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The Middle East: Without A Middle
How can mediators expect to develop multicultural conflict engagement and transformation programs for Jews and Palestinians when there is no equity between them? On what can trust be based when the Israeli State continues to rupture the Palestinian identity and rob the Jewish Israeli of truly knowing his/her neighbour? Mediators are stymied by this reality but are also reticent to engage in advocacy strategies as they fear losing their “neutrality” status, but what else can we do?
There are many hundreds of NGO’s working in the interest of peace in the Middle East, but how can any of them move towards this end when in fact the psycho-physical-social reality is that there is no equity between Jews and Palestinians. Palestinian citizens of Israel have never had full rights of citizenship as do Jewish Israelis, and while Jewish citizens of Israel publically memorialize the horrific genocide that Jews suffered in WWII, Palestinian citizens do not have the social right to publically express memories of their Nakba (catastrophe) experienced at the creation of the Jewish State. The State of Israel, a majority of its Jewish population, and many Jews worldwide, believe that Israel is still the David in the eye of Goliath, victim to everyone else’s hatred, holding onto a small slice of earth least they be washed back into the oceans.
One of the missing pieces in this dominant State position lies hidden within a deeper history of early Zionism of the late 1800's. To entice European Jews to move to Palestine, the fathers of Zionism published widely throughout Eastern and Western Europe a chief selling motto embellished from the Old Testament, ”here is a land without people for a people without a land...". This statement frames an assumption that there was NO ONE living in Palestine, therefore NO ONE would be displaced if the Jews arrived to take the land. The reality is that many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced, cunningly, by the Zionist leaders.
Most of the Jews emigrating from Europe to Palestine during and soon after the years of WWII, blinded by the chaos and horror they were fleeing, never knew of the displacement of Palestinians. Jews who could manage to escape Europe fled to Palestine for survival from genocide, and as the world did not want Jews on their shores, nor had any interest in recognizing the rightful existence of the Palestinians, no one objected to the manner in which Jews “settled” in Palestine as colonizers.
My own parents were among those fleeing to Palestine, a flight I never questioned as of absolute necessity. From the stories they told me, I presumed that they too were led to believe that Palestinians were never displaced, and It grieves me deeply that they did not live long enough to untangle their skewed perception. In their story where was the voice of the Palestinian who lost his home, her village, their heritage...uprooted after centuries on the land, displaced and fractured from relatives and loved ones? Ironically, the affect of the Palestinian tragedy was not different from the Jewish one...displacement, fractured and dispersed families, heritages and homes. One crisis mirrors the other. This is the social political context that laid the groundwork for the Israeli/Palestinian bloodshed that has crept through to our collective present.
Israel, as a land settled by Jews for Jews is not different from other settler colonizer nations of the time, whether Britain’s empire from South Africa to India, Jamaica, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or France and Belgium throughout Africa, Holland in Indonesia, etc. In each settlement, rights were taken by an incoming population to satisfy the intentions and needs only of the takers and in violation of those who were already there.
What confuses the case of Jews settling in Palestine to form a Jewish State in 1948, is a very old and complex history mythologized since the Old Testament, that places both Jews and Palestinians as tribal cousins on this same soil thousands of years ago. What happened between then and now, warped by time, history, memory, myth and the spoilage of nations at war, boggles the mind and throws this story of settler colonization into a mirrored rubric of infinite return. As the story spins, Jews were once conquered and evicted from this land themselves. Sound familiar?
Critical questions are desperately needed to uncover the underlying circumstances behind the early Zionists’ creation of the State of Israel. Jews cannot expect Palestinians to have empathy towards Israel when there is no reciprocity of empathy towards them. All parties, including other nation states who have always had a stake in the outcome, must critically examine their respective histories, bias, complicity and fear.
The world watches from a distance as the vicious cycle of mirrored victimization continues to be reflected between Palestinian and Jew. Engagement processes that are creative and allow for fair exchange must be initiated to begin to open the possibility of dialogue and change. Jews need to recognize that their fear of annihilation, institutionalized by State protocols, perpetuates their victimization and frozen adversarial position. Palestinians need to recognize that their victim status and depression of spirit is perpetuated by their continued sublimation of expressing the grief beneath their internalized anger. Before conflict engagement and transformation can be initiated, a middle ground must be developed to build capacity for mutual critical questioning and expression. The Middle East needs a middle.
Biography
It is as an artist that Dorit Cypis arrives at Conflict Resolution. Her 25+year career in the arts, exploring the social, physical and psychological aspects of who we are, how we represent our-selves and how we relate to others, brings a breadth of knowledge, experience and subtle tools?to her conflict resolution practice. Foreign Exchanges, directed by Cypis, brings together the best of her professional practices as artist, mediator and educator. Cypis offers perceptual tools from aesthetics to recognize and decipher social context and identity, reflexive tools from the somatic arts for self-recognition and self-knowledge and communication and negotiation tools from mediation to creatively engage with and transform conflict.
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Website: www.foreignexchanges.net
Additional articles by Dorit Cypis
Comments
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| Alan ,
Pocono Pines PA |
02/15/11 |
| Dorit, pt. 2 |
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Many disputes, especially long-lasting intractable ones in the Middle East revolve around differential and often self-serving interpretations of history… history that is usually highly resistant to facts supplied by adversaries and subject to reactive devaluation. Even facts supplied by a “neutral” can be discounted. Even worse, when neutrals supply what they consider fact, they may lose ability to facilitate effectively. Like your professor friend who was critiqued for showing “anti Israeli” films in his class, I was recently attacked by both sides in a local dispute for inaccurately summarizing an existing conflict. Neither side wanted objective analysis; they wanted support for their views and discrediting of their opposition. Bernie Mayer has made the related point that mediation is not a panacea for all disputes in “Beyond Neutrality”. Some disputants want a brand of “justice” more properly labeled “vengeance”.
