Competing Narratives about Competing Narratives: Psychology and Palestinian–Israeli Conflict

Competing Narratives about Competing Narratives:Psychology and Palestinian–Israeli Conflict

Dennis Fox*Department of Legal Studies, University of Illinois at Springfield

Abstract

In their professional and academic roles as well as their personal and political efforts, many psy-chologists seek to understand, and ultimately help resolve, the conflict between Palestinians andIsraelis. Too often, however, they overemphasize the centrality of competing narratives, partly inresponse to depoliticizing academic norms that demand the appearance of objectivity and neutral-ity. As a result, conflict-resolution approaches such as dialog and mediation and common sugges-tions based on split-the-difference compromise favor a status quo in which the side with morepower, Israel, remains dominant. In contrast, a critical psychology perspective consistent with jus-tice-based conflict transformation understands that even-handed empathy-seeking and negotiationsprioritizing procedural minutiae can achieve neither justice nor reconciliation.

As Boston activists gathered to protest the ongoing siege of Gaza after Israel’s 2010 attackon the Free Gaza flotilla’s Mava Marvara, a friend I’d met through the Radical Psychol-ogy Network (Fox, 2001) asked what I’d been up to. Hearing I was writing about Israeland Palestine for a psychology journal, he asked, somewhat bemusedly, ‘Are you still inthat psychology world?’ In response I mumbled something about trying to offer a criticalperspective amidst a sea of liberal complacency.

That same week, a Danish student preparing for a critical psychology orals exam thatfocused in part on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict emailed me half a dozen excellent ques-tions. Fortunately – since I didn’t have good answers – I had no time to attempt a sub-stantive response. Here are her questions:

1. How would you constructively work with the Arab–Israeli conflict from a criticalperspective?

2. In your latest book I’ve read that community psychology is related to critical psychol-ogy; how would you see community psychological projects in the context of Israeland Palestine?

3. Do you totally reject the idea about psychological perspectives on conflict resolutionor do you just want to add the issue about justice?

4. What do you think about the function conflict resolution represented in the school forpeace where the participants are very aware of the asymmetric power relations?

5. When I visited Birzeit University I talked to a lot of students and some professors whodidn’t even believe that there existed a peace village (I told them about Neve Shalom-Wahat al Salam) and that it was propaganda – is that your impression that most Pales-tinians don’t really believe in peace?

6. Since there is a lot of hopelessness involved in the conflict I think a big challenge is toempower people so they have the courage to fight non-violently for peace and justice

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without giving up – how do you think that is possible? (Isabel Bramsen, personal com-munication, 29 May 2010)

While my friend implied that psychology, or at least mainstream psychology, has little tooffer, Bramsen’s questions suggest issues worth considering, several of which I touch onhere. After briefly addressing social psychology’s mainstream underpinnings, academicobjectivity, and psychology’s traditional approach to conflict resolution, I take a closerlook at the relevance of competing narratives to justice-based reconciliation.

Social Psychology’s ‘Sacred Liberal Values’

Jonathan Haidt recently claimed that ‘‘social psychologists are a ‘tribal-moral community’united by ‘sacred values’ that hinder research and damage their credibility – and blindthem to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals’’ (Tierney, 2011, p. D1). Thefield’s unsurprising anti-conservative tilt is worth pondering, but more relevant to thePalestinian–Israeli conflict is psychology’s marginalization of views further to the left thanliberal (Fox, 1993). Radical and critical perspectives are particularly important when liber-als and conservatives tilt the same way, as demonstrated in the United States by bipartisansupport for Israel.

My own introduction to social psychology took place in the 1960s, when liberal activ-ism helped move experimentation from the laboratory to the streets. A course in the psy-chology of prejudice epitomized an apparent consensus that widespread problems hadsocial psychological roots and thus needed social psychological solutions – not just preju-dice but violence, war, inequality, and, once the 1970s began, sexism, environmentaldestruction, and just about everything else. As a young liberal, all this struck me asworthwhile; as a Jewish Zionist who saw anti-Semitism and dangers to Israel almosteverywhere, it struck me as crucial.

