Human rights,micro-solidarity and moral action: ‘Face-to-face’ encounters in the Israeli/Palestinian context

Abstract

While there is extensive literature on both the expansion of human rights and solidarity movements, and on micro-solidarity and violent actions, here I ask what is the relationship between human rights, micro-solidarity and social action? Based on a case study of structured, face-to-face dialogue group encounters in the Israeli/Palestinian context, I draw on Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory to demonstrate why emotional energy and the ritualization of historical narratives have very limited potential to translate into human rights-based moral actions. Instead, I suggest, these encounters produce micro-solidarity that ascribes additional weight to ethnic categories, serving to polarize and homogenize groups along ethnic lines.

Keywords

face-to-face encounters interaction ritual chains Israel/Palestine micro-solidarity social action

Introduction

‘How do human rights, micro-solidarity and social action relate to each other? Can the ideological message of human rights morality be channeled through bonds of solidarity and be transformed into a moral action? Human rights as a “belief in the inherent dignity and equality of each individual person”’ (Elliott, 2014: 410) – further translated into an ability to constitute social events by interpreting grievances and defining them as violations that should not, and need not, be tolerated – became a bedrock philosophy for public recruitment into ‘proper’ moral actions. Whereas the literature on the dissemination of the human rights agenda is well established, and there is well-documented evidence on various international solidarity human rights movements, the research on human rights and micro-solidarity is truly scarce. To understand the relationship between the micro and macro levels of social solidarity, we need to understand whether and how micro-solidarity pushes people into a moral action. Morality and solidarity are symbiotically connected (Alexander, 2014). However, this linkage does not necessarily translate into the morality of human rights. For human rights, to accept the equal moral standing of all individuals is thus fundamental, albeit implicit when discussing solidarity.

In this short piece, I use Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory to explore whether human rights-sponsored face-to-face projects of dealing with the past can enable solidarity bonds that push people into a morally-based social action. It proceeds in three parts. First, I briefly establish my theoretical framework: the main principles of micro-solidarity and interaction ritual chain theory. Secondly, I give a historical background to the emergence of ‘face-to-face’ encounters in the Israeli/Palestinian context. Finally, based on three interaction ritual chain theory principles, I analyze: 1) the ritualization of historical narratives, and 2) the emotional energy, micro-solidarity and their potential to recruit group members into action. I conclude by suggesting that though solidarity bonds proliferate, they also make ethnic division more pronounced, disabling the long-term commitment to human rights across different ethnic groups.

Micro-solidarity

Solidarity has been a well-investigated subject in sociology, starting from Comte, Durkheim and Weber, and later on with Goffman, Garfinkel, Collins, Malešević, Hechter and Laitin, to mention but a few. Erving Goffman, who contributed greatly to our understanding of solidarity at micro-levels through his dramaturgic approach to the presentation of the self, expounded the Durkheimian approach. He stressed the importance of social structure, arguing that subjective consciousness is secondary and derivative. His central focus is grounded is his treatment of the interaction order as a distinct unit of analysis where interaction occurs in contexts in which two or more individuals ‘are physically in one another’s response presence’ (Goffman, 1983: 2). In a way, his contribution partially addressed his attempt to confront radical empiricists, first and foremost, Harold Garfinkel, who believed that ethnomethodology, based on principles of phenomenology, should replace the symbolic interactionist theories (such as Goffman’s), arguing that they were ‘fooling themselves in thinking they are getting to the bedrock in social life in their situation and their role-making’ (Collins, 1994: 274).

My understanding of micro-solidarity draws on extensions of Durkheim’s work and scholars such as Mauss, Goffman and, in particular, Randall Collins. Collins builds on Durkheim’s explanation of what creates social membership, on Goffman’s interaction ritual analysis, as well as the social exchange theory put forward by Mauss, in an attempt to determine the situations within which people display solidarity with others. In his interaction ritual chain theory, Collins parts from Goffman’s interaction ritual analysis where sacred objects are already structured, arguing that ‘intense ritual experience creates new symbolic objects and generates energies that fuel major social change’ (Collins, 2004: 42–3). Collins pointed out that emotional attachments play an indispensable role in human actions. He developed a theory of situations, arguing that interconnections in local situations, and their embedding into larger structures across time and space, along with the extent of their spill-over, constitutes a micro-pattern (Collins, 2004: 5). Individuals are much more motivated when their concerns are personal and involve people who they know and care about. Interaction rituals generate a variable level of emotional energy in each individual over time. Emotional energy operates as the common denominator in terms of which choices are made among alternative courses of action. Individuals apportion how they invest in work and in ritual participation with a view to maximizing their overall flow of emotional energy (Collins, 2004).

Collins argued that emotional energy is the main motivating force in social life, saying that the emotional, symbolic, and value-oriented behavior of any group of participants is determined by chains of previous encounters, which he called interaction rituals. His main stand is that, in face-to-face interaction, people establish a common focus of attention to become mutually entrained in a common rhythm of speech and bodily movements, and to intensify a shared emotional mood. Interaction rituals are created in face-to-face encounters once people share a mutual focus of attention and a common mood, which are further translated into a group emotion. Voice and gesture become synchronized, sweeping up participants into rhythmic entrainment. Successful IRs generate trans-situational outcomes, including feelings of solidarity, respect for symbols that recall group membership, and a shared emotional energy. Ideally, the person who has gone through a successful ritual feels energized: more confident, enthusiastic, proactive. Emotions such as anger, rage, pain, hope, despair, excitement, thrill, risk-taking or joy, as the core motivators of activism, shape ‘a vocabulary of sentiment’ (Geertz, 1973: 449) that mobilizes, generates and homogenizes feelings, aggregated over time. Emotional energy operates as the common denominator in terms of which choices are made among alternative courses of action. Hence, according to Collins, because interaction rituals vary in the amount of solidarity they provide, and in the cost of participating, there is a market for ritual participation that shapes the distribution of individual behavior. The economy of participating in interaction rituals shapes individual motivation for participating in the economy of material goods and services (Collins, 1993). Collins rightly pointed out that local encounters – micro-situations – have both agency and structure. ‘Agency’ is understood as the energy appearing in human bodies and emotions, and as the intensity and focus of human consciousness that arises in interactions in local, face-to-face situations or that precipitates a chain of situations (Collins, 2004: 6). ‘Structure’ points to the existing infrastructures to pursue further and translate emotional energy into a moral action. Central to his interaction ritual theory is that a high degree of emotional entrainment results in feelings of membership that are attached to cognitive symbols, which further results in a desire for action that is considered a morally proper path. (Collins, 2004: 42). Simply put, a more shared emotional and cognitive action is likely to forge stronger and more durable bonds of micro-solidarity (Malešević, 2017: 289).

Face-to-face encounters in Israel and Palestine

My focus here is not the individual but the context, both performative and situational, which predefines the outcome of the social solidarity being produced. To evaluate the relationship between human rights, micro-solidarity and social action, I analyze structured face-to-face encounters in Israel and Palestine, whose main purpose was to reshape the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of facing past human rights abuses in order to ‘rehumanize the other’.

