Asymmetry in Framing War and Peace

Last weekend my wife and I watched the 2007 documentary To Die in Jerusalem, which tells the remarkable story of two teenage girls and two broken mothers. On March 29, 2002 17-year old Ayat Al-Akhras blew herself up in front of an Israeli grocery store. Among her victims was an almost identical 17 year-old Israeli girl named Rachel Levy. The film follows Rachel's mother on a several-year endeavor to meet the mother of her daughter's killer. It culminates in a tense video teleconference, where the two worlds of Israel and Palestine collide. For a few minutes these two mothers embody all the animosity, misunderstanding, and bitterness of that terrible conflict. I walked away from the film a bit dazed, overwhelmed by the gulf between these two women and the seeming impossibility of ever finding common ground. But it is a good film, capturing the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through human eyes.

One thing struck me in particular. During the final meeting between the two mothers, Rachel's mom practically begs the other to renounce violence. What an example we would be, she says, if the two of us could promise to disavow violence and promise to work towards peace. Ayat's mother refuses; she keeps returning to the horrors of occupation and insisting that Palestinians will always resist. Talking about nonviolence and peace is absurd because talk won't change the occupation. Rachel's mom is exasperated that Ayat's mom wants only to talk about politics. Can't she just leave politics alone and talk about peace and reconciliation? We often discuss the asymmetry of tactics and even strategy in many modern conflicts, but these two women illustrated something more subtle and more distressing: a fundamental asymmetry in how they even frame the conflict.

The scene echoed a key point from the book Unity in Diversity: Interfaith Dialog in the Middle East, which profiles interfaith dialog efforts in several countries. The chapter on Israeli-Palestian dialog reflected what I saw in To Die in Jerusalem. Israeli participants in interfaith dialog want to set politics aside; instead of dwelling on political differences they want to build relationships, discuss their faiths, and work on peacebuilding and reconciliation. Palestinian participants, on the other hand, cannot stop talking about politics; it is seemingly all they want to talk about. This exasperates the Israelis. Many dialogs shipwreck on these shoals. There is a fundamental asymmetry here. According to the Palestinian narrative, they live under daily political and social injustice; for them, it is impossible to talk about reconciliation without addressing their grievances.

Understanding this dynamic has unlocked so many messy social problems for me. Take race relations in the US. In my mostly white private high school I learned that fighting racism meant being "color blind"--I should view people of every race and color the same way. It was unsettling to me (and still is for many white people) when I met minorities who could not stop talking about race. Can't they just get over it? Do we need to have classes on what it means to be a black man in America, or have heritage months for every minority on campus? My perspective changed when my wife worked for three years at an inner-city high school. We spent those three years in close contact with racial minorities in disadvantaged situations. I realized that for many minorities, race is so important because they believe it is directly tied to economic and social injustice. Color-blindness isn't a valid model, they say, because it does not address injustice or structural racism; a better approach is to acknowledge and try to remedy race-based injustice in a society. Indeed, multicultural studies have moved away from color-blindness as a model and towards this latter approach. Of course many white people don't buy this, because they don't believe they are responsible for the injustices.

I'll cite one final example, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict again. I just finished reading Sandy Tolan's excellent book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew & the Heart of the Middle East. It tells the story of a Jewish family who fled Bulgaria to the new Jewish homeland during the Holocaust and moved into a vacant house there; it also tells the story of an Arab family driven from the same house during the violence accompanying Israel's creation. Years later, members of these two families meet and develop a tense friendship. Two families. One house. One piece of land. The entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict is embodied in these two families. Dalia, the Jewish homeowner, pleas with Bashir--her Palestinian counterpart--to work with her for peace. Bashir essentially refuses. Talking about peace is meaningless without remedying injustice, he says.

In these situations the two sides are at an impasse. The asymmetry in how they frame the conflict makes it impossible to even have a conversation. The two sides have wildly different views of what peace even means. How do we move forward? I'm not sure. Understanding and acknowledging the divergence of viewpoints is a start. This is an area I hope to study more while living in Jordan.