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Ethnopolitical conflicts are pervasive in a culture and involve a relationship between locally situated parties and larger groups. The conflict is perceived as both an interpersonal problem and a group level problem. Attempts to resolve these conflicts are significantly at the interpersonal level in the form of communicative contact experiences that seek to change relationships in the hope that such changes will find their way to group levels. If intergroup contact of any sort (problem-solving groups, dialogue groups, civil society) is going to claim efficacy then there must be some principled relationship between interpersonal interactions and the larger world of social structure. This calls to mind work by Giddens on the relationship between communicative interactions and the pre-existing structural world (e.g. “culture,” “ethnicity”). Sociologists refer to this as the micro-macro link and the connections between the real-time world of individuals and the larger world of social structure. Conflict resolution experiences rely on interdependence between forms of interpersonal communication and broader group goals. For example, communicative contact between conflicting groups can have multiple goals. One goal can be immediate and concern change or attitude adjustment on the part of those participating in the communicative encounter, while a broader goal is concerned with the relationship between the communicative encounter and the conflict as a whole. Israeli and Palestinian high school students, for example, might interact in order to appreciate each other’s values and culture, and then have mechanisms to return to their home communities to transfer their experiences and widen the impact. A macro category such as “Israeli” or “Palestinian” serves as a shorthand for numerous micro communication and cultural behaviors. This leaves room for definition and change of meaning.

The term interaction ritual from Goffman refers to the motivations, resources, and messages of language users who are parties to conflicts to produce histories, cultural content, and stored memories. Ethnopolitically divided groups distort these processes on the basis of attribution errors, incompatible narratives, interpretive disjunctions, incomplete scripts, biased indexicality, and perceptual biases thereby producing dangerous, damaging, and inaccurate macro categories. Some interaction ritual chains (e.g. mutual victimization claims) are counterproductive and circulate in the larger community thereby perpetuating the conflict. Controlled encounters designed for positive change have new interaction rituals as a goal. A category for the other group such as “violent,” “backward,” “manipulative,” “deceptive,” or “rigid” contain the reality that lives in the network of communicative relationships. By changing the interaction rituals and activating the network of communicative relationships it’s possible to alter the group’s reality and alter the categories of meaning that sustain the intensity of the conflict. Macro categories of meaning (gender, ethnicity, group identification) are enfolded into individuals and displayed in communicative practices. Biased meanings are thus easily foregrounded in the context of ethnopolitical conflicts.

For example, one of the macro meaning categories for intractable conflicts in general, and the Israelis and Palestinians in particular, is “victimhood.” (See Eidelson and Eidelson for more on victimhood.) Victimhood is that state where groups feel a loss or sense of insecurity and diminished self-worth because of aggressive outsiders. Each group feels as though victimhood correctly characterizes their condition. Third person affects and group level perceptions supports the notion that even when individuals do not feel victimized, they believe that victimization characterizes their group. Typically, ethnopolitically divided groups argue about who has suffered more and “compete” for the most victimized status. The macro category “victim” serves as a short hand for a compilation of micro-experiences. Talk in localized contexts produces interaction ritual chains that circulate like capital between micro-and macro levels of reality. By changing the interaction rituals group members can change the nature of the circulating symbolic capital. Just as the label describing someone’s personality (e.g., friendly, aggressive, authoritarian) is an encapsulation of interaction encounters, so too are macro descriptive terms of group experiences. Conflict resolution is about changing communicative relationships in micro-contexts so that the phenomenological reality of the concept changes at the macro level.

Given that the territories are defined as a “frontier land”—neither sovereign nor part of the Israeli official map—their definition is open to construction. Israeli settlers frame three discursive dilemmas they must solve. These three dilemmas are (1) the construction of authenticity, (2) the discourse of marginality including the confrontation with the Palestinians or the “native others”, and (3) the use of rituals and collective memory to normalize life and established cultural and religious authority. Settlers must engage in various sense making patterns in order to facilitate the appropriation of the land.

The Authenticity Dilemma

Ethnoreligious communities are mostly constituted by narratives about their origins. These narratives are composed of bits of history and group identity that are consolidated into a narrative or “imagined community.” Such narratives must be complete and coherent enough to include discourses about belonging, citizenship, culture, as well as position people in relation to one another. These narratives are particularly potent because they clothe power with legitimacy, which is just the discursive puzzle that requires resolution.

The most important settler element of recorded time is the sanctity of the past. The insistence on the divine promise of the land to the Jewish people negates any legal arguments about property rights in the present. The relationship between the land and the Jews is transhistorical and therefore not subject to secular considerations. The land is a heavenly bequest to the Jewish people and their rights can never be relinquished. Moreover, the Jewish people are not “born of the soil” but arrived in the land on the basis of the covenantial relationship with God. In other words, the claim on the land is stronger than mere historical rights. Just as the American Indian cannot claim rights to the land, a Jew could not claim rights to the land of Israel on the basis of historical inhabitants; rather, the Jewish people claim their unique covenantial history and the fact that they created this history.

The solution to the discursive dilemma – the one most fundamentally associated with Jewish authenticity for settlers – about how to reconcile redemption with the institutions of the state lay in pragmatism. Religious settlers would not turn away from the commandment to settle the land, but find a more practical way of fulfilling it. This would be accomplished by the invocation of the security frame.

The Marginality Dilemma

The discourse of marginality is about the relationship between the center and the periphery and how the concept of the periphery, or margin, is essential to the concept of the center. The Palestinians live at the periphery of the environment and this increasingly informs their identity, albeit an undesirable one. The margins of a landscape contain what one is but not what they should be, and the conflict comes from the individual’s struggle against being socialized by the margins. The discourse of marginality depends on comparisons of the center to the margins.

We can borrow some from Gramsci here by pointing out that the marginal or disadvantaged group is in a binary relationship with the dominant group, cut off from most avenues of legitimate participatory politics, especially in the dominant sphere. The discourses that emerge from the authoritative center overwhelm local specificities and place the marginal group in a position that is enervated and without agency.

The Authority Dilemma

Settlers marginalize Palestinians by appealing to authority, but it is an authority that resonates with the settler community and deep elements of the Jewish historical consciousness. In other words, they are unconcerned with the general international community or the public at large and seek a form of self justification based on internal community authority standards. Traditional social movements are more successful when they use frames that are pragmatic for the intended audience. Hence, the appeal to the biblical right to the land or Jewish ethnoreligious roots creates arguments that resonate and converge with the interests of the target settler community.

The dominant settler discourse is built on the premise of biblical promise. It stresses the authority of the Bible and the word of God and projects an unassailable morality and inevitability. The invocation of the Bible and the word of God frames the narrative in language sealed from criticism and scrutiny. By definition, any questioning or challenge is viewed in moral terms and considered unacceptable. In contrast, the Palestinian narrative is less grounded in religious terminology but no less hardened by claims of historical rights.

Given the contemporary image of Islam as violent, and the current grip that extremist Islam has on the image of Islam, it’s a little difficult to explain that Islam has a preference for nonviolence and forgiveness. But Islam has a long history of reestablishing harmony and solving problems through genuine reformation including the moral courage to sincerely forgive others.

The interpenetration of Islam as a religion and the resolution of secular problems is a core theme in the Islamic definition of peace. Peace in the Islamic tradition is related to God and reflects a higher reality. In the Koran peace is affirmed in many aspects of the language and as a condition of paradise. It is something the innermost person yearns for and it is related to wholeness attained through the relationship with the divine. Now, peace in Judaic or Christian traditions is also a higher-order reality and integral to the primary religious precepts of these religions. But the contemporary problem with conflict resolution in Islam is just such a notion of the divine because the most recalcitrant tension is that peace has been defined as Islamic peace. And making relationships and having a sense of community is based on sharing Islamic principles. Thus there is an inconsistency between theory and practice where both sides, Islam and the West, have arguments between principles and practice and conflict is rooted in these disagreements between how to express and practice the divine. So in extremist Islam jihad is an effort aimed at the more abstract religious principles of the Islamic community and its maintenance (according to the practitioners of this strand of Islam) but it is a practice that justifies violence. Hence, the Muslim extremist and the religious Christian or Jew – or even the secular person – holds the same sense of peace as being integrated into the community but the conflict results from the practice of violence which is justified in one case but certainly not in the other. The jihadist “practice” is not considered acceptable as an expression of the holy Koran by either some other Muslims or group.

There is considerable overlap between the Western conception of peace and the Islamic one but the overlap is not complete. Even the role of acceptable legal precepts and wisdom is valued in Islam above the capricious decisions of dictators or force of the military. Islam has always held its military and check and rejected abuses of power. There is a tradition of positive peace based on the actual practice of justice and not only the absence of arbitrary rule. There has been a long tradition of Islamic scholarship and wisdom, even wisdom in the Western tradition, but the relationship between reason and religion has maintained which is one difference between Islam and the West. This leads to an important difference between Islam and the West which is that reason in the West has been elevated to a more “correct” way of thinking. Passion in Western conflict management is considered disruptive and in need of control. A fundamental difference that accounts for the difficulty and intractability of conflicts between Islam and the West is the thorough integration and wholeness of the concept of peace with religious precepts. Peace is not only the domain of secular social science but peace begins with God and his attained as God calls everyone to the “house of peace.” Peace in Islam is patterned on harmony and religion based integration. The word jihad means to strive for the divine, but from a contemporary Western Islamist perspective has been corrupted by the inclusion of justifiable violence.

Islam also has a tradition of cooperation and coexistence with groups that were either divergent or even antagonistic toward Islamic precepts. There is a discursive tradition in Islam which refers to the “house of peace or truce” and includes issues concerning limits on war, truce with non-Muslims, and general concerns about managing conflicts. But the more dichotomous thinking of fundamentalists currently holds sway because military ideas about jihad have moved to the forefront. It remains true that a conception of peace and conflict management cannot be separated from Muslim discourse. Even the idea of individual freedom in Islam is based on the attainment of freedom as a result of being at peace with and integrated into the broader religious community. Individual freedom clearly is not synonymous with “doing whatever you like.” Rather, individual dignity emerges from the maintenance of harmony between individuals and God. There is in contemporary Islam a tension between using religion to justify violence and actual conflict dynamics. Conflicts are typically rooted in political and economic grievances, but religion is used to intensify attitudes and rally support. Nuance and issue complexity are lost as the discourse gets simpler and adherents become more radicalized. Currently Islamic fundamentalist leaders have made the claim that Muslims are occupied by non-Muslims in foreign lands and oppressed by various transnational governments. Casting such a wide transnational net is unusual and is typically interpreted as exceptional religious vocabulary used to justify violence. But from a dialogue and conflict management perspective using such religious discourse is not unusual. Moreover, the West must approach Islam with respect to pragmatic conflict dynamics (economic, political, and social issues) – including exploring the relationship between the conflict and Islamic principles – in an effort to meet group secular needs while maintaining harmonious relationships within the community. The West after a long period of engagement can turn this tradition to its advantage and the advantage of all.