Social psychology’s ‘crisis of confidence’ (Elms, 1975) passed me by completely untilsome years later, when the field’s concerns, which earlier had seemed so exciting and fullof potential, began to look too narrow, preoccupied with statistical rather than real-worldsignificance, aiming for incrementalism rather than transformation. As the crisis subsided,social psychology mostly resumed its liberal-reformist experimentalist path. Focusing moreon individual prejudice than institutional racism, for example, most psychologists soughtto understand and fix the individual and perhaps the interpersonal, not the institutionaland societal. Social psychology today routinely reduces big problems to small pieces thatadd up to much less than the whole. Directing attention almost exclusively to individualstrengths and weaknesses, while sometimes useful in specific cases, oversimplifies multidi-mensional causes and thus overlooks the possibility of comprehensive solutions.

Relevant to the present topic, traditional research on social psychological constructsand viewing conflict resolution as more a matter of technique and compromise thanaddressing power imbalances too often leave injustice in place. This appears to be the casefor Moises Salinas, who insists in Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict that ‘‘the obstacles to achieving peace are more psychological thanpolitical’’ (2007, p. 126). Salinas reviews research in stereotypes and prejudice (his pri-mary specialization), hate (extremism, dehumanization, and violence), pain (trauma), andhope (reconciliation and the psychology of peace). Yet, adhering to norms emphasizingthe appearance of objectivity, the book strenuously avoids the politics behind its analysis(Fox, 2007). This is not unusual. Avowed or implied neutrality routinely deflects the aca-demic gaze from much that is relevant. It also masks the potential impact of an author’s

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background and commitments on choices about what evidence to credit and what lessonsto draw (Salinas’s About the Author page notes he is a Zionist activist). All this essentiallydepoliticizes conflict by removing from consideration power, history, law, and justice infavor, for example, of acknowledging both sides’ competing narratives, politely dismissingthem as substantively unverifiable or irrelevant, and emphasizing instead procedural detailssuited to the different sides’ cultural norms and negotiating styles.Responding to critics (Elbedour & Ferguson, 2008; Fox, 2007), Salinas (2009) says:

[t]he question is whether depoliticizing the conflict can help move towards a solution. One ofthe main premises of the book is precisely that in order to solve the problem, there is no choicebut to move away from the parallel, contradictory, and irreconcilable political and historicalcontextual narratives, and into a human paradigm with an orientation to the future. Counselingpsychologists have showed that you can only resolve a conflict when you are able to movebeyond the past. As long as we insist on focusing on who is to blame for the conflict, we willnever be able to solve their problems. (p. 342)

Salinas may be right about counseling when the agreed-upon goal is to maintain existingrelationships. Yet the parallel to political conflict is imperfect when no agreement existsabout desired goals and values and when the two sides have vastly different resources andpower. Depoliticized approaches often categorize this conflict as one between two equallyvictimized peoples who see things differently but want – or should want – to kiss andmake up without recrimination. In sharp contrast, others recognize the imbalancebetween Israeli occupiers steadily expanding Jewish settlements in Palestinian territorysince 1967, armed and backed by the United States, and Palestinians living under anoccupation that, while changing form over time, makes ordinary life impossible (Gordon,2008). Those who prioritize Israel’s dominant position and Jewish identity regardless ofconsequences are poles apart from those who look to international law or other generalstandards as the only way to resolve intractable conflicts around the globe.

Huygens (2009) notes that psychology’s norms arose during a period of European con-quest, exploitation, and domination. Ignoring that context strengthens an unjust statusquo within the Western world and is even more damaging in less powerful societies. Yetpsychology’s endorsement of traditional values, assumptions, and practices remains strongdespite activist, feminist, radical, critical, and postmodern critiques. Critical psychologistsfrom a range of subdisciplines believe that mainstream psychology pays too little attentionto the impact of injustice and oppression on human behavior (Fox, Prilleltensky, &Austin, 2009a; Sloan, 2000). While a psychology of social justice might be ‘messier, moreinconsistent’ than forms of postmodern critical psychology emphasizing apolitical theoreti-cal rigor (Fox, Prilleltensky, & Austin, 2009b, p. 16), it more closely matches the aims ofthose who seek not just to reveal disparity and injustice but to do something about it.

Objectivity and Timidity

Mainstream academics traditionally claim that research should be, and often is, objectiveand value-free. Critical theorists, in contrast, note that even in the hard sciences personal,professional, and political biases inevitably come into play, from choosing theoretical mod-els and framing research questions to scrambling for funding and selecting methodology toanalyzing findings and recommending policy. The pose of objectivity and ethical neutral-ity often masks personal preferences and institutional inertia that favor particular interests.Focusing on ‘objectively’ determined, narrowly focused data rather than on value disparityand power imbalance leads in conventional rather than system-challenging directions.

