Lessons on Conflict and Coexistence from the Divided Holy Land(s)

Peter T. Coleman

Protests in Jerusalem over current attempts by the Israeli government to change its Supreme Court

After an 11-hour overnight flight from New York City to Tel Aviv recently, I found myself immediately in the throes of a political protest. Within minutes of reaching my hotel on the outskirts of Jerusalem that Saturday evening, my colleagues Ifat Maoz of Hebrew University and David Sherman of UC Santa Barbara, whisked me off to witness Week 21 of the anti-judicial “reform” protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, which were being held religiously (pun intended) in streets across the nation on Saturday nights. This one outside the President’s home, and a few blocks from the Prime Minister’s official residence.

The crowd, draped in Israeli flags (the Progressive camp’s attempt to lay claim to the national symbol), and chanting De-moh-kraht-yah (Democracy in Hebrew), were thousands of passionate, secular and religious Israelis of all ages, dead set on stemming their nation’s slide toward autocracy. My local colleagues expressed great concern over the designs of current hard-Right government, as well as the current strategy of the Ultra-Orthodox community to procreate its way towards a political powerhouse in order to reshape the future of the country. This, in essence, is Israel — a place I am only beginning to come to know and appreciate as Conflict Central.

I had been invited to the Holy Land(s) to keynote a conference on the future of conflict resolution research by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University. My talk focused on the implications of the approach to addressing toxic polarization in America offered in my recent book The Way Out, for circumstances in Israel today. A tall order. Not only is this part of the world known for the grinding intractability of its many deep-seeded, interlinking conflicts, but in preparing my remarks I learned that US polarization was also having a direct effect on vital American support for Israel, with Republican sympathy for Israel rising and Democratic sentiment plummeting in recent years. Yet another interlinked conflict.

Although I had visited Israel before and had conducted a few studies there, this was my first time staying in Jerusalem for the duration. A vibrant city, I took the opportunity to wander its streets. One night, I walked through a residential neighborhood of gorgeous estate mansions, which had been owned by Palestinian elites until their forced removal in 1948, and were today inhabited by wealthy Jewish Israelis and foreign diplomats. At sunrise one morning I got lost for hours in the quiet of the Old City (my GPS failed mysteriously within its stone walls), but managed to trek my way through all four of its ethno-religious quarters and encountered large bands of worshipers of different faiths gathering at their respective holy sites, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. I also had the pleasure of mingling with gaggles of small children in each quarter (as well as a multitude of “Community Cats”) as they made their way off to school.

Jewish-Israeli school children in the Old City

One of the countless Community Cats wandering the Old City

On my last morning, I headed North through the modern city center to the famed and flagrant Machaneh Yehudah Market, where Arabs, Jews, and Christians alike went about their daily food shopping. It felt hopeful to stand amidst the close choreography of this mundane, ethnically integrated tableau.

Morning in the Machaneh Yehudah Market

The formal lessons learned on this visit came from participating in the Truman Institute conference and dining all week with dozens of colleagues and students from the University. The panels at the meeting were replete with new, practical insights. For example, on the first day Professor Lior Lehrs presented on the importance of understanding how interlinked conflicts can benefit from the study of interlinked peace processes, a glaring gap in research. Keren Winter-Dinur, a PhD student at Truman, shared her findings on the implications of differences in the temporal framing of peace processes, or those promoting short-term, concrete outcomes vs long-term, lofty effects. She found that longer-term framing increases chances of reaching agreements, but shorter-term framing led to more durable outcomes. In addition, David Sherman offered a master class keynote on his program of original social psychological research on psychological barriers to bipartisan climate policy within the U.S. It was a tour-de-force with direct relevance for intergroup negotiations everywhere, and one I plan to share with my colleagues at the Columbia Climate School. Oh, yes, and I spoke on overcoming polarization too, which was enthusiastically received.

David Sherman and me in front of the Truman Institute

The second day of the meeting was, for me, a highlight. In addition to excellent presentations on interventions for increasing minority participation in politics (Lee Aldar), for enhancing a sense of belonging among Palestinian female students at Hebrew University (Inbal Moskovich), and on the effects of Volodymyr Zelensky’s communal (warmth) personality traits on fostering empathetic support for Ukraine (Dr. Meital Balmas), there was also a grand finale. This was what I would characterize as a participatory action research project of the Truman Institute, which they call the East Jerusalem Lab.

