“Victims” Versus “Righteous Victims”: The Rhetorical Construction of Social Categories in Historical Dialogue Among Israeli and Palestinian Youth

Abstract

Informed by social identity theory and a rhetorical approach to the study of social category construction in social interaction, this study analyzed the nature and function of participant utterances in two conditions of intergroup dialogue about history between Israelis and Palestinians. Across conditions that sought to either emphasize recategorization into a common in-group identity or subcategorization into mutually differentiated identities, Palestinian and Arab Israeli utterances primarily reflected the theme of victimization, while Jewish Israeli utterances primarily reflected themes of justification and victimization. The way in which these utterances produced social competition for victim and perpetrator roles and reproduced master historical narratives of Palestinian victimization versus Jewish Israeli "righteous" victimization is illustrated. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of narrative and rhetoric about social categories in settings of intractable political conflict, and implications for dialogue-based intervention about history are addressed.KEY WORDS: Israel-Palestine conflict, history, identity, social categorization, intergroup contact, discourse analysis, rhetoric, victimization, narrative As a scientific discipline, political psychology is concerned with the relationship between particular political configurations and accommodations (e.g., government, public policy) and the mental-the stuff of thought, feeling, and motivated, situated action. A recent significant movement in political psychology concerns the increasing centrality of the idea of narrative as a mechanism through which to interrogate this complex and dynamic relationship between politics and the mind (Hammack, 2008;Hammack & Pilecki, 2012). Scholars have increasingly argued (and demonstrated empirically) that narratives represent sense-making devices of the social and political world that individuals call upon as they explain, justify, and legitimize their political behavior, be it related to their decision to vote for a particular political candidate or to engage in acts of political violence (e.g., Andrews, 2007;Couto, 1993;Hammack, 2010;Witteborn, 2007). The stories with which individuals engage as they ascribe a sense of purpose to their acts tell us much about the nature of human political behavior and contribute to our larger theoretical concern with the relation among politics, mind, and action.Political Psychology, Vol. 35, No. 6, 2014 doi: 10.1111 In this article, we examine the way in which narratives that explain and justify violence are deployed in conversations about history among Israeli and Palestinian youth, seeking to apply this rich theoretical perspective on narrative and politics to the naturalistic setting of an existing program ostensibly seeking to alter the rhetoric of conflict through conversation. We addressed three research questions in this study. What are the dominant themes that emerge in historical dialogue among utterances of Israeli and Palestinian youth? How does this thematic content...

Interrogating the Process and Meaning of Intergroup Contact: Contrasting Theoretical Approaches

“…Our study compared two competing approaches to dialogue within intergroup contact rooted in social psychological theories (see also Pilecki & Hammack, ). Our intent was not to provide a definitive answer to which of these competing approaches is more valuable in a conflict setting or which achieves some particular outcome that can be causally isolated to the contact paradigm.…”

“…However, little research has systematically varied the paradigm of dialogue facilitated in order to see whether a particular form of dialogue‐based contact might more effectively challenge existing power asymmetries. Recently, Pilecki and Hammack () found that Jewish Israeli and Palestinian youth engage in a consistent pattern of competitive victimization when discussing history regardless of the facilitation paradigm used. The MD paradigm, particularly as developed and put into practice in Israel at the School for Peace, is explicitly intended to empower the lower status group in the encounter (Halabi & Sonnenschein, ).…”

Putting the Social into Personal Identity: The Master Narrative as Root Metaphor for Psychological and Developmental Science

“…We prefer to think of these types of master narratives as their own distinct "kind," chiefly because we place great emphasis on the process of social categorization and its implications for human development in all of our work [e.g., Pilecki & Hammack, 2014;. In our view, subsuming the social-categorical master narrative within the biographical privileges personal identity by suggesting that individual cognition about the life story precedes consideration of social cognition.…”

Negotiating the past, imagining the future: Israeli and Palestinian narratives in intergroup dialog

“…Hammack, Pilecki, and Merrilees (2013) found evidence that the goals of the confrontational model, particularly increased self-examination, awareness of intergroup difference, and acknowledgment of power asymmetries between groups, were reported by a sample of Israeli, Palestinian and US youth participating in dialog. Pilecki and Hammack (2013), however, found little difference in the historical narratives constructed by Israeli and Palestinian youth participating in dialog employing either a coexistence or confrontational model. Results revealed a common pattern across models; namely, both Israelis and Palestinians deployed historical narratives to compete for the title of "victim" within the conflict and gain the moral status that it entailed.…”

“…In studies examining integrated Jewish-Palestinian bilingual schools in Israel, Bekerman and colleagues have found that, despite efforts to provide an integrated curriculum legitimizing both historical narratives, hegemonic and exclusivist collective narratives and identities inevitably emerged (Bekerman, 2008(Bekerman, , 2009aBekerman & Maoz, 2005;Bekerman & Zembylas, 2010). Pilecki and Hammack (2013) discovered that, within the context of intergroup dialog, exclusivist narratives of history can facilitate processes of competitive victimhood as both groups emphasize instances of outgroup harm toward the ingroup.…”