In Israel-Palestine, the human rights-centered ‘facing the past’ agenda is best echoed in the institutionalization of dialogue groups. Building on already present co-existence projects that, in the 1980s, became a significant element in the Israeli education system¹ under the agenda of peacebuilding, the Oslo Accords brought to the fore a plethora of new face-to-face projects. Those face-to-face projects infiltrated into already well-developed infrastructures of the ‘coexistence sector’ which diversified over the years, and during the mid-1990s, expanded dramatically. The Oslo Accord, in 1993, spawned a proliferation of face-to-face projects, primarily financed by EU and US agencies, that mainly focused on relations between Israelis and Palestinian subjects of the newly formed Palestinian Authority (Rabinowitz, 2001: 67). Thus, one of the prominent trademarks of the Oslo process was the scores of peacebuilding projects initiated by local and international organizations in order to improve the relationship between the sides, not only at the official level of policy makers, but also within grassroots communities (Maoz, 2004: 566). Two of the most prominent institutions that adopted and developed a variety of face-to-face projects in the 1980s and early 1990s were the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which operated in the co-existence field roughly between 1982 and 1992, and whose early work later became the conceptual backbone for the Ministry of Education’s Unit for Democracy and Co-existence; and the Neveh Shalom/Wahat el Salam School for Peace, dedicated to conducting dialogue workshops for Israeli Jews, Israeli Palestinians, and Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, workshops in which issues and experiences relating to the conflict, power-asymmetries, discrimination, and oppression are discussed and studied. In the 1990s, those efforts were further multiplied by the work of a variety of human rights and peace-promoting institutions in both Israel and Palestine such as the Jewish Arab Institute for Peace in Ramat Haviva, the IPCRI Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information, MECA Middle East Children’s Alliance, PRIME (composed of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East, Neveh Shalom/Wahat El Salam), Bat-Shalom/The Jerusalem Link and Palestinian women’s organizations, situated in Jerusalem and in the West Bank, as well as the Crossing Borders peace-building projects, which convey a high degree of Jewish-Palestinian equality in several important dimensions (Maoz, 2004).

Despite the challenges dialogue groups faced over years,² these groups continue to exist and even thrive to this day. Under the idea that any mutual understanding between sectors of Palestinian and Israeli societies – typically youths, academics, or women – would be generalized for their respective societies to help understand the other’s narrative, those efforts were followed by multiple intergroup workshops initiated at various universities across Israel.³ People-to-people peacebuilding activities took place in a variety of forms, first and foremost, dialogue projects between non-official yet influential individuals from both sides, such as academics, dominant non-governmental actors and individuals of close proximity to decision-makers, but also meetings between schoolchildren, joint sports matches, and joint movie and theater productions. The main purpose of what is called ‘education for peace’ was to show that the other side is just as human and that both sides seek peace and prosperity (Pundak et al., 2014). During such meetings, participants undergo a process in which they have to face their misconceptions in order to re-humanize the other side. Equipped with a variety of theoretical approaches,⁴ all face-to-face encounters are meant to emphasize meeting the ultimate ‘other’. Most dialogue encounters conducted were characterized by structural inequality and domination between two groups with asymmetric power-relations, who are engaged in a competition over scarce resources; the Jewish majority (some 80% of the Israeli population) is in control of most material and political resources and determines the national character of the country. With a turnover of tens of thousands of participants in workshops, meetings and other activities, these peace-promoting institutions became household names within the Israeli educational systems, attracting considerable public attention and scientific curiosity (Rabinowitz, 2001: 68). Maoz (2011: 116) showed that a series of public opinion surveys of representative samples of the Jewish-Israeli population in the years 2002, 2003, and 2005 indicate that about 16 percent of the Jewish-Israeli population, one in six, have participated in at least one program of planned encounters between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in their lifetime. In fact, the smaller size of the Palestinian community compared to the Jewish Israeli community, and the fact that there are far fewer schools in the Palestinian sector meant that, at the height of the co-existence project, Palestinian schools were in high demand by Israeli counterparts for joint occasions. Through the years the Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF) alone has arranged almost 7000 dialogue meetings, with more than 200,000 participating youths and adults.⁵ The assumption was that, personalized and personified in the interlocutor, the narrative would help listeners develop mutual empathy through which ‘the otherwise silent underdog assumes a voice and becomes raconteur, […] expected to infuse the moment with emotional significance’ (Rabinowitz, 2001: 70).

