Dennis Fox’s Weblog

In a new posting on Subtopia, a fascinating blog exploring in part architecture’s political implications, Bryan Finoki interviews Jay Isenberg, the architect/artist who organized the Dialogue on the Wall multimedia art installation at Form and Content Gallery in Minneapolis last August. I’ve described here before my experience participating in the panel discussion related to the exhibit, which included some of my photos of Israel and Palestine.

Jay says much of interest about his work, the preparation for the exhibit, the politics of architecture, and more. I like Jay and respect his efforts to tackle this difficult subject. He took on a huge project, despite opposiiton. Where I differ from him, though, is his commitment to a form of neutrality that is more likely to be a barrier than an aid to justice-based solutions.

In the interview, Jay explains his stance this way:  “My natural viewpoint is as a neutral and from there I navigate through issues.” I think this stance leads many astray. It may be useful in Jay’s own work as a mediator in architecture-related disputes, but I don’t think the dynamics work the same for more complex issues such as Israel and Palestine and even at times in more mundane but troubling settings such as divorce mediation.

Approaching issues as a neutral can help a newcomer, a mediator, a helping professional identify issues to explore further. It can help make sense of complexity. It can prevent premature commitment to one side or the other. But that initial neutral stance is less justified once there is enough information to assess responsibility for right and wrong. That does not mean taking sides. It does mean using reasonable principles or standards regardless of which side benefits more. It is both wrong and dangerous to make believe both sides have equal power and responsibility, to act as if the perceptions of the batterer are as valid as those of the battered.
Responding to a comment of mine on his blog, Bryan seems to agree that the dialogue approach is now  “seemingly such an exhausted model” and asks “how might we explore new formats for discussion?”

By coincidence, today I received a link to this  column by Tom Pessah, a young Israeli coming to terms with the knowledge that his Tel Aviv home was buit on land belonging to a Palestinian village destroyed and erased from the map at Israel’s birth. The portions most relevant to the Dialogue approach include this:

The meeting between Israeli and Palestinian college students was organized by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, a community that tries to promote coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Unlike other groups, their idea wasn’t to help us find friends, to realize the “Other” wasn’t so bad, to create a shared belief in some kind of vague peace, tame and apolitical. It was quite the opposite: they tried to push us to confront some of the hardest issues, without guaranteeing any agreement would be found.

Pessah later realizes this:

It seems much simpler to me now: Palestine/Israel isn’t mine to give; Palestinians have as much of a right to it as I do. The former inhabitants of Sumeil don’t need my big-hearted generosity: they need my recognition of the injustice committed towards them when they were expelled from their homes in 1948. They need me to remind people that most of Israel is built upon land that belonged to Palestinians. They need me to invite them and their children to come and live with us.

Like Pessah, I think even-handed approaches based on a refusal to assess responsibility cannot possibly help. Insisting that each side’s perspective is equally valid makes some sense if the goal is understanding psychological motivation. It is mostly irrelevant, though, if the goal is an outcome based even partially on justice.

In other words, it is undeniably true that people on different sides have different perspectives and assumptions. That’s one factor that extends the conflict, though not the only factor (I’m setting aside for the moment those who fully understand and accept their role as oppressors, such as Benny Morris and others — going back at least to Vladimir Jabotinsky — who accept as simply necessary Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians and the destruction of villages such as the one Pessah’s house stands upon). But the role of outsiders not inherently committed to one side or the other is not to make believe all positions are equally valid but to assess the situation based on available universal, external principles and to urge resolution based on those principles. The proper stance is not to be “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine” but “pro-justice.” When justice points the blame at one side more than the other, neutrality is no longer a morally acceptable stance. It simply reassures the guilty that their actions are justified.

It took me a long time to reach the point of looking at all this from the perspective of universally applicable principles of justice and fairness instead of from a primary concern with what’s best for Israel or the Jewish people — the perspective I absorbed in the 1960s as a teenage Zionist in Brooklyn. The appeals of nationalism and ethnic identity and in-group culture that seemed so obvious 40 years ago now seem unjust and regressive. If we are to get to a future where nationalist, religious, ethnic, and other tribe-like identities no longer justify oppression and repression and no longer risk plunging us all into technologically out-of-control conflagration, the only reasonable principles are universal rather than specific.

Under those principles — whether it’s international law, which I’m not a particular fan of, or simple commonsense notions that it’s wrong to bully the weak no matter how much you’ve been bullied in the past — any effort to portray Israelis and Palestinians as equal victims and perpetrators is morally wrong as well as counterproductive. Dialogue groups and similar processes that assume equivalence can only strengthen support for Israel’s intransigence, prevent justice for Palestinians, and extend the conflict into the future.

Given this, I don’t have a good answer to Bryan’s question about new formats for discussion. I understand the importance of settings and formats and fair process. But these are meaningless if justice is left out, and sometimes they hinder getting to the real issues. I’ve touched on this elsewhere, recently in criticizing Moises Salinas’s book on the psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for its determined focus on low-level negotiation issues and the like rather than on history, justice, law, and other factors apparently irrelevant to those who just want people to get along. I’d like people to get along too, but the reasons they don’t are not likely to be resolved if they are smoothed over with talk, even if the talk come with smiles, hugs, and tea.

Technorati Tags: co-existence, mediation, dialogue group, international law, Israel, Jay Isenberg, Moises Salinas, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Israel/Palestine, Social Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.