Your goal of creating a middle ground is admirable, but I doubt that such a middle ground can be created by adopting one side’s version of history no matter how accurate and “right” that side is. Nor can middle ground be easily created by justifying motives of either side at the expense of the other.
However some of our standard mediation tools could benefit the parties:
n encouraging each group to try to understand the history, perceptions, feelings etc. of the other group even though they do not agree—emphasizing empathy as a means of starting to understand and negotiate.
n Identifying interests, needs, and goals of each group even if the interests are not compatible.
n Generating and considering options that might lead to some degree of mutual satisfaction, and then asking the parties to evaluate their feasibility, implementation, and potential for acceptance by main actors.
n While acknowledging the real impacts of contextual history, asking parties to evaluate options from the present. “ What can we do now? “ The moving finger having writ moves on….” Because history is irreversible, does not mean that remedies do not exist; however the more that actions, especially those seen as unjust, are time-distant, the less likely they are to be reversed. For example, the probability for present day African Americans to receive reparations is miniscule; however advocacy for equal access to current privilege is an attainable goal The “right of return “ for displaced Arabs may fall in the distant past category especially considering the potential impact on Israeli demography.
Middle ground is useful if identified by the parties, not the mediator. Getting stuck in history is a dominant and unproductive theme in most entrenched international conflict including this one, but helping parties to get unstuck and deal with the present and future is an extremely difficult task, even for a mediator perceived as a true neutral.
Advocacy by mediators, in their role as mediator, might be well restricted to advocacy for the mediation process itself e.g. Mediators Beyond Borders is currently advocating for insertion of mediation language and process in the proposed UN Climate Change treaty, but they are not engaged in the actual mediation of climate conflicts.
Lastly, much of Howard Gadlin’s 2/8/11 interesting interview with Robert Benjamin here on Mediate.com is very relevant. Gadlin focuses on the potential superiority of mediation and neutral facilitation over advocacy in achieving justice and social progress. Well worth a view at: mediate.com//articles
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| Alan ,
Pocono Pines PA |
02/15/11 |
| Dorit, pt 1 |
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Dorit: Thanks for your passionate, mostly historical, analysis of why there is little real peace in the Middle East among Israelis and Palestinians. Although you provide a current salient example of an unbalanced mediation table, the scenario you describe also exists many places in the world of conflict -- including in more mundane mediations between individual disputants.
For some mediators, neutrality must be maintained at any cost with the main or only remedy for bias being recusal. Other mediators believe that they can facilitate dialog effectively if their behavior is perceived as neutral even if they harbor unexpressed bias. Still others, possibly including you, believe that it could be part of the mediator role to attempt table balancing by making parties aware of facts -- in this case, historical facts.
My view is that effective facilitation indeed requires behavior that is perceived as neutral by the parties. But because mediators are humans living in the same world as parties, I recommend that mediators who come to view one party as disadvantaged or another as manipulative and powerful might consider changing hats and instead advocating to support the disadvantaged party or group. There is nothing shameful about advocacy, consulting, or support, but it is NOT mediation.
Similarly, many mediators refuse to accept cases that include domestic violence because they believe that the victims cannot negotiate as equals, and/or that the mediation process may expose victims to additional danger. More generally, some ”mediation philosophers” are concerned about whether mediated agreements result in fairness or justice, and whether or not mediators must maintain neutrality. For example, see Joseph Stulberg on this somewhat moral issue. |
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| A ,
Boston MA |
01/10/11 |
| Israel: a biased view |
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There is so much bias and distortion in this article, it is hard to know where to begin to correct it. The fact remains that Israel is an island of freedom in a region of brutal dictatorships. If you're a woman, a Christian, a homosexual, and even an Arab, there is no place in the Mideast where you have more rights (or any rights at all) than in Israel. |
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| Jonathan Reitman,
Brunswick ME |
jreitman@goslinereitman.com
01/02/11 |
| so sad, so true |
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Dorit-- Thank you for your heartbreaking but accurate analysis of the polarity that precludes true dialogue (as Ken notes in his comment). I was taken by your comment that mediators are "reticent to engage in advocacy strategies as they fear losing their “neutrality” status, but what else can we do?" We need not even be engaged in advocacy activities to be accused of losing our neutrality, or with being an advocate for "the other." In my conflict resolution courses I have often shown movies, that are by ANY fair standard truly objective in their reporting of the situation, and its tragic impact on human lives. Yet I have had students walk out in protest, or complain to the dean, or shout down guests who were portrayed in the movie, because of the movie's alleged anti-Israeli bias. There is very little opportunity to explore common ground. But to answer your question directly, I think mediators do what we always do: keep on modeling the possibilities for transforming dialogue, listening deeply to those who are offended, and keep compassionately reminding everyone who will listen that the joint Israeli-Palestinian narrative is filled with victims and injustice on all sides. In other words, we provide the middle when the parties can't. |
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| kenneth cloke,
santa monica ca |
01/02/11 |
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This is an excellent article Dorit, thank you for posting it. One of the difficulties in even talking among ourselves about mediating in the middle east is that the rhetoric and language on both sides immediately leaps to a place where listening and dialogue are precluded and impossible, where the cycle of accusation, counter-accusation and defense become self-perpetuating. What we want instead is stories, like the ones you tell about your family; stories that are human, real and undeniable, that elicit a deep form of empathy and compassion that is not viewed as a form of surrender. What we want is not the superficial middle of formal compromise, but the deeper middle that marks the beginning of genuine recognition, which is essential for collaboration. |
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