Ritualization of historical narratives

Relying on Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory to understand the development of micro-solidarity and its potential to grow into value-driven action, I elaborate on: 1) the ritualization of historical narratives created in the group that enable emotional energy of high intensity; 2) the emotional energy, micro-solidarity and their potential to recruit group members into action. To that end, I use in-depth analysis as well as partial transcriptions as they appear in a very rich literature,⁶ that gives a pretty clear picture on the aspects of interest to me (in particular in relation to the ritualization of historical narratives and emotional energy). The encounters used in this analysis are diverse, had various degrees of success, and took place sometime during the past 20 years in Israel.⁷ However, they all have in common that the recruitment used was based on equal participation from different ethnicities (known as the ‘balance formula’), the structure of the encounters, and the phases the participants experience in those encounters. However, due to the length of this piece, the examples used here provide a brief illustration. Detailed, in-depth analysis will be available in David (forthcoming).

Out of dozens of dialogue projects that promote a structured form of dealing with the past, while each has its own methodology, they all have in common the use of the ‘balance formula’. In all face-to-face dialogue projects, participants are recruited based on their ethnic/religious affiliations. This is crucial if we want to understand the creation of interaction rituals. Bringing participants together in face-to-face encounters in which they are already ascribed roles has an immediate impact on the ways in which they start forming and negotiating rituals among themselves. From the very beginning, it works as a primary set of references; thus, the interactional rituals that evolve during the process are all seen through the prism of this structured division. In practice, this means that even those participants that have an ambiguous relationship towards their ethnic/religious identity prior to the meetings are likely to become more attached to their ethnic/religious identity.

One of the main products that results from these encounters is how historical narratives become ritualized and forms clear stratifications between the groups. From the beginning of their encounters, the participants are encouraged by the facilitators to freely express their views on the past or the ongoing conflicts. However, under the pretense of a ‘safe space’, they are also guided to do it in a particular way. In the Palestinian and Israeli case, subjects such as the war of 1948 and the disastrous demise of the Palestinian community in what became the state of Israel, and the pre-1948 chapters of Palestinian history or the desire of Palestinians to redefine their place as second-class Israelis, were discouraged and, if necessary, ignored (Rabinowitz, 2001). Other topics that were off the table were the status of the PLO or the ‘Jewishness’ of the state (Abu-Nimer, 1999). This fine tuning of the direction in which the discussion goes takes place within two main frameworks: 1) the Goffmanian ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ scenario, meaning a threshold on what can, and should, be said when negotiating self-interests, and 2) the degree to which the participants control or are controlled by their rituals.

Thrown into their ethnic identities, all participants are pushed into a role-playing that enables them to embrace their own ethnic narratives, moving from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’. The shift from an individual to a collective ethnic identity is the locus of the encounter and it happens almost instantly, once they feel a threat to the assigned role as representative of their own group belonging.

Here is an example of a Jewish male student, addressing a Palestinian participant, who participated in a year-long face-to-face dialogue encounter:

May I ask you a question? You are telling me that you are discriminated against and I believe you, I agree with you. […] What would have happened to us [the Jews] if, in 1948, an Arab state had been established here? What would have happened if we were the minority and you ⁸ the majority?…Do you think that we could live in peace, and I could be a student at one of your universities? (Helman, 2002: 331)

Or as another Palestinian interlocutor pointed out: ‘but in the end you are all Jews’. The bottom line is that Jews are Jews, and Palestinians are Palestinians’ ( Bekerman, 2009: 216).

This is precisely how the shift from ambiguous, individual self-narrating to a socially-formed (and often ossified) and patterned collective identity enables an ethnically-based ritualization of the past, while dismissing variety in favor of essentialization (Helman, 2002). This on and off between using ‘I’ and ‘we’ in situations of particular essentialized ethnic identities – employed to justify and help negotiate one’s own position in the group as a whole, as well as in one’s own ethnic group – is easily traceable in the use of personal names. The use of personal names affirms the individual character of the relationship through which what one thinks of that person as an individual, with their own biography and history, is communicated (Collins, 2004: 84). However, both individual names and narratives of those individuals become charged with significance through the accumulation of the general capital of each ethnic group. Ethnic identities, liberated by the discourse of culture and hybridity, return to their primordial meaning and assert again their hegemonic power (Bekerman, 2009: 216). The switch from singular to plural participation of the self is not only a matter of placement within the group but, more importantly, it is an appeal for a collective action. It is a (performative) recruitment to a display of power between ‘us’ and ‘them’.⁹ From the interaction ritual chains’ point of view, the shift to ‘we’ is contagious. Once this becomes an available option in the repertoire of communication, it does not take long to see that participants in these structured face-to-face encounters start internalizing their ascribed roles, pushing for the homogenization of their ethnic groups.