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Despite academic norms, people still care. However, mandating the appearance ofobjectivity masks, and often dampens, the passion that drives many academics into conten-tious fields to begin with. Although many of us hoped enhancing knowledge would dosome good, graduate school taught us that societal impact is not the main goal. In any pro-fessional field, advanced training transforms would-be do-gooders into cautious profession-als who internalize the field’s substantive, social, and political limits (Schmidt, 2000). Itreshapes initial impulses, teaching us what is legitimate and what is not. It directs youngscholars toward easily manageable research projects, often trivial variations of past workmore likely to pad the curriculum vita and justify new funding requests than to advanceeither scientific knowledge or social justice. In the end, research too often buries relevantvalues and allegiances beneath a patina of substantive neutrality and emotional distance.

Ideologically convenient academic norms, thus, reinforce political timidity by favoringthe status quo while marginalizing more challenging scholarship. The phrase ending somany reports – ‘more research needs to be done’ – too often implies no question canever be resolved because, after all, we don’t yet have enough data. Ironically, analysesreplete with ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ qualifications bring respect and admi-ration. We pride ourselves on our cognitive complexity. But if years of investigationeventually lead to conclusions that favor one side, we draw accusations that we don’tunderstand the situation’s complexity or that we are unforgivably biased. Professional sta-tus and job demands, policy preferences of granting agencies, external political pressuresand commitments, and the hope that policy makers will pay attention to our researchchannel us away from topics and conclusions that might shake things up. Only confusionis legitimate. Mainstream psychology’s depoliticized approach to Israel and Palestinereflects many of these influences.

Competing Narratives

British journalist Robert Fisk had this to say about his work in the Middle East:

Here’s another piece of media cowardice that makes my 63-year-old teeth grind together after34 years of eating humus and tahina in the Middle East. We are told, in many analysis features,that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are ‘competing narratives’. How very cozy.There’s no justice, no injustice, just a couple of people who tell different history stories. ‘Com-peting narratives’ now regularly pop up in the British press. The phrase, from the false languageof anthropology, deletes the possibility that one group of people – in the Middle East, forexample – is occupied, while another is doing the occupying. Again, no justice, no injustice,no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly ‘competing narratives’, a football match, if youlike, a level playing field because the two sides are – are they not? – ‘in competition’. And twosides have to be given equal time in every story. (Fisk, 2010)

Competing narratives are well known in another relevant context: mediation, dialoggroups, and similar forms of conflict resolution and conflict management that outsiders aswell as Israeli liberals frequently advocate. That Palestinians and Israelis are steeped inconflicting national myths is not at issue; such differences attract significant academic andpolitical attention (Rotberg, 2006). What is problematic, though, is responding to contra-dictory perceptions by directing attention to process rather than justice.

Approaching issues as a neutral can help a newcomer, mediator, or helping professionaldiscover how each side frames important issues. In deep political conflicts, however, rec-onciliation requires acknowledging and resolving long-standing grievances and transform-ing institutions. While dialog and self-disclosure can generate powerful emotions and



personal change, increasing interaction and sometimes empathy and friendship, they donot reliably enough motivate commitment to end institutional injustices linked to favoredvalues and group interests. Key conflict-resolution assumptions are inappropriate whenthe opposing sides have unequal power, especially when external standards such asinternationally applicable principles of law or justice overwhelmingly support the weakerside. Neutral mediation that pretends all perceptions are not only equally relevant butequally valid delegitimizes crucial concerns by rendering victim and victimizer equallyresponsible, rewards the more powerful side’s stubbornness, and institutionalizes existingdisparities.

In 2006, I spent a day in Bet Jalah, near Bethlehem, observing Palestinian and Israelihigh school teachers work on a dual-narrative history project. Directed by Sami Adwanand Dan Bar-On of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME), the teach-ers had produced short texts on key events; the Israeli narrative runs down the left sideof each page, the Palestinians’ down the right (PRIME 2003). One thing about this diffi-cult project struck me as curious: PRIME did not envision working toward a single nar-rative that both sides might someday come to accept. Integrating the conflictingperspectives, I was told, if such a task could even be accomplished, would likely makethe material impossible to use in either Palestinian or Israeli schools. Bar-On and Adwan(2006) ‘‘assume it is not possible to develop such a bridging narrative in the near future,except among a few exclusive and elite groups’’ (p. 205).

