La empatía como un pie en la puerta inter-étnica: facilitación de la percepción bilateral positiva entre los estudiantes judíos y árabes en Israel
Limor YehudaWestern Galilee College, Israel
Yuval WolfBar-Ilan University, Israel ABSTRACT A heavy load of blame, hostility, and violence typifies the relationships between Jews and Arabs in Israel for nearly two centuries in a row. The present study is an exploratory experimental attempt, within the framework of Functional Measurement, to examine the viability of empathy as a means to facilitate a positive shift in functional cognitive schemata of helping. The participants, 143 Jewish and Arab (57 and 86, respectively) female students, were sampled from an Israeli academic college, where the Jews-Arabs ratio is nearly 50-50. Each Participant met individually 4-8 times, once a week, with a same sex and same age experimenter (another student). Each experimental session included a conversation where the experimenter approached the participant empathetically for approximately 15-20 minutes and asked her repeatedly to imagine a series of meetings between two female students (Jews and Arabs in all combinations) where one such protagonist attempts to receive form the other (Jew or Arab) lesson notes. This manipulation was arranged within the framework of a bi-factorial model, that isi.e., the level of needs of both protagonists (3 x 3). In each such encounter the participant was asked to estimate the likelihood that the imagined request will be fulfilled. The results show that serial exposure to empathy affected positively mainly Jewish students. The relevance of the findings to the notion of 'functional social cognition' and to the body of knowledge which deals with majority-minority relations is pointed at.
The aim of this exploratory study was to assess the level of justification of intergroup violence from the perspective of Israeli Arab minority group (n=196). The study analyzed the link between threat perception and justification of intergroup violence in Israel, which presents a suitable setting due to ongoing conflict between Arabs and Jews. Results indicate that symbolic threat is more salient among Israeli Arab participants compared to realistic threat. The study also found that females tended to perceive violence committed by Arabs against Israeli Jews as more justified than males suggesting that women are more prone to frustration due to intersectionality, leading to violence. In addition, a strong correlation between a person's support of the idea that frustration led to intergroup violence and their justification of such violence was found, supporting some of the frustration-aggression hypothesis. Results emphasize the need to emphasize understanding intergroup conflicts in international relations.
In recent decades international and regional human rights norms have been increasingly applied to constitutional provisions, revealing significant tensions between primary political arrangements, such as power-sharing institutions, and human rights norms. This book argues that these tensions, generally framed as a peace versus justice dilemma, are built on an individualistic conception of justice that fails to account for the empirical reality in places characterized by ethnically based political exclusion and inequalities. By introducing the concept of 'Collective Equality' as a new theoretical basis for the law of peace, this timely book proposes a new approach for dealing with the tensions between peace-related arrangements and human rights norms. Through principled, pragmatic, and legal reasoning the book develops a new paradigm that captures more accurately what equality and human rights mean and require in the context of ethno-national conflicts, and provides potent guidance for advancing justice and peace in such places.
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