Although many of the participants have, to some degree, blurred perceptions of their ethnic identities, over the course of the meetings, it is those identities that get more pronounced. In other words, those meetings bring together people who are assigned their ethnic or religious identities, lessening the importance of other possible identities, such as their gender, class, rural/urban location, profession, or differences based on generational gaps, which become just a side effect of their ascribed ethnic identities. The transition from ‘I’ to ‘we’ is contextual and works as a marker for the ritualization of their historical narratives. Hence, the initial differences soon become part of a power negotiation centered on ritualizing their historical narratives. On the one hand, Jewish participants channel their desire to be seen as liberal, egalitarian, progressive and humane. However, this suddenly clashes with their position of control, a position that gives rise to feelings of superiority and to patronizing attitudes towards the Arabs (Halabi and Sonnenschein, 2004). On the other hand, Palestinian participants often feel less comfortable than their Jewish counterparts in expressing their views due to requirements or expectations to speak Hebrew during the encounter. Thus, while aspiring to full equality, the Palestinians participating in the encounter come face-to-face with the degree to which they have internalized their oppression, resulting in differences between them largely fading away, and their constructed and suddenly available similarities homogenize them into a seemingly unified group of suffering people.

The triggers that ascribe power to national narratives and generate emotional energy around them, as a pattern for micro-solidarity in the Israeli-Palestinian case, take place in response to liberal Jewish showing off. Once the Palestinians ask to re-balance the power, they are usually interested in focusing on politics, resulting in the Jewish attempt for ‘restoration of power’ (Halabi and Sonnenschein, 2004). Essentialism is at its strongest once the Jewish side becomes defensive – all culturally-embedded stereotypes come out, regarding each other’s religious beliefs, cultural norms, and societal values. Once this box is opened, it almost instantly polarizes the groups. In the following example, a Jewish participant articulates this clearly:

If the Arabs were to be in control, they would massacre the Jews and throw them into the sea, since Arab values and their moral level are beneath Jewish values; or in the society where women are killed for the sake of honor, what kind of values can we expect?

A Jewish female participant continued with this essentialization: ‘We think that Arab culture values human life less, they kill women to restore the family’s honor’ (Helman, 2002). This orientalization and essentialization immediately triggers the Palestinians to enter the ‘forbidden ground’ of comparing Israeli behaviors towards Palestinians to those of the Nazis to the Jews. Once a comparison is made, everything that takes place afterwards is an accumulative process of emotional energy that only adds to the value of their clashing perceptions of the past. Facts are occasionally brought up to establish authority, stories of suffering are told to claim moral victory. Villains and victims appear.

A female Palestinian student reflects:

I want to ask you: you were victims of the Holocaust, of the Nazis and it was hard, I know it was hard. And after all that [suffering] you came here, and established a state, and despite all your suffering, you treated the Arabs the same way…well not the same, but almost the same…and you always get furious when people say that you treated the Arabs the same way the Nazis treated you. You went through a terrible time, you did not have a state, you did not have a home, you had nothing, and you came here and treated us the same. (Helman, 2002: 332)

In a furious response to her, a Jewish female student said:

You really hurt me. It hurts even more that you [pointing to the Jewish male student] agreed with her and you feel ashamed. Because it is not the same as they [the Nazis[ did to us. (Helman, 2002: 332)

Comparison between the plight of the Palestinians and that of the Jews in the Holocaust is the biggest no-go issue in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict discourse in general, and in the laboratory of face-to-face encounters, it is an ‘exploding point’. This immediately ratifies the legitimacy of both narratives and is a one-way street to further homogenization of their narrow, ethnically-bound identities. The retrieval of basic, nationalized patterns of collective memories reflects more than anything else the tenacity of the memory infrastructures in the societies from which they come and to which they are returning. A typical response comes from Jewish participants: ‘I am not ready to allow any comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba’ (Bekerman and Zembylas, 2012: 81).

