Anders Hoeg Hansen
PhD student
Nottingham Trent University
anders.hansen@ntu.ac.uk
With this
paper I aim to thematise a level of conflict mediation and conflict work, one
not often reaching the media headlines. My research for a PhD deals with a few
micro-level educational intervention programmes in Israel. I am investigating
narratives and expressions of belonging and longing, power and identity in conflict
coping educational co-operative projects in the state of Israel; projects
that engage the Jewish and the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, though
inevitably dealing with the situation in the West Bank, Gaza and the region in
general.
In this
paper I will present and discuss a particular project taking place at a range
of settings in Israel, though differing in format and often changing – or
temporarily stopped - according to the developments in the conflict. I will
argue how that project unfold ambivalent desires and anxieties, that it draws
heavily from dominant national and media discourse and at the same time departs
from these. The projects are very much, on the one hand, re-producing a
dichotomous reality, but on the other hand they are as well offering pedagogies
that create new paths of imagination and dialogue for all parties involved: -
teachers, students and facilitators.
My attempt
has been to look beneath the corridors and battle fields of macht to
look at unusual, civic and dialogic power games or meetings. I have for a few
years now been dealing with a, so to speak, ‘subterranean level’ of possible machen[2]
where ordinary young high school students and junior high school pupils, and
teachers and project facilitators, Jews and Palestinians, deal with conflict,
or experiment with tools of conflict coping, while people in cities around them
or in the West Bank and Gaza are getting blown up. Some of the people attending
projects have relatives who’s been attacked, others have participated in riots
themselves, according to one facilitator. This is the context in which these
project are offered, and people keep attending. The projects are clearly not making
change on the macro level, but, then again, useless mediators and useless old
leaders on both sides are creating even less change, so how can citizens get on
with their lives and change something, for themselves, on levels they are
capable of inhabiting and affecting? I
have been asking whether the already habitualised and repetitive patterns of
discourse on history, nation, belonging, identity, experience and hate - and
hope, for that matter - are being, ‘opened’. Are the ‘Chinese boxes’ we all carry
along, in terms of identity, challenged and transformed in some of these forms
of micro-level intervention work?
Before
wrestling with the questions, I will present the settings and say a bit about
the unstable stage and play of identity in Israel.
The core of
my fieldwork[3] is done at
two of the major settings for Jewish-Palestinian projects, the educational
centre Givat Haviva and the only Jewish-Arab village of Israel, Neve Shalom/Wahat
Al-Salam (‘Oasis of Peace’)[4].
Both settings run youth projects, courses and engage in different forms of
activist work and public seminars around the issue of conflict. In my thesis I
am primarily looking a two forms of projects: a 2 to 3 day long encounter
workshop project between high school students and a 2 year long junior
high school project within the school curriculum. In this paper I will deal
with the former and my fieldwork extracts are taken from 2 Givat Haviva
encounters October last year, a year into the present intifada.
As you may
know, Israel has got 1 million indigenous Palestinians with Israeli citizenship
- a minority amounting to approximately
one-fifth of the state’s population, the territories not included. They live
mostly separated from Jews and attend their own schools. The Palestinians of
Israel are mainly Muslim, but there is also a minority of Christian and Druze.
They are Arab and Palestinian, but they don’t live in the territories and they
have Israeli citizenship. They speak almost fluent Hebrew, a sort of stepmother
tongue, and English as a third language. Arabic is their mother tongue.
The Jewish
population is a mix of Askenazim (European) and Mizrachim
(Oriental), secular and Religious and in-betweens. A minority of black Jews
from Ethiopia entered the country in the early decades of statehood. In the
early 90s a large number of Russian Jews began to arrive. Both Jews and
Palestinians are, so to speak, groups with borders running through their
tongues; multiple cleavages exist and
they are constantly challenged with finding a home in a mosaic of
possible and complicated allegiances, in terms of Israeliness, nation,
ethnicity, religion, local and regional identity, not to speak of gender, race
and class. Issues that are, as well, a field of struggle in Israel.
I want to
quote an extract from a dialogue between two well-known writers in Israel, the
Palestinian Israeli Anton Shammas and the Jew A. B. Yehoshua.
Shammas: “You see
Israeliness as total Jewishness”. “And I don’t see where you fit me, the Arab
into that Israeliness. Under the rug? In some corner of the kitchen? Maybe you
won’t even give me a key to get into the house?”
Yehoshua: “But Anton, think
of a Pakistani coming to England today with a British Passport, and telling the
British, ‘Let’s create British nationality together! I want Pakistani, Muslim
symbols! Why should the Archbishop of Canterbury preside over the crowning of
the Queen? I want there to be Muslim representation as well! Why should we
speak English? There are a lot of languages here’. Think of him coming and
making demands! The English tell him ‘No my good man! We have no objection to
your speaking Urdu, and you may receive – as a minority – schools and mosques,
but the country’s identity is English, and your are a minority within that
nation!’
Shammas: “Buli [Yehoshua’s
nickname], the minute a man like you does not understand the basic difference
between the Pakistani who come to England and the Galilean who has been in
Fatusta [a village in Galilee, northern Israel] for untold generations, then
what do you want us to talk about?”
Yehoshua: “I don’t
understand you”. “If there hadn’t been anti-Semitism in Europe, you wouldn’t
even know how to write the word ‘Israel’ (in Grossman, 1993: 254).
The assertions
in the talk touch upon the crux of the matter, I think, illustrating the
conflictual narratives of belonging and the different forms of allegiance with
Israel and the problem of the character of the state. Yehoshua seems to be
comparing the Arab in Israel to an immigrant, who enters what another man see
as homeland, while Anton Shammas asks for a share in Israeliness. The
Palestinian is not an immigrant but it is as well true that the Jews have
shaped the particular form of (be)longing and nationality Yehoshua calls
Israeliness. Can Shammas then equally share this Israeli nationality? Shammas
may vision Israeliness in a political sense, as an inclusive citizenship – and
he may as well be planting one of his feet on the other bank of the river
through his emotional ties with brothers in the territories: isn’t he closer to
sharing a Palestinian nationality with the rest of the Palestinians in Gaza and
the West Bank? And how can he get accepted by at least one of the parties?
The
participants in the encounters are not middle aged writers but high school
students, where – as one facilitator said – “you can hear voices of their
parents speaking through their throats”. The projects are run by a team of
Jewish and Arab facilitators, or moderators. An Arab and a Jew is present when
activities run in sub-groups. “The work of the facilitator is to encourage to
talk”, as the Arab facilitator Ayub says.
Let me show
an outline of the types of activities that appears in the project[5].
The first half of the first day deals with
personal, cultural issues. They "have to know each other a little bit
before dealing with the conflict", Limor, a facilitator[6],
says. They begin with name games, make switch-place games,
and continue with playing and presenting cultural topics; girl-boy relations,
parental relations, neighbour relations, and gradual outward relations. The
idea is to approach more sensitive issues slowly.
They come with stereotypes. Jews think that the Arabs "come with kiffeya [traditional Arab male red/white headgear]", Revital says. "For the Arabs they see for the first time [Jewish] youth who are not soldiers". They don't know much. Limor explains how a Jewish student once asked about the term 'Israeli Arab': "does that mean he has a Jewish mother?", the student asked.
"They get a shock, a good one", Limor
continues. I ask questions about student expectations. The Jews "want them
[the Arabs] to like us" "they will see we are not so bad". The Arabs come more weak,
"want the Jews to know us". The know is important,
Arigh, a facilitator, says. She
explains to me that the Jews are thinking they are making the Arabs a
favour doing this, while the Arabs come to convince the Jews. Generally there
is a good feeling in the beginning. The curve breaks when they start to talk
about stereotypes. They try to keep the good feeling; ‘you are okay (the group
present), we are talking about the other people’, is a typical attitude, Arigh
explains. Several facilitators explain that they are not teaching but trying to
help the discussion along. We help the teachers to continue in school. For the
students it is a study of themselves.
Ayub, another facilitator, explains that they start
off the encounter (the introducing speech) in Arabic, then in Hebrew. The
reality is reversed. There are two languages, and the Arabs can speak Arabic if
they want to. The Arabs are usually “being shy”. “If they chose not to talk, it
is okay”, Ayub says. “If they don’t get the chance [to talk], it is my
problem”. The work of the facilitator is to encourage to talk”, but not
necessarily in Arabic for the Arabs[7].
These
extracts show, I think, that the facilitators is in a delicate two-fold
mediator or helper role. They try to help the debate along, asks questions, ask
for clarifications and encourage both parties to unfold their thoughts and
emotions. It is nevertheless not a third party or a neutral party, though I
can’t help of thinking of a Paulo Freirian dialogic and problem raising
education that kicks off group processes based on co-operation and the
conquering or gradual pursuit of ‘freedom’ and empowerment (Freire, 1978:
7-17).
The Arab
facilitator is often struggling a bit more being a translator of the Arab
speech that may come from Arabs. They can speak Hebrew, but often they choose
Arabic as a form of self-empowerment and ‘ground-gaining’, which make the Jews,
who only know very little Arabic, frustrated. This was clearly demonstrated
during the two encounters I watched.
I spoke with
one of the more deviant Jewish students about these issues. He explains that
yesterday some of the girls asked the Arabs to speak Hebrew. “Some didn’t ask
so nicely and some did”. The girl asking not so nicely said “Jewish is the
national language”. “In fact there is two. Hebrew and Arabic”, he says. And
Russian is getting there, I say. He laughs. He says that he came here to learn
about the other but also “your self” and he continues to explain that he
“didn’t agree with the group”. There was a problem with the other boys. One
said that “we treat the Arabs nicely”, and he didn’t agree. He explains that he
lives in an area where there are many Arab villages. He did some work for a
movement in Misgav where they tried to bridge the groups and they went out
together. “We didn’t speak politics”, he said “but you can’t leave politics
out”. I ask him about what he has learned here, and he doesn’t succeed in
coming up with an answer. He looks thoughtful, contemplating. “I’ll have to
think about that”.
After the
final session of this group I speak, as in all breaks, with facilitators. Limor
explains that the tall girl in the group were talking to these Arabs as it they
were part of one national group of Muslims. A long time they were circling
around a “suggestion”: If you don’t feel Israeli, why don’t you leave. The
Arabs were just responding: I am Palestinian, I was born here. The Arab silence
the first day was partly a strategy, a reply to the attack, and partly they
were caught in a situation where they had a hard time expressing themselves
fully about the issues, Limor said. And they found out that they could use
silence as a “tool of resistance”, “make the Jews frustrated”. It became clear
though that in fact the Arabs were cornered most of the time despite the
strategy of silence in these two workshops. I will present extracts from my
field report that may illustrate this:
After a coffee
break in the second workshop, the 2nd day, something very
interesting happens. The Jews come in first and instead of forming a half
circle of Jews vs. Arabs, they spread around the whole circle. They are not
equal in number today, there are more Jews, despite some of them being send off
for dope smoking the night before. Some seats are free, and when the Arabs come
in they look puzzled, where is my seat,
where is my(!) group? The Jews are sitting there with quizzical grins. I have
my thoughts about a cunning Jewish plan, but am also thinking that they may
have been told to change places. They are not, I am told afterwards. Limor told
later, that the Jews tried to weaken the Arabic ‘bloc’ by separating them.
Limor is recognising the cunningness but there is also a trace of disgust in
her voice when she says “they mirrored Israeli policies”, i.e. by fragmenting into
sub-units, like e.g. the Israelis call them Muslims, Christian and Druze.
In the new
class “structure” the discussion continues, there is a lot of bevakasha
(please), beseder (okay, good, yes depending on context). They are
continuing a drawing game which you may remember from the programme
presentation. Some more drawings come out after the game was abandoned over an
hour ago. The game was cancelled spontaneously because of the discussion. Now
it is brought back: The Jews portray Arab stone throwers, masked men, police,
women veiled in black completely, a mosque with the crescent moon, there are
red-white road stones in the streets. This is an Israeli cityscape icon though.
It is everywhere. In the Arab group apart from the orthodox and kids and David
star there are some women wearing daring bathing suits. Each group look
sceptical and a bit reserved after the presentation. They enter a discussion
about Judaism and Islam. The Arabs look bewildered and not confident, less of
them in the room. The Jews argue internally as well. All the way through they
prove to be the loudest[8].
A tall girl is attacking Islam, they are now approaching stuff in the light of
the September the 11th as well. Limor tries unsuccessfully to enter
the discussion. Mizrachim, ideology, conflict. They are debating all the hard
issues now. The Jews seem to be Ashkenazim only. The Arab group has stopped
speaking. One blonde Jewish guy, the guy I mentioned earlier on, is differing
from his group, trying to correct the girls without being too deviant, i.e.
without dismissing himself from the group. At some point the Jewish girl
‘brigade’ stops speaking as well. I spoke to Limor about the tall girl during
the next break. She has got “a lot of fears”, “she is not focused”. Later Limor
explains that she had experienced an attack while riding in a car with her
mother. A stone thrower. No one got hurt. It has affected her.
After the break
the Arab group stays away. The Jews sit waiting. Limor is expecting a boycott.
I go to the hallway outside, I look out the window, and down there on the lawn
in the sunshine stands Ayub with a grin. Now the Arab group comes in. Has he
been pushing them to go back? Back in class the Arabs now speak Arabic now and
then. The facilitators are silent.
There is quiet. Finally, Fadi the Arab facilitator speaks, then Limor.
The Facilitators start to ask the numb Arab girls questions. To get them to
speak again. The Arab girls chose silence as an empowering tool, to create
frustration in the Jewish group, and that was successful. This subgroup in the
workshop seems to have reached a ‘should-we-stop-or-continue’ point, a strange
impasse. The facilitators seem to want some premises or conditions to be met or
agreed upon by all of them. Then Fadi leaves with the Arabs. An unplanned
uninational session now takes place.
The talk in the
Jewish group is heated and there are internal differences which can more easily
find voice now that the group is on its own. I went out to the Arab group as
well, but they start approaching me, smiling, giggling. I seem to destroy the
group dynamics, so I leave.
In the Jewish
uninational session, it seems to be boys vs. girls. When they return to class,
Jews and Arabs together, there is now shouting, the tall girl points fingers
towards her temporal bones several times, the Arab girls are speaking again.
The Jewish girl is addressing Fadi. The most aggressive Jews are leaving. “Ma
as-salami” (bye/peace be with you), an Arabic girl says with irony and a grin.
The two groups are of equal size now, it is suddenly getting calm and more
respectful, some of the Arabs are now for the first time allowed undisturbed
speaking time. There is something similar to what we could call dialogue going
on. Maybe they now listen due to exhaustion?. Facilitators slowly take over.
They are explaining something. Teaching?
“What do you
think of this fucking Israel”, one of the Arab guy says, when I approached him
for a chat. I try to play the ball back to him, and start a conversation about
this and that. “I can speak Hebrew if they have a problem”, he says. “It is the
same”, “don’t expect anything”. I ask about his expectations for tomorrow,
“none”, he replies. Why did you come here “to get a break”[from school], he
explains. We talk about the final bit after some Jews left and the atmosphere
changed. “I could relax”, he says. It was “leisure”. Limor says that the final
bit, after the Jews left, they were experiencing a “catharsis”. She is
confident about her choice of word!
Before finishing with the fieldwork I want to present
extracts from an evening discussion with a bunch of Arab girls and a male
teacher present: It was after the
dances and the end of the official program. At first there are three Arab
teachers present and only one of them feel comfortable and interested enough to
have a proper conversation in English. After some chat among all of us, I move
outside with one of the teachers, soon a group of students follows. The teacher
said, while we sitting on the bench for this informal talk, that they are happy
with the meeting, they “didn’t come to solve”, “they came to speak”, they
“don’t expect change”, “only to speak”. It is the teachers job to take the
issues further and to meet more, create things together. The teacher group are
all environmental or/and natural sciences and they have been playing with the
idea of a co-operative environmental thing with the Jewish class. There is a
hidden agenda in the encounter. They can use this to get acquainted and try to
build something educational together. Later on I function as a kind of mediator
or helper between two groups of teachers who want to do a questionnaire to
their students.
A girl approaching our space, curiously
tells that she came here to “speak Hebrew”. Suddenly more people comes and my
talk with the teacher now evolves into a big group discussion. Soon we strike
other notes: teachers and students now start get more critical or they seem to
speak more freely. The students were using my presence, for a start, not to
voice their inner angers or dissatisfaction, but as an opportunity for ‘fun’
and some English. And I am the one who’s dragging them into issues with
questions that may be too leading like…. ‘come on, tell me, what message do you
have for the Jews tomorrow [second and final day], there must be something you
want to tell them?’. “We are Palestinians, it is our land”, the same girl says.
We are a minority but we have a right to live as other citizens. “We have our
own culture”, “we are proud”, “we are citizens as well”. “Next generation will
change”. “Now it will be the same”. “We can speak with Jews closely here”. “Not
all of the Jews feel the same. Some of them believe we can live together”. Some
Jews “feel superior”, the students said. I am a bit afraid of the presence of
the teacher. And the fact that they may say things he want to hear. Later I
realise that there seems to be a special and honest student–teacher relation in
this group, and that the students may be for real. The teacher now responds to
the message question for the Jews: ”Israel must leave the West Bank”, the
teacher said. The enemies of Israel are our brothers. It is a democracy for the
Jews. More Arab students approach, and interaction become more informal. I get
the girls to sing some Umm Kalthum and Fayrus. Some of the few Arab singers I
listen to occasionally. They perform easily. A boy, performs in front of me to
impress the girls, “looove
is lifeeee, life is looove”, “I have several girlfriends”, “so you write Arabic
(I tried to perform as well!!) so why don’t you speak, what’s the problem?”. He
teases, and my oral skills are not impressive.
The high
school projects have elements, though
often performed in highly chaotic ways,
that allows room for dealing with a changed nature of the relationship
to the state, where the students gain new knowledge and a fresh unusual
experience, encountering themselves and their own concepts of identity – and
this in a formative period of their lives. They are forced to reflect upon
their visions of the state and their relationship to others. The teachers and
the facilitators, Jews and Palestinians, are as well drawn into these
processes. Particularly the teachers who participate with a class for the first
time are going through a learning process. Particularly the drawing a
combinatorial map-game, the identity card-game and the simulation of political
negotiators-game provide, in three different ways, a potential of machen
and change of vision, of self and other.
The
meetings between human beings, whose nations are in conflict, can of course be
a transformative event seen from the perspective of the four eyes that meet,
but we must bear in mind that they return to separate realities and headlines
on bombs and war the next morning. We are thereby better off by phrasing the
project as a conflict coping work or conflict exercises by peaceful
means rather than conflict resolution, as a former Givat Haviva employee
noticed.
For now,
the project provide situations, interventions, where the execution of power
could be said to find less unequal, more plural forms, creating space, hypothetically,
for slightly changed positions and identities to form. The ruling practices of strength
of course penetrate the educational settings where a small number, not just out
of idealism, engage with what could be termed machen, opposed to macht,
i.e. they try to create room for dialogue or play out the power game on another
level, introduce or perform plays and activities being participants and
mediators, in a test of themselves as citizens in civic and
private forms of action[9],
using a term inspired by Hannah Arendt. It is important to emphasise the
character of the whole thing as a test, for some a frustrating one, and as well
a tight roping talk between the inevitable interpersonal aspect or what
Rabah Halabi calls a coexistence encounter[10]
and – on the other hand – the design or structure of the encounter as an intergroup
meeting (Halabi, 2001a, 2001b)[11].
They may be
able to create new assemblages – for example by strengthening the identity of
the Jews, but in terms of strengthening their Israeli identity, and
strengthening the identity of the Palestinians as well, as a people, and as
well give them another sense of their fellow Jewish Israeli citizens and peers
in terms of Israeli culture. This is definitely a potential in the simulation
game. On the other hand, the overcoding, or the dominant media narratives in
both camps – two confrontational engineerings of consent – make things very
complicated. There is a limited space for alternative educational discourse and
narratives in a time of conflict and a hegemonic reconsolidation of the two
camps. In Israel it is as always hard times for the liberating, empowering
pedagogies inspired by Paulo Freire.
The
settings and projects work as an temporary autonomous, yet not context-ridden
sphere where citizens can pursue or develop their conceptions of a better life
and get their tempers going dialogically, against the troubled lives they have
(Benhabib, 1992:99). Neutrality, becomes in this case about inserting a space,
Givat Haviva, where the minority can become visible and recognised within,
making the country look more democratic or reducing the democratic deficit in
the macro-structures. But the overall structures remain.
Before the
outbreak of the intifada, the Palestinians were just as eager to participate
(confirmed in facilitator interviews). Is this because it is the Palestinians’
only opportunity for empowerment and durcharbeiten (Ricoeur, 1999: 6),
and what about many of the guilt ridden Jews sense of debt? For some
students more profane, adolescent reasons prevail: to get out of the school for
a few days. Furthermore the encounter rests on a belief that dialogue is most
efficiently effectuated and practiced among two groups, relatively unified,
meeting as an us and them, and going back during the encounter
and afterwards, to address the issues in their own national groups. To take
another approach not based on dichotomies may be unrealistic in a situation of
conflict, especially in the un-equal reality as the Jewish-Palestinian
situation in Israel. The Palestinians are in need of unification which is a
pre-condition of their empowerment and sense of ‘gaining ground’ in the mental
sense. If their group-feeling weren’t constructed, or if the encounter just
tried to promote common ‘Israeliness’ downplaying the Jewishness and the
Palestinian Arab, they would maybe end up feeling that their problems as a
group in Israel were covered up, neglected.
The attempt to provide room for practices and experiences of group-empowerment and tests of agency is strongly encouraged in many of the pedagogical activities, such as the photo language and simulation game in the encounters and the general discussion on citizenship, equal rights, etc. which moves the discussion from the cultural domain to a political domain. In general the negotiation oscillates between aspects of the kulturnation vs. staatsnation[12].
In conclusion I want to argue that the projects need to spend more time asking how and why we have (be)come to this, and how can continue to become (something else). At present it is too focused on what we are. The different entstehungs[13] are not traced, unfolded and problematiced.
Another
question is how to empower the strong group with the intention of building
co-operative practices and willingness to change. This task seems to be
unfulfilled, since the method of giving the Jews a shock can just as likely
produce defence mechanisms, as it can produce awareness and attitude change. In
October 2000 encounters were cancelled. Both organisations felt it was time for
uninational working through in the midst of the sudden killings that brought
all parties to the state of despair. They thought that meetings would produce
more frustration.
The
intention is not to create a space outside larger structures of power,
but to mould and work with the inequalities in ‘other ways’; create ‘shared
civility’ at least a sort of Arendtian, associational space (Benhabib,
1992)[14]. This vision of associationality is though
complicated by the mutual and further cleavage creating “identity panics”
happening on both sides. Palestinians and Jews alike find their lives
disrupted, unsafe, threatened, and they seek shelter in each camps national
discourse. Narrative and dialogue though have the potential to become vehicles
for imagination and judgment and for understanding as well as confrontation in
education. They call us to reconsider what and how we know (inspired by
Witherell, 1991: 238-241). It is this possibility of narrative as creation I
see initiated in drawing, identity cards and simulation games, but not taken
far enough. To use some of Gilles Deleuze’s concepts it is a game that aim to
create new principles of right ( as e.g. the simulation game) (Patton,
2000: pp1-10), deterritorialisation
of the present (putting drawings together) (pp11-28), a conceptual
clarification and rupture (identity and simulation ) (pp11-28). The students
are driven by necessity as learning to swim in a foreign element, i.e. water
(confronted with the other) (Patton pp11-28). To take some points from Homi Bhabha,
it is unfortunately a form of unification reproducing difference, rather than differentiation of the
process of containing newness and new constellations of difference, opposed to
the intergroup empowerment of initially constructed groups (Bhabha, 1992).
Returning to Deleuze, each person nevertheless undergo stages for acting and
being acted upon (Patton, 2000: pp47-67). My fieldwork extracts strikes
down where the problems are hardest. Where each party seems to be acted upon,
or re-acting, rather than action together. The games and ‘fights’ work as a
torchlight, though maybe a weak one, on the invisible, inherent structure, the abstract
machine or panopticon (in Patton, pp49-67, referring to terms by
firstly Deleuze and secondly Foucault).
It is creating
an emotional confusion, as Farhad, a facilitator said to me during a previous visit. Leaving me confused as
well. I need to finish and I would like to believe, as Niza Yanay, that the
possibility for change is there when contradictory values or ideas are held
together at the same time. (Yanay, forthcoming).
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Culture & Society 19(3) [forthcoming]
[1] Power is here understood in a productive and creative sense, as the potential space for acting and speaking in interaction, and not – as force or strength a static entity of a ruler or ruling system seen in isolation. Inspired by Hannah Arendt (1958) The Human Condition p200.
[2] Macht here understood as the force or strength and dictates of a ruler or ruling system, not to confuse with the inventive making/re-making, i.e. machen, understood as modus operandi of action and machen where the human powers correspond to a plurality that makes power dividable. Strength on the other hand is indivisible. Terms borrowed from Hannah Arendt (1958) pp199-207, 230-236.
[3] The empirical material for analysis in my thesis is provided via a ‘triangular’ method combining interviews, primary texts and observation. Firstly, I did semi-structured interviews with the projects organisers and participants: directors, facilitators/co-coordinators, teachers and students. Secondly, I have done discourse analysis on written essays, project descriptions, course outlines and compared with related research. Thirdly, I have tested the ‘saying’ of the oral and written texts (primary texts and interviews) with an observance of the ‘doing’. The observation is conditioned by a simultaneous limitation and advantage(!): student group dynamics are less likely to be disturbed in a context where the participants are aware that the researcher knows little of the language spoken. This furthermore motivated intense focus on non-verbal language. Work with actual dialogues and activities during the 4 days of observation relied on facilitator-summaries, and talks with participants, in breaks, many times during each day. The thesis aims to balance and compare these different forms or methods of intervention.
[4] Givat Haviva was named after Haviva Reik a Jew parachuting into occupied Slavika to save other Jews during the war. Givat is the Hebrew word for a small hill. The organisation grew out of a large kibbutz youth organisation and was established in 1949, while Jewish-Arab exchange projects began in the 60s. The village Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam was slowly growing from the early 70s and onwards when a Egyptian born Jew leased some ground from an adjoining Monastery on a hilltop in central Israel on the border to the West Bank. Today some 40 families, Jews and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, live there and institutions like a school and an educational centre have run for a few decades. Most of the pupils attending the school come from outside.
[5] The programme is my write-up of a range of texts, facilitators translations and my observation of activities. The projects I went along with ran for two days instead of three or four, though with most of the activities above incorporated. It differs, depending on the financial situation of the schools, time, schedules on all sides etc. There are no strict time-frame. Jewish schools pay app. 30 pounds per day pr student. Two facilitators tell me that Arab classes pay a little less because of their weaker budgets.
[6] I spoke mostly to four facilitators, two Jews and two Palestinian Israelis: The two Jews, Revital and Limor are both in their early 30s with academic degrees, Revital has been engaged with psychotherapy as well, while Limor has done plenty of NGO work. The two Palestinians are at present at Tel Aviv University. Arigh is a woman in her mid 20s working with Ariela Friedman who’s done extensive work on Neve Shalom. Ayub, who has worked at Neve Shalom is doing an MA on conflict work set up by the University and Neve Shalom. He is around 30.
[7] The students are sometimes using their teacher as
counsellor, for help, support. This facilitator has a disagreement with the
director Fahad around the issue of teacher observation. Another one, who is
away today, has allowed them to be present. He would ideally rather want them
out of the room. I mention that in Neve Shalom they have a second smaller room
separated from the activity room by a mirror. Yes, he says, he has worked
there, but it is not a solution, they can still get ‘in contact’, and it is better
to leave them out. It is not clear how it has ended up, apparently they are
allowed to participate some of the time. During the four days I was following
two encounters the teachers were rarely present, but coming in and out once in
a while.
[8] The different conversational styles of speech, e.g. Jewish Sabra Israeli dugri (‘straight talk’)vs. traditional Arab musayra (non-interruptive style) has to be taken into consideration if expanding the argument. It is left out here, but dealt in the thesis (using e.g. Katriel, 1986 and Zupnik, 2000)
[9] Action is, as I understand the heavily discussed term, strongly related to what I call machen (a term only vaguely described in Arendt): a public practice of power, springing up between men/women in a combined, dynamic performance or actuality where the making and end are incorporated in the activity itself, as with the dancer who performs (dances, acts) something which can be seen as a product itself; a dance. Action in Arendt, though, always establishes relationship, chain reactions and tends to cross over boundaries. Hannah Arendt, 1958: 190-207.
[10] related to the contact hypothesis, a sort of mechanical solidarity principle advocating that a face to face encounter will reduce stereotypes and provide room for seeing the other as human and similar. Developed in the US in the 40s and 50s by Allport, later taken up in Israel in the late 60s by e.g. Amir (see e.g. Pettigrew, 1986: 171)
[11] Many accounts on projects doesn’t fail to include sentimentalised accounts of overfriendly, hormone driven, flirty relationships between Jews and Arabs (e.g. Nir, Haaretz, Feb 2002). This aspect was not dominating during the meetings I attended. Rabah Halabi, who is co-directing School for Peace at the village distinguishes between one model aiming to develop warmer relations between Jewish and Arab individuals (coexistence model) and a meeting between two national groups (intergroup) where the encounter is intended to be a microcosm of the reality outside. Halabi and the School for Peace advocates the intergroup approach, though points that a model that contributes to the understanding of the conflict can’t change reality as the coexistence model which, Halabi argues, sweep problems under the rug.
[12] The culturally and ethnically connotated understanding building on the notion of Jewish-Israeliness – equivalent to e.g. homo Austriacus and Bekenntnis zu Oesterreich – draws from the concept of the kulturnation, while the staatsnation emphasises issues of citizenship, legal and democratic institutions, rights and duties and on political membership (Wodak et al, 1999: 169). Nadim Rouhana points that a solely political angle to national membership misses out the emotional aspect of and nationality then tends to become empty (Rouhana, 1997).
[13] The notion of enstehung meaning emergence or becoming -
different from ursprung (origin) – are terms used by Foucault from
Nietzche. They are central in Foucault’s notion of genealogy, paying
attention to the non-purity of beginnings, focusing on the becoming of voices
and ideas through confrontation (Michel Foucault, 1971).
[14] This not to confuse with a Habermasian idea of communicative action since the forms of dialogue are transgressing lebenswelt issues and certainly strategical in form and content. By using Bakhtin and Ricoeur, not dealt with in this paper, I have been able to capture the polyphony of speeches within time spans and processing that challenges or works with larger national/grand narratives