Last week, a handful of students walked (or logged into) my classes asking about what was happening with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the interesting elements of the news cycle’s return to the conflict is the way the news cycle itself responds to an escalation in violence on the part of Israel or Palestinians, but not typically the structural violence inherent in the ongoing occupation that has led the major Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and Human Rights watch to declare the occupation is now apartheid. Of course, the conflict is covered as newsworthy events happen, but, like the other tendrils of the American empire, it is mostly invisible in the United States for people not directly impacted or who are not otherwise actively following events, despite the nearly $4 billion that the US government sends to Israel every year.
On some level, the same is true for state violence and bloated police budgets in the United States. Unless you are a subject of state violence, or personally connected to state violence in some way, it mostly goes unseen, unnoticed, and unreported by major media. This is increasingly less true as a result of Black Lives Matter raising the profile of police brutality, but for my students – many of whom have had personal experiences with state violence – high profile news stories on violent conflict typically provoke curiosity.
The consequence of this is that for many young people, this latest escalation is the first time they have paid attention to the existence of the conflict between Israeli and Palestine. When students ask questions about the news, my response is typically to assess what they already know, ask them to complete brief research to deepen understanding, fill in some gaps with my own background knowledge or a short video, and ask students what they think. I heard from students that there were missiles being fired into Israel and that Israel was responding. “It’s complicated,” another student explained, mentioning the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. Another chimed in that her father, knowing she was taking Global Politics, had asked the previous night, “what do you think about what is happening in Israel?” She said she didn’t know, but that she’d ask her teacher, and then asked, “So, what do you think Mr. R?”
During the second intifada, when I was in middle school, I recall asking my mother, an American Jew, a similar question as we listened to NPR in the car, as I tried for the first time to figure out what was happening and how my own Jewishness was connected to this very foreign place. I don’t recall what she said, but I remember feeling dissatisfied and curious, which ultimately sparked a lot of research that on some level led me not only to take a birthright trip to Israel, but also to the study of politics and international relations. This interaction, and the reactions of my students, highlights the way that outbreaks in outright violent conflict or violent episodes (like the murder of George Floyd), and the news that reports on them, renew conversations and raise questions for people, who often have disparate entry points into the conversation depending on their existing knowledge, life experiences, and background.
The way much of the conversation around violent conflict in the news cycle happens online is not that useful for deeply understanding the issues. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media apps aren’t set up for listening to diverse perspectives and understanding complexity. Instead, they largely seem to provoke rage. News, likewise, provokes rage as advocates of both the Israeli government and Palestinians accuse mainstream media and each other of bias and bigotry in the form of anti-semitism or Islamaphobia. To be fair, these conversations aren’t so much better offline, and people largely talk past each other on this issue and many others, assuming that they are the true experts.
My classroom tends to be one of the few places I see in my life where reasonable discussion over serious issues doesn’t regularly devolve into people talking past each other and name-calling, although it’s certainly happened. How then, do you do justice to one of the most contentious issues in politics in a few minutes at the start of class?
In this case, after students shared their ideas, and we established some shared understanding, I shared the concept of structural violence and asked students if they thought it would be understandable for a man with a knee on his neck to fight back if he was able. Now, I’m sure this analogy would anger the pro-Israel contingent out there, and of course, I expressed to my class that it’s pretty much impossible to express a view on the conflict without someone claiming it is biased. Indeed, I said, they might ask, “What about that terrorist group Hamas that the Palestinians elected that’s sending rockets to Israel and using innocent Palestinians as hostages?” All of those things are true, but if someone had a knee on my neck and someone else was offering food, medical care, and saying they would protect me and fight for me, I might vote for them too. I don’t think it justifies terrorism, but it sure explains why the conflict persists. And when we understand and acknowledge the root causes and dynamics of conflicts, we take the first step towards resolving them.