As Brubaker and Cooper (2000), Malešević (2006) and Bergholz (2016) rightly pointed out, national identities are not living things in the world but a perspective of the world. The ritualization of historical narratives points to the co-constructed nature of categories, always in need of a differential in order to be sustained. This difference might be hidden or visible, but without it, the clarity of national/ethnic identity would not be possible. Hence, those ascribed and internalized identities are co-dependent, coupling, constrained by the available resources and the power boundaries of the stage on which they are enacted. Intergroup dialogue between Israeli Jewish and Palestinian students shows that dialogic encounters between groups in a situation of domination and structural inequality do not inevitably crack the code of essentialism. Instead, they often reproduce monological discourses of culture and identity and solidify them, further legitimizing power differentials and structural inequality (Helman, 2002: 346). In other words, similar to face-to-face encounters in the Balkans (David, 2019) or in Ethiopia (Svensson and Brounéus, 2013), even in this categorical key of ethnicity, group members did not come to think of the opposite group much differently just because they presumably met a nice person belonging to that group. Instead of humanizing the group as a whole, the micro-solidarity formed in face-to-face encounters enabled further ethnicization, making the category of ethnicity a focal point of reference.

Emotional energy, micro-solidarity and moral action

Emotional energy is the key. It is not nearly enough to share personal stories entwined in historical narratives in order to produce micro-solidarity among the participants, let alone to engage them in a common moral action. Emotional energy is carried across situations by symbols that have been changed by emotional situations (Collins, 2004: 107). The participants focus attention on the same thing, and are aware of each other’s focus and become caught up in each other’s emotions. The predicted outcome of a successful emotional coordination is feelings of solidarity. Hence emotional experience is a significant trigger for moral actions.

Structured face-to-face encounters are artificial environments that need to stage and, in many ways, manipulate participants’ feelings. The performativity of the stories of suffering matters because this is how the audience is being recruited both emotionally and cognitively. It is an invitation to empathy but also to conflict. After hearing a story of a Palestinian who got shot during the First Intifada in 1987, a Jewish high school student¹⁰ said:

I think there cannot be peace because there are so many fanatical people. In particular, on the Palestinian side. What is the purpose of the State of Israel? To be a home to Jewish people? What is the purpose of Hamas? To destroy Israel.

As the debate continued between the Jewish student and a Palestinian facilitator, in a sudden change of rhythm, a Jewish student says, ‘Why don’t you move to Jordan? There is no place for both of us here!’¹¹ The tempo of those sessions is intense and leaves participants uneasy. Though the emotional energy produced in the clash between the sides is directed at producing an eye-opening moment, the effect is often quite the opposite. The rhythmic coordination of gestures transforms participants’ feelings into collective feelings and makes it possible for the members of the group gathered together to feel part of the same community of belonging. Palestinians, in their sustained silence throughout the exchange with their Jewish counterparts, seem at no point to be ready to allow any social sphere, formal or other, to be considered free of interethnic tension (Bekerman, 2009: 210):

You said it angers you if a Palestinian does not condemn terrorist attacks. What angers you?…I am dying of fear. What should I apologize for? (Bekerman and Zembylas, 2012: 79)

Sentences like those often fill the group with tension. Once such references are made, participants start using the third-person plural in their ongoing attempts to categorize the group. The discourse becomes full of self-reparations, overtly strong comments, and multiple pauses, all pointing to the difficulty encountered by the interlocutor while attempting to prevent confusion and maintain a mutual orientation. The members of the community of belonging come together, share a certain level of excitement, begin to act together, each seeking to adapt their own individual rhythms to the collective rhythm, and by doing so, increase their level of emotional involvement. Once the process of ritualization of historical narratives starts to unfold, it becomes fueled with emotional energy.

