Combining Themes
Next week at the University of Miami I’m scheduled to do a relatively informal talk-and-discussion that combines several pieces I’ve described here in more detail. The topic: “Critical Psychology, Justice, and Reconciliation in Israel and Palestine, or Why Jimmy Carter is Only Half Right.” I’m still trying to sort out some of the ambiguities.
In November, I spoke at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva about critical psychology’s potential relevance to Israel. Critical psychology has more than one strain, but in large part it challenges mainstream psychology’s support for an unjust status quo. In that talk and in other Israeli settings I speculated about what an Israeli critical psychologist might find worth paying attention to. One thing I emphasized, especially in my course on Psychology, Law, and Justice, was the widespread insistence that Israel can be both a Jewish state and a democratic state. The failure to make democracy meaningful for all but the Jewish majority is so obvious that anyone who looks at the situation critically should wonder just why so many Israelis and their supporters abroad believe the impossible, or at least say they believe it.
That this topic is so touchy should make critical psychologists even more interested, because when an untenable assumption becomes part of the dominant ideology the logical consequences mount rapidly and even bureaucratically into outcomes that could never be justified if they were examined with an open mind. Example: yesterday’s matter-of-fact story in Haaretz about debates between demographers over how to alter Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries to ensure a Jewish majority. What does it mean that so many Israelis can read something like this and not be horrified? How would Israel’s American supporters react to a U.S. city’s declared plan to change its borders to exclude residents of the wrong race, religion, or ethnicity? This policy may be explained by nationalism or tribalism. But democracy?
After leaving Be’er Sheva in December for Ramallah, I talked at Birzeit University about law, justice, and reconciliation. I tried to distinguish between, on the one hand, dialogue groups and other formats designed to reach peace and co-existence through better understanding and empathy, and, on the other hand, a more substantive reconciliation based on taking justice seriously, acknowledging past misdeeds, and transforming the institutions and ideologies that created injustice to begin with. I think I need to work on this part, partly because the distinction is not easy to convert into action and partly because too often there are preconceived notions about just who is to become reconciled. It’s one thing to call for reconciliation between Israel and Palestine — accepting the official but probably impossible two-state goal — but it means something else to talk about reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians as people who live on the same piece of land, free of nationalist and religious bottom lines. That seems to many the most impossible prospect, but maybe it’s my pessimism about the traditional framework that makes me think something more far-reaching is worth aiming for.
Otherwise another horror from this week’s Haaretz will also escalate into matter-of-fact routine: the decision to move the Separation Barrier near Modi’in Ilit eastward a few miles to make sure 1500 more Jewish settlers are on the Israeli side of the future de facto border - even though this will strand 20,000 Palestinians in the no-man’s land west of the fence.
After I returned home — more than a month ago now, and it seems much longer — I wrote a short piece on Jimmy Carter’s refusal to criticize Israel’s internal democracy even as he denounced its apartheid-like policies toward Palestinians under occupation (such as that decision to move the fence eastward). At his Brandeis speech last week Carter mentioned this issue in passing. He didn’t follow up on it, but just suggesting that visitors to Israel might examine Israel’s treatment of Arabs within its borders clarified that Carter knows more than he’s willing to say.
So where does all this leave me when I sit down in Miami for wine and cheese with what promises to be a small roomful of academics and psychologists? I dunno. I’ll let you know later where the discussion takes us.