Most Palestinians I’ve met make mutual understanding less of a priority than PRIME.After years of dialoguing, they are frustrated by activities that ‘normalize’ relationshipswithout resisting occupation; they object to endless political negotiations that bypass coredisputes or that seem destined – even designed – to resolve those disputes in Israel’s favor.Kaufman-Lacusta (2010) provides a wide range of Palestinian and Israeli reflections onthis issue. Ghassan Andoni, for example, former director of the Palestinian Center forRapprochement and cofounder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), recallsspending ‘‘fourteen years of my life in dialogues with Israelis, encouraging dialogues, try-ing to bring about more understanding … [but] right now, we are not trying to build aPalestinian peace movement. We are trying to build Palestinian civil-based resistance’’(Kaufman-Lacusta, 2010, pp. 102–103). The ISM’s Huwaida Arraf traced Palestinianrejection of normalization to the period after the 1993 Oslo Accords, ‘‘where so muchmoney from the international community was invested in ‘people to people’ programsand conflict resolution programs and dialoguing,’’ which she described as ‘‘Israeli feel-good programs’’ that ‘‘diverted energy from resistance to the occupation’’:

They met a Palestinian and they talked to a Palestinian – ‘He understands me and I understandher’ – but in the end, the occupation was just ‘cemented’ really, because the focus was shiftedfrom what Israel was doing on the ground to ‘let’s dialogue and learn to like each other’. Pales-tinians don’t have a problem living with Jews and Israelis, so that’s not the issue … The issuehas got to be the occupation … (Kaufman-Lacusta, 2010, p. 155)

Kaufman-Lacusta’s interviewees want peace and reconciliation, but they also want justice.Like the Palestinian academics and activists I’ve met, they have little confidence in Israeliswho are eager to talk and understand but unwilling to reassess their bottom line. Theyare, though, eager to work with Israelis who resist the occupation. A broad array ofPalestinian-organized nonviolent protests have drawn increasing numbers of Israeli Jewishactivists (Kaufman-Lacusta, 2010; Rothchild, 2007). Still, caution remains. Jeff Halper,coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, points out thatparticipating in Palestinian-led nonviolent protests is itself ‘‘fraught with ‘the danger of



normalization’’’ when ‘‘‘good relations’ are promoted and the source of oppression isdownplayed and rendered non-urgent’’ (Kaufman-Lacusta, 2010, p. 155). Similarly, Israeliparticipants in PRIME’s dual-narrative history project who had more freedom of move-ment than their Palestinian peers were able to bring them needed travel permits, ‘‘but thiswas actually detrimental to the project, as it gave the representatives of the stronger,Israeli side more power’’ (Bar-On & Adwan, 2006, p. 209). Adwan (2009) later wrotethat PRIME met with resistance from Palestinians for whom ‘‘these books are justexcuses for Israeli behavior, as they watch Israel continue to build settlements’’ (p. 145).

Organizers of a 2008 conference on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Salinas & AbuRabi, 2009) explicitly maintained that academic research and depoliticized conflict resolu-tion will lead to a stable two-state solution. In response, I pointed out that the list of sug-gested relevant topics omitted justice and law (Fox, 2009). From a conflict-resolutionperspective, these omissions make sense: including them would push the conversationcloser to the Palestinian narrative, making even-handedness more jarring. The conference,as a result, was not designed to explore which side’s perceptions more accurately reflecthistorical events, commonsense notions of fundamental fairness, or global human rightsstandards, or even whether those events, notions, and standards are relevant, because, afterall, ‘‘perception is more important than reality’’ (Salinas, 2007, p. 126).

Justice and Standards

It’s hard enough to agree about what’s legal; deciding what’s just is even more compli-cated. That’s why legal scholars traditionally maintain justice is not law’s proper goal –justice is too subjective, too culturally specific, whereas law is, or at least claims to be,more objective. That’s also why social psychologists generally study procedural ratherthan substantive justice. One consequence is that identifying procedures that make peoplefeel good – whether in a courtroom or in a mediation or negotiation session – makes iteasier to create the appearance of justice without actually delivering it (Fox, 1999).