Other methods to produce emotional energy go even further. It takes people from their controlled environments and pushes them to have a real emotional and bodily experience. The degree of the intensity of the experience varies and will produce different degrees of micro-solidarity. Naturally, different participants will react differently to those experiences. However, Collins’s (2005: 125) argument that short-term emotions are derived against the backdrop of an ongoing flow of emotional energy developed between group participants seems to be right. Whether the Israeli and the Palestinian participants are taken to Deir Yassin, or to see the Palestinian village ruins from 1948, their previous experience will affect them in a very particular way. They might feel anger, anxiety, humbleness, pain, sorrow, empathy, or anything else that becomes translated into a bodily experience that produces strong emotional ties and solidarity attachments among the participants. It is not so much, as Boyns and Luery (2015: 157) suggested, that ‘negative emotional energy is the product of the unsuccessful exchange of cultural capital and indicates a failure to create, or the defilement of, a secure social bond’, but rather negative energy has an extraordinary power to provide clear inter-group boundaries. This is because those emotions are filtered through the processes of ritualization in which their assigned ethnic identities already position them either as the victim or the perpetrator in the event, further homogenizing them with their ethnic groups.

Through the process of ritualizing the past, and despite the homogenization of their ethnic identities, face-to-face encounters shape emotional energy that produces micro-solidarities on the ground. The short-term impact of these encounters is well reported in both the Israeli/Palestinian context. A typical reaction to those encounters, in terms of the Jewish participants’ experience, is described in most of the interviews as earth-shaking, a significant experience in which they confronted, for the first time, their roles in the Jewish-Arab conflict (Yiftach et al., 2010: 574). The excitement and feeling of collective effervescence is empowering, and the vast majority of participants feel strong bonds with most of the group members. The time spent together over several months, mutual educational trips, intensive emotional ups and downs, and no less important, the time spent together during breaks, bus rides and in preparation – in a Goffmanian sense, ‘moments back stage’ – all of those produce real feelings in a group. Maoz (2000) showed that, after participating in the workshops, both Jews and Palestinians viewed each other as more ‘considerate of others’, ‘tolerant’, and ‘good hearted’ than they did before. Paradoxically, even though the main outcome of those face-to-face meetings is a further strengthening of their ethnic identities, the overall feeling of excitement over a significant meaning-making process masks the stratifications and enables sweet feelings of group solidarity.

According to Collins’s theory, successful ritual interaction generates trans-situational outcomes, including feelings of solidarity, positive moods and affective commitments. Emotional energy operates as the common denominator in terms of which choices are made when it comes to alternative courses of action. Once participants enter face-to-face assemblies and create a mutual focus and shared mood, they generate the symbolic capital to become successful in future encounters. Hence, we would expect to see those Israeli/Palestinian encounters transform into an oasis of mutual action in the long run. This, however, rarely, if ever, happens.¹²

Though the initial feelings are sincere, those feelings will soon either evaporate or become hijacked by the state apparatus. However, what stays in the long run is the ritualized nature of their historical past, while the group solidarity that trumps ethnicity is destined to crumble apart. The evaluation of such face-to-face encounters shows very limited and narrow transformations in the long run. This is because, for micro-solidarity to be effective in a broader community, it has to be widely supported by the existing infrastructures that enable the enhancement of those feelings of inter-group solidarity. In fact, face-to-face encounters between Jews and Palestinian serve as power rituals that ‘on the micro-interactional level bring individuals who are unequal in their resources’ (Collins, 2004: 112) where the Jewish participants enhance and sustain their emotional energy by perpetuating structural inequalities and retreating to their historical narratives as the ultimate victims. Once the participants are back in reality, the only infrastructures they encounter on a daily basis, in every segment of their lives, are those that reproduce the ritualization of ethnically-bound historical narratives that further reclaim power domination of the Israeli Jews. In practice, this means that the ethnic category of the groups has just gained additional weight, not the opposite. Consequently, two distinct conclusions can be drawn from this. At the empirical level, dialogue groups seem to be deeply embedded in wishful thinking, envisioned through human rights values and universal equality between peoples. In reality, however, they have very limited power to engage people to carry on a moral action that trumps ethnic and/or religious divisions. At the theoretical level, though the encounters are reported to effectively generate moral solidarity between participants, the situation and the context created by national infrastructures refuels the value of ethnically-ritualized narratives of the past, which in turn serve to ethnically homogenize and essentialize the participants’ understanding of selfhood, drawing Jews and Palestinians further apart.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by European Commission, Project no 745922 HRMN.

