SUNY Press Open Access

Why It Is Needed and How It Works

Björn Krondorfer

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438471822
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Paix et développement mondial

When we open the newspaper, watch and listen to the news, or follow social media, we are inundated with reports on old and fresh conflict zones around the world. Less apparent, perhaps, are the many attempts at bringing former adversaries together. Reconciliation in Global Context argues for the merit of reconciliation and for the need of global conversations around this topic. The contributing scholars and scholar-practitioners—who hail from the United States, South Africa, Ireland, Israel, Zimbabwe, Germany, Palestine, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands—describe and analyze examples of reconciliatory practices in different national and political environments. Drawing on direct experiences with reconciliation efforts, from facilitating psychosocial intergroup workshops to critically evaluating official policies, they also reflect on the personal motivations that guide them in this field of engagement. Arranged along an arc that spans from cases describing and interpreting actual processes with groups in conflict to cases in which the conceptual merits and constraints of reconciliation are brought to the fore, the chapters ask hard questions, but also argue for a relational approach to reconciliatory practices. For, in the end, what is important is to embrace a spirit of reconciliation that avoids self-interested action and, instead, advances other-directed care.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7139.

1

Interpersonal Reconciliation with Groups in Conflict

Israelis and Palestinians, Germans and Jews

BJÖRN KRONDORFER

In the summer of 2014, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas in Gaza fought a lethal fifty-one-day war, I met with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in a location in the West Bank, close enough to the border to be within relatively safe reach for Jewish Israeli citizens. We met to engage in difficult conversations among people in conflict, with people who have been hurt, injured, traumatized, fearful, and distrustful—in the belief that it is continuous human contact that prepares us for better times, even when everything around us seems to fall apart. Besides the actual dead and injured, this war had pushed Palestinians and Israelis even farther apart, demanding and enforcing group loyalty. Internally, each community ostracized and punished individuals who dared to stay in touch with people from the other side. And yet, a group of Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans met for four days, revealing to each other their fears and opening their hearts.

On the last day of the seminar, the Palestinian Authority unexpectedly called our retreat center, claiming that we had no permission to meet and that we had to leave. As it turned out, this was not true, since it was a German NGO that had organized the meeting; hence, there was no requirement to inform the Palestinian Authority, which, in turn, would have informed the Israeli security.1 However, this call led to turmoil and confusion among the participants. A young Israeli psychologist and grandchild of Holocaust survivors no longer felt safe and accused the leadership of failing to provide security. He got so frightened that his whole body began to shake. He asked why the Palestinian Authority even knew that we were meeting here. His fear spread like wildfire through the group. Fear is contagious. It took us a long time to contain it, with the eventual result that the young man decided to stay with us for the remainder of the seminar (Krondorfer 2015a).

A year later, in 2015, we met again at the same location with a group of about twenty Palestinians, Israelis, and Germans ranging in age from the late twenties to mid-seventies. The memory of the previous year’s violent confrontation was still alive but it had receded enough for people to join together in an interpersonal setting to explore the effects and meaning of “borders” in our lives. For Palestinians, the pressure to abide by the “anti-normalization” campaign was strong. This political campaign refuses to accept the status quo of the occupation by discouraging and disallowing any Palestinian-Israeli cooperation. Palestinians are not supposed to meet with Israelis unless such meetings lead to political-structural changes regarding the occupation. Given the “anti-normalization” campaign, the willingness of Palestinians to join our mixed seminar required courage: their attendance went against their community’s consensus. For the Israeli participants, the high personal risk that marked their attendance of the summer seminar during the 2014 war had been lessened in 2015, but the continued siege mentality of Israeli society left them with a persistent unease about meeting with Palestinians in Palestinian territory.

Had the seminar followed a conventional dialogue format, where people congratulate themselves simply for conversing with each other, the Palestinians could have judged it as part of the “normalization” campaign, and hence unacceptable. I suggested to the group that starting an “anti-fear” campaign might be more helpful than subscribing to an anti-normalization code if the goal is to move both sides out of the current quagmire. I also wanted a commitment from each member in the group to make our four-day meeting “real” and to commit to the hard work of reconciliation. This set into motion a more honest but also more demanding process. As a result, the issue of trust and mistrust forcefully emerged on the last day. I will return to this later.

In this chapter, I reflect on the dynamics of interpersonal encounters between groups who have been historically in conflict or find themselves in an ongoing conflict. Those dynamics include the role of personal and collective memories and large-group identities, chosen traumas and unsettling empathy, trust and fear. Specifically, I am illustrating these dynamics with examples from my work with Israelis and Palestinians (case 1) and Germans and Jews (case 2). Reconciliation in this context is understood as a relational practice.