One way through this morass, admittedly imperfect, is to decide not which competingnarrative is right but which broader external standards are relevant. Whether these includethe system of international law created by nation states with their own interests in mindor more generalized notions of fairness, justice, and morality, resorting to wider-rangingnorms makes sense even when moving from generalities to specifics raises new complica-tions. Advocates of a human rights focus will continue to debate those who seek justice-based conflict transformation, even while some attempt to merge the two (Dudouet &Schmelzle, 2010). As Darweish (2010) noted, in both Palestine and Israel,

a multi-dimensional understanding of human rights, and also of development and conflict issues,will enable human rights, conflict transformation and development organizations who areengaged in the struggle for peace and justice to develop a multi-faceted strategy … to transformthe conditions that have given rise to discrimination and oppression. (p. 92)

Whatever form it takes, justice-seeking cannot completely resolve conflicting principlesor differing experiences. It cannot completely erase the passage of time. Ending injusticefor past victims becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, and can create new victims,descendants of those benefitting from the past. So justice-for-everyone is not so easy. Onthe other hand, reconciliation requires ending institutional support for continuing injus-tice. Simply ending violence without acknowledging and trying to resolve grievancesleaves conflict’s sources intact.



Mediators who assume, in practice if not in theory, that the best outcome to any con-flict is someplace in the middle often press both sides to shift positions. This sometimesmakes sense, but compromise can disproportionately disadvantage the side that has alreadylost too much. Israeli–Palestinian dialog efforts often fall into this trap by giving equalweight to incompatible narratives that, I suspect, most outsiders would not considerequally justified. When supporters of Israel dismiss as biased any contradiction of Israel’sofficial narrative, the principled response is not to agree with either party’s self-servingideology but to apply broader understandings from other global contexts. The commonslogan ‘Peace with Justice’ insists that any compromise must be principled and honest, nota muddle forced upon those too weak to resist. Aiming for conflict transformation ratherthan conflict resolution means dealing with root causes, not just papering over the past:

[C]onflict transformation, because of its explicit grounding in social justice and hence inherentlynormative foundation, may provide a more nuanced and fruitful conceptual space for thinkingabout human rights, conflict and peace than conflict resolution and conflict management. Plac-ing constructive social change at its core, conflict transformation acknowledges the need foraddressing power imbalances and recognizes a role for advocacy and the importance of voicesthat challenge the status quo. (Parlevliet, 2010, p. 16)

Israeli Critical Psychology and the Challenge for Palestine

At Ben Gurion University in 2006, the late Dan Bar-On asked me to talk to the facultyabout critical psychology’s relevance to Israel, whose psychologists he considered rigidlytradition-bound. Wondering aloud what an Israeli critical psychologist might find worthexploring, first I asked how mainstream Israeli psychology – like mainstream psychologyelsewhere – helps maintain an unsatisfactory status quo by directly supporting it, by imag-ining that a ‘values-free’ psychology is divorced from politics, or by avoiding politicallycharged issues completely.

Next I wondered if an Israeli critical psychology is really possible. Under difficult con-ditions with a widely shared confining narrative, how likely are traditionally trained psy-chologists to gaze at the society around them free of ideological assumptions? Does acritical perspective depend on alienation from social norms and assumptions? It was in a1966 Zionism course in Jerusalem that I first learned of Kurt Lewin’s (1941) work on theJew as Marginal Man. As it turns out, many North American critical psychologists havebeen Jewish, arguably reflecting Lewinian marginality, so in Israel I now wondered iffully belonging eliminated marginality’s benefits. Critical psychologists typically identifywith the downtrodden, the oppressed, but what happens in a country where the divideseems so insurmountable, the Other openly declared the Enemy? Will Israel’s future criti-cal psychologists more likely be Palestinian than Jewish?

Finally, I wondered how critical psychologists might approach both the internal con-flict between Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian Arab citizens and the national conflictbetween Israelis and West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. What empirical issues are worthinvestigating, ideological myths worth dissecting, tribal and nationalist assumptions worthchallenging? Israel’s most noticeable internal confusion is the claim to be both a Jewishand a democratic state. Many Jewish Israelis resolve the contradiction by distorting ormaking ambiguous both relevant terms. Despite widespread agreement that Israel shouldalways have a Jewish majority, for example, there’s no consensus about what that meanslegally, politically, or religiously. And despite claims to be ‘the only democracy in theMiddle East’, Israel’s democracy is relatively shallow, grounded in majority rule more



than individual and minority rights (Avishai, 2002; Cook, 2006). Might critical psycholo-gists help other Israelis see things afresh, free of a gaze that converts the Jewish experienceof victimhood into justification for victimizing others?