Notes

References

Abu-Nimer

(1999) Dialogue, Conflict Resolution and Change: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Israel. New York: State University of New York Press.

Alexander

(2014) Morality as a cultural system: On solidarity civil and uncivil. In: Jeffries

(ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Formulating a Field of Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bekerman

(2009) Identity work in Palestinian–Jewish intergroup encounters: A cultural rhetorical analysis. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4(2): 205–219.

Bekerman

Zembylas

(2012) Teaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace Education and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bergholz

(2016) Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community. New York: Cornell University Press.

Berxiltz

(2016) Violence as a Generative Force. New York: Cornell University Press.

Boyns

Luery

(2015) Negative emotional energy: A theory of the ‘dark-side’ of interaction ritual chains. Social Sciences 4: 148–170.

Brubaker

Cooper

(2000) Beyond ‘identity’. Theory and Society 29(1): 1–47.

Collins

(1993) Emotional energy as the common denominator of rational action. Rationality and Society 5(2): 203–230.

10.

Collins

(1994) Four Sociological Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11.

Collins

(2004) Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

12.

David

(2019) Historical narratives as foundations for ethnicized identities: ‘Facing the past’ encounters in the Western Balkans and in Israel/Palestine. East European Politics. DOI: 10.1080/21599165.2019.1616545.

13.

David

(forthcoming) The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Elliott

(2014) The institutionalization of human rights and its discontents: A world cultural perspective. Cultural Sociology 8(4): 407–425.

15.

Geertz

(1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

16.

Goffman

(1983) The interaction order: American Sociological Association, 1982 Presidential Address. American Sociological Review 48(1): 1–17.

17.

Halabi

Sonnenschein

(2004) The Jewish-Palestinian encounter in a time of crisis. Journal of Social Issues 60: 373–387.

18.

Helman

(2002) Monologic results of dialogue: Jewish-Palestinian encounter groups as sites of essentialization. Identities 9(3): 327–354.

19.

Malešević

(2006) Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

20.

Malešević

(2017) The Rise of Organised Brutality: A Historical Sociology of Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

21.

Maoz

(2000) An experiment in peace: Reconciliation aimed dialogues for Israeli and Palestinian youth. Journal of Peace Research 37: 721–736.

22.

Maoz

(2004) Peace building in violent conflict: Israeli-Palestinian post-Oslo people-to-people activities. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 17(3): 563–574.

23.

Maoz

(2011) Does contact work in protracted asymmetrical conflict? Appraising 20 years of reconciliation-aimed encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Journal of Peace Research 48(1): 115–125.

24.

Pundak

Ben-Nun

Finkel

(2012) More relevant than ever: People-to-people peacebuilding efforts in Israel and Palestine. Palestine-Israel Journal 18(2&3): 46–53.

25.

Rabinowitz

(2001) Natives with jackets and degrees. Othering, objectification and the role of Palestinians in the co-existence field in Israel. Social Anthropology 9(1): 65–80.

26.

Svensson

Brounéus

(2013) Dialogue and interethnic trust: A randomized field trial of ‘sustained dialogue’ in Ethiopia. Journal of Peace Research 50(5): 563–575.

27.

Yiftach

Maoz

Bekerman

(2010) Dialogue and ideology: The effect of continuous involvement in Jewish-Arab dialogue encounters on the ideological perspectives of Israeli-Jews. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 34(6): 571–579.