Identity and Violence | Psychology Now

At the height of the American counterculture era that experienced then not long ago spawned the “summer months of like,” Woodstock, and other outpourings of alienation from Cold War period normalcy, I joined a team of late teenagers and early 20-somethings seeking to create a community dependent on physical labor, mutual assist, and financial and social equality.

The nucleus of our team arose from friendships fashioned in American Jewish summer season camps and in a single of the first American “havurah” communities (a word deriving from the Hebrew for friendship). As a result of an abnormