needs, require attention (Maslow 1943). The needs Maslow lists are food security, medical care, housing, and safety. For Dajani, these needs focus more on the love of the country, attachment to the land, liberty, identity, honor, dignity, respect, and self-esteem.

The book addresses questions such as: What role would knowing the other (and showing empathy for the “suffering of the other”) play in acknowledging, accepting, and understanding the psyche of the other? How did the evolution of Mohammed Dajani from extremist to moderate take place? What were the moral motivations that inspired Dajani to shift from the state of dehumanization, delegitimization, demonization, non-recognition, and non-acceptance of the other to legitimization, recognition, appreciation, and humanization of the other? What moral principles guided this transformation from stone to flesh, and what role did his moral and ethical upbringing play in changing his behaviour? What role did his ethical identity play in this transformation? How does the Hölderlin Perspective relate to the Wasatia Perspective as a tool in the reconciliation process? Should moderation and reconciliation precede or follow the resolution of the conflict? What are the values that led Dajani to take the path of moderation? What is the right thing to do when it comes to suffering, human rights, and delivering justice and equality to the other?

The answers to how to transform human behaviour from extremism to moderation hold enormous significance not only for the communities in conflict in the region but also within any community where inter-communal conflict exists. Extremists are attempting to change the course of history to fit their vision. If extremists’ triumph, the political stability, economic prosperity, and human security of people living in states dominated by extremists will be at risk. Moreover, international trade and human mobility will be at risk. Conflict will spread, and people will resort to violence, armed struggle, and terrorism to control resources. Monopolies of power would become more common, economies would deteriorate, and genocide would become more prevalent. The middle path would be a way to a meaningful life.

Hence the book From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh aims to demonstrate the significance of morality and ethics for human behavioral and intellectual transformation changes shifting from radicalism, extremism, and intransigence (the heart of stone) to balance, moderation, and reconciliation (the heart of flesh). In exploring the causes of of transformative processes, the role of family, religion, education and ethics cannot be underestimated. From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh focuses on the descriptive ethical dimension of the events that play a significant role in shaping the individual and collective consciousness and memory. The aspiration is to contribute to the ethical research on moderation of being just, doing what is right, and being balanced in motivation by taking the middle path. Reconciliation may blossom through mutual empathy, trust-building, forgiveness, and compassion. The vision of transforming cold, stony hearts full of anger, hatred, fear, bitterness, and fury into hearts of flesh full of life, hope, courage, and optimism holds enormous potential for a happy life. The book illuminates the mysterious ways morality and ethics play a challenging role in transforming individuals from being entirely exclusive to becoming inclusive. Also, causing a person to shift their ideological orientation from one end of the spectrum to the middle through realizing the Wasatia principle of temperance, the Aristotelian golden mean, and Maimonides’concept of the mida beinonit, referred to as “the doctrine of the mean.”

The trend would be more in line with the thesis, which argues that practitioners of conflict resolution need to focus more on reconciliation (the restoration of hope, confidence, trust, cooperation, accord, and harmony between rivals) than on temporarily resolving the issues that fuel the conflict. Here, reconciliation techniques shift the focus in two ways. First, they take more of a grassroots bottom-up approach to build peace within the civil society of rival communities and not only between its leaders. Second, reconciliation is a long process that requires an extended time to resolve disputes and end conflicts.

The book From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh employs the case study as its methodology to seek answers to questions raised. The case study examines Palestinian intellectual and peace activist Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi and studies his shift from a mindset of radicalism and extremism to moderation, compromise, tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and normalization. Such a transformation is eagerly sought to put an end to people’s suffering in a protracted conflict. It describes Dajani’s upbringing in a liberal Muslim family, educational and political journeys, ethical and moral development, professional career, and efforts to enhance creativity and critical thinking in his teachings. It portrays his educational philosophy of breaking taboos by establishing the American graduate Studies program at Al-Quds University in 2002 and leading a controversial student trip in March 2014 to the Auschwitz Nazi death concentration camp to teach his students about the Holocaust. The book sheds light on the long-term effect of seeking knowledge, searching for the truth, and showing empathy for the historical suffering of his occupiers in the transformation process of his values, behaviour, and aspirations.

From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh is divided into eight chapters of different perspectives dealing with moderation concepts and philosophy. The introductory chapter lays down the historical background of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Chapter One narrates the major historical events which shaped the Middle East and contributed to the ideological, intellectual, and political transformation of Dajani. It successfully blends the historical narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian controversy and contemporary thought on theoretical and practical importance issues to illuminate the linkage between the essential concepts of moderation and reconciliation (see Hameiri et al. present volume). The historical background aims to help explain the environment in which Dajani grew up and identifies the significant events that shaped his career. It recounts history through advancing three narratives: the international, the Israeli, and the Palestinian. Chapter two describes the factors influencing the change process for Dajani, such as his family, education, religion, culture, and media. From the Friends Quaker School, Dajani adopted his views on religious tolerance and religious freedom, which later played an essential role in shaping his Wasatia philosophy. At the Friends School in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Dajani was taught not to feel any distinction between people with different faiths, colors, and ethnic backgrounds and not to differentiate between someone rich and someone poor. The Quaker philosophy coincided with the Quran that all religions and beliefs, called for similar values, and became his guiding light. Later on, he taught his students the significance of seeking mutual understanding through education. He kept a strong sense of egalitarianism within himself and the professional skills to deal with adversity, and the broad sense of self-confidence that eventually helped him to overpower his intense feelings for retaliation and retribution. Chapter Three focuses on converting the case study from a “heart of stone to a heart of flesh”, i. e., from extremism to moderation. Chapter Four discusses the concept of moderation in ancient and modern times and brings a range of classic philosophers – from Plato to Aristotle to Maimonides to al-Ghazali – to bear witness on the significance of the middle path in human lives. The book illustrates that classical philosophy can still deal with crucial modern issues.

Consequently, Chapter Five outlines the factors influencing the creation in Palestine of the moderate Islamic movement named Wasatia and outlines its activities to spread the culture of justice, balance, middle ground, and centrism within the Palestinian society and abroad. Chapter Six analyzes Dajani’s views on peace initiatives and reconciliation, stressing that the best pathway to settlement is finding solutions both parties would accept as good enough. The Seventh Chapter details the actions Dajani took and the risks to which he exposed himself as well as his professional career to enrich the knowledge of his students by taking them on a breakthrough visit to the Nazi death concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. The trip aimed to teach Palestinian students reconciliation through empathy and expose them to the realities of the taboo topic of the Holocaust (Dajani et al., 2016; Barakat, 2014). However, the Palestinian public was outraged, and Dajani was condemned even among his colleagues at al-Quds University as a “traitor” and “collaborator.” His car was torched, and his life was threatened. Chapter Eight concludes the research by stressing the significance of the Wasatia moderation approach as being essential for creating an environment conducive to attaining reconciliation in the midst of conflict by building bridges of understanding, trust, empathy, and goodwill – all essential ingredients for negotiating in good faith and achieving a comprehensive sustainable settlement.

In his book Sources of the Self, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor provides a thoughtful insight into moral biography (Taylor 1992, p. 15). In the first part of his book, he explains that identity always evolves within a moral landscape, where traditions bring good and evil but change through shifting environments, social processes, and individual choices. Dajani first constructed his identity within a family and school environment, where values of kindness, compassion, tolerance, and forgiveness were dominant, even though intense experiences of injustice have been significant. At the American University in Beirut, his moral landscape changed. Extremism and violence frequently gained positive connotations. Moderation and tolerance were not perceived as esteemed values anymore. Moving to the West, Dajani found his way back to the values of his childhood. Being distanced from the conflict and exposed to a liberal culture opened his eyes to see the bigger picture. Exposure to the clashing Israeli-Palestinian narratives, educational insights, personal experiences, and openness to the perspectives of the other may facilitate our journey from extremism to moderation.

Through his life journey, Dajani has developed two models of reconciliation: the first is entitled “Big Dream Small Hope” (Dajani Daoudi 2006), and the second is the Wasatia Initiative (Dajani Daoudi 2009). The model describes how the mindset of two groups in conflict decides their willingness to reconcile or continue fighting. The model raises the question: Is it our psychology, nature, culture, or our politics that prevents achieving a negotiated settlement to a conflict? According to Dajani, the “Big Dream” for one side is to wake up one morning and find that the other has disappeared. The “Small Hope” for both disagreeing groups is to find that peace prevails, and both coexist in harmony with secure borders, and good neighbourly relations, enjoying the prosperity reconciliation and democracy entails. In his model, Dajani describes the rise of a new paradigm in which people in conflict are not divided by national affiliation but by political ideology: those who support peace in one camp and those who oppose it. The model calls upon people to become aware of the immorality of exclusivity embedded in the “Big Dream” since it implies ethnic cleansing of the other. The “Small Hope” holds a positive value since it symbolizes the Wasatia cycle of moving from extremism to moderation, reconciliation, peace, and democracy in an experience of creativity, wonder, enlightenment, and inspiration.

In his famous poem The Road Not Taken, published in 1916, American poet Robert Frost describes the dilemma of choosing one of two forks in a road through the woods. Having settled for the less-traveled fork, with some regret, the traveler notes that regular momentum would cause him to press ahead and thus negating a return trip to try the other path. Similarly, conflict momentum pushes groups in conflict to press ahead and deny them a return trip to adopt the other path of peace.

A complex issue the book raises is whether ethics have a role in changing extremists with “hearts of stone” and “big dreams” of exclusivity to “hearts of flesh” with “small hope” of inclusivity. The first may use unilateralism, boycotts, anti-normalization, violence, terrorism, genocide, and mass-deporting the other to enjoy the right to the land by denying the human rights of others; the second are those committed to dialogue, diplomacy, normalization, compromise, and peaceful resolution of conflict. As a task of political philosophy, the book addresses how and why a leading Palestinian influential figure, who once used to be an extremist, became a moderate, overcoming dualistic thinking forms like “I am right/you are wrong; my cause is just/your cause is wrong; I am an angel/you are the devil; I am destined to enter heaven/you are going to Hell; my religion is what God desires/your religion is what God rejects,” developing commitment to religious tolerance, diversity, plurality, peaceful coexistence and cooperation.

The book carefully examines the ethical indicators which determine the choice of the path to take when one faces crucial decisions. The central focus is targeting three core values: (a) moderation — reflecting justice and balance in dealing with daily personal and national issues, and (b) reconciliation — reflecting the willingness to resolve by sacrificing maximalist demands, respecting the personal and collective narrative of the other, feeling compassion for the pain and suffering of the other, and showing interest by putting oneself in the shoes of the other, (c) democracy — reflecting one’s feeling of respect for the views and expressions of others and tolerating the faith and beliefs of others. These three concepts are linked together, each leads to the other, and one cannot flourish without the other. They form what Dajani calls the “Reconciliation Cycle,” i. e., that moderation paves the way for reconciliation, which in turn contributes towards the creation of a more trustful society, influencing its attitude for a peaceful end to the conflict by ushering in peace, democracy, and prosperity.

The book concludes by stressing the urgency to follow the path of moderation to achieve peace, security, and prosperity as a treasured heritage for future generations. Though Dajani’s family background, personal experience, and educational development played a crucial role in changing his way of thinking and conduct, he is not an isolated case. It is possible to replicate his transformation by creating a peaceful environment and culture. Findings of the book assert that the deep-rooted ethical and academic teachings are essential agents who facilitated his shift from the periphery to the center: “Us or them” / “I am right, you are wrong” / “It is either black or white” / “My way right or wrong” (win-lose outcome), to adopting moderation, i. e. “us and them” / “I may be wrong, you may be right” / “Between black and white there is gray” (win-win outcome).

The research identifies the new trend of benefiting from modern communication social media and technologies, such as Facebook, to reach out to the public. The Wasatia initiative benefits from websites and groups social networks by using them as a sounding board to enable direct citizen engagement with the reconciliation process and call for a deep commitment to a vision of moderation as a transformative, democratizing force. Such a medium is a powerful and vital tool to voice the aspirations of Wasatia as a movement with limited financial resources, providing fresh, unexpected insights about politics, religion, and culture.

The research emphasizes that reconciliation is not a static state but an almost never-ending dynamic process. In our world, reconciliation is an unsatisfied craving. Therefore, spirituality is necessary for sustaining continuous efforts toward reconciliation. However, the commitment to a religion, is not needed, but it can help to motivate persistent engagement and may act as a heavenly resource of inspiration for reconciliation.

From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh is a textbook to help readers understand the twin subject matter of moderation and reconciliation. With this publication, teachers, students, and anyone interested in the topic will find interesting practical insights and answers to their questions concerning reconciliation. Readers could think about the questions and then discuss the ideas with others, which would serve as a starting point for future research of the issues it debates. Reading through the book provides the reader with a deep understanding of the issues it covers and is enlightening for those concerned about whether one should do the right thing if the personal costs are high?

In conclusion, From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh is a discourse on pluralism, heterogeneity, and cultural diversity dissected and extensively illustrated for peace and reconciliation scholars. It explores critical approaches to moderation and relates them to the

field of coexistence. It approaches the inter-relationships between moderation and

reconciliation from two perspectives. First, is the theoretical approach that places high value and distinctive characteristics on the concept of moderation. Second, the on-ground practical implementation of the concept by the Islamic movement Wasatia within the Palestinian society to generate a national culture of temperance and acceptance. The book offers a comprehensive account of how people may shift their philosophy and identity from political extremism to a moderate philosophy in theory and practice amid conflict. 

References

Abstract

Martin J. O’Malley’s contribution, Narratives and Justice in Reconciliation Research: An Applied Ethics Perspective, examines methods and principles for reconciliation research. The first part outlines Martin Leiner’s keystone principle, the Hölderlin perspective, which is central to the Jena Center of Reconciliation Studies (JCRS) endeavors. The second part proposes a related justice principle, the Schiller correlative. Part three deepens the conceptual reflection on reconciliation and justice and introduces three derivative priority rules for dealing with intergroup conflicts. The ethical, political, and local (subsidiarity) priorities offer practical guidance for understanding and dealing with conflict and post-conflict transitions. Finally, part four describes how reconciliation work can promote justice through memory narratives that contribute to social flourishing. The Hölderlin perspective softens many rigid boundaries used to conceptually separate situations of war from peace, antagonism from reconciliation, and even victim(s) from perpetrator(s). It draws insight from the poet Hölderlin (1770–1843) to contemplate reconciliation existing within our modern condition’s complex but inherently social nature. O’Malley argues that justice – the concept – is optimally understood as a virtue that is actualized in practical reasoning ordered to the elusive but necessary goal (telos) of social flourishing. Conversely, understanding justice in some essentialist, idealistic, or universalistic way can undermine the pursuit of practical actions with unrealizable expectations. The author’s applied ethics perspective argues that both reconciliation and justice share a telos of social flourishing and are therefore necessarily mutually supportive.

Introduction

This essay examines the methods and principles of reconciliation research. The first part outlines Martin Leiner’s keystone principle, the Hölderlin perspective, which is central to the Jena Center of Reconciliation Studies (JCRS) endeavors. The second part proposes a related justice principle, the Schiller correlative. Part three deepens the conceptual reflection on reconciliation and justice, introducing three derivative priority rules for dealing with intergroup conflicts. The ethical, political, and local (subsidiarity) priorities offer practical guidance for understanding and dealing with conflict and post-conflict transitions. Part four describes how reconciliation work can promote justice through memory narratives that contribute to social flourishing. The Hölderlin perspective softens many rigid boundaries used to conceptually differentiate war situations from peace, antagonism from reconciliation, and even victim(s) from perpetrator(s). It draws insight from the poet to contemplate reconciliation existing within the complex but inherently social nature of our modern condition. The virtue justice is, like reconciliation, ordered to the elusive but necessary goal (telos) of social flourishing. Justice and reconciliation are necessarily mutually supportive because they share a telos of social flourishing. This essay represents part of a larger argument developed for an applied ethics monograph.

Hölderlin Perspective. Keystone of the Jena Approach to Reconciliation

The Hölderlin perspective is an approach to “seeing” conflict contexts that intentionally investigates reconciling dynamics that persist even during conflicts’ most violent expressions. It is inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry from the early Romantic era – when the glory of the Enlightenment was dimmed by terror and tumult following the French Revolution. The perspective also represents the judgment that conflict and post-conflict interventions and research should be guided by an umbrella category of reconciliation. Reconciliation provides the teleologically-ordered framework of principles, priorities, disciplines, and goals, within which transitional justice, restorative justice, and many other fields of activities and research have important roles. Leiner uses the word “perspective” to highlight its instructive role in guiding reconciliation work. The Hölderlin perspective supports the principles, methods, and spirit of the Jena approach (Leiner 2012).

The perspective we use to “see” a conflict impacts the ways we come to understand the conflicts themselves and the potentials for dealing with them. The Hölderlin perspective softens many hard boundaries used to conceptually separate situations of war from peace, antagonism from reconciliation, and even victim(s) from perpetrator(s). Instead, it draws insight from the poet to contemplate, first, reconciliation existing within the complex but inherently social nature of our modern condition, and second, fuller reconciliation as the elusive but necessary goal towards which individuals and communities strive. Conflict and violence present situations of immense personal and social cost to be avoided and resolved, when possible, but we are indelibly marked by historical, recent, and continuing conflicts – large and small. Our lives are never free from conflict and its effects. Reductive individual and group identifications are counter-productive for promoting sustainable peace and reconciliation. And the Hölderlin perspective draws from the field of hermeneutics to bring critical attention to abstract, exclusionary, or alienating group boundaries. Even categories such as victim/perpetrator, for example, deserve close critical attention for the ways that such identifications promote or reduce openness to reconciliation. In this teleological approach, reconciliation as goal (telos) is stimulus and measure.

Schiller Correlative: Justice is a Virtue Characterized as Prudent Political Action Ordered to Social Flourishing

Justice, as concept, is best understood as a virtue expressed in prudent political action necessary for and ordered to the best flourishing of the community. Because justice and reconciliation processes share a common purpose (telos), on the conceptual level they must be at least potentially compatible and mutually supportive. The applied level is immensely complex, of course, but nevertheless the Jena approach holds that there is no justice without reconciliation; no reconciliation without justice. Intergroup conflict that is marked by dehumanizing violence must be dealt with in ways that not only respond to the violence with justice-relevant processes, but those processes must contribute to some possible productive future for the groups involved. The “Schiller correlative” taps insights from the historical figure regarding the vastly complex tragic histories, which exclude future-oriented “justice” options. Tragedies such as genocide, deliberate targeting of non-combatants, intentional displacement of peoples, and so on, all call for international and legal responses that seem incompatible with any mutually acceptable terms for sustainable peace.

War and peace have been topics for philosophical analysis and a famous example is Immanuel Kant’s 1795 Perpetual Peace. Kant’s contemporary Schiller, however, preferred to explore the topic of conflict as a playwright. He used the dramatic form to address the complexity of violent conflict; an example is the Wallenstein trilogy based on a Thirty-Years-War context. The Hölderlin perspective draws attention to reconciling realities within situations of violent conflict, the Schiller correlative sheds light on the individual and social paths of dealing with conflict despite the quagmires they may present. For example, in “Wilhelm Tell” (1805), the play’s conflict situation calls forth the hero Tell to identify and condemn injustice. Yet, his heroic action best expresses justice in its transcendence of injustice – when Tell’s creative action opens a potential future for his family and community. A more contemporary real-life Tell would be Nelson Mandela in post-Apartheid South Africa. Mandela understood the importance of recognizing past injustice and the need to build law-based courts and governing institutions, and he also understood that his land required creative leadership to transcend its troubled past with a compelling narrative of future flourishing. In so acting, Mandela expressed the virtue of justice.

Virtues are praiseworthy habits, and justice is a praiseworthy habit of practical reasoning or prudence. Whereas the virtuous musician expresses her virtuosity in the playing of music, justice is expressed in practical reasoning, in pragmatic action in the midst of messy social contexts. With Schiller in mind, the justice concept is defined to integrate the wisdom of philosophical traditions as well as contemporary social science approaches. The claim here is both simple and profound. As simple, defining justice as a virtue has a long tradition. Yet the profound claim is that this is not just one more justice approach among many, but a formal definition of the concept itself. Justice cannot be reduced to some abstract idea of balance, nor to some static essentialist thing like a catalog of rights. Justice, as concept, is most appropriately understood as being expressed in actions that optimally deal with conflict contexts to achieve situations most generative of social well-being.

Justice is therefore appropriately described in the philosophical tradition as a virtue. This is as true now as it was for Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Peirce, to the present. This tradition informs the following definition: “Justice as virtue” is a trained faculty of practical reasoning that is expressed in action and characterized by the following five elements:

1. It is expressed by a community or by a leader on behalf of the community, though it is obviously relevant to individuals.

2. It is characterized by prudence, which is another way of saying good judgment or practical reasoning.

3. It is based upon stable dispositions – that on the social level are institutionalized in systems of governance, principles of rights, ethics, social rules, and traditions.

4. It is ordered to the telos or purpose of the community’s best flourishing.

5. And, it is applied in the most local context – a characteristic clarified in the principle of subsidiarity.

Ethical reflection upon the nature of justice is relevant because actions undertaken to achieve reconciliation require a telos by which those actions can be measured, and this telos is the vision of the good – the common good. Achieving consensus on a justice definition may seem like a path of more conflict, as opposed to reconciliation, given the wide divergence of political worldviews, religious commitments, and ethical beliefs existing among and within social groups dealing with conflict. However, the present attempt to provide a justice definition does not attempt to achieve unanimity on metaphysical, religious, or even deep ethical levels, but rather to establish a formal conceptual framework upon which reconciliation efforts can be guided and evaluated. The justice definition builds upon ethical theories from classical sources, especially from Aristotle’s teleological approach of practical reasoning, Schiller’s aesthetic pedagogy, and Dewey’s pragmatism. This approach respects the rich pluralisms of our complex world. It builds on O’Malley 2016 and summarizes positions developed in a forthcoming monograph.

Having outlined the Hölderlin perspective above, the justice definition of the Schiller correlative supports the three priority principles relevant to reconciliation. The priority of the ethical and the political are direct consequences of the justice concept definition, given its teleological nature. And the subsidiarity principle provides a limiting framework for determining the reconciling community. These three sub-principles are relevant to present discussions regarding the various academic approaches to conflict and post-conflict studies such as transitional justice, restorative justice, negotiation, conflict resolution, etc…. The position argued here is that it is prudent to have a broad-umbrella reconciliation field for integrating the various practical disciplines that address particular needs relevant to the always unique local expressions of violent conflict. Moreover, the argument here is that on the level of concept, it is incoherent to consider justice as merely one approach, discipline, strategy, or whatever that could compete with another approach, discipline, strategy, or whatever.

A military doctor’s son, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was trained for military medical service and familiar with violent conflict’s terrible trauma. Political and violent conflict provides setting for Schiller’s dramatic works, which remain most revelatory of his prodigious philosophical and historical wisdom. The use of non-formal philosophical expressions such as drama and poetry is typical for many of the figures associated with Jena Romanticism. Dalia Nassar (2014) argues that Romanticism can be differentiated from idealism by looking at the questions figures were attempting to address. This seems a productive way of reading the figures in Jena. Schiller, for example, is associated with Sturm und Drang, Goethe’s classicism, and idealism. Yet his pursuit of questions regarding personal identity vis-à-vis society, aesthetics, and morality are characteristically Romantic, in my judgement. Leaving aside the debate on philosophical schools and periods, these brilliant thinkers gathered in Jena, during the last decade of the 18^th century, including Hölderlin (1770–1843), were part of a community intentionally formed by Goethe. He was directly responsible for bringing Schiller to Jena and sponsored his appointment at the university. Whether the community formed their ideas in Jena, or traveled to Jena because of already achieved commonalities, they were united in their enthusiasm for Kantian and Enlightenment ideas and their critique of overly abstract idealistic philosophy. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, we have Schiller expressly describing philosophical ideas. Here, he commits himself to the practical part of the Kantian system even as he attempts to transcend its “technical formulation” (Letters, 1^st: 24). This transcendence cannot be achieved with new abstract formulations, and he resists that temptation. “We must indeed, if we are to solve that political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom” (Letters, 2^nd: 27). Thus, looking at dramatic works for insights into reconciliation is principally consistent with the theoretical principles that represent Schiller and his colleagues and students who formed the core of German Romanticism.

Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) and Wallenstein (1799) are similar in portraying vicious cycles of violence swelling to encompass more and more perpetrators and victims. In the dramatic literature, traumas of violence are physical and emotional, and the effects of un-healed trauma include emotional sicknesses with festering and contagious capacities no less catastrophic or mysterious than any plague. Schiller, an autodidactic reader of both Kant and Aristotle, integrated the insights of both philosophers with the early Romantic insight that subjective personal identity is an inherently social reality. This is an idea that Hegel, Schelling, and others were contemporaneously dealing with in Jena. Given the complexity of human individual and social life, justice cannot be reduced to some notion of balance or law or fairness or any other conceptual measuring stick. Like the complex characters of Schiller’s plays, personal and group identities possess porous and overlapping boundaries that resist hard-edged categorization as entirely perpetrators or victims. Thus, human action is most adequately understood within the multidimensional historical matrix of active and passive participation in a “fallen” disordered world. This world has potential for hope, goodness, right action, and justice. But such potential is not actuated because of traumas, resentments, oppressions, misunderstandings, disappointments, loneliness, and misdirected longing.

Achieving good/right/just action within a disordered context requires more than, for example, Kant’s universalizable moral rules or principles. Schiller does not use this language, but justice as right action is never a static thing; it is more optimally described as a virtue abiding in persons and groups acting to re-order social relationships (the polis) to be more loving, more peaceful, more equitable, and simply happier. When faced with tragedy, what does justice counsel? Justice is expressed in the creative realization of what is possible, not in some abstract idea of what is perfect or pure. Individual virtue and well-being are cherished, but justice most appropriately describes practical reasoning ordered to social flourishing. As concept, it is a social virtue.

Justice Is a Virtue – Not a Static Thing

The ethical priority distills the pragmatic Aristotelian insight that justice is always the answer to the question “What ought I, or we do?” Two words in that question deserve attention. “Ought” is a normative word indicating the relevance of right and wrong, better and worse. “Do” indicates that the question requires an action, a performance. Thus, it is fitting to understand justice as a virtue – because a virtue is expressed in action. The athlete expresses virtue in the activity of her sport, the pianist in her music, the artist in her creation. Virtuous activity produces artifacts and is guided by principles and ideals, but we can and should remain aware of the differences. The relevance for reconciliation is that justice is expressed in actions relevant to social conflicts. Understood in this sense that is deeply rooted in theories of western philosophy, the virtue justice is inherently relevant to reconciliation, and it is inconceivable that justice could hinder resolving conflicts because justice is always ordered to communities’ flourishing.

Having established the need for clarity regarding the justice concept, the following section develops the justice definition with five elements derived from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (NE). Though consistent with NE, the definition is a derivation constructed to address contemporary needs: Justice is best defined as a) political action, b) characterized as prudence, c) based upon stable social systems/dispositions, d) ordered to the telos of the community’s best flourishing, and e) applied most in the most local context.

“Just Memory” Approach to Analysis and Interventions

Jena’s teleological approach is analogous to the multi-staged medical model with capacities for trauma triage when necessary to deal with immediate crises, followed by intervention protocols to achieve sustainable injury/disease management, and motivated by the broad goal (telos) of achieving health outcomes to the degree that they are possible. As in medicine, reconciliation requires many disciplines providing crucial research relevant for effective interventions. An example of Jena’s research is “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone,” sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project had Israeli, Palestinian, and German-based scholars working in a transdisciplinary way on a common question: Where the “other” is the adversary out-group, does encountering the suffering of the other influence willingness to reconcile?

Scholars use the tools of different disciplines collaboratively. Disciplines include social psychology, political science, religious studies, theology, and philosophy. Studies undertaken provide insight into the central question about encountering the suffering of the other. One intervention involved an academic course for students at an Israeli university on the topic of reconciliation that included field trips to locations relevant to Palestinian history and the hardships and suffering associated with the Palestinian experience from the time of the Nakba (1948) to the present. A related intervention involved students from Palestinian universities learning about Jewish history and the Holocaust in an academic setting before traveling to Europe on a five-day field trip. The field trip included experiencing the actual sites of historical injustice, memorialized in the museums preserving what is left of the concentration camps where the Holocaust was perpetrated. Many other social psychological studies and theoretical sub-projects probed the phenomenological dynamics of encountering the suffering of the other.

A theme emerging is a reinforcement of the importance of groups experiencing the suffering of the other through a lens of their own in-group suffering. This is true for both Israeli students and for Palestinian students. When conflict groups are mixed, each group can react to perceived threats by becoming defensive. Social psychologists best address these dynamics and advise how to avoid triggering responses and how to reinforce identity security. By adopting recommended measures, participants in field trips were more willing to learn about and recognize the out-group’s historical tragedies. Yet even with care to avoid defensive reactions, participants’ recognition of their enemies’ (out-group) trauma was interpreted within a framework and moral compass of their own in-group tragedy narratives. Thus, Israelis viewed Palestinian hardships without suspending their own family historical Holocaust suffering.

Moreover, Palestinians viewed concentration-camp sites while also thinking about their own hardships of continuing Israeli occupation installations such as checkpoints and Israeli prisons. Speaking tentatively and only for myself at this stage in interpreting these experiences, the interventions show that reconciliation interventions require careful and value-transparent framing with the aim of bringing participants to situations of greater reconciliation. Interventions must be recognized as limited but perhaps helpful tools.

Sagy 2016 describes an analogous dynamic in her social-psychological approach of salutogenesis, which advocates a context-relevant teleological methodology analogous to a medical model of aiding persons or groups to achieve their own health or well-being. By working interdisciplinarily, Sagy is inspiring her field to engage other disciplines regarding how well-being can be described and fostered, and she is advocating research that engages social-context questions about peace, openness to the other, and justice, all with a view to understand how these concepts correlate with personal and social health; which are analogous to this essay’s telos of human flourishing.

Using a medical model as analogy, the Jena approach seeks to develop interventions as potential resources for specific goals within a larger goal of social health/flourishing. Like an individual patient whose medical history and context must be considered by a medical professional, each conflict presents a unique narrative. Thus, narrative interpretation (hermeneutics) helps critically interpret conflict and post-conflict situations to offer practical recommendations for promoting reconciliation.

Mohamed Dajani Daoudi’s work in the project with Palestinian experiences of historical Jewish suffering also helps shed light on the Jena approach. Dajani Daoudi’s teaching and research on the Wasatia concept deals with a central ethical pillar of many Palestinians’ Muslim religious convictions. He recommends focusing on the concrete, the local, the achievable “middle way” of Wasatia, rather than getting lost in abstractions of maximalist concepts or demands. To strike the correct balance requires understanding and framing traditions, practices, and memories within narratives ordered most optimally toward the local community’s best flourishing.

Dajani Daoudi’s approach is consistent with the approach of Miroslav Volf, who discusses the role of post-conflict memory in The End of Memory (Volf 2006). Remembering the suffering of historical injustice is a moral duty, Volf claims, but the question is, how should violent injustice be remembered? He answers that the potential content for memory is immense in matter and nature, and thus ought to be tied to a beneficial purpose with meaning for the future. This is not relativism, as acknowledging historical data as truthful is essential, but requires active interpretation for realizing beneficial memory. Dajani Daoudi seeks to remember the historical suffering of Palestinians, including that of his own family, while at the same time not excluding the history of Jewish suffering.

Ricœur makes similar arguments.

Trauma-focused memory can fixate on wrongdoing and suffering, whereas “exemplary memory” moves beyond passive experience and re-trauma, beyond self-destructive re-action in potential forms of violence and vengeance. Though difficult, intentionally proactive memory constitution frames memory in perhaps abstract terms as exemplary for moral meaning, in whatever form that could take (Volf 2006, pp. 87–89).

Such framing requires, of course, an ethical structure. Volf builds upon Christian traditions and scriptures. Ricœur builds upon supererogative spheres of alterity and love. Dajani Daoudi frames Palestinian suffering with Wasatia principles analogous to Aristotle’s teleological teaching. For Volf, new potentially traumatic memories can be framed in Christian mysteries of suffering and redemption, which function as meaning-providing resources that are (potentially) ordered towards future action unbound from violent retributive cycles. Remembering subsidiarity, the fifth element of the justice definition, the local priority would guide our understanding of potential narrative resources for the Israeli-Palestinian context. Sagy, working in Israel among religious and secular Jews and Muslims, would draw on local traditions for that context, but the structure of the approach is analogous, using religious and cultural resources to address, heal, and focus memory. Dajani Daoudi’s ethical and religious principles are relevant because of his connection to Palestinians’ local context.

Building upon Ricœur, Kearney 2003 uses an analogous approach to memory, a work that has special relevance for reconciliation due to its treatment of the alienating nature of historical injustice in the construction of the narratives that give meaning and orientation to social groups. Violence is alienating in social conflicts because it is a means that is inherently destructive of future cooperative flourishing. Violence-hardened alienation finds its way into narratives in both clear and complex ways. Kearney’s philosophical/hermeneutical approach helps one a) to “read” the violence of narratives, b) to analyze the narratives in terms of ethical principles, and c) to then form narratives more worthy of productive futures. It is not enough, Kearney argues, to use post-modern approaches that analyze and deconstruct power relations existing in the complexities and antinomies of separate group narratives of past injustice or trauma. This perhaps respects the different perspectives of victim groups’ historical suffering but remains mired in that complexity and leaves present and future intergroup interaction without narrative openness or commonalities.

A second “false path” is characterized by the lugubrious melancholy of ruminations and depressive fixations on past trauma and present powerlessness because of historical injury. Kearney argues that using memory exclusively to ruminate on the feelings associated with trauma could keep the victim continually returning to debilitating memories, reliving them, and interpreting present realities and future possibilities in terms of loss, subjection, and hopelessness.

When conflicts stories are studied like the texts of literature or scripture, we use the methods of analysis that have been developed for such study, namely hermeneutics. As a discipline itself, hermeneutics deals with issues of meaning, bias, history, values, and much more. It is no coincidence that Ricœur and Kearney are key figures in the field. In his Hölderlin perspective, Leiner also uses hermeneutic methods to interpret conflict as already possessing reconciling elements. Likewise, the Schiller correlative is an impetus to interpret conflict from the perspective of justice. Kearney’s recommended third strategy, “just memory,” is consistent with and informs the Jena approach to reconciliation with its emphasis on studying existing and potential narratives relevant to conflict. “Just memory” offers a fundamentally social imagination and ethical vision of participating in processes that form narratives of justice focused upon encountering the “other” with hospitality and humility. Hospitality and humility are value-laden dispositions that implicitly embrace the principle of human dignity; it is an ethical act to be “with the other,” discovering and thus writing narratives open to future flourishing. This “ethical priorities” approach is consistent with Sagy and Dajani Daoudi. Kearney’s account reveals the phenomenological processes by which humans can participate in creating life-giving narratives for personal and social identity constructions ordered towards self- and community flourishing.

References

Abstract

Challenging the widespread assumption according to which reconciliation is understood as a process or an aim to be achieved in the post-conflict period, i. e., after or beyond formal peace processes between political leaderships, Yoav Kapshuk’s paper on Reconciliation in Peace Agreements? The Case Study of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process presents principles of reconciliation as crucial elements that could be applied in formal agreements to end conflicts. They include transitional justice, historical truth, historical acknowledgement, and dealing with past injustices’ socioeconomic and structural aspects. In its first part, the paper discusses these reconciliation principles in the context of formal peace processes, recommending ways of incorporating them into agreements. The second section applies them in a model for solving the Palestinian refugee issue based on the Oslo peace process. The paper argues that formal peace agreements must not be exclusively identified as the objective of the conflict settlement or resolution techniques. Integrating reconciliation principles in formal agreements can benefit attempts to end protracted conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian case.

Introduction

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is considered intractable and unresolvable. In the course of its hundred and more years, and certainly, since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Oslo Process is widely considered the most serious attempt to bring the conflict to an end. The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians began in earnest in Oslo in 1993 and ended with the outbreak of the Second Intifada, also known as Al-Aksa Intifada, in 2000. One of the most controversial issues on which no agreement could be reached is that of the Palestinian refugees from 1948. This issue was not a part of the discussion that led to the interim agreements as part of the Oslo process. US President Bill Clinton presented the proposed model for resolving this issue to both sides in December 2000. The Clinton Parameters were discussed in the 2001 Taba Summit but led to no agreement. Israeli and Palestinian veterans of the Oslo process proposed a similar model in the 2003 Geneva Accord.

In the following sections, I use this model for a permanent solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as a test case to expand the critical literature dealing with conflict resolution. Three major techniques for dealing with conflicts are settlement, resolution, and reconciliation. There is a significant difference between conflict settlement and resolution on the one hand and reconciliation on the other. Reconciliation involves the consideration of a conflict’s complex root causes by exposing the truth about injustices related to the conflict as well as acknowledgement and assumption of historical responsibility by the perpetrators (Rouhana 2011; Kelman 2008). Reconciliation is also unique in that it is suitable for dealing with prolonged and intractable conflicts, which are central to collective identities shaped over generations of conflicts in the context of asymmetrical relations of power, domination, oppression, and collective exploitation (Rouhana 2004, 174). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict meets this definition, claiming reconciliation is the most appropriate technique for dealing with conflicts (Peled and Rouhana 2004).

In this paper, I use the Oslo model for a permanent settlement of the refugee issue to suggest a novel interpretation of the reconciliation technique. In the first section, I discuss four reconciliation principles. The second section demonstrates why the Palestinian refugee issue is a crucial element of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a third section, I then analyze the model for resolving the refugee issue proposed at the end of the Oslo process by considering reconciliation principles as they ought to be articulated in formal agreements. In the last section, I explain how the conclusions drawn from this article could challenge civil society and the international community regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Principles of Reconciliation in Formal Peace Negotiations

This article considers reconciliation as an umbrella concept and as an “overall perspective englobing conflict resolution and other topics” (Leiner, 2018, 178), which includes historical truth, historical acknowledgement, and coping with structural aspects of past injustices, and transitional justice.

The first reconciliation principle is revealing the historical truth about the conflict. The narrative adopted by each party to the conflict is one of the key factors that perpetuate the dispute. Usually, the perpetrators conceal the truth about their wrongdoing, and the informational gap between victimizer and victimized deepens the latter’s grudge. Moreover, the victims’ often silenced and marginalized voices are central to their collective identity. Accordingly, any reconciliation needs to involve public agreement on the historical truth (Bashir 2011; Crocker 1999; Dwyer 1999; Lambourne 2009; Rouhana 2011). It is also essential for the peace agreements to include a detailed description of the history of the conflict emphasizing wrongdoings. If no consensus can be reached regarding historical truth, the agreement should at least include a statement of each party’s position.

The second principle, related to historical truth, is acknowledging and assuming historical responsibility for past injustices. In the peace agreement, both parties – but mainly the more powerful ones – must admit to their wrongdoings, accept the historical responsibility, and face the consequences. This process is challenging because such recognition “undermines the internal sense of justice” and moral integrity of the perpetrating party (Jamal 2001).

Restoration and compensation for the victims are related to the third principle: dealing with the structural aspects of the conflict. The critical literature on conflict resolution has mostly ignored this aspect, which is also missing in most reconciliation mechanisms, such as truth and reconciliation commissions (Killen 2010, 315; Carranza 2008) but has recently attracted growing scholarly attention (Schmid and Nolan 2014). These studies suggest that reconciliation should reduce the structural and material inequalities of parties to a former conflict since those inequalities belong to the results of the conflict and are integral to its injustices (Hecht and Michalowski 2012). It is therefore desirable for peace agreements to include provisions for compensation, reparation and restitution of property, the return and naturalization of refugees and plans for the rehabilitation of victims. Moreover, they should include concrete steps and a schedule for socioeconomic restructuring to achieve “distributive reconciliation” (Aiken 2010, 171; Lambourne 2009; Muvingi 2009).

The last principle is transitional justice. I consider transitional justice the most appropriate approach to dealing with intractable conflicts. This approach emphasizes the process of coping with past injustices related to the conflict (Teitel 2003; Teitel 2000). The starting point is to acknowledge the parties’ asymmetrical power relations, facilitating the transition from oppression or exploitation to a situation where the victims’ moral dignity is restored, or at least, the transition from a “barbaric” to a “minimally decent society” (Bhargava 2000; Rouhana 2011; Rouhana 2004). Transitional justice is transformative since the reassessment of the past is designed to improve future relations and achieve a practical solution. It means the asymmetrically powerful party must be willing to implement the solution without being punished or brought to its knees (Peled and Rouhana 2004).

The concept of transitional justice is often defined as the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses in order to ensure accountability, serve justice, and achieve reconciliation” (UN, 2010, p. 4). The transitional justice literature and practical initially focused on the legal responses of postcolonial regimes to injustices perpetrated by previous oppressive regimes (Teitel 2003). However, as the literature developed, its concept of TJ expanded beyond the legal area to include a variety of ways to deal with past injustices while integrating values such as history, truth, memory, and identity (IJTJ, 3 (2007)). Alongside the field of academic research, the title “transitional justice” is also used to describe the action, and policy and activity in the practical political sphere, including the establishment and activities of institutions such as international courts, truth, and reconciliation committees, reparation programs, as well as human rights organizations, victim organizations, and so on (McEvoy & Mallinder, 2016).

The Palestinian Refugee Issue: The Crucial Element of the Conflict

The Palestinian refugee problem is a result of the 1948 war in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced and subsequently denied permission to return. In this catastrophe, the so-called “Nakba,” the Palestinians lost their homeland, and their society and culture were destroyed (Khalidi 1992). The year 1948 is the primary date in recent Palestinian history: “That year, a country and its people disappeared from both maps and dictionaries (Sanbar 2001, 87).” Thus, many Palestinians consider the Nakba as the formative event for the Palestinian people, whose identity revolves around displacement and exile – “the disintegration of society [and] the frustration of national aspirations (Sa’di 2002, 175).”

According to the Palestinians, the historical responsibility for the Nakba lies with the Zionist enterprise. However, the Palestinian position on the issue of return is complex. On the one hand, the refugee problem constitutes the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even though more than six decades have passed, and only Israeli recognition of the refugees’ right of return will bring it to an end (Abu-Sitta 2009). On the other hand, the Palestinians realize the anxiety raised by the very mention of such a solution. Therefore, it is often claimed that Israel must recognize the right of return in principle, while how this is to be accomplished should be subject to negotiation (Khalidi 1992).

According to the Israeli narrative, the return of refugees to territories within the 1948 borders would threaten the state’s Jewish character and lead to a significant change in society. Most Israeli Jews are terrified of this idea since the addition of millions of Palestinians to the country’s population would transform Israel from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens.” The Jewish public’s strong position on the right of return was documented in a survey conducted in 2002. The survey findings indicated that the very mention of the “right of return” was a cause for anxiety, while the implementation of that right was seen as the potential cause of tragedies, such as “destruction of the state,” “massacre of Jews,” and even “holocaust” (Zakay, Klar and Sharvit 2002).

Since both Jews and Palestinians consider the refugee issue crucial to their future national existence (Ju’beh 2002; Peled and Rouhana 2004; Barkan 2005), it is perfectly suitable for illustrating the principles of reconciliation in a formal peace agreement. Since the refugee issue is the core of the conflict for both parties and is largely responsible for shaping their collective identity and memory, the reconciliation technique is ideally suited for dealing with it. Moreover, the formula according to which the conflict must be settled first and the reconciliation phase initiated only afterward has failed to achieve much progress in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The refugee issue was the main reason which prevented the parties from signing a comprehensive peace agreement at the 2000 Camp David Summit (Peled and Rouhana 2004). The conclusion is to aim for reconciliation during the formal negotiation process for a peace agreement that would end all mutual claims. The importance of reconciliation during the peacemaking process is also part of the “Hölderlin Perspective,” which is an antithesis to the perception of reconciliation as an event that occurs only after a peace-building process. According to this perspective, a reconciliation process should be applied in the middle of a conflict (Flämig and Leiner 2012, 16–17; Barakat, Z.M., 2018).

Model for a Permanent Agreement on the Refugee Issue

US President Bill Clinton proposed a model for resolving the refugee issue in December 2000 (Clinton 2000). The Clinton Parameters were subsequently discussed during the Taba Summit in January 2001, but no agreement could be reached. A reliable summary of the Taba discussions related to the refugee issues may be found in Article 3 of the ‘EU Non-Paper’ prepared by Miguel Moratinos, EU Special Envoy to the Middle East Peace Process (hereafter, Taba Document). In 2003, this model was presented with some modifications as part of the unofficial Geneva Accord (Geneva Accord 2003 [GA]), signed by Israeli and Palestinian representatives who had led the Oslo process. The following discussion focuses on the Taba Document, the Geneva Accord, the Clinton Parameters and their differences.

The model for a permanent agreement on the refugee issue is presented the Geneva Accord and the Taba Document as crucial to the peace process. Israel and Palestine recognize that “an agreed resolution of the refugee problem is necessary for achieving a just, comprehensive and lasting peace (GA, Article 7.1i).” This development demonstrates that the parties understand the importance of an agreement on this issue to facilitate a “lasting” peace. The second part of the article acknowledges that the solution “will also be pivotal in the stability and development in the region (GA, Article 7.1ii),” i. e., the parties recognize the importance of the solution to the refugee issue for the future of their relations and the entire region.

Conclusion

This analysis of the model for solving the Palestinian refugee issue in the three documents – the Clinton Parameters, the Taba Document, and the Geneva Accord – partially incorporates the principles of reconciliation in formal peace agreements. Concerning the principle of transitional justice, according to which the parties would recognize the right of return but negotiate its implementation with due consideration for Israel’s demographic fears so that it could remain a Jewish state, it would seem that the Clinton Parameters have incorporated it most thoroughly, albeit not completely. The Geneva Accord, on the other hand, lacks Israeli acknowledgement of the Nakba, whereas the Taba Document and the parties’ Position Papers only present the controversy. Secondly, the principle of historical truth is partly incorporated. On the one hand, the Taba Document refers to the importance of agreeing on a joint historical narrative, and the Geneva Accord devotes space to future reconciliation plans where the parties would promote mutual understanding of past events.

Concerning the principle of historical responsibility, the parties recognize the importance of compensating the Palestinian refugees and thus offering certain recognition of the injustice perpetrated against them. However, Israel’s avoidance of taking the brunt of the responsibility for the compensation mechanism weakens the link between compensation and recognition. Finally, the principle of dealing with the conflict’s socioeconomic aspect is also only partly incorporated since, on the one hand, Israel is opposed to property restitution. At the same time, none of the three documents refers to the need for distributive justice or redistribution of resources. On the other hand, compensations are discussed in detail, particularly in the Geneva Accord, including an action plan and a clear schedule.

The proposal of incorporating principles of reconciliation in the Israeli-Palestinian formal peace negotiation can facilitate attempts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as well as other conflicts). However, in the middle of 2019, this task still seems like an insurmountable hurdle when no significant negotiations are held between Israel and the Palestinians.

References

Abstract

According to Dina Dajani Daoudi’s paper on Transitional Justice and Reconciliation in Intractable Conflicts, the relationship between reconciliation and transitional justice is so complex as the practices have been adopted as substitutes rather than complementarities. Her paper explores the interdependent relationship of both defining transitional justice and reconciliation through their mechanisms that at times overlap, proving their converging nature and interdependence and diverge, requiring an over-compassing approach to reconciliation that can nurture the process of changing relationships without solid institutional structures and expectations. In her conclusions, the author argues that it is futile to pursue transitional justice without addressing the psychological needs of a given society. In order to build sustainable peace, they cannot be ignored, and they can only be addressed through a comprehensive process of reconciliation, incorporating institutional mechanisms of transitional justice.

Introduction

This paper aims to explore and explain the interdependent relationship between transitional justice and reconciliation in the case of intractable conflicts. It provides a simple but clear understanding of both concepts and their relationship to each other. In the DFG-funded project “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone,” a reconciliation-oriented project that aims to study the effects of encountering the suffering of the other on one’s level of empathy in the Israeli-Palestinian context, the question of transitional justice has also been addressed at a conference, in Jerusalem in 2016, on Transitional Justice Conference: Contemporary Theories and Practices. Therefore, this paper demonstrates both the overlap and independency of the concepts that result in their interdependent nature in intractable conflicts.

Transitional justice and reconciliation are two oceans of disciplines that have evolved from conflict resolution theories and practices in recent history. Transitional justice and reconciliation emerged from the practices of peace-keeping, peace-building, nation-building, state-building, conflict management, conflict transformation, and conflict resolution and studies of political science, law, development studies, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Such fields aim to achieve effective strategies and their successful implementation in the post-settlement phase of the conflict.

Definitions of reconciliation and transitional justice vary as both disciplines engage in a wide range of theories and practices depending on one’s adopted approach toward conflict resolution. However, I argue that it is ineffective to adopt transitional justice or reconciliation without including the other in the case of intractable conflicts. To demonstrate my claim, I first explain what intractable conflicts are and how they differ from other conflicts. In attempts to develop a structure for studying social conflicts, many schemes have been developed to classify and categorize conflicts. Christopher Moore presents such a structure based on a “five-fold classification scheme involving structural, interest, value, relationship and data conflicts (Mitchell 2014, 48).” Other categorizations classify conflicts based on the “level” in society to which they occurred or on the scope of who is involved. He distinguishes between “inter-personal”, “inter-group”, “intra-national,” and “international.” These different categorizations tackle ideal key points of the conflict but, as Mitchel explains, are unfocused. To bring further clarity to the conversation, Mitchel provides five considerations of how one can categorize intractable conflicts: the nature of the issues involved, the structure and nature of the parties involved, the nature of relationships between the parties, the complexity of the conflict system involved, and the dynamics involved in the conflict (Mitchell 2014, 49).

Intractable conflicts are conflicts that last for long periods, at least for one generation, and develop a cyclical nature. As a consequence of their longevity, intractable conflicts infiltrate the societal and psychological infrastructure. They involve deep-seated identity-related topics that become existential and are perceived to be irresolvable and to have a zero-sum end (Mitchell 2014; Bar-Tal 2000). “They are demanding, stressful, painful, exhausting, and costly both in human and material terms” (Bar-Tal 2000, 353). Violence in intractable conflict “occurs over time, with fluctuating frequency and intensity” and is not restricted to military confrontations and hostility but to civilians as well (Bar-Tal 2000, 1432). As a result of their nature, “parties engaged in an intractable conflict make vast material (i. e., military, technological, and economic) and psychological investments to cope successfully with the situation” (Bar-Tal 2000, 1432).

The resolution of such conflicts would not be addressed by implementing one mechanism of transitional justice, such as retribution or reconciliation, such as truth commissions. In contrast, Bar-Tal expresses that only a comprehensive approach that caters to the psychological needs of the people involved in the conflict can alleviate the situation and ensure results. This desired outcome would result from building robust psychological infrastructures that allow the evolution of society from adopting an ethos of conflict to one of peace (Bar-Tal 2000; Bar-Tal and Rosen 2009; Bar-Tal et al. 2014).

A Comprehensive Approach?

When dealing with societies in conflict or post-conflict societies, different kinds of challenges occur, including the deterioration of trust among parties or between people and institutions, the collapse of state institutions and the inability to enforce the rule of law, the loss of legitimacy to a central unifying entity, the dominant sense of injustice, the asymmetrical balance of power and the asymmetry between victim and perpetrator or even the cyclical role of victim and perpetrator, the distortion of reality, and the absence of “truth,” among others. The nature of intractable conflicts combines these challenges and demands the implementation of a combination of mechanisms from transitional justice and reconciliation.

Transitional Justice

The attempt to address all these challenges by transitional justice is evident in the discipline’s effort to develop a clear understanding of them. Among the numerous definitions available, the scholar who coined the phrase, Ruti Teitel, defines transitional justice as “the conception of justice associated with periods of political change, characterized by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of respective predecessor regimes (Teitel 2003, 69).” She emphasizes the relationship between political change and justice in the process of transition. Later on, the former UN Secretary-General Report The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies, defines it as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation (UNSC 2004, 4).” In this context, transitional justice concerns situations where a state or a people tries to move from a conflict situation to a post-conflict one.

Moreover, ICTJ¹1

Founded in 2001 in New York, the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) aims to pursue accountability for massive human rights violations and restore confidence and rule of law through transitional justice mechanisms. https://www.ictj.org.

explains transitional justice as a process that seeks to recognize the rights of the victims, promote civic trust and strengthen the democratic rule of law (ICTJ 2015). The process can vary from the mere acknowledgment of responsibility by the perpetrator to the establishment of formal judicial bodies, such as criminal tribunals. ICTJ’s definition highlights the victim’s rights and their responsibility towards them. In addition to stating these definitions, one must expand on the layers involved, including what kind of justice is to be implemented? And where is it derived from?

Whatever kind of justice is realized, there is a consensus that these mechanisms aim “to reduce the sense of injustice felt by victims in order to reduce communal antagonisms in the post-conflict environment of divided societies (Aiken 2014, 50).” Sandford and Lincoln address the source of justice from which society can derive its methods, such as “local” and “community justice” (Sanford and Lincoln 2010), in which justice is experienced, perceived, conceptualized, transacted, and produced in various localities, ranging from village-level interactions between former victims and perpetrators to offices of nongovernmental organization and the courtrooms of international tribunals (Hinton 2010). Drexler warns against the dangers of localizing transitional justice since conflict is rarely independent of the involvement of international actors. Therefore, “[t]ransitional justice mechanisms that legalize conflicts tend to horizontalize them – that is, to posit conflicts between different groups in society rather than between the state and its citizens (Drexler 2010, 50).” Practices so far have included retribution and reparation as well as restorative, civic, socioeconomic, social, administrative, and constitutional justice.

Mechanisms of Transitional Justice

Retributive justice is one form of institutional justice that is practiced on both levels of the international and national community. It is based on establishing tribunals to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. They serve a vital function of reactivating social solidarity and reaffirming moral values. However, retributive justice is criticized for providing little healing power to the victims (Andrieu 2014; Hinton 2010; Teitel 2000). Therefore, it is an attempt to rebuild relations between individuals, institutions, and rule of law enforcement. Criminal prosecution in retributive justice operates at a national and international level. Examples of international tribunals include the Nuremberg Trials and the Tokyo Trials. More recent examples are the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Hybrid tribunals include the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (aka Khmer Rouge Tribunal), and examples of national tribunals include the cases in Greece in 1974, Argentina in 1985 and, Ethiopia in 1994 (Huyse 2003).

Restorative justice is the mechanism most associated with reconciliation. It describes the process where all parties involved in the conflict come together to resolve the conflict collectively. It addresses the asymmetrical power between victims and perpetrators and attempts to restore dignity to victims and help them process their experiences of violation and abuse towards healing (Andrieu 2014; Laplante 2014). It “relies on the concept and virtue of forgiveness, with truth commissions often accompanied by a measure of amnesty, a sacrifice justified in the name of abstract goals, such as truth or reconciliation (Andrieu 2014, 94).”

Reparation is the economic compensation for committed injustices. It is not limited to monetary compensation but includes redistribution of wealth in an inclusive manner where previously excluded, or marginalized groups would be able to enjoy an equitable share of resources (Andrieu 2014; Laplante 2014; Greiff 2006).

Civic justice specifically tackles relationships between “the government and the governed” (Laplante 2014, 74). It focuses on the ideas of citizenship and participation in public life. Civic justice also aims at establishing societies with democratic values of political participation, free speech, freedom of association, and equal and fair treatment. In return, it reinforces the rule of law and ensures the government’s legitimacy. Moreover, it intends to remedy political disparities in societies.

Socio-economic justice is closely linked to the field of development as it “seeks to remedy historical social and economic inequalities” (Laplante 2014, 77). Complementary to civic justice, socio-economic justice addresses structural violence that has institutionally victimized members of society repeatedly.

Social justice is equivalent to restorative justice as it concerns victims’ dignity through truth-telling and punitive measures. It seeks to protect victims from limited reparative justice without attempting institutional reform or accountability (Andrieu 2014). Administrative justice or lustration is the process of cleansing and purging a system goes through to separate itself from the remnants of the past (Teitel 2000). Constitutional justice embodies the ideal form of justice by ensuring the rule of law expressed in the constitution (Allan 2001).

This wide range of transitional justice mechanisms seems inclusive and comprehensive. However, in practice, it is limited. The limitations, which must be addressed, include the difficulty of initiating a process without the halt of conflict and political will to ensure the delivery of reparations, the sincerity of apologies and acknowledgment of guilt to restore relations, holding perpetrators accountable, and a lack of measurement techniques to determine the effects of implemented transitional justice mechanisms. These limitations lead to the question of how reconciliation can complement the process of transitional justice to resolve intractable conflicts.

Reconciliation

Most authors agree that reconciliation describes a process rather than an outcome. Martin Leiner defines reconciliation as “the overarching approach to conflicts with [a] focus on processes of rebuilding relationships. Its goal is to create ‘normal’, ‘trustful’, and if possible ‘good’ and ‘peaceful’ relationships (Leiner 2018, 179).” John Paul Lederach defines reconciliation as a process of relationship-building as part of conflict transformation as well as an outcome that is part of the experience of sustainable peace (Lederach 1997). Although historically presented and practiced, Bar-Tal and H. Bennink explain that reconciliation has only “emerged as a defined area of interest in political science and political psychology” since 1994 (see Leiner 2018, 176). Therefore, reconciliation does not only acknowledge political arrangements toward conflict resolution but addresses the psychological process of changing the culture of conflict and enmity towards a culture of peace and tolerance (Leiner 2018; Whittaker 1999). Since a comprehensive approach to reconciliation is both theory and practice-based, it also means that, like transitional justice, it encompasses mechanisms and processes of healing, attaining a form of justice, truth-telling, and reparations (Fischer 2011; Huyse 2003).

The healing process in intractable conflicts is not confined to physical injury but deeply psychological and emotional. The traumatic incidents experienced during a conflict impact an individual’s sense of the self and the sense of belonging to the collective. Therefore, reconciliation requires eliminating the source of the injury by tackling structural forms of violence that lead to deprivation, repression, and re-victimization, whether on a prolonged period of exposure to multiple traumas at the same time. As a result, space for individual and communal healing must be available. Strategies include psychological programs, counselling and intervention, training local capabilities, support groups, and symbolic forms of healing. The process is highly contextual and should be inspired by local rituals and culture within more comprehensive reconstruction efforts. In the absence of truth, acknowledgement, and justice, the healing process is incomplete, as demonstrated by the cases of South Africa, Chile, Argentina and Brazil (Hamber 2003).

As previously mentioned, justice has many forms. It is a normative concept that depends on local context and understanding. The neglect of this crucial point might lead to the implementation of counter-productive structures that estrange society even further from justice and thus from reconciliation.

Some scholars support retributive justice because it can diffuse tension and complement reconciliation. In the absence of retribution, Huyse argues that victims might embark on a journey of “self-help justice.” Without an apparent undermining of perpetrators, the system remains vulnerable to submitting to their influence once again. Retributive justice is one form of public acknowledgment needed by victims to restore their self-confidence and trust in the system; it individualizes guilt to steer away from collective demonizing, strengthens legitimacy, and democratization processes and breaks the cycle of impunity.

On the other hand, seeking retribution may have dire effects on accomplishing a peace settlement, reconsolidating democracy, and strengthening governance and development. For example, the argument of Uruguayan President Sanguinetti for consolidating peace and human rights for the future was more important than seeking retroactive justice in the present. President Sanguinetti feared provoking retaliation against the incumbent system and the risk of returning to a military dictatorship (Huyse 2003, 103). Moreover, retributive justice has a limited impact in addressing victims’ psychological needs for long-term healing and undermines the truth. It is a western-oriented approach that might not cater to the local understandings of justice in certain societies (Huyse 2003). As an alternative, societies may adopt restorative justice, the establishment of truth and reconciliation commissions, and/or reparative justice. Restorative justice focuses on the harm done to people and what the victims’ needs are. Unlike retributive justice, where perpetrators must be punished, restorative justice holds perpetrators accountable by their obligation to comprehend their wrongdoing and take responsibility to make things as right as possible for their victims. As a result, restorative justice enables engagement and participation in the reconciliatory process (Zehr and Gohar 2003). For example, William Ury provides insight from traditional African jurisprudence of the San/Bushman that focus on reconciling rather than pursuing vengeance (Ury 2000).

Truth-telling is one of the essential steps in the pursuit of reconciliation. Truth commissions are established for the sole purpose of dealing with the past through truth-seeking. There are several projects that governments and regional organizations could embark on, such as historical commissions and inquiries. Historical commissions aim to clarify historical truths and acknowledge practices that have affected victims of ethnic or racial groups and their descendants, such as the US Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilian and the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Official and semi-official inquiries overlap with truth commissions, implying that they are more powerful but less independent than truth commissions. Governments establish them to investigate and report on severe cases of repression. Examples include the International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (Freeman and Hayner 2003).

Truth commissions are non-judicial, temporary bodies that focus on the past and “are officially sanctioned, authorized or empowered by the state and, in some cases, by the armed opposition (Freeman and Hayner 2003, p. 125)” to investigate patterns of abuses and specific violations of human rights over a period of time. Truth commissions are established in periods of political transition, either from conflict to peace or from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Like restorative justice, commissions provide a platform for victims and establish a detailed record of the past. Besides, they enable an informed public debate that promotes a democratic transition and social reconciliation (Freeman and Hayner 2003). However, commissions may have biases and unrealistic expectations. Therefore, in the absence of a comprehensive process with political interest and accountability measures, commissions would be insufficient to produce any significant results.

Reparations are compensations to redress past wrongs. Vandeginste explains the variety of terminology embedded within reparations, such as restitution, which describes the restoration of a situation to its original before committing injustice. Compensation, in contrast, is the recognition of a committed injustice and the payment of money to compensate for suffered losses. Rehabilitation, in turn, focuses on the “restoration of victim’s physical and psychological health.” Satisfaction derives from redress by actions and gestures by the perpetrator towards the victim, such as acknowledgment, apologies, sanctions, and commemorations (Vandeginste, 2003).

Complementary Nature?

As demonstrated by these mechanisms, there exists a significant overlap between transitional justice and reconciliation. Both aim for justice to prevail and function in a social and political transition. However, transitional justice is a top-down institutional approach whose implementation relies on a final status agreement. Its mechanisms are procedural. Hence fail to consider the psychological readiness of individuals to heal from the past and move towards the future. In contrast, reconciliation mechanisms are not bound to an agreement for implementation but are applicable in the midst of strife. Leiner brings forth the Hölderlin approach, supported by the quote of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin in his novel Hyperion, Versöhnung ist mitten im Streit und alles Getrennte findet sich wieder (Leiner 2018; Barakat 2017). This seemingly open-ended nature of the process of reconciliation questions its applicability and sustainability.

Intractable conflicts run deep into the psyche of its participants. While both transitional justice and reconciliation attempt to address the different needs for sustainable transition through acknowledgment, restorative justice, and reparations, it is unlikely that a successful process can take place without an inclusive, bottom-up movement to pave the way for sustainable political and social structures. Reconciliation offers the opportunity for individuals’ social and political transformation in the middle of a conflict, as demonstrated by Zeina Barakat, who traces the evolution of Mohammed Dajani Daoudi from extremism to moderation in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian intractable conflict (Barakat, present volume). Also, transitional justice offers a top-down process that ensures future accountability and structural sustainability, an explicit, systematic practice that validates a form of closure. This symbiotic comprehension of transitional justice and reconciliation addresses the question of justice in a framework of reconciliation that was a recurring theme in the “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” project.

In conclusion, Leiner advocates that reconciliation does not mean merging all societies into one mold. In contrast, it “means creating a space where former enemies can become political opponents within the bounds of the rule of law (Verdeja 2009, 13).” Instead, it is a process than an achievable objective (Freeman and Hayner, 2003) that can take place in circles and events during the period of conflict to prepare society for a conflict transformation. Adopting an early approach toward peace and reconciliation prepares the bases for a sturdy structure where transitional justice mechanisms can be implemented. Many cases of regression and disappointment have been recorded through attempts to implement selective mechanisms of either transitional justice or reconciliation. A successful case for transitional justice and reconciliation is West Germany in the aftermath of WW II. Although separately, both transitional justice and reconciliation practices were implemented to help society reintegrate into the community of nations. This successful case, among many failed attempts, proves that it is futile to pursue transitional justice without addressing the psychological needs of society. Thus, these psychological and social needs can only be addressed through a comprehensive reconciliation process, incorporating institutional mechanisms of transitional justice.

References

Abstract

The urgency of taking psychological needs seriously becomes dramatically evident when victimhood is assumed as identity. Rahav Gabay, Boaz Hameiri, Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, and Arie Nadler’s paper on The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood: Conceptualization, Cognitive and Behavioral Consequences, and Antecedents addresses the issue of the subjective experience of victimhood in interpersonal relations as an enduring personality disposition. According to the authors, the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV) is an individual-level characteristic in the general population affecting how individuals feel, think, and behave in hurtful situations. Through a phenomenology of victimhood in interpersonal relations, the paper proposes a conceptualization of TIV as made up of four dimensions: the need for recognition of the suffering, the tendency for moral elitism, the lack of empathy for others’ sufferings, and a tendency for rumination about past or future interpersonal offenses. Showing how cognitive processes of interpretation, attribution, and memory reinforce feelings of victimhood and retaliation, the findings demonstrate that people high on TIV experience daily interpersonal victimization more often, more intensely, and for more extended periods.

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Numerous studies in social psychology have characterized victimhood as a fundamental component of human conflicts. Victimhood has been widely studied as a possible result of hurtful events in interpersonal relations (Vangelisti 2009) and in the context of intergroup conflicts (Bar-Tal 2007; Bar-Tal et al., 2009; Hameiri and Nadler 2017; Noor et al., 2012; Shnabel and Nadler 2008). These studies suggest that the experience of victimhood emerges when individuals or groups feel offended, disappointed, exploited, insulted, rejected, or betrayed, which leads to the perception (see Leary et al., 1998; Schori-Eyal et al., 2017; Vangelisti et al., 2005) of victimhood as a central part of their identity. While some individuals overcome such unpleasant episodes with relative ease and move on, others continue to feel wronged and victimized. Consequently, they experience themselves as victims more often, more intensely, and for longer periods of time (Ulric, Berger, and Berman 2010).

Despite the vast interest in victimhood as a fundamental part of human conflict, surprisingly little is known about the personal dispositional tendency for victimhood after experiencing hurtful interpersonal interactions. The current research addresses this gap, reviewing and integrating the literature on victimhood in intergroup and interpersonal relations to develop a comprehensive definition of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV) composed of four psychological dimensions. This analysis is followed by an empirical examination of the affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences of TIV, and its antecedents.

Clinical-Based Theory on the Victimhood-Centered Personality

Works in clinical psychology have suggested that victimhood can be a factor in interpersonal relations. Whereas some individuals can move on relatively quickly after interpersonal conflicts, others dwell on feelings of hurt and victimhood (Feeney 2005; Leahy 2012; Shaver et al. Cassidy 2009). The clinical theory claims that individuals characterized by dispositional victimhood tend to be preoccupied with feelings of belligerence and display anger and aggression (Berman 2014).

Aggressiveness among individuals with dispositional victimhood may be part of a defense mechanism against painful emotions, such as shame, uncertainty, humiliation, or guilt. It seems to displace anger against a past perpetrator towards the person’s current relationships. When behaving aggressively, these individuals use their suffering as a justification for causing suffering to others while perceiving themselves as highly moral and ethical. Individuals exhibiting dispositional victimhood also often attempt to control others by accusing them of immoral, unfair, or selfish behavior (Berman and Mendelson 2005).

The current study reveals that the dispositional tendency to adopt the identity of a victim in interpersonal relations (TIV) comprises four related dimensions: (a) the demand for recognition of one’s suffering and victimization (from the perpetrators and others), (b) feelings of moral superiority, (c) a lack of empathy and attentiveness to the suffering of others, and (d) rumination about interpersonal conflicts. These four dimensions of victimhood have also been documented in intergroup relationships (Noor et al. 2012) and are described below.

Cognitive and Emotional Consequences of TIV

In interpersonal conflict, sustaining a positive moral image is a significant motivation, which explains why the two parties of conflict are likely to construct two different subjective realities (Baumeister 1996; Baumeister et al. 1990; Baumeister, Exline and Sommer 1998). Thus, the role one assumes, whether victim or perpetrator, has a vital effect on the way the situation is perceived and remembered. Offenders tend to attribute lower severity and illegitimacy to the transgression than their victims, who often perceive the offenders’ motivations as arbitrary, incoherent, senseless, and immoral. Moreover, victims are likely to perceive the offender’s act as having more severe consequences than the perpetrators do (e. g., Baumeister 1996; Baumeister et al. 1990). Our studies show that these cognitive biases increase in individuals scoring high on the above described four dimensions of victimhood. In other words, interpretation, attribution, and memory biases result from both an actual offense that occurred in the course of interpersonal relations and the victim’s personality disposition (TIV).

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Interpretation Bias

In the context of TIV, interpretation biases contain two meanings. The first is the perceived offensiveness of an interpersonal situation. We pointed out that people high on TIV perceive both low-severity offenses (e. g., lack of help) and high-severity offenses (e. g., an offensive statement regarding their integrity and personality) as more severe than those who scored low on TIV. The second type of interpretation bias refers to increased anticipation of suffering in relatively innocuous interpersonal situations, i. e., in ambiguous situations. In other words, high levels of TIV are associated with an increased perceived probability of negative behaviors by others towards the self in ambiguous situations. For example, people high on TIV were assumed that a new manager in their department would show less consideration and willingness to help them even before they met. These biases also exist in close relationships, e. g., expectations that a good friend will be reluctant to assist the others in times of need.

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Attribution of Hurtful Behaviors

TIV leads to attributing offenses to the offender’s negative stable characteristics (e. g., personality) and unstable harmful properties, such as negative moods or unrealistic expectations. This finding, which shows that high TIV is associated with blaming others in offensive situations when it is unclear who is accountable, is related to theories that associate victimhood with an external locus of control (Bar-Tal et al. 2009; Zur 2005). Other related research shows that the extent to which individuals find an interaction hurtful is directly related to the perception that the harmful behavior was intentional (McLaren & Solomon, 2008; Vangelisti et al., 2005; Vangelisti & Young, 2000).

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Memory Bias

We have shown that people high on TIV have more negative memory bias, i. e., they recalled more words representing offensive behaviors and feelings of hurt, such as betrayal, anger, disappointment, and wretchedness, compared to the participants low on TIV. This memory bias is related to the fact that people high on TIV tend to ruminate and be more preoccupied and emotionally involved in issues of offense and hurt. Related research on the effect of rumination on memory bias has found that rumination perpetuates increased negative recall (e. g., Lyubomirsky, Caldwell and Nolen-Hoeksema 1998) and recognition (e. g., Edwards, Rapee, and Franklin 2003) in different psychological situations.

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Behavioral Consequences of TIV. Forgiveness

Individuals are described as forgiving if they inhibit retaliatory or destructive responses and respond with conciliatory or constructive behaviors, affect, and cognition (McCullough 2000). According to Baumeister et al. (1998), cognitive processes, which include perspective-taking, i. e., understanding the offender’s point of view mediate forgiveness. The findings of our study indicate that TIV is related to a lack of willingness to forgive. The difficulty in adopting the perpetrator’s point of view, experienced by people high on TIV is one possible cause of the decreased tendency to forgive. Moreover, rumination over interpersonal offenses, the fourth dimension of TIV, is also likely to decrease the willingness to forgive and increase the intent to retaliate against the offender (Collins & Bell, 1997; McCullough et al., 1998).

In parallel to the lesser willingness to forgive, we found that TIV is related to an increased desire for revenge. The cognitive implications of TIV seem to underlie its behavioral outcomes since the effect of TIV on the desire for revenge was mediated by negative attributions to the offender. In the experiment that yielded these results, participants imagined that they were lawyers who had received negative feedback from their senior partner in the firm. The higher a participant’s TIV, the more they tended to attribute the criticism of the senior partner to the negative properties of the senior partner himself, which led to greater desires for revenge.

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Antecedents of TIV: Attachment

According to Attachment Theory, a person’s early relationships with caregiver’s shape adult working models of interpersonal relations (Bowlby 1973). Mikulincer and Shaver (2016) argue that working models are generalized across recurrent interactions with others via transference processes and strongly influence attitudes, emotions, emotional regulation, and behavioral strategies in relationships throughout adult life. The literature on attachment suggests that there are at least three distinct attachment styles which are termed secure, avoidant, and anxious.

Anxiously-attached people tend to be dependent on others’ approval and continual validation. They feel good about themselves when a partner offers praise and affection, but they often feel less worthy when others are critical or rejecting. They intensively seek reassurance, which stems from negative self-representations and doubts about their social value (e. g., Mikulincer and Shaver 2016). In their interpersonal relations, they are likely to perceive others as ambivalent. On the one hand, they anticipate rejection or abandonment and thus negatively perceive others. On the other hand, they perceive their partners as a vital source of value and esteem. Thus, they depend on others to maintain their self-esteem and self-worth (Knee et al. 2008). Hence, characterizations of anxiously attached individuals are a combination of being very sensitive to the responses of others and being unable to regulate their own hurt feelings and recover self-esteem (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2016). This combination makes anxious attachment an essential antecedent of TIV and its four related dimensions.

Our data revealed that anxious attachment is an antecedent of TIV. The relationships between TIV and anxious attachment vary across the four dimensions of victimhood. As a result, anxiously attached individuals felt a more significant need for recognition when offended than secure and avoidantly attached individuals (“it is important to me that people who hurt me acknowledge that an injustice has been done to me”). They also tend to experience more moral elitism (“I give others much more than I receive from them”) and a lack of empathy (“People claim that I have hurt them because they cannot see that they are the ones hurting me”) and rumination (“I am flooded by more anger than I would like, every time I remember people who hurt me”) than secure and avoidantly attached individuals.

From a motivational point of view, TIV seems to offer anxiously-attached individuals an effective framework for constructing their insecure relations with others. The first dimension of TIV, the need for recognition, allows anxiously-attached individuals to express their disappointment, while the recognition of hurt feelings provides attentiveness and empathy. Thus, being acknowledged enables anxiously-attached individuals to sustain their hope for better future relationships with others, while moral elitism facilitates their confidence that good deeds will be reciprocated. The third dimension of TIV, a lack of empathy, stems from the desire of anxiously attached individuals that their victimhood will take center stage while they are unable to acknowledge the suffering of others. Finally, the fourth dimension of TIV, rumination, also relates to the preoccupations of the anxiously attached to their interpersonal relations and their hope of achieving recognition of their victimhood.

Abstract

Well-established research on the psychological experience of social power and leadership joins the novel concept of TIV in Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, Rahav Gabay, Boaz Hameiri, and Arie Nadler’s essay on The Victimhood Oriented Leader. The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood among Powerholder. Given the assumption that individuals with a high-TIV are more likely to interpret conflicts as hurtful episodes in which they are the ongoing victims, the paper shows how they attribute the hurtful behavior to the malicious intentions of the offender and develop a desire for revenge that will compensate them for their suffering. Power is a crucial factor in this regard. When high-TIV individuals are in low-power positions, their ability to translate these thoughts and desires into action is limited by various constraints. On the contrary, when high-TIV individuals obtain positions of power and leadership, they have access to various resources, and limitations for action are reduced. The paper presents what happens – in cognitive and behavioral terms – when high-TIV individuals reach leadership positions by suggesting that victimhood-related cognitions and behaviors can potentially have disastrous effects when leaders possess them.

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Power, often defined as asymmetric control over valued resources, is considered a fundamental aspect of social relations (e. g., Dépret and Fiske 1993; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). Power is primarily relevant to the social psychology of leadership, which incorporates control over various financial, social, and symbolic resources. In this paper, we focus on powerholders with a high tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV) (Gabay et al. 2020; Gabay et al. present volume), meaning that they have an ongoing perception of themselves as victims, which fundamentally affects the way they perceive themselves and their relationships with others.

Exploring TIV among powerholders is particularly crucial because the decisions made by leaders have a significant effect on their personal relationships, and also, the lives of many others depend on their judgment. Thus, victimhood-related cognitions, emotions, and behaviors, which adversely affect interpersonal relations (Gabay et al. 2020), can potentially have disastrous effects when leaders possess them. Moreover, because control over valued resources reduces practical and mental limitations, power itself has a dis-inhibiting effect (Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson 2003). Consequently, leaders with power are expected to exhibit victimhood-related cognitions, emotions, and behaviors more strongly than individuals with high-trait victimhood in low-power positions.

The current paper reviews and integrates social psychological literature on power and victimhood. First, we briefly examine two distinct lines of research in social psychology: from one side, the recently-developed concept of a personal tendency for victimhood (TIV) (Gabay et al. 2020), and from the other one, the research on the psychological experience of social power. Then, we integrate these two lines of research, focusing on the reinforcing effects of power and victimhood on the perceptions and behaviors of social leaders. We present our experimental findings and suggest directions for future research on TIV, power, and leadership.

The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV): Perceiving Oneself as a Victim

Social life is replete with situations of interpersonal conflict that are open to interpretation. We wait for people who are late for meetings, are surprised by people who cut us off when we speak, annoyed when co-workers tackle our initiatives and insulted by those who disregard our ideas and suggestions. Some people overcome such incidents with relative ease, interpreting them as an unpleasant but natural, unavoidable part of social interactions. Others tend to interpret interpersonal conflicts as hurtful events, perceiving themselves as victims who suffer from the malicious behavior of others. We have conceptualized the latter predisposition as a tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV), or a personal propensity to perceive oneself as a victim in social and interpersonal relationships (Gabay et al. 2020).

TIV includes an ongoing experience of the self as a victim, a feeling that is then generalized to many types of situations over time. In their interpersonal relationships, individuals with high-TIV feel victimized more often, more intensely, and for a longer time than other people. Four psychological dimensions are part of TIV: (a) the need to have one’s suffering recognized; (b) moral elitism, i. e., the feeling that the victimized self is more moral than other individuals; (c) a lack of empathy and attentiveness to the suffering of other individuals; and (d) rumination over negative feelings and thoughts related to interpersonal offenses (Gabay et al. 2020).

In hurtful events, high-TIV fundamentally affects individual emotions, cognitions, and actions. When recalling a hurtful event, high-TIV individuals use more words representing hostile behaviors and negative feelings (e. g., betrayal, anger, disappointment, wretchedness) than participants with low-TIV. Negative recall may stem from the tendency of high-TIV individuals to ruminate about incidents of interpersonal conflict since rumination has been found to increase both negative recall (Lyubomirsky, Cladwell and Nolen-Hoeksema 1998) and recognition (Edwards, Rapee and Franklin 2003). Moreover, rumination over interpersonal offenses was found to motivate the intention to retaliate against the offender (Collins and Bell 1997; McCullough et al. 1998).

Cognitively, high-TIV individuals are more likely to anticipate that others will hurt them. When offended, they tend to (a) interpret the episode as more severe and (b) attribute the offensive behavior to the malicious intentions of the offender (Rahav et al. 2018). Since indignities are deepened when hurtful behavior is perceived as intentional (Vangelisti et al. 2005), high-TIV individuals may experience offenses more intensively if they attribute higher malicious intent to the offender. Interestingly, collective-level victimhood seems to have similar cognitive effects: Perpetual In-group Victimhood Orientation (PIVO) is the belief that a person’s in-group is constantly being victimized and persecuted by different enemies. High-PIVO individuals are more likely to attribute hostile intentions to members of the outgroup, particularly after being primed with reminders of historical trauma experienced by their in-group (Schori‐Eyal et al., 2017).

Behaviorally, high-TIV decreases an individual’s willingness to forgive an interpersonal offense and increases their desire for revenge (Gabay et al., 2020). Interestingly, negative attributions of the offender mediate the effect of TIV on the desire for revenge. Thus, the cognitive implications of TIV seem to underlie its behavioral outcomes: High-TIV increases attributions of hurtful behavior to the negative properties of the offender, which in turn leads to greater desires for revenge. Similar patterns were found on the collective level: Having a strong sense of collective victimhood was associated with low levels of willingness to forgive and increased motivation to seek revenge (Wohl and Branscombe 2008; Noor et al. 2008; Schori-Eyal et al. 2017).

In sum, high-TIV individuals are more likely to interpret conflicts as hurtful episodes in which they are the victims, attribute the hurtful behavior to the malicious intentions of the offender, and have a desire for revenge that will compensate them for their suffering. When high-TIV individuals are in low-power positions, their ability to translate these thoughts and desires into action is limited by various social and material constraints. However, when high-TIV individuals obtain positions of power and leadership, they have access to various resources. These resources are sources of power that reduce both mental and behavioral limitations for action. How does a person’s characteristic tendency for victimhood (i. e., high TIV) impact their perceptions, decisions, and behaviors when in a leadership role? Do the psychological effects of power and victimhood (i. e., TIV) reinforce each other?

The Study of Power in Social Psychology. Basic Concepts and Main Findings

In social psychology, power is often defined as an asymmetric control over valued resources in social relationships. In recent decades ample social psychological research has investigated the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral effects of social power (for reviews, see Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson 2003; Magee and Smith 2013; Guinote 2017). Overall, social psychological studies of power consistently indicate that because powerful individuals act in a more resource-rich environment, they experience fewer mental or behavioral constraints. Consequently, the powerful are more likely to express their thoughts, values, and goals in their actual behaviors than those with low power (Bargh et al. 1995; Chen, Lee-Chai and Bargh 2001; Galinsky et al. 2008). Powerless individuals, in contrast, experience social constraints and feel dependent on others; as a consequence, their behavior is more inhibited (Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson 2003).

A large body of research shows that individuals in positions of high power direct their attention toward their own thoughts, feelings, and goals, often at the expense of devoting attention to others. Thus, power seems to increase self-focus, goal orientation, and also psychological distance, and the use of stereotypes (De Dreu and Van Kleef 2004; Fiske 1993; Goodwin et al. 2000; Keltner, Gruenfeld and Anderson 2003; Keltner and Robinson 1997; Rodriguez-Bailon, Moya and Yzerbyt 2000). For example, during negotiations, powerholders felt more confident about revealing their interests (Anderson and Galinsky 2006) and reported that they expressed their actual attitudes more often than individuals with less power (Anderson and Berdahl 2002).

At the same time, powerful negotiators were also less accurate in perceiving the emotions of their counterparts (Galinsky et al. 2006; Keltner and Robinson, 1997) and less influenced by them (Van Kleef et al. 2006). High-power participants were less likely to consider the perspective of others and the possibility that they might lack the knowledge to which the participants had private access (Galinsky et al. 2006).

Emotionally, powerholders experience overconfidence in their skills and believe that chance events are subject to personal control (Sivanathan and Galinsky 2007). At the same time, high power decreases empathy and compassion for others’ suffering (Van Kleef et al. 2008) and increases objectification: a process in which people are treated as objects, a means to an end, regardless of the value of their other human qualities (Gruenfeld et al. 2008).

Galinsky et al. argue that “power reveals the person” because power decreases social and material inhibitions; powerholders can express their values and traits more freely (Galinsky et al. 2015). Indeed, experimental studies suggest that power increases generosity among individuals with a communal orientation but decreases it among individuals with an exchange orientation (Chen, Lee-Chai, and Bargh 2001). Similarly, social-value orientation significantly predicted the extent to which high-power negotiators trusted their opponent, but it did not predict the trust levels of participants in a baseline condition (Galinsky et al. 2008). Finally, findings of an organizational field study suggest that firms with liberal CEOs invest more in corporate social responsibility than firms with conservative CEOs and that this difference is significant among more powerful CEOs (Chin, Hambrick, and Treviño, 2013). Imagine that these powerholders have a high tendency for victimhood in interpersonal relations. Which thoughts would be revealed by high-power? What actions would become possible?

Reinforcing Effects of Power and TIV

This paper contributes to the literature on leadership by discussing the potential reinforcing effects of power and TIV. We reason that the disinhibiting and revealing effects of power mean that powerholders will manifest their mental and behavioral characteristics more strongly than low-power individuals. Moreover, we suggest that power and TIV may have a mutually reinforcing effect, which could significantly bias their perceptions, decisions, and actions. Since powerholders are often in leadership positions and can influence other people’s lives, these biases may have disastrous effects on the high-TIV individuals themselves and all other individuals who depend on their judgment.

First, we would like to consider how high power should affect three of the basic psychological components of TIV: lack of empathy, rumination, and moral elitism. Past research indicates that high power has a detrimental effect on social attention: reducing perspective-taking, empathy, and care. Among high-TIV powerholders, these effects are likely to reinforce their lack of empathy for others. Consequently, high-TIV powerholders might be more likely to objectify and use others without much awareness of or concern about others’ well-being, suffering, or pain. For example, leaders of this type are more likely to promote policies without sufficient awareness of their implications for low-power populations, such as financial policies that harm the poor, security acts that endanger entire populations, or immigration policies that put marginalized groups at risk. Studies of power further suggest that it increases self-focus and directs the powerholder’s attention to their thoughts, feelings, and internal experiences. This increased self-attention should intensify rumination among high-TIV powerholders, who tend to be preoccupied with hurtful events and lead to deeper, lengthier emotional engagement with offensive situations. Similarly, the over-confidence related to high power may reinforce the moral elitism associated with TIV. Consequently, high-TIV powerholders may be particularly likely to exhibit moral overconfidence by depicting themselves and their group as good, just, and flawless while conceiving of others as evil, unfair, and unreliable.

High power may further reinforce the cognitive and behavioral consequences associated with TIV. Cognitively, high-TIV powerholders are likely to perceive and construe offences more severely and interpret ambiguous situations as offensive. There is a higher chance that they will attribute hurtful behaviors to the malicious intentions of the offender. Here, we should consider, for example, the complexities associated with supporting refugees who seek asylum in western countries. The motivation to accept and support them due to their unfortunate circumstances often comes with concerns for the financial, social, and cultural investment that may be needed. Our findings suggest that high-TIV individuals are less likely to experience such internal complexity but probably develop extreme, one-sided opinions (Rubel-Lifschitz et al., 2018).

We (Rubel-Lifschitz et al., 2018) examined the attitudes toward refugees (Esses, Hamilton, and Gaucher, 2017) among individuals with low-TIV versus high-TIV by comparing those who voted for right-wing parties to those who voted for left-wing parties. We found that among participants with low-TIV, less concern for refugees was expressed by right-wing than left-wing voters. However, the difference in their attitudes was small and insignificant (M=3.91 versus M=4.53). Among high-TIV participants, on the other hand, the gap was larger: Right-wing participants with high-TIV expressed extremely little empathy towards refugees and objected to any policies that might assist them (M=3.18), while left-wing participants with high-TIV articulated high concern for the refugees and willingness to invest resources in their safety and well-being (M=5.16). Thus, high-TIV seems to be associated with more extreme political opinions on both sides of the political spectrum. We replicated this result pattern using an experimental design in which the psychological experience of victimhood was manipulated through a recall task. Again, victimhood increased the difference between right and left-wing in their attitudes towards refugees compared to the control group. Overall, these findings suggest that the psychological experience of victimhood enhances extremity in political attitudes. When high-TIV individuals are in high-power, such extreme positions can be translated into actual policies that influence the lives of both residents and refugees.

Leadership roles include responsibility for handling numerous ambiguous situations. Organizational politics and manipulations could be interpreted as an unfortunate but natural part of professional life or a hurtful, unforgivable betrayal. Crime among poor populations can be perceived as a problematic yet understandable aspect of their economic survival or an inexcusable phenomenon that should be severely punished. Eating meat can be seen as a natural behavior supported by an unthinking industry or as an unhuman behavior that should be abolished. Large-scale international relations are also subject to interpretation: a military exercise in a neighboring country can be seen as a diplomatic challenge or as a threat of war, demonstrations can be perceived as a sign of distress and frustration that should be addressed, or as a provocation that must be eliminated and controlled.

We reason that leaders with high levels of TIV will be more likely to interpret equivocal incidents as injurious, offensive, and malicious. Behaviourally, we expect that those with high-TIV will have less motivation to forgive an offender and an increased desire for revenge (Gabay et al., 2020). Because of the disinhibiting effect of power, the likelihood that powerholders’ goals and desires will develop into actual action increases (Galinsky et al. 2006). Thus, a desire for aggression and revenge can quickly transform into aggressive retaliatory actions among individuals who possess social power.

We (Gabay et al. 2020) investigated the effect of power and TIV on actual revenge behaviours in a laboratory experiment. Revenge was displayed by allowing participants to inflict monetary damage to an alleged partner who offended them. To create the offence, we used the Dictator Game (Kahneman et al. 1986), in which the alleged partner was the allocator. The participants were told that their partners did not equally divide a valuable resource (10 NIS), i. e., they took more money for themselves. The participants, who were all the recipients in this game, had to accept the unfair offer passively and were thus perceived as victims (see Selten 1978; Siman Tov-Nachlieli and Shnabel 2014). Then, participants received the opportunity for actual revenge: they could decide how much of the alleged partner’s monetary gain they would keep. Thus, all participants were placed in a position of high-power in which they had control over valued resources in social relations (Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson 2003). Since the funds taken from the partner were not returned to the participants, pure revenge was possible. Our findings revealed that high-TIV powerholders were more likely to use the power vested in their hands vindictively. Specifically, high-TIV powerholders were more likely to reduce the profits of a person who has hurt them compared to low-TIV powerholders. The findings further indicate that the association between TIV and revenge was mediated by increased negative emotions (anger, humiliation, and hopelessness) and the entitlement to immoral behavior. According to the critical literature on power, this mediation effect may stem from a reinforcing consequence of high-TIV and high-power: high-TIV individuals experience negative emotions and moral entitlement in a harmful event. Because high-power draws attention to the powerholders’ inner world, these negative psychological experiences are amplified. Moreover, because high-power reduces mental and behavioural limitations, high-TIV powerholders were able to translate their desire for revenge into actual vindictive behaviour.

Implications, Limitations and Future Research

This paper focused on leadership’s psychological and behavioral implications with a high tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV). It contributed to the existing literature by (a) reviewing the social psychological literature on power and victimhood; (b) discussing and investigating potential reinforcing effects of power and victimhood on the perceptions and behaviors of social leaders. Overall, our analysis suggested that when high-TIV individuals are in power, the mental and behavioral limitations that usually inhibit their behavior are reduced. Consequently, power allows high-TIV persons the capacity to turn negative emotions and cognitions into extreme attitudes and behaviors. We, therefore, surmise that high-TIV leaders are more likely to be fear-oriented leaders (Nadler 2018), who focus on simplistic solutions in light of past collective traumas, and who are less likely to become hope-oriented leaders focussing on a complex, positive vision of a collective future.

One limitation of the current research design is that it did not compare high-TIV and low-TIV individuals in low-power positions. Future research on TIV could thus advance this investigation by directly comparing the cognition and behavior of high-TIV and low-TIV individuals in high and low-power positions. Such research could, for instance, empirically examine whether high-TIV individuals in high-power positions are indeed more likely to perceive ambiguous situations as more hurtful and respond to them in a more aggressive and vindictive manner than high-TIV individuals in low-power positions. Future research could also include a more field-oriented approach and investigate the behavior of high-TIV versus low-TIV leaders in real-life situations.

The reinforcing effects of power and TIV may be particularly relevant in situations of inter-group conflict, in which the leader’s perceptions, decisions, and behaviors might have detrimental effects. We infer that high-TIV leaders will be more prone to interpret such conflicts as stemming from the destructive, malevolent intentions of the other side and, therefore, promoting more aggressive, violent responses. Moreover, they are less likely to acknowledge the victimhood of their adversary, which has positive effects on intergroup relations (Hameiri et al. present volume). These policies are likely to result in conflict escalation, rather than diplomatic negotiations, which require acts of forgiveness and reconciliation.

New media is another factor that may intensify the reinforcing effects of power and TIV. Social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, are fast, rarely regulated, and highly accessible. Consequently, they can efficiently serve as a platform for unsophisticated and impulsive communication. High-TIV leaders who perceive the world in dichotomist and emotional terms should be more likely to use new media to share extreme, emotional, and simplistic messages.

Long before experimental studies of social power were conducted, Abraham Lincoln said that “nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” This paper reviews how the revealing effect of power interacts with a high tendency for interpersonal victimhood. Our discussion opens a theoretical and empirical path for future examination, which may shed new light on the psychology of those individuals who might lead our nations and shape the conditions of our lives.

References

Abstract

Boaz Hameiri, Rahav Gabay, Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, and Arie Nadler’s paper on Victimhood Acknowledgment as a Vehicle to Promote Intergroup Conciliatory Attitudes in a Context of Intergroup Conflict focuses on the consequences of denying and acknowledging victimhood. Although acknowledging victimhood in contexts of historical mass victimization may trigger positive effects on victims’ well-being and willingness to reconcile with their former tormentors, its denial can be experienced, conversely, as a revictimization. The chapter is based on research conducted in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Two large-scale surveys and three field experiments examine the effects of the belief by group members that their adversary acknowledges their victimhood (Holocaust and Nakba for Jews and Palestinians, respectively). This belief is associated with Israeli-Jews’ readiness to accept responsibility for Palestinian sufferings and offer apologies. For Palestinians, it is also linked to a perceived higher likelihood of a reconciled future with Israelis.

Introduction

Members of groups immersed in intractable conflicts perceive them as existential and insoluble (Bar-Tal 2013). Such conflicts often resist resolution because of psychological barriers that block the path to achieving a compromise on issues that separate the two parties (e. g., division of disputed land). Among these emotional barriers are a lack of trust, the fear of being blamed as the author of immoral acts, and the victims’ desire to avenge past victimization (Nadler 2012). Furthermore, in intractable conflicts, a sense of collective victimhood is an inseparable part of the shared collective memory of the conflict and the ethos of conflict (Bar-Tal 2013). The study we conducted as part of the “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” project focuses on how the acknowledgement of the in-group’s victimhood by the adversary ameliorates the negative consequences of competitive victimhood (Noor et al. 2012). We examined this issue within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the most intractable conflicts. Despite the enormous cost to human life, economic resources, and psychological traumas for both sides, it has defied resolution for more than a century.

Being a victim of violence is a negative psychological experience. It results in an increased sense of humiliation, fear, anger, hopelessness, and a desire for revenge (Skitka, Bauman, and Mullen 2004). Being a victim is a source of identity threat, as it portrays victims as powerless with no control over their fate (Shnabel and Nadler 2008). This conglomerate of affective, cognitive, and motivational reactions associated with victimhood constitutes a significant psychological barrier to ending the conflict (Noor et al., 2012). Despite the detrimental consequences of victimhood for intergroup relations, being a victim is associated with psychological benefits, such as garnering support from third parties. Indeed, groups compete with each other over which is the “true victim” (Noor et al. 2012). This competitive victimhood is documented in several conflictual contexts. It has dominated relations between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland (Noor, Brown and Prentice 2008), Serbs and Croats in former Yugoslavia (Andrighetto et al. 2012), and Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East (Shnabel, Halabi and Noor 2013). Besides, competitive victimhood is associated with belligerent attitudes towards the adversary, such as the lack of trust or the unwillingness to forgive (Noor et al. 2012). Considering the motivation of the adversarial groups to “win” the competition for victimhood, a proclamation by a reputable third party, such as the UN, that one group has suffered more than its adversary increases the readiness to reconcile (Siman-Tov Nachlieli, Shnabel, and Halabi 2015). 

The group’s victimization is a central element of the narrative about the causes of the conflict and its progression that serves as a major building block of the group’s collective identity (Paez and Liu 2011). Frequently, an instance of past victimization is the nucleus of the story that the group tells its members about the roots of the conflict and the conditions for its resolution. Moreover, past victimization becomes the group’s “chosen trauma” that affects the course of the conflict and the likelihood of its resolution (Volkan 2006). The Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba, i. e., the Palestinians’ belief that the establishment of Israel turned them into refugees, are two of these “chosen traumas” that play a central role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis’ preoccupation with security concerns and fears of annihilation can be traced to centuries of discrimination, persecution, and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust (e. g., Klar, Schori-Eyal, and Klar 2013). The Palestinians’ desire to redeem their people from the status of stateless refugees refers to the establishment of Israel in 1948 (Auerbach 2009). Although the group’s adherence to its victim identity can have positive consequences for the group, such as a sense of entitlement, it is detrimental to intergroup relations (Noor et al., 2012). For example, reminding Canadian Jews of the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust reduced their concern for the moral implications of actions committed by Israelis against Palestinians (Wohl and Branscombe 2008).

Social psychological research and theory suggest three mechanisms that may reduce the negative impact of group adherence to their victim identity on intergroup relations. The first mechanism rests on the assumption of the needs-based model of reconciliation (Nadler and Shnabel 2008) and consists of restoring the victim’s sense of power. This process has been shown to increase trust in the adversary by members of victimized groups (Shnabel, Nadler, and Dovidio 2014) and readiness to reconcile with the opponent (Shnabel et al. 2009). The second mechanism focuses on inducing group members to view both the in-group and the adversarial out-group as victims (Shnabel et al., 2013). This inclusive common victim identity results in more positive intergroup perceptions and less competitive victimhood (Vollhardt and Bilali 2015). The third mechanism emphasizes the acknowledgement of the in-group’s victimhood. We assessed this mechanism in our conducted study as part of the “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” project.

Works on the effects of acknowledgment of victimhood in intergroup relations support the claim of its ameliorative effects on the well-being of victims. Acknowledgment of the sufferings of victims in Chechnya had positive effects on their psychological well-being (Maercker et al. 2009), and acknowledgment of the suffering of political prisoners was positively related to their reduced desire to take revenge on their tormentors (David and Choi 2009). In an experiment conducted in Belgium, attitudes towards the French-Speaking community improved when they acknowledged the Dutch-speaking community’s past sufferings (Alarcón-Henríquez et al. 2010). Similarly, individuals of Armenian descent who were exposed to the recognition of the Armenian genocide by Turkish groups and Jewish students who experienced the acknowledgment of violence against Jews by Poles and Germans evidenced more conciliatory attitudes towards their former tormentors (Vollhardt, Mazur, and Lemahieu 2014). The denial of an in-group’s victimhood, especially when it reflects on the group’s “chosen trauma,” is tantamount to questioning its collective identity and is experienced as a re-victimization. Thus, the denial of the Armenian genocide elicits feelings of resentment, hatred, and anger among Armenian survivors (Kalayjian et al. 1996).

Our study examines whether the positive effects of acknowledgment of an in-group’s victimhood by the adversarial group would impact people’s readiness to make compromises on central issues that have been on the negotiating table between Israelis and Palestinians, such as the final status of Jerusalem or the evacuation of settlements in the West Bank. This idea departs from previous studies investigating the links between acknowledgment of victimhood and intergroup relations in at least three respects. First, the examination focuses on the effects of acknowledgment within the context of a “hot” conflict that has defied resolution for decades. Second, the studies analyze the effects of acknowledgment on the willingness to compromise on specific conflict-related issues rather than on the victims’ well-being or general positive attitudes towards the adversary. Third, intense feelings of competitive victimhood characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Nadler 2002). This instance is not the case for the Jewish-German or Armenian-Turkish relations, where a relative consensus on the identity of the victims exists. This point is particularly important because competitive victimhood not only leads each party to pay exclusive attention to their own sufferings but also to minimize, or even deny, the adversary’s victimhood (Vollhardt 2009). This development can be seen in the recurring attempts by Palestinians to belittle or deny the Jewish Holocaust and by Israelis to minimize or doubt the sufferings of Palestinians since 1948. This reality has contributed to the distrust and animosity that have characterized the relations between these two peoples. Moreover, the tensions have also been expressed in parties’ unwillingness to make concessions to each other on critical issues, which could have facilitated a movement forward.

Current research indicates that a strong sense of collective victimhood is negatively associated with intergroup trust (Andrighetto et al., 2012; Noor, Brown and Prentice, 2008) and a decreased readiness for intergroup forgiveness (Noor, Brown and Prentice, 2008). Distrust in one’s adversary also decreases the willingness to compromise to promote an end to the conflict. In situations in which the adversary cannot be trusted, making political compromises may seem to be a risk to the in-group’s safety. In a study conducted in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jewish-Israelis who showed a stronger sense of collective victimhood were less willing to support compromises to end the conflict (Schori-Eyal, Halperin, and Bar-Tal 2014). Our study examines whether these negative trends can be reversed through the reciprocal acknowledgement by Israelis and Palestinians of the other’s “chosen traumas,” such as acknowledging the Jewish Holocaust by Palestinians and the Nakba-related sufferings by Israeli-Jews. Besides, we analyze whether this recognition affects the readiness to make compromises on key divisive issues.

Empirical Findings

In order to examine the link between the perceived acknowledgment by the adversarial out-group of the in-group’s trauma and the readiness to reconcile with them, Hameiri and Nadler 2017 first conducted two surveys among Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians who live in the West Bank. Within a representative sample of Jewish-Israelis, the extent to which participants perceived that Palestinians acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust was associated with a greater readiness to recognize the Palestinians’ suffering and an increasing willingness to take responsibility and apologize for it. These relationships between the main variables were similar for Israeli-Jews and Palestinians, particularly in a large sample of Palestinians living in the West Bank. The perceived acknowledgment of the in-group’s victimhood was positively related to the in-group’s readiness to acknowledge the adversary’s victimhood and a conciliatory attitude towards them.

The correlational nature of these findings does not reveal that the perceived acknowledgement of the in-group’s trauma by the “enemy” in a protracted conflict facilitates the end of the conflict. Group members who had conciliatory attitudes may be more willing to recognize the victimhood of the enemy and believe that the enemy acknowledged theirs in turn. Thus, to examine the hypothesis that acknowledging the in-group’s victimhood by the enemy causes greater willingness to make compromises on key divisive issues and take a conciliatory orientation towards one’s adversary, we conducted three field experiments: two with Jewish-Israeli participants and one with Palestinian citizens of Israel. These experiments also allowed us to examine the psychological mechanisms that drive these effects.

In the first field study, we found that manipulated acknowledgment of victimhood led Jewish-Israelis to express more trust toward Palestinians and, most importantly, more willingness to take responsibility, apologize and make political concessions to promote a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The mediation analysis suggests that the manipulated high levels of acknowledgment (vs. low acknowledgment) led to more trust in Palestinians, which in turn led to more positive conciliatory attitudes. In the second field study, the results generally replicated the pattern of the first one. High levels of acknowledgment (vs. low acknowledgment) by Israeli-Jews of Palestinians’ sufferings led the Palestinian participants to express more trust in Israeli-Jews, adopt more positive conciliatory attitudes towards them and led to a higher willingness to endorse political concessions to promote peaceful conflict resolution. The mediation analyses also indicate that trust only played a mediating role when the dependent variable focused on the conciliatory attitudes toward Jewish-Israelis but not when it was associated with the participants’ willingness to make compromises.

The final study aimed to replicate the previous findings and shed light on the psychological mechanisms potentially accounting for the link between acknowledging victimhood, the readiness to compromise, and adopting conciliatory attitudes in “hot” conflicts. Because this study was conducted in early 2016, when violence peaked in Israeli-Palestinian relations, we were only able to recruit Israeli-Jews. This study also included a control group that read a story that focused on the Holocaust but did not imply anything about the level of its recognition by Palestinians. This process allowed us to assess the effects of high vs. low acknowledgment against a comparable baseline. Finally, the study assessed the role of four conceptually relevant variables as psychological mechanisms, namely trust, collective victim identity, need for acceptance of the in-group, and reciprocity, to explain the effects of acknowledgment on concession-making, taking responsibility for the adversary’s sufferings, and the act of an apology.

The results replicated the main findings of the two previous studies. Compared to the low acknowledgment and the control group, Israeli-Jews who had been exposed to a high level of victimhood acknowledgment by Palestinians evidenced greater willingness to compromise, take responsibility for causing suffering to the Palestinians, and apologize for it. This effect was mediated by decreased adherence to collective victim identity, a lower need for acceptance, and a higher need to reciprocate. Unlike the previous studies, there were no effects on trust in the Palestinian group, potentially caused by a floor effect. With regard to the second mediator, i. e., the degree to which group members regard their group’s past victimization as a central element in their collective victim identity (Klar, Schori-Eyal and Klar 2013), protracted and violent conflicts, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are dominated by feelings and perceptions of competitive victimhood, which emphasize the state of being a victim and become a central element in the group’s identity (Noor et al. 2012). This centrality of victimhood leads to perceiving the adversary as a source of potential re-victimization and results in the adopting of a cautious and unyielding stance in relations with them. The opponent’s acknowledgement of the group’s victimhood implied that competitive victimhood no longer dominated. Lowering the centrality of the in-group’s victimhood also led to a more conciliatory orientation and greater willingness to make concessions on divisive issues.

The third mediator, i. e., the participants’ need for acceptance, was vital in the present study with Israeli-Jews, participants, who, like many other Israeli-Jew frequently experience threats concerning their moral image since Israel is often perceived as the perpetrator of immoral behavior towards the Palestinians (Shnabel et al. 2009). According to the needs-based model and related research, the threat to moral image results in the group’s need to be accepted by out-groups, which discourages reconciliation until the need is met (Shnabel and Nadler 2015). The acknowledgment of the Jewish Holocaust by the Palestinians implied that the participants understood, however conditionally and tentatively, that Jewish history compels Israelis to be overly vigilant, which may lead them to implement immoral policies. This process reduced the threat to Israelis’ moral image and, concomitantly, the need for acceptance from other groups, i. e., the world community. Studies have shown that satisfaction with the need for acceptance of the perpetrator increases the readiness to reconcile (Nadler and Shnabel 2015).

Similarly, for Israelis lower need for acceptance mediated their willingness to make concessions in the present study. The fourth mediator, i. e., the participants’ need to reciprocate the acknowledgment of their collective victimhood by adopting a conciliatory orientation. Since we could not directly ask the participants whether the acknowledging of their victimhood should be reciprocated by making concessions, we assessed variations in the need for exchange. Specifically, we asked them if they thought that an acknowledgment of their group’s victimhood needed to be reciprocated by the acknowledgment of the Palestinian suffering and found that this was indeed the case.

Discussion and Conclusion

Overall, these findings suggest that acknowledgment of the in-group’s victimhood by the adversary has positive effects on intergroup relations. The two surveys conducted in Israel and the Palestinian Authority indicate that the perception by Israeli-Jews of Palestinians who acknowledge the Holocaust as a major victimizing event for the Jewish people was related to their acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering and the willingness to take responsibility and apologize for it. In the same vein, the Palestinian perception of Israeli-Jews who acknowledge Palestinian Nakba-related sufferings was related to their readiness to recognize the Jewish Holocaust and their belief in the possibility of a reconciled future with the Israelis. Three subsequent field experiments substantiated the causal link between the acknowledgement of the in-group’s victimhood, the readiness to compromise on divisive issues, and the adoption of conciliatory attitudes towards the adversary. These experiments also examined the mediators of these links.

The mediational analysis in the final study suggested that the effects of acknowledgment of victimhood on concession-making and conciliatory orientation reflect the workings of (a) identity-related and (b) relationship-related psychological mechanisms. A threat to moral identity is likely to have led the Israeli-Jewish participants to embrace collective victimhood with its associated feelings of entitlement, whereas the acknowledgement of victimhood diminished this threat and the associated need for acceptance by others. This progress lessened the need to embrace a collective victim identity. Consistent with the needs-based model of reconciliation (Nadler and Shnabel 2015) and work on collective victimhood (Noor et al. 2012), these identity-related changes increased the readiness to reconcile by taking the “first step” forward, i. e., offering concessions and adopting a conciliatory orientation. Apart from acknowledging victimhood, the participants perceived that the adversary made a positive gesture towards the in-group, which impacted their readiness to reciprocate and increased their trust in the other side. These relationship-related variables mediated the effects of acknowledging the Jewish Holocaust on concession-making and conciliatory orientation. However, due to deficient intergroup trust stemming from violence on the ground, this effect did not play a similar role in the final study.

These dual identity-related and relationship-related mediational paths are likely to be operative in protracted and violent conflicts. Such conflicts generate threats to group identities and are associated with much intergroup distrust and animosity (cf. Nadler 2012 for a similar distinction between socio-emotional and instrumental processes of reconciliation). The relative salience of each of these paths in mediating the effects of acknowledgment is likely to be determined situationally. Compared to protracted and violent conflicts and therefore associated with threats to collective identities, the mediating role of identity-related aspects is expected to be smaller than in shorter and less violent conflicts. Additionally, when the source of acknowledgment is a third party (e. g., when the UN recognizes Israeli or Palestinian victimhood), the mediating role of relationship-related aspects in explaining the effects of acknowledgment is anticipated to be lower than when the source is one’s adversary. These and related questions await the scrutiny of further research.

The research we conducted as part of the “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone” project is unique on several levels. First, it examines the effects of acknowledgment of victimhood on the victimized group instead of the perpetrating group’s willingness to acknowledge their adversary’s victimhood, the associated collective guilt, and conciliatory orientations (as did Čehajić and Brown 2010) within the context of an ongoing, protracted and violent conflict. Second, this method extends the examination of the effects of acknowledgment beyond the commonly used attitudinal and perceptual measures employed in previous research, which has focused on conflicts that have long ended, to examine the readiness to make actual concessions that can break the cycle of violence in an ongoing protracted conflict. This focus highlights the applied implications of the current research. In conflicts where the belittling or denial of the other’s victimhood may be prevalent, their recognition by the adversary, even if not caused by them, may be an essential step forward. Gubler, Halperin, and Hirschberger (2015) study, which found that Israelis who read a message written by a Palestinian who acknowledged the Holocaust evidenced empathy towards their Palestinian adversary, supports this argument. As studies on competitive victimhood (Noor et al. 2012) and moral disengagement (Bandura 1999) have shown, feelings of empathy toward one’s adversary are vital steps toward ending the conflict. Finally, research on victimhood acknowledgment is in its initial stage, and the interwoven psychological process still needs to be identified.

Although victimhood acknowledgment by adversaries seems a promising and even necessary route to promote positive relations, conflict resolution, and reconciliation, it rarely happens (e. g., Kapshuk, present volume). Such acknowledgment, for example, may be perceived as hindering the in-group’s campaign to garner support from third parties (Noor et al., 2012). In cases in which an out-group was victimized by one’s in-group, the reluctance to acknowledge the other’s victimhood may stem from the need to maintain a positive social identity, whether by belittling the other’s victimhood or minimizing one’s culpability for it (Leiner et al. 2010). One promising approach for addressing this low willingness to acknowledge the adversary’s victimhood is intergroup and particularly intragroup dialogue. Such dialogue was found to lead to positive effects on various conflict-related outcomes, including, expression of empathy toward the Palestinian narrative among Jewish-Israelis (Ben David et al., 2017; Sternberg, present volume; Zigenlaub, present volume).

A relevant field for future research should examine the effects of acknowledging victimhood by a third party. If the effects of acknowledgment are due to an increase in the victim’s conception of feeling morally superior to the adversary, acknowledgment by a third party (e. g., the UN) should have similar, if not stronger, ameliorative effects as acknowledgment by the adversary. However, if the positive effects of acceptance are attributable to the implication that the enemy legitimizes the in-group’s identity, an acknowledgment from a third party should have lesser, if any, ameliorative effects. Another branch for future research concerns the different meanings acknowledgment of victimhood has for the more and less powerful in the conflict. Consistent with the logic of the needs-based model (Shnabel and Nadler 2008), acknowledgement means that the injustice done to the weaker party is recognized and needs to be rectified, whereas, for the more powerful party, acknowledgment means that since they are perceived as victims, they are exonerated from being portrayed as evil perpetrators. The finding that Israelis’ need for acceptance of Israel by the world community was weaker in high acknowledgment conditions than in low acknowledgment conditions supports this reasoning (Hameiri and Nadler 2017).

Hence, the most important implication of this study is that the first step to intergroup reconciliation is the acknowledgment of the adversary’s victimhood. Adversarial groups not only deny their responsibility for the out-group’s sufferings, but forces of competitive victimhood led them to deny or belittle the significance of these sufferings. When collective victimhood is a crucial component of the group’s self-perception and relations with out-groups (i. e., the “chosen trauma”), denial equals invalidating the group’s identity. This denial of victimhood negatively influences intergroup relations, even after the conflict has ended, and is particularly destructive in ongoing conflicts. As the present findings indicate, under these circumstances, the denial of the in-group’s victimhood leads to intransigent positions on divisive issues that threaten to turn the conflict into a protracted one. Acknowledging the adversary’s “chosen trauma” lowers in-group members’ defenses against future re-victimization and encourages compromises on divisive issues and a more conciliatory and hopeful view of their relations with the adversary than if such an acknowledgment is withheld. By studying the effects of acknowledgment of victimhood in the context of the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the present study illustrated these processes. The question as to whether these findings are unique to such contexts where parties deny each other’s “chosen trauma” or are also manifested in other kinds of intergroup conflicts should be further examined in future research.

References

Abstract

Anat Sarid, Anan Srour, and Shifra Sagy’s paper Sense of National Coherence and Willingness to Reconcile: The Case of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict examines a new concept – sense of national coherence (SONC) – and its relationship with willingness to reconcile. Based on Antonovsky’s concept of sense of coherence, SONC is defined as an enduring tendency to perceive one’s national group as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Previous studies found SONC and other similar concepts to be a barrier to openness to the other. The authors hypothesized that after a violent and stressful event (the Gaza war in 2014), SONC would be stronger, and willingness to reconcile would be lower than before the war. Moreover, they expected that the relationship between SONC and willingness to reconcile would be negative and even stronger after the war. The research questions were examined among Israeli-Jewish students. Questionnaires were administered to a sample of 140 students before the military action and 90 students after it. The results support research hypotheses regarding the negative relationship between SONC and willingness to reconcile. This relationship was found to be stronger after the military action. The discussion focuses on the dual role of SONC as a resilience resource in hard times on one hand and at the same time as a potential barrier to a peace process in areas at war or in serious conflict.

Introduction

Research in conflict areas indicates that nations with a stressful social reality tend to develop a socio-psychological infrastructure that provides a coherent, predictable, and meaningful worldview (Bar Tal 2013). These infrastructures serve as a prism through which society members absorb information about the social reality and interpret their experiences (Moscovici 1988). The current study examines a new concept – sense of national coherence (SONC) – and suggests that it is a significant part of this infrastructure (Sagy 2014; Mana, Srour and Sagy 2019). Moreover, we examined the link between one’s perceptions of his/her own nation and his/her willingness to reconcile with the other side in the conflict.

Antonovsky’s salutogenic model, and its core concept of “sense of coherence” (SOC), focuses on the ability of individuals to cope with stressors in life and stay healthy. SOC is defined as a global orientation of the individual, an enduring tendency to perceive the world as comprehensive, meaningful, and manageable (Antonovsky 1987). Accordingly, the relationship between SOC and health, stress, and coping has received much attention and quite consistent results in research (Eriksson and Mittelmark 2016). Research reviews for more than 40 years have confirmed the main salutogenic hypothesis: A person with a strong SOC will be able to cope better with life stressors than someone with a weak SOC (Eriksson and Mittelmark 2016; Eriksson and Lindström 2005) and stay healthy. However, Antonovsky claimed that “in the face of collective stressors, the strength of the group, rather than of the individual sense of coherence, is often decisive in tension management” (Antonovsky 1987, p. 178–179).

Sagy and Antonovsky (1992) suggested expanding the original definition of sense of coherence from a “global orientation of the world” into a defined collective like the family. Later on, Sagy (1998) continued to develop the concept of sense of community coherence (SOCC) which related to a specific community group. The three dimensions measured in SOCC are the same as the original concept of SOC: Community comprehensibility relates to the perception that life in one’s community is perceived as predictable, safe, secure, known, and understood. Manageability relates to the perception that one’s community can assist its members, is available to them, and meets their demands and needs. Lastly, meaningfulness relates to the perception that belonging to the community gives meaning to its members, provides challenges, and is worthy of investment and engagement.

Like the SOC of the individual, SOCC has been studied in relation to better coping with stressful events like bomb attacks, fire disasters, and deportation (e. g., Braun-Lewensohn and Sagy 2011; Sabato and Galili 2013; Peled, Sagy and Braun-Lewensohn 2013).

Recently, Sagy (2014) proposed new salutogenic questions which no longer concerned only the relationships between SOC, stress, and health. These new questions have been studied in a few research projects: How does a collective with a strong sense of coherence perceive, feel, or behave towards the “other” group members in a conflict? Does a group’s tendency to perceive its world as comprehensible, meaningful, and manageable related to greater openness to the other narratives, or does it involve clinging to the rigid in-group narratives? Is an individual, a group, a collective, or a system with a stronger sense of coherence more likely to live in peaceful relations with their surroundings? (Sagy and Mana 2017; Sagy 2014).

This new approach sought to explore the relationships between levels of SOCC and openness to the other. Findings from different social contexts revealed similar patterns: Palestinian Muslims and Christians (Mana, Sagy and Srour 2016); ultra-Orthodox and national-religious Jews in Israel (Somech and Sagy 2019) and Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo (Telaku and Sagy 2019) – stronger SOCC was found as related to a lower level of legitimization, higher anger, and lower empathy towards the out-group collective narratives. Strong SOCC was also related to a stronger tendency to reject the other group members and to adopt a separation strategy (Mana et al. 2012; Somech and Sagy 2019). In the context of intergroup conflict, perceptions of one’s community as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful reinforce the individual group members and promote their own well-being and health (Braun-Lewensohn and Sagy 2011; Mana and Sagy 2020). At the same time, however, it strengthens their feelings and attitudes towards separation, differentiation, and superiority over the other group. Thus, it could lead to attitudes of discrimination against the other group (Mana et al. 2015; Sagy and Mana 2017).

Based on these findings, a few recent studies suggest expanding the SOC concept to the national level (Mana et al. 2019). The unique contribution of the new concept sense of national coherence (SONC) to the wide range of literature related to the national “imagined kinship” (Anderson 2006) is the salutogenic perspective and the integration of the three components of SOC: comprehensibility (the cognitive element), meaningfulness (the emotional-motivational element), and manageability (the behavioral element).

1. Comprehensibility. This component mainly relates to the cognitive need to perceive the national group and its action as comprehensible and logical. Several concepts have been developed in psychology, sociology, and anthropology literature in order to describe the constructs which help national group members to gain comprehensibility, for example, ethos (Bar-Tal, Oren and Nets-Zehngut 2014), collective narratives (Liu and Hilton 2005; Hanson 1989; Hein and Selden 2000) and social representations (Duveen 2007; Moscovici 1988). These constructs serve as the main prism through which the national group members understand collective phenomena as coherent and comprehensive. It helps them legitimize and justify the national group actions and the social order (Liu and Hilton 2005; Sunshine and Tyler 2003). In hegemonic societies, the sense of comprehensibility is generally high, and the shared social representations, narratives, and ethos are perceived as “common sense” and as the only legitimate way to interpret and understand the social reality. However, in more diverse societies, when members of the nation are differentially exposed to new information, their level of comprehensibility could be lower (Moscovici 1988).

2. Manageability. Manageability mainly relates to the behavioral level of SONC, the “doing” parts, meaning the perceptions that the nation could assist its members, is available to them, and meets their personal and collective demands and needs. National manageability is related to the levels of confidence and trust in, and satisfaction with the national institutes and systems, like the army and the justice, political, educational, welfare, and security systems (Christensen and Lægreid 2003). It also relates to group members’ perception of national institutes’ and systems’ capacity, efficacy, and readiness to cope in times of stress and danger (Chaskin et al. 2007; Stith et al. 2006).

3. Meaningfulness. Meaningfulness is related to the emotional-cognitive elements of SONC. It mainly refers to the feelings that the nation has a meaning to its members by providing challenges, goals, vision, and a shared destination. Additionally, it expresses the feeling that living in one’s own nation is worthy of investment and engagement (Anderson 2006). Meaningfulness could also be related to patriotism - the set of attitudes and beliefs that refers to individuals’ attachment and loyalty to their nation and country (Bar-Tal and Staub 1997). These feelings of belonging to a meaningful national group serve as the main component in the social identity or collective identity and in the way people describe and perceive themselves (Tajfel 1981). Political psychologists (e. g., Bar-Tal 2013) have described how such feelings of meaningfulness are promoted and encouraged by national interests. The nation, as an entity, speaks and acts (Anderson 2006; Hanson 1989) via its social systems (e. g., media, education) and in this way promotes ideology, ethos, collective narratives, and social representations which strengthen feelings of meaningfulness, patriotism, and solidarity (Bar-Tal, Halperin and Oren 2010; Liu and Hilton 2005).

Is SONC a barrier to reconciliation, or could it advance a willingness to reconcile? When people feel that they can rely on their nation’s resources, does it promote openness towards the other group in a conflict, or does the opposite happen, and they are less open towards that group? A recent study by Mana and colleagues (2019) found that people with strong SONC tend to give less legitimization to the other group’s collective narratives. Based on these findings, we hypothesized that SONC might be an obstacle on the way to reconciliation.

The Context of the Conflict – Before and After Gaza War

We examined the research questions in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and compared two situations – before and after a violent event, the Gaza war in 2014. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is defined as an intractable conflict (Kriesberg 1993) since it is violent, long-lasting, perceived as irresolvable, and affects many aspects of life. Over the years, the conflict expanded and is characterized by violent actions – war, military confrontations, and terror attacks.

During the last decade, one of the main areas of the conflict has been along the Gaza border. The political situation and the tension along the border between Gaza and Israel have been the cause of several military operations in Gaza. The war in 2014 lasted more than one month. During that time, thousands of rockets and missiles were fired from Gaza to Israel, and major damage and destruction were caused to buildings and infrastructure inside Gaza.

Compared to previous military operations in Gaza, the 2014 operation (to which we refer in the current study) was longer and had more severe results. It directly affected the lives of many Israelis, especially those living in the southern area of Israel (Elran and Altshuler 2014). Surveys conducted after that war showed that the Israeli-Jewish populations had moved to the right on the political map (Elran, Ben-Meir and Sher 2015). The researchers explain the prevalence of right political views after the event in the growing feelings that military force is the only way to keep security in Israel. It is also relevant in the context of willingness to reconcile – if you believe that military force is necessary, it affects how you perceive the end of the conflict (Elran, Ben-Meir and Sher 2015).

As mentioned previously SONC could be considered as an important coping resource for people in the context of national stressful events. The Gaza war in 2014 was such a stressful event. Therefore, we expected that after that event SONC would be stronger and willingness to reconcile would decrease. Moreover, we expected that strengthened SONC will be also related to lower level of willingness to reconcile.

Hypotheses

1. We expected to find a negative correlation between SONC and willingness to reconcile.

2. We expected that the violent event (the Gaza war) would have a different influence on SONC and willingness to reconcile: After the violent event, SONC will be stronger, and willingness to reconcile will be lower than before the event.

3. We expected that the negative correlation between SONC and readiness to reconcile would be stronger after the violent event (the Gaza war) than it was before that event.

Method

Results

Table 1 shows the means found regarding the two variables in this research – SONC and willingness to reconcile.

M6▴▾

​No significant differences between males and females were found regarding SONC (t=-.90, p>.05) or willingness to reconcile (t=1.42, p>.05). Pearson analysis revealed correlation between levels of willingness to reconcile and age (r=.21, p<.01) and a negative relationship between levels of SONC and age (r= -.18, p<.05).

Our first hypothesis refers to the relationship between SONC and willingness to reconcile. We hypothesized that the relationship between those 2 variables would be negative. Indeed, we found a strong negative correlation between those two variables : r=-.49, p>.01, n=301.

We also hypothesized that the violent event (Gaza war) would have a different influence on the two variables – SONC will be stronger, and willingness to reconcile will be lower after the war. As expected, SONC was found to be weaker before the military action (M=3.42, Sd=1.02) than after it (M=3.97, Sd=0.84), and willingness to reconcile was found to be stronger before the military action (M=4.23, Sd=1.60) than after it (M=3.66, Sd=1.48). Both differences were significant (SONC: t=-4.95, p<.01; Willingness to reconcile: t=3.27, p<.01).

Our last hypothesis was that the violent event (Gaza war) would also influence the negative correlation between those 2 variables, and after the war, we would find a stronger negative correlation between SONC and willingness to reconcile. Before the war: r=-.38, p<.01, n=168 and after the war r=-.55, p<.01, n=133. Indeed, we found a significant difference between the correlations Z=1.86, p<.05.

Discussion

This research employs a new concept – sense of national coherence (SONC) – which represents the perception of a nation’s infrastructure in intractable conflict. SONC means the perception of one’s nation serves as a coping resource for the individual (Mana and Sagy 2020) but, at the same time, could be a barrier to reconciliation. Our hypotheses were confirmed, and a negative relationship was found between SONC and willingness to reconcile. This suggests that the more people tend to perceive their nation as manageable and meaningful for them as individuals, the less they will be willing to end the conflict in peaceful ways and reconcile with the other side. Further research is needed to explain the mechanism that makes SONC a barrier to reconciliation.

One possible explanation is based on a recent study (Mana et al., 2019) that found strong SONC to be negatively correlated with low levels of openness toward the other group in the conflict. It may be that when people tend to feel they can rely on their nation, they are less open to the other group and less willing to reconcile.

Similar results were found in studies of a similar collective concept – SOCC-which relates to the community instead of to the nation: strong levels of SOCC were correlated with low levels of openness toward the other group (Mana et al. 2012, 2015; Telaku and Sagy 2019).

One of the realities of living in an area of intractable conflict is that episodes of violent outbreak are not rare. Our data were collected before and after a violent event in the conflict, the war in Gaza that took place in the summer of 2014. Having data from two time points enables us to compare the results before and after the violent event and thus try to understand the effect that such violent events have on people living in a conflict area.

Indeed, after the violent breakout, SONC was stronger, willingness to reconcile was lower, and the negative relationship between SONC and willingness to reconcile was stronger. These results suggest that one of the effects that episodes of the violent outbreak have on people is moving them to even greater reliance on their nation as a coping resource. In times of war or crisis, people need to perceive their nation as just and they need to feel that their lives are manageable and meaningful. In terms of SONC, we can say that violent episodes make people perceive their nation as more manageable, meaningful, and comprehensible. Mana and Sagy (2020) suggested that SONC can be considered a salutogenic resilience factor, which helps people cope well in times of violent and stressful collective episodes. Since the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perceived as intractable (Bar-Tal 2013), the SONC enables individuals to cope well despite the prolonged situation.

Our results suggest that SONC might be a barrier to reconciliation and, as such, it might obstruct the possibility of ending the conflict in peaceful ways. Despite this negative link, we still suggest that SONC is a meaningful concept relating to the process of reconciliation in intractable conflict. SONC may serve as a barrier to reconciliation due to its unique characteristics as a resilient factor in the continuing conflict.

Can we change this circular pattern?

We believe that educational interventions could make a change. Zigenlaub and Sagy (2020), for example, found that Israeli participants of dialogue groups, after one year of intervention, still presented strong SONC and strong identity with their collective narratives, and also expressed more acceptance of the narrative of the “other” group (the Palestinians). This effect was found whether the group was an intra-group (only Israelis) or an inter-group (Israelis and Palestinians).

Further research is needed concerning levels of SONC among people who live in relatively peaceful areas such as asking about the relationship between this national concept and openness to other groups like immigrants and minorities. These questions appear to be relevant to many Western countries these days.

References

Abstract

Encountering the suffering of the others cannot be separated from acknowledging their narratives. Michael Sternberg and Shifra Sagy’s paper on the question of When Israeli Students encounter Palestinian Narratives explores the contribution to reflexive learning about conflict reality, which takes place by meeting narratives of the other in intragroup dialogue. Their paper presents dynamics triggered by dialogue within one national group (in this case, a group of Jewish-Israeli undergraduate students) in the context of a binational conflict. Their study explores the contribution of dialogue to the capacity to relate to ongoing conflict relations from perspectives that go beyond binary and oppositional assumptions and positions (“us” and “them”). The paper shows that intragroup dialogue contributes to a reflexive exploration of participants’ involvement in the conflict through an increased readiness to challenge hegemonic perceptions of conflict reality, i. e., to consider and examine alternatives to existing types of conflict engagement as valuable, and to cope with the challenges of becoming an active bystander towards the abuse of power relations.

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This paper outlines a study of an encounter between Jewish Israeli students with Palestinian narratives (Sternberg 2017; Sternberg, Litvak Hirsch and Sagy 2018). The encounter is based on intragroup dialogue, and the research explores the cognitive and emotional contribution of such an encounter to an understanding of the other. The primary research goal is to explore the contribution of encountering narratives of the other in a setting of intragroup dialogue to reflexive learning about conflict reality and potential shifts in perceptions of conflict relations.

Sources of Violence and Challenges for Transforming Violent Conflict

In this section, we relate to theoretical approaches that address the understanding of challenges for conflict transformation in violent conflict, adding possible roles of dialogue in this context.

