Nimrod Rosler

Socio-psychological implications for an occupying society: The case of Israel

Although prolonged occupation of a nation is no longer a common phenomenon, where it does exist, it bears harsh implications for all parties involved. This article examines the socio-psychological implications of occupation on the occupying society, using the case of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967 as an example. The article first delineates the concept of occupation from a socio-psychological perspective, which supplements the legal-formal aspect. The authors then propose a conceptual framework that analyzes the psychology of the occupying society. Within this framework, they describe the psychological challenges that the occupation may pose to the members of the occupying society. Next, they introduce psychological mechanisms that members of an occupying society may use in order to avoid facing these challenges. Finally, they offer a number of ideas regarding the relationship between these mechanisms and the process of ending the occupation.

The distinctive effects of empathy and hope in intractable conflicts

The goal of the current research was to examine how discrete positive intergroup emotional phenomena affect conflict-related attitudes in different contexts of intractable conflict. We hypothesized that empathy, but not hope would be negatively associated with aggressive attitudes during escalation, while hope, but not empathy would be associated with conciliatory attitudes during de-escalation. In study 1, we examined our hypotheses within a correlational design in an emotion-inducing context, while in study 2 a two-wave survey was conducted during real-life events within the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; a peace summit as well as a war. Both studies supported our hypotheses, thus indicating the unique, yet complimentary, contribution of each of the two emotional phenomena to the advancement of peace.

Gender-empathic Constructions, Empathy, and Support for Compromise in Intractable Conflict

The goal of the present study was to investigate how empathy and gender-empathic constructions affect the levels of support for political compromise in an intractable conflict. Gender-empathic constructions relate to perceptions that individuals hold about self or others as having feminine-empathic gender traits. We hypothesized that empathy will be positively associated with support for compromise, but that perceiving one’s own group as feminine empathic will be negatively associated with such attitudes, with empathy being a significant mediator. Data were collected through a public opinion survey conducted with a representative sample of Israeli-Jewish adults (N = 511). The findings supported our hypotheses, thus indicating that perceiving one’s own group as having feminine-empathic traits and empathy toward opponents made significant contributions to explaining Jewish-Israeli willingness to compromise with Palestinians. The implications of our findings for understanding the role of gender-empathic constructions and of empathy in conflict resolution are discussed.

Yitzhak Rabin: soldier, leader, statesman

ity between the community and the state, disillusionment with legal non-violent means of influence, and moral outrage at new state aggression against the community. While this model makes sense, it leaves the reader craving more specificity. For example, the model tells us too little about why some radicalized youth choose to fight their states instead of travel abroad to fight perceived enemies of the umma (the Muslim community). Indeed, Sageman leaves unaddressed how individuals choose between several courses of action and prioritize their targets among several out-group enemies. An obvious answer would link individual choices to opportunities and, importantly, to the way jihadi groups nurture the process of radicalization and try to direct sympathizers to certain actions. The considerable neglect of this aspect seems, again, to counterproductively link back to the Sageman–Hofmann debate and, again, it weakens the book overall. Finally, the book suffers from the lack of supportive empirical evidence to accompany its theoretical claims. The author promises that the evidence is forthcoming in a book to be published in 2017, but this is hardly satisfying; one comprehensive book would have been much more useful than two incomplete ones. Given that Misunderstanding terrorism is a relatively short book with considerable redundancy, there is an uncomfortable feeling that the choice to divide the work into two books may have been motivated by the wrong considerations. It is unfortunate—Sageman is an important scholar with ideas worthy of a serious discussion which this book does an insufficient job of promoting.

Containing the Duality: Leadership in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process

Peace process is characterized by a complex political and social context creating difficult challenges for societies previously engulfed by conflict and for those who lead them. This was the case when the official peace process—known as “the Oslo process”—started between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on September 1993. The basic role of a political leader from a sociopsychological perspective is to assist society in coping with the challenges that it faces and to mobilize its members for the policy she/he is constructing. In the challenging circumstances of a peace process following an intractable conflict, as those created during the Oslo process, the role of the leader becomes even more prominent. A unique psychosocial role for a leader during a peace process is coping with duality which characterizes it. During the Oslo process, for example, both Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat had to assist their societies in coping with a complex dual reality, which included cooperation and signing agreements between the sides, acts of serious violence, continued building of settlements in the occupied territories, and agreement violations. Each of the leaders fulfilled this role using messages of different content but whose aim was similar—to create rhetorical containment. The aim of rhetorical containment—a concept which is proposed for the first time in this chapter—is to aid the public in moderating and processing the difficulties and the pain involved in the peace process and to accept the complex character of the process through the speeches of the leader.