If the fundamental Israeli question is whether to be a Jewish or a democratic state, fun-damental for Palestinians is whether to choose between justice and reconciliation, assum-ing either one someday becomes possible. How much justice will Palestinians demand,how little will they accept? Is compromise acceptable, or only a step toward a differentlong-term end? Visiting Ramallah’s Birzeit University, it was clear that Palestinian aca-demics had little consensus. Might critical psychologists be able to address them, focusingnot on negotiation techniques and individualistic assumptions but taking into accountpower and justice?

Lykes and Coquillon (2009) note that ‘‘as critical psychologists and human rights activ-ists, we should consider the multiple meanings of words like recovery, healing, repara-tion, and reconciliation … Thus psychological language of ‘recovery’, as commonly used,is insufficient to encompass the search for justice with truth’’ (pp. 296–297). So long asacademic research, political negotiation, and apolitical dialog assume equality of percep-tion and seek split-the-difference compromise, reconciliation will remain impossible. Suc-cessful efforts must acknowledge the imbalance of power and suffering as well as thehistorical and continuing responsibility for injustice. Mainstream psychology is illequipped for such a task, because its professional horizons and ideological blinders dismisssuch concerns as irrelevant. Critical psychologists aiming to advance justice, in contrast,insist that power cannot be ignored. Adopting approaches consistent with conflict trans-formation rather than narrower conflict resolution or management, we should facilitateprocesses that require accepting responsibility, making amends, and changing institutions.Only such an approach can lead to justice and encourage the flexibility we hope will ariseon both sides once past wrongs have been acknowledged and remedied.

Short Biography

Dennis Fox’s work in critical psychology frequently explores the intersection of psychol-ogy, law, and (in)justice. His essays have appeared in journals ranging from American Psy-chologist, Law and Human Behavior, and Journal of Community Psychology to New Ideas inPsychology, Theory in Action, and Radical Teacher. Fox’s co-edited book Critical psychology:An introduction (Sage, 1997, 2009) describes critical psychology’s background, internaldebates, and implications for social issues such as racism and globalization and offers prac-tical lessons for theory, research, therapy, community change, and political resistance.Co-founder of the Radical Psychology Network, Fox, has been on editorial boards ofthe Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology,and Behavioral Sciences & the Law. In 2006, he was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Peaceand Conflict Resolution Studies at Ben Gurion University, Israel, and a consultant inLaw and Society at Birzeit University, Palestine; in 2009, he was a Fulbright Distin-guished Lecturing Chair at York University in Toronto. He is retired from the Univer-sity of Illinois at Springfield (formerly Sangamon State University), where he was anAssociate Professor of Legal Studies and Psychology. After receiving a BA in Psychologyfrom Brooklyn College ⁄CUNY and an MA and PhD in Social Psychology from Michi-gan State University, he was an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow in Mental Health Policy andAdministration in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s program in law and psychology.In addition to his scholarly work, Fox has written analytical, opinion, and personal essaysfor outlets such as the Boston Globe, Education Week, Tikkun, and Social Anarchism.



Endnote

* Correspondence address: PO Box 35384, Brighton, MA 02135, USA. Email: [email protected]

Portions of this article were presented in previous papers: The development of North American critical psychology, plusquestions about its relevance to Israel, Ben Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, Israel (2006); Law, justice, and reconciliation inthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Comments and questions from a visiting critical psychologist, Birzeit University, Ramallah,Palestine (2006); Academic objectivity, political neutrality, and other barriers to Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, Israeli-Pales-tinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace Conference, New Britain, Connecticut (2008); Palestinians under siege: A criticalpsychology perspective on mental health and justice, Gaza Community Mental Health Center’s 5th International Confer-ence, Ramallah, Palestine (2008).

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Competing Narratives about Competing Narratives: Psychology and Palestinian–Israeli Conflict

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Transcript of Competing Narratives about Competing Narratives: Psychology and Palestinian–Israeli Conflict