Conflict transformation approaches define violence by the degree to which basic human needs are violated (Miall 2004). According to Galtung (2009), there are three fundamental forms of violence. First, violence occurs as the outcome of actions (direct violence); second, as the result of polarized social structures which cause violation of basic human needs of underprivileged populations (structural violence); third, as what occurs when cultural systems legitimize the violation of the basic human needs of selected populations (cultural violence). Within such a framework of conflict analysis, the sources of violence which need to be resolved are primarily related to a power asymmetry that permeates the violations of rights and needs of underprivileged sides (Darweish 2010). However, such asymmetric structures cannot be transformed without addressing cultural premises that legitimize or obscure violence (Bar-Tal 2013). When violence is perceived as a given element of societal reality, we can expect the evolvement of cultures within which power is considered a resource that must be monopolized. Such cultures of domination based upon power over relations and orientations not only guide attitudes towards sides in an ongoing violent conflict but also become an inherent dimension in group relations within conflict sides (Francis 2011).

Collective narratives of groups are a central aspect in the construction of group identity (Liu and Hilton 2005). Societies involved in conflicts form conflict-supporting narratives that play an essential role in satisfying the identity-based needs of the individuals and the collective. These narratives tend to focus on the themes of threats and delegitimization of the opponent, glorification and victimhood of the ingroup, the need for patriotism and unity, and the ingroup’s aspiration for peace (Bar-Tal 2013).

Therefore, the students involved in this research were, challenged by the encounter with Palestinian narratives that challenge perceptions of the self, the other, and the conflict relations. A shift towards favorable positions to resolve conflict in a non-violent manner would involve emotional and cognitive challenges. Conflict reality has to be addressed from a complexity perspective, i. e., a reality in which the roles of victim and perpetrator are blurred. In contrast, Israelis must accept the loss of privileges for a while from a structural-political perspective since severe power asymmetry is an obstacle to reconciliation (Darweish 2010). The premise of these approaches is that through the belief system which underlies them, narratives play a crucial role in sustaining conflict and related intergroup relations (Sagy, Ayalon and Diab 2011). Collective representations of historical narratives based on the acknowledgement of the other can promote effective communication and behavior congruity, whereas contradicting representations are related to miscommunication and mistrust (Bar-On and Kassem 2004). These incidents lead to the proposition that the ability to acknowledge the other’s narrative and recognize the inherent complexity of conflict relations can promote the readiness to reconcile (Sagy, Ayalon and Diab, 2011).

Such a shift in the context of violent conflict might ultimately contribute to the transition from passive to active bystander (Staub 2013). Passivity by witnesses or bystanders contributes massively to the evolution of violence and harm by groups (Ibidem). Contributing to the transformation of cultures of violence requires active bystandership (Lederach 2005). The shift toward active bystandership involves the ability to disengage from ethnocentric perceptions, contain the emotional challenges of acknowledging narratives that contradict collective assumptions about the conflict, and accept the moral obligation to address our contribution to violence even when this demands readiness to face psychological and material danger (Staub 2013). Addressing conflict without the defensive character of ethnocentric narratives creates the potential for the recognition of deeds that are morally “irrevocable” (Ferrari, present volume). Such acknowledgment may involve the painful experiences of remorse for wrongdoing, but at the same time, it may contribute to the potential for reconciliation. Efforts that are invested in denying memories of wrongdoing may be transformed into efforts to reconcile with deeds of the past, and attempts for actions that may contribute to a future guided by a commitment to moral obligations.

Dialogue as a Generator of Change

Contact theory is the basis of most forms of dialogue encounters in general and particularly in Israel (Maoz 2012). Gordon Allport first formulated the theory in 1954 with his fundamental assumption that a direct encounter with the other creates opportunities to overcome negative stereotypes and humanize the other (Allport 1979). However, effective intergroup contact relies on conditions such as equal status of both groups in the contact situation, ongoing personal interaction between individuals from both groups, cooperation in a situation of mutual dependence, and institutional support attuned to norms related to equality (Pettigrew 1998). The critique of dialogue based on contact theory points out that it tends to disregard the political reality of asymmetric power relations. In this context, dialogue may prove counterproductive as the exposure to ongoing external power relations and the hostile environment may cancel the initial positive effect of the small group process (Maoz 2012).

Even though the inherent challenges of intergroup dialogue in the context of an asymmetric conflict are well-documented, less attention has been drawn to the use of intragroup dialogue as a principal setting. It is usually addressed as a supportive framework within an intergroup process and not as a principal framework in its own right (Rothman 2014). However, in the case of protracted conflict, distinct intragroup work might be necessary because we can expect conflicts towards the outgroup on the conflict sides. That is, conflicts within the sides that need attention to create the ability for constructive conflict engagement with the outgroup (Rambsbotham 2010).

The tradition of peace education and recent initiatives guided by conflict transformation perspectives focus on intragroup dialogue as a reflexive process (Broome and Collier 2012). In such dialogue programs, in-group members explore their multiple identities and different perspectives about possible ways to resolve the conflict on the intergroup level. Rothman (2014) argues that an intragroup dialogue that encourages critical reflexivity can contribute to complex thinking about the other by first fostering it within the ingroup.

This study aims to add propositions about the significance of intragroup dialogue by exploring how the intragroup setting might contribute to students’ readiness to deeply explore in-intergroup conflict. Furthermore, this study examines the potential contribution to participants’ readiness to address diverse perceptions of identities, power relations, and narratives, to adopt positions of critical reflexivity, challenge hegemonic perceptions of conflict reality, and explore alternative types of conflict engagement.

3a. Method. Background: Field Site And Group Description

This research is part of the project “Hearts of Flesh–Not Stone,” trilateral cooperation between German, Palestinian and Israeli researchers. The Israeli team conducted the study presented in this paper.

A major element in the Israeli research design is an academic year course in 2013–14 and 2014–15, each time with the participation of twenty-four Jewish Israeli B.A. students from the Department of Education at Ben-Gurion University. In the first course, approximately two-thirds of the students were women, whereas a third were men. In the second course, the majority of students were women, while only three participants were men. All students were in their mid-twenties (25–29 years, SD 1.16).

The course started with twelve weekly meetings, which combined learning about the nature of conflicts and engaging in a reflexive exploration of the participants’ emotions and thoughts provoked by the topics. This was followed by encounters with Palestinian narratives involving two-day trips to sites connected to historical narratives about the Nakba and current everyday difficulties Palestinians face due to ongoing conflict. On these trips, participants met with Palestinians who shared their personal stories. In addition, dialogue sessions took place in which participants processed their experiences. In the last part of the course, several meetings were arranged in which participants processed the course experience. Two members of the Israeli research team facilitated the course, and the facilitation team was gender-balanced. The first author of this article was one of the facilitators.

The site tours aimed to provide opportunities for direct encounters with the other, which might have assisted in challenging prejudices and stereotypes. The introduction of theory-based knowledge on conflict challenged one-sided perceptions and assumptions. The encounter with and responses to Palestinian narratives served as an invitation to explore social constructions of conflict experiences and positions. The context of an Israeli ingroup exploring conflict with the Palestinian other aimed to address differences within the group.

3b. Method: Research Tools and Data Analysis

The study combined three qualitative components. First, phenomenological components, i. e., the student’s understanding of what was happening, are expressed in their reflections about their learning experiences (Snape and Spencer 2003). Second, participative action research components are based on the joint exploration of evolving positions and group shifts towards the group’s knowledge base (Kemmis and McTaggart 2000). Third, ethnographic elements are related to the contextualization of the group contents within a specific social reality, using participant observation by the researcher (Denzin and Lincoln 2000).

The data sources include recordings and verbatim transcriptions of the class sessions and discussions during the site visits, which were thematically analyzed (Ritchie, Spencer and O’Connor 2003). Another data source is a set of eight semi-structured individual interviews with randomly selected participants, conducted in the middle and at the end of each course. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed by topic (Legard, Keegan and Ward 2003). A third source was a field diary in which the first author described his subjective experiences and observations of the evolving group processes (Denzin and Lincoln 2000). Major themes were derived from all three components. The findings were organized to provide the framework for an exploration of meanings that students ascribed to their learning experiences on conflict and students’ insights about their involvement in the socially patterned context of conflict.

The research data was used to compare between findings of the academic year 2013–14 and 2014–15. These results enabled a comparison of the potential significance of shifting social reality foremost related to conflict escalation. In the summer of 2014, before the start of the academic year, the Israeli-Gaza conflict escalated. Israel launched a military operation in the Gaza strip while the Israeli public experienced rocket attacks from the Gaza strip. During the course, additional occurrences preoccupied students, such as the escalation of violence involving civilians in what is at times referred to as the Silent Intifada of summer 2014. This was also the case throughout the fall and winter of 2014–15.

Ethical Considerations

Students were informed about the research character of the course. To participate in the course was a voluntary decision. We coordinated the research together with the ethics committee of the Department of Education, which approved the combined set of academic courses and related research.

Findings

In this chapter, we present findings concerning the study goal, which was to explore the contribution of encountering narratives of the other in the setting of intragroup dialogue to reflexive learning about conflict reality. Furthermore, we explore the significance of escalating violence in group-based learning. We first summarize the major findings, then propose a conceptualization of the mechanisms that contribute to the social construction of conflict reality, which was implied throughout the evolving group conversations. The following sections focus on the main findings on the perceptions of “them and us” within the conflict and the evolving changes in these perceptions throughout the course process.

Students Discoveries about the Social Construction of Conflict Reality

Above, we presented the significant findings on perceptions of conflict reality and the evolving changes in these perceptions throughout the course. In the following sections, we elaborate on the major findings and propose a conceptualization of interrelated mechanisms that contribute to the social construction of conflict reality that was discerned throughout the course. Moreover, we outline the obstacles and opportunities for a change in the construction of conflict reality that could be determined. By using quotations from the documentation of the course meetings, we exemplify the social construction mechanisms and changes in the participants’ involvement in these mechanisms as a result of the intragroup dialogue.

Discussion

This study aimed to explore the contribution of encountering narratives of the other in the setting of intragroup dialogue to reflexive learning about conflict reality. The university course aimed to create a learning environment that encouraged reflexivity in exploring the participants’ involvement in collective narratives, related identities, and power relations. This dialogue-based exploration involved the cognitive and emotional dimensions of learning as a process of change.

We have presented the major findings on perceptions of conflict reality and the potential significance of conflict escalation to the intragroup dialogue. In addition, we have presented collective assumptions that are evident throughout the evolving conversations in the group and that are of significance to students’ involvement in the social construction of conflict reality. We suggest that premises related to Israeli deep culture, a culture that is embedded in the given structure of the conflict, influence these assumptions (Galtung 2009). These mechanisms serve to adjust students’ perceptions of ongoing conflict and the violence involved (Bar-Tal 2013). The findings support previous studies, which indicate that in the context of violent conflict, specifically in the context of escalation, there is the potential for the evolution of corresponding societal structures and cultures that represent power over relations and assumptions (Francis 2011).

Moreover, the findings also support prior studies which relate to the role of narratives in supporting mechanisms that contribute to a moral disengagement from violence towards the other and indicate the potential contribution of encountering narratives of the other to reconciliation (Sagy, Ayalon and Diab 2011). Furthermore, the results add evidence to propositions about the potential contribution of intragroup work to constructive conflict engagement in the context of deep-seated intergroup conflict (Rothman 2014). We also propose that these findings indicate the contribution of specific cultural premises to the position of a passive bystander in relation to violence towards the other, the challenges and opportunities for the transformation of these premises in the context of intragroup work, and the contribution of such transformations towards transitioning into the position of an active bystander (Staub 2013).

The participative inquiry approach that guided the facilitation of the learning and the research process aimed to create opportunities for discovery. Participants in such a process attempt to explore the complexities and challenges of a given societal reality, the types of change they want to promote, and opportunities and obstacles towards change (Gergen and Gergen 2001). It is a deeply political process, a process of emancipation, since it aims to empower participants to contribute towards change; change attuned to challenges of justice and equality (Lederach 2005).

The learning process discussed in this paper reflects this orientation. This participative inquiry-inspired learning process dealt chiefly with shared involvement in the deep structure and deep culture of ongoing violence related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the conflict-related structure and culture could not be separated from diverse power relations within Israeli society (Francis 2011). As we discovered, the focus of encountering narratives of the other runs counter to premises that guide thoughts, emotions, and actions within Israeli conflict discourse (Adwan, Bar-Tal and Wexler 2014). The exploration of cognitive and emotional responses to this learning focus led to the discovery of mechanisms that obscure, contextualize, and justify involvement in violence. Such learning provided an opportunity to experience an environment that contradicts many of the premises of the deep culture of violence. Power relations, their significance, and our involvement and contribution to them, have been critically assessed throughout the paper. Collective identities have been addressed in terms of diversity and complexity, and the political history of the conflict has been explored from different perspectives. Within such a learning environment, the individual is encouraged to explore emotional and cognitive challenges inherent to the attempt to overcome the given political discourse; encountering the narratives of the other becomes an opportunity to address conflict relations from perspectives attuned to reconciliation, such as the acknowledgement of diverse narratives, empathy for the suffering of the other, and the potential to address violence as an element that is inherent in the conflict and not necessarily attributed only to the other (Lederach 2010, Nadler, Malloy and Fisher 2008).

The research findings discussed in this paper raise questions that demand further attention. To what extent can a specific case study contribute to understanding processes in societies in violent conflict (generally) and within Israeli society (particularly)? The case study provides insights into the significance of evolving structural and cultural mechanisms in the context of violent conflict and escalation. However, further research on the findings presented in this paper could address their significance on a societal level. Similarly, regarding the processes of change that were discerned in this research, the question arises of how significant they are on a societal level, most importantly concerning transitions from positions of a passive to an active bystander?

Moreover, what is the potential role of education institutions in promoting critical learning in the context of ongoing conflict? Under what conditions and to what degree can the academic environment encourage learning that challenges major premises of hegemonic political discourse? Finally, this research focused on the processes of learning and change that could be observed during the course. However, the potential contribution of the course to the perception and position of the participants over time demands further study.

The findings of this study contributed to understanding the mechanisms that nurture the acceptance and even support for addressing the conflict by mainly violent means. We hope that further research on critical reflexivity in the midst of violent conflict will indicate how a transformation of the culture of violence can become feasible.

References

Abstract

Efrat Zigenlaub and Shifra Sagy’s contribution: Learning the Narrative of the Other. What Type of Encounter is More Effective? compares two types of dialogue groups (intra- and intergroup), among students at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the academic year of 2016–2017. The intra-group included only Jewish students, whereby the inter-group included Jewish and Bedouin students. Aiming to measure the increase of willingness to reconcile, the authors tested whether interpersonal contact constitutes an advantage or might inhibit the processes of acknowledging the other and their narratives. The findings indicate that the legitimacy of the Palestinian narrative and trust towards Palestinians increased in both groups, while hatred, fear, and anger toward Palestinians decreased. Moreover, feelings of shame among Jewish participants towards Palestinians increased in the intra-group and decreased in the inter-group. Correlations between the different variables strengthened in the intra-group and not in the inter-group, indicating the possibility of developing a more coherent and less confused stance regarding the conflict in the intra-group but not in the inter-group.

Intergroup Relations in Conflict Situations

Research in the field of intergroup relations has developed considerably during the last decades (Sternberg, Litvack-Hirsch and Sagy 2017) in an attempt to reduce stress and prejudices between groups in conflict. The most common and accepted approach, known as the contact approach, was developed by Allport (1954), who claimed that the best way to reduce stress between members of groups in conflict is to bring people from two rival groups in contact with one another. Many social programs were developed based on the contact approach, such as ethnically integrative schools, racially mixed neighborhoods, and others (Nadler 2000). A meta-analytical study (Pettigrew and Tropp 2011) analyzed 713 independent samples from 515 research studies, which examined contact-based programs in 38 countries. Pettigrew and Tropp’s study supported the approach’s effectiveness by reducing prejudice between groups of different background, age, and other characteristics.

Other recent studies indicate the limitations of this approach. One limitation is that interpersonal experiences do not necessarily affect attitudes towards the whole group (Hewstone and Brown 1986). Another limitation is the difference between the majority and the minority group regarding the needs and expectations of group communication. While the majority group wants to preserve the status quo, the minority group aims for a change (Sidanius and Pratto 1999). Studies have shown that in joint meetings, members of the minority group preferred to talk about the inequality of power between the groups, while the majority group tried to blur inequalities by drawing attention to similarities between the groups and to encouraging a more personal discourse (Saguy, Dovidio and Pratto 2008; Suleiman 2000). Regardless of these limitations, the contact approach is still the primary approach on which dialogue groups are based.

Dialogue groups serve to reduce prejudice and hostility between groups in conflict (Bar Tal 2002; Salomon 2002; Stephan and Stephan 2001). In the form of meetings, dialogue groups are designed to help the participants understand the conflict and suggest ways to deal with it. This process includes the development of the participants’ awareness of the complexity of the conflict and their role in it as well as the investigation and construction of their identity (Sagy, Steinberg and Fahiraladin 2002). Dialogue groups are a particular type of discourse that produces dialogues and differs from the usual meaning of a discourse between two people and from a discussion:

“Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth, and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself […]. In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.” (Bohm 1990, p. 2)

Bohm views dialogue as an essence rather than a discourse between two people: “a dialogue can be among any number of people, not necessarily two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself if the spirit of the dialogue is present” (Ibid., p. 2). This in-depth approach is most relevant to the present research, which refers to an intra-group as a dialogue group.

Inter versus Intra-Group: Comparative Research

The review above presents two approaches to interventions (inter- and intragroup) reduce prejudice and hostility between groups in conflict. The current study compared these two approaches in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the framework of courses at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. We examined the results of the two approaches, measured by levels of acknowledgment of the collective narrative of the other and the willingness to reconcile.

As far as we know, no similar studies that compare inter-and intragroup approaches have been conducted. In an in-depth review, we found the aforementioned qualitative study by Ford (2012) that compared an intra-group of white students and an inter-group of white and non-white students and found that both groups achieved their goal of creating a more complex personal and theoretical understanding of white identity and its development.

The current study is thus innovative in comparing two kinds of dialogue groups: an inter- and an intra-group. The initiators defined the purpose of the respective group meetings as acknowledging the collective narrative of the other and increasing group members’ willingness to reconcile (Sagy 2017). The study examined how and to what extent each group contributed to this goal. Was there an advantage to the interpersonal contact, or did the contact block processes of recognizing the other?

In the study of relations between groups in conflict, several common and accepted variables were selected for comparison: the perception of collective narratives, feelings towards the other, trust in the other, and the willingness to reconcile. Those variables represent the goals of the initiators of the dialogue group.

Method

Findings