First, a tiny bit of background for those like me who are unfamiliar with the history of East Jerusalem. It is a sector of Jerusalem held by Jordan in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which is today deemed part of the Palestinian Occupied Territories, but lies outside the perimeter of the West Bank. Unlike Palestinians who live in other areas of the state of Israel, its inhabitants are not citizens (only Permanent Residents) and do not hold Israeli passports. Hebrew University sits on a hill abutting and overlooking East Jerusalem.

A view of East Jerusalem from the veranda of the faculty dining room at Hebrew University

Although about 15–20% of students at Hebrew University are Palestinian, historically few East Jerusalem Palestinians have attended the University. This has recently begun to change, with today about 750 students from the area attending HU. However, the challenges these students face to learning Hebrew, entering college, and finding a sense of belonging at the University are considerable. This is coupled with the fact that these students often face negative consequences from their home community for attending HU and thus aligning with Israel and “normalizing” their contested status as an occupied people. These challenges were the genesis of Truman’s bold experiment: The East Jerusalem Lab. The idea was to engage EJP-HU students in action research aimed at studying and giving back to their own community.

The East Jerusalem Lab

Preliminary findings from the inaugural project of the Lab — a qualitative study on the effects of an Israeli-state mandated curriculum in EJ public schools — was presented in the last panel session of the conference. The Lab’s coordinator, Ziad Abu Zayyad, the supervising faculty, Dr. Samira Alayan, and six student-researchers, Lana Ikelan, Noorman Rajabi, Rojeh Gharfeh, Alexandra Shahwan, Areen Mustafa, and Rua Bustami, presented their findings. In essence, they suggest that both the Palestinian-supported curriculum and the Israeli-mandated curriculum (which neglects Palestinian history and identity) have benefits and consequences for students, and that some combination of both should be offered. The more significant concern voiced during the panel discussion is the leveraging of school curricula in EJ by Israel for political control of Palestinians. This idea was met with expressions of frustration by some Jewish-Israeli students in the audience, but the discussion remained civil. This is a highly complex set of issues, but suffice it to say that Truman offering this project and this platform to Palestinian students at Hebrew University was notable and impressive.

Colleagues and Students from The Truman Institute

And then there were the many delicious meals I shared with my new colleagues, where I could listen and learn from candid conversations about the current states of affairs in the region. The Director of Truman, Ifat Moaz, had generously curated a series of meals for David and I to meet and speak with her colleagues. Here, I got a deeper sense of the powerful cultural riptide that many of the Palestinian students must navigate at Hebrew University. Some of the foreign-born faculty described how they had been attracted to Israel, but many of the faculty I spoke with shared deep dismay over the unsustainable nature of the political situation in Israel; the ongoing occupation and (until recently) the complacency of Progressives, perpetual cycles of violence, rise of the far and religious Right, expansion of Israeli settlements, and the cronyism and corruption of many of Israel’s top politicians. A few mentioned exit plans for themselves and their children, feeling increasingly pessimistic about the future of their home.

Ultimately, I was struck by the essential dilemma they all seemed to face here — between a genuine need for basic safety and security and a need for a profound reckoning with the history and omnipresence of injustice and oppression in this most beautiful and sacred place.

The view from my hotel room

From my hotel room balcony on my last evening in Jerusalem, I was suddenly struck by the sound of music — the extraordinarily beautiful dissonance of the many calls to prayer emanating from Abu Tor and Silwan, neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, mixing with the tolling of the bells from Christian steeples in and around the Old City. It went on for a few minutes. The sun was setting on a glorious evening, and the discordant blending of the notes rising from this tortured landscape offered a stirring glimpse of the unique promise it holds for all its people.

My time in Jerusalem was, in a word, full — replete with conflict, contradiction, regret, passion, insight, beauty and connection. For Jerusalem, at its best, is quite alive. Five thousand years old, with a population today of just under a million, and upwards of 3.5 million pilgrims from all three major monotheistic religions visiting every year, jostling for position, it can’t help but teach you, change you.

It did me.