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Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Useargues that rhetoric, ideology, and myth have played key roles in influencing the development of the 100-year conflict between first the Zionist settlers and the current Israeli people and the Palestinian residents in what is now Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is usually treated as an issue of land and water. While these elements are the core of the conflict, they are heavily influenced by the symbols used by both peoples to describe, understand, and persuade each other. The authors argue that symbolic practices deeply influenced the Oslo Accords, and that the breakthrough in the peace process that led to Oslo could not have occurred without a breakthrough in communication styles.Rowland and Frank develop four crucial ideas on social development: the roles of rhetoric, ideology, and myth; the influence of symbolic factors; specific symbolic factors that played a key role in peace negotiations; and the identification and value of criteria for evaluating symbolic practices in any society.

The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their 'War of Independence' and the Palestinians their 'Nakba', or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse. This book explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel's war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, Ronit Lentin makes a contribution to social memory studies through a critical evaluation of the co-memoration of the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli Jews. Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin's central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine.

Applies clinical pyschology to explain the dynamics of the Middle East peace process. By applying a clinical psychologist’s insight into the Israeli-Arab conflict, Ofer Grosbard lays the foundation for a new theory and practice that espouses the use of clinical tools to promote relations between countries, religions, political parties, cultures, and different identities.

The Israeli television series Fauda tells the story of an undercover unit pursuing a notorious terrorist to avenge terror attacks that he masterminded and to prevent his future attacks. The series bolsters Israeli collectivity by re-enacting past traumas and capitalizing on the fear of traumas yet to come, but it also dismantles national unity by portraying other ways for individuals to develop relationships with the collectives to which they belong and by attempting to find alternative temporalities to ‘traumatic time’ that returns to haunt the present from the future. While the plot aims to reinforce national identity by overcoming situations of imminent disaster, the televisual language creates another time based on overlaps between the various narrative threads of both Israeli and Palestinian identities, thus opening up new opportunities for co-existence and another relationship between the singular and the plural.

We sketch a variety of institutional, discursive, professional, and personal 'Vectors', dating back to the 1980s, in order to explain how 'national trauma' was able to go from a cultural into a professional category in Israeli mental health during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-2005). Our genealogy follows lan Hacking's approach to transient mental illnesses, both illustrating its fertility and expanding its horizon. Thus, we also explore the dynamics that developed in the Israeli mental health community with the advent of 'national trauma': while the vast majority of Israeli psychologists and psychiatrists did not adopt the category, they embraced much of its underlying logic, establishing a link between Israeli identity and the mental harm said to be caused by Palestinian terror. Remarkably, the nexus of national identity and collective psychic vulnerability also prompted the cooperation of Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli mental health scholars seeking to explore the psychological effect that the minority status of Israeli Palestinians had on them during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

An ecological perspective was used to predict school violence from a number of variables describing the students and their families based on nationally representative sample of 10,400 students in grades 7–11 in 162 schools across Israel. Self‐administered anonymous questionnaires that included a scale for reporting victimization by serious and moderate physical violence, threats, and verbal–social victimization were filled out during class. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) examined the relationships between students’ reports of victimization and student level variables (gender, age) and the school‐level variables—cultural affiliation (Jewish vs. Arab), the socio‐economic status (SES) of the school's neighborhood and students’ families, school and class size, school level (junior high vs. high), and school climate. Variance between schools accounted for 9–15% of the variance in student victimization (major factors being school climate characteristics and percent of boys at the school). Boys reported higher victimization than girls for all forms of school violence. Students in junior high schools reported more victimization than high school students. Higher levels of victimization were reported in overcrowded classes, while school size was not associated with students’ reports of victimization. Although there were almost no differences between Jewish and Arab schools in students’ reports of victimization, the SES of the school's neighborhood and students did have a moderate effect. The discussion highlights the importance of improving school climate and the need to allocate more resources to schools in low SES contexts in order to protect students from school violence.

Ethnic conflict often focuses on culturally charged symbols and rituals that evoke strong emotions from all sides. Marc Howard Ross examines battles over diverse cultural expressions, including Islamic headscarves in France, parades in Northern Ireland, holy sites in Jerusalem and Confederate flags in the American South to propose a psychocultural framework for understanding ethnic conflict, as well as barriers to, and opportunities for, its mitigation. His analysis explores how culture frames interests, structures demand-making and shapes how opponents can find common ground to produce constructive outcomes to long-term disputes. He focuses on participants' accounts of conflict to identify emotionally significant issues, and the power of cultural expressions to link individuals to larger identities and shape action. Ross shows that, contrary to popular belief, culture does not necessarily exacerbate conflict; rather, the constructed nature of psychocultural narratives can facilitate successful conflict mitigation through the development of more inclusive narratives and identities.

By applying a clinical psychologist's insight into the Israeli-Arab conflict, Ofer Grosbard lays the foundation for a new theory and practice that espouses the use of clinical tools to promote relations between countries, religions, political parties, cultures, and different identities.

This chapter explores what promises to be a critical turning point in Israeli public discourse on national security. It analyzes how the social project of developing mental coping skills to alleviate emotional experiences of fear and anxiety has merged with the dominant Israeli ethos of nationalism, enmeshing itself in two contradictory yet hegemonic notions of \"victimhood\" and \"aggression.\" Three discursive practices gain prominence in this fairly notion of resilience. The first: mixing clinical concerns regarding traumatic and post-traumatic symptoms with snippets from the political dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians. The second: linkage between various social players based on their planned collaborations toward preventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and developing resilience among Israeli residents. The third: moving back and forth between an \"emergency\" mode and a mode of \"daily routine.\" Once framed and then praised as resilience, fortifying entire communities against post-traumatic symptoms joins esteem for heroism as an emotional and social standard.