Dennis Fox’s Weblog

I left the hyperbolic “First International Academic Conference on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace” halfway through its second day. The conference had its positive moments. I met a few interesting people, but only a couple whose political take on things left them as frustrated as I was. For the most part my previously discussed hesitations about whether to participate proved to be on target. Maybe someday I’ll learn to trust my instincts and stop trying to manufacture optimism.

Mazin Qumsiyeh attended the first day. He and I both tried to raise critical points about the underlying even-handed, equal-victimization assumptions. Except for our own presentations to smaller groups, though, we could only ask questions at the end of keynote talks. The schedule left no time for the entire group to address what we both thought central: the implications of forging ahead without considering whether their basic framework made sense. We asked our questions, and were met with polite interest, but no follow-up.

One thing that did surprise me - to show my own naiveté -  was the lack of Palestinian participation. The conference was billed as co-sponsored by JANIP, the Jewish-American Network for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and ATFP, the American Task Force on Palestine. And the featured speakers included almost as many Palestinian or other Arab academics as Jewish (Israeli and American). I knew the motivating force was Moises Salinas, whose book on the psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve reviewed critically. And I knew the conference theme — working toward something like the Geneva Initiative - was more attuned to Israeli perspectives than Palestinian. But despite this I did think they’d have actual Palestinians more or less on their wavelength in the room. But I was wrong. The actual conference program reveals the paucity of Arab names.

When I asked about this disjunction during a lunch-time announcement break (since there was no time scheduled for this sort of discussion), the response was predictable. We tried to get more Palestinians, but they didn’t come. The ATFP is not an academic organization, and so doesn’t have JANIP’s connections. But although there were regrets about this, there was zero discussion of whether this Palestinian absence was one more sign that the underlying assumptions were, by their very even-handedness, tilted toward Israeli interests.

Many of the Jewish attendees were affiliated with JANIP and/or Meretz-USA, an affiliate of Israel’s left-Zionist Meretz party. There were a lot of members of the campus-based Union of Progressive Zionism. The conference was, in reality, a strategy session of these inter-connected political groups rather than a serious scholarly effort to get at the root of the problem.

Mazin Q, a geneticist by training, pointed out in his talk that the group was focusing on symptoms and moving to treatment without having come up with an adequate diagnosis. I made much the same point using other terminology (Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation). Thinking about this as I drove home yesterday, I boiled it down to this: In approaching an issue such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, academics claiming objectivity should begin with no preconceived notions about either the cause of the underlying problem or the preferred solution. This conference, though, explicitly rejects the usefulness of looking at history and responsibility, and aims explicitly for a particular outcome. These assumptions make the scholarly garb pretty feeble. They also demonstrate a main point of my presentation, that the pose of objectivity more often than not supports a status quo in which those with power stay in power.

As I’ve reiterated endlessly here, proper diagnosis should take into account how existing injustices came about. Polls that show majority Palestinian support for a two-state solution, which the conference stalwarts rely on heavily, don’t really get to whether Israel would possibly agree to the kind of two-state solution most Palestinians think fair. My own sense is that, in addition to a viable state, Palestinians want Israeli acknowledgment of its responsibility for Palestinian oppression and some method of making up for that past to the extent feasible. Some people at the conference agreed this is reasonable, but the more formal presentations and suggestions made it clear that Israel should not be expected to delve into the past.

There was a lot of conference talk about generalizations and stereotypes, a lot of psychologizing about people on both “extremes” who don’t quite see things as they really are, who don’t understand their own cognitive biases. This got pretty thick, but not once did I hear a presenter speculate about whether their own analyses might fall into the same trap.

I was reminded, as I had feared, of my experience last summer at the Minneapolis Dialogue on the Wall panel discussion, another public event that became a Jewish-centric forum where the polite search for peace and reconciliation meant an even-handed process that excluded reference to justice, human rights, and law. It just astonishes me, over and over, that so many people claiming progressive motivation can dismiss these concerns as irrelevant, not even worth talking about.

Technorati Tags: critical psychology, dialogue, international law, Israel, Jewish State, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Moises Salinas, neutrality, Palestine, Reconciliation, social psychology

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Critical Psychology, 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.