By emphasizing the relational quality of reconciliation over policies geared toward structural changes, I am following a framework of social reconciliation as outlined in the Introduction to this volume. I am not, however, arguing in favor of an individualized personal approach that disregards the political settings within which interpersonal encounters take place. When I facilitate groups in conflict it is very clear that the specific contours of interpersonal encounters manifest themselves in political history and that the dynamics unfolding in such processes are embedded in the deep structures of social identity.

Biographical Interlude

How did I get involved in working with groups in conflict? Some background about my personal path toward facilitating interpersonal encounters will help to contextualize my thoughts on reconciliatory processes.

I was born in Germany fourteen years after the end of World War II and after the end of Nazi Germany’s murderous ethnic cleansing operations and genocidal campaign against European Jews. I belong to West Germany’s postwar generations. Although there is no direct causal link between my generational belonging and my engagement in reconciliation (after all, most of my peers have little interest in such matters), my postwar German identity remains a strong motivational source. Growing up in the comforts of a fairly stable democracy, I also grew up with stories and images of suffering that Germans endured during the last years of the war and the early postwar years. In this sense, I belong to the “second generation,” surrounded by and participating in the postwar master narrative of German suffering.2 My parents received most of their education during the Nazi regime and experienced the end of the Third Reich as young adults. In 1945, they were, respectively, seventeen and eighteen years old. Both lost their childhood homes and also family members in the war.

My father was born in 1927 in the Sudetenland, the part of the Czech Republic that had a strong German population. When he returned to his home in Moravia in 1946, after spending one year as a POW in a Czech prison, he found his mother alone in the apartment. His father was still in captivity in the Soviet Union. No stories exist in my family about my grandfather’s POW experience. My father’s younger brother, age sixteen, had killed himself accidentally when mishandling antiaircraft weaponry in a military training unit. In the summer of 1946, my father and his mother were expelled by the postwar Czech government and, after a long train ride in cattle cars, found themselves in a small town in Hesse, a region under the control of the American Allied forces. In Hesse, he eventually met my mother.

My mother grew up in Königsberg in East Prussia, today Kaliningrad in Russia. In January 1945, at age seventeen, she fled from the advancing Soviet army. She was sent by her mother to find her way across war-torn Europe by herself. She reunited with her family in West Germany, also in a small town in Hesse. Her father, a German army officer, had died of cancer in 1941. Her mother now had the arduous task of building up, out of nothing, a new existence in West Germany for her four children (for whom she had earlier received the bronze Mutterkreuz, the Nazi medal awarded to highly procreant German mothers).

My social identification with Germany as a nation was weak until I came to the United States as a graduate student in 1983. It was weak insofar as I took my German identity as a given, in no need of further reflection. The stories passed on in my family about the Hitler regime, which almost exclusively focused on moments of personal affliction during the war years, were similarly taken for granted. Those seemingly dependable narratives, as well as my uncontested sense of belonging, were unsettled when I encountered the Jewish community in Philadelphia and befriended both rabbinical students of my age and Holocaust survivors of my parents’ age. I no longer was simply “Björn.” I was now primarily “German,” a representative of my age group who had to account for the lives, deeds, and choices my parents and grandparents had made during the Nazi regime and, by implication, during the years of the Holocaust.

I plunged into the study of the Holocaust. The more I studied, the more German I became. It was both confusing and exhilarating, eliciting feelings of guilt and, at times, shame. It was gratifying to explore the complexity of history while interacting with my Jewish peers. Occasionally, it also gave me—and I admit this with some embarrassment—a sense of smugness: I was the “good German” willing to face the past.

Over time, the family narrative of German war affliction got shaken up when stories emerged that put my family in proximity to the Holocaust. Sometimes, these were passing moments, when, for example, my mother pointed herself out in a black-and-white photo as a young teenager at a birthday party in Königsberg, and then pointed to a girl right next to her, stating that she was Jewish. When I asked to tell me more about her, she abruptly ended the conversation (Krondorfer 2001). A graver moment occurred later, albeit only accidentally. After I had already spent ten years in the United States, I learned from my father that he had been stationed as a seventeen-year-old soldier-in-training near Blechhammer (Blachovnia), a Jewish slave labor camp in Upper Silesia, Poland. For one year, from 1943 to 1944, his task was to “protect” a German industrial site from Allied bombing raids (Krondorfer 2000; 2002).

During those years of growing awareness of the legacy of war and genocide in German history in general, and in my family history in particular, I worked with people in a number of interactive environments to explore our differences vis-à-vis the long-lasting effects of the past. These included working with ethnically and nationally diverse student groups, religious leaders, community organizations, and visual and performance artists. I have also facilitated workshops on the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories and led trilateral, intergenerational encounters for Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in the West Bank, Jerusalem, Greece, and Germany.3

Developing sensitivity toward the dynamics of power asymmetries and becoming aware of the perception gaps between marginalized and dominant communities (see Baumeister 1997, 18–19) are now an indispensable part of my work with groups in conflict. Grounded in my own history, I became sensitized to facing the effects and aftereffects of my large-group identity. Questions of German accountability and acknowledgment of wrongdoing—and the accompanying moral emotions, such as guilt and shame—could not be avoided. Rather, they needed to be juxtaposed to and integrated with the perspectives of victimized communities. I learned that interpersonal encounters remain incomplete unless one addresses the perspectives of both the victimized communities and perpetrator mentalities. In the face of a Jewish presence, for example, the master narratives of postwar German suffering got exposed as one-sided, distorted, and misleading. Previously unquestioned “truths” conveyed in family memories became unsettled. Concomitantly, collective loyalties upheld and enforced in such narratives were also shaken up.

The fact that these dynamics involved vicarious identification with the guilt and complicity of perpetrator society did not diminish the impact of those experiences (Vetlesen 2005; Brunner and von Seltmann 2006.). In the case of Germany, the perpetrators themselves, with few exceptions, did not engage with the people they had victimized, and so it fell onto the new postwar generations to pick up this unfinished task. Such vicarious identifications raised awareness for how family memories are transmitted intergenerationally and are passed on to new generations below the surface of conscious cognition and reflection.

Over time, I understood that reconciliation is not just a mental state or a moral intention—and certainly nothing that one can do by oneself—but a commitment to engage with the other. When interacting with people within demanding, yet protected environments, it is important to disrupt patterns in which the “othering” of the other fuels subterranean tensions, misconceptions, prejudice, and toxic projections and counterprojections. The goal of interpersonal reconciliation is not to make the other into someone whom one wishes to be according to one’s own ideals. Nor can the other become someone who resembles oneself or mirrors one’s own values. Rather, it is the respect for and integration of differences. It is trying to see others in their own right and granting them their own experiences, frailties, and imperfections. When I speak of the relational nature of reconciliation, otherness is not dissolved into sameness. Trust is earned and (re)established when engaging the other as “other,” while simultaneously engaging (self-) critically with people from one’s own community and family.

Trauma and Trust: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

It is now time to return to the trilateral meeting in the West Bank in the summer of 2015 with which I began this chapter. I mentioned above that the issue of trust was put on the table on the last day of this workshop/seminar. To clarify: this meeting, like similar trilateral gatherings for Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans that I have been part of for several years, was not called a reconciliation seminar. As a matter of fact, the term reconciliation was neither mentioned in any of the brochures and invitations nor in the seminar itself. The absence of this term, however, does not matter here, since the point is not to argue philosophically for the validity of an abstract notion but to utilize “reconciliation” as a way to analyze dynamics as they emerge and express themselves in guided, interpersonal group processes. The framework of social and relational reconciliation, as described and defined in the Introduction of this volume, is one lens through which we can understand such processes. Another framework, for example, would be to read such meetings through the lens of trauma (Krondorfer 2015b). This would not fundamentally change our understanding of the nature of these interpersonal encounters, but simply bring diverse elements of analysis to the fore.

To provide a little more context, we need to go back to an early moment during the 2015 seminar on borders.4 On the third day, the group of Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans reached a consensus to explore, under the guidance of my facilitation team, the issue of “collective trauma.” We separated each national group and asked them to write on a card what they perceive as their own collective trauma. We also asked them to write on two separate cards what they perceive are the traumas of the other two groups. The German group, for example, named their own trauma “Collective Guilt”; for the Israeli trauma, the Germans identified “antisemitism,” and for the Palestinians, the “Nakba”—the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and villages (Meir 2009). The Palestinians named their own trauma also the “Nakba”; for the Germans, they said “Holocaust & Guilt,” and for the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Social and Political Reconciliation
• Chapter 1 Interpersonal Reconciliation with Groups in Conflict: Israelis and Palestinians, Germans and Jews
• Chapter 2 Beyond a Dilemma of Apology: Transforming (Veteran) Resistance to Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and South Africa
• Chapter 3 Societal Reconciliation through Psychosocial Methods: The Case of Zimbabwe
• Chapter 4 Bringing Faith into the Practice of Peace: Paths to Reconciliation of Bosnian Muslims
• Chapter 5 Reconciliation in the Midst of Strife: Palestine
• Chapter 6 No Future without a Shared Ethos: Reconciling Palestinian and Israeli Identities
• Chapter 7 When Reconciliation Becomes the R-Word: Dealing with the Past in Former Yugoslavia
• Epilogue. Memory versus Reconciliation
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover