Dvir Abramovich

Overcoming the Cultural Barriers of Conflict: Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims

This paper critically explores the complex and crucial subject of intercultural engagement between Israelis and Palestinians. It identifies the crucial role dialogue plays in empowering the major stakeholders in the enduring conflict to move beyond oppressive cultural stereotypes and the attendant cloud of despair that has descended on the region. In different ways, the paper shows how after so many years of failures, Israelis and Palestinians have allowed for the introduction of new factors, namely, reconciliation and interfaith projects that have radically changed the dynamics of this problematic relationship. By employing a wide range of examples and narratives, drawn from various sources, the paper aspires to bring appropriate case studies from the grassroots level, often marginalised or altogether ignored, in order to analyse and detail the success intercultural encounters have brought to bear. In the final analysis, it hopes to promote, through the issues examined, the story of Israeli–Palestinian cultural engagement as a possible model for narrowing the chasm, entrenching the prevailing ethic of tolerance and advancing closer relations not only between the two peoples at the heart of this paper, but all combatant parties.

Relationship Building in the Middle East among Adversaries: Israelis and Palestinians

This chapter will showcase the invaluable role that intercultural dialogue, encounters, workshops, and structured interactions between Israeli Jews and Palestinians play in advancing reconciliation and friendships, crucial to long-term resolution of the conflict. Also identified and examined are the unsung peacemakers and conciliators who, in the face of hostility and accusations of betrayal, are holding reconciliation-aimed sessions between Israelis and Palestinians and Jews and Muslims to bridge the cultural gap and put a human face on the other. Referring to the “Contact Hypothesis,” Ifat Maoz correctly asserts that “intergroup contact can, under certain conditions, be effective in reducing hostility and prejudice and in creating more positive attitudes between the groups.”1 Furthermore, this chapter will illustrate that, despite the overwhelming reports and images of violence that foreground the suffering of both peoples, and have engendered a sense of irreconcilable differences and hopelessness, there is another perspective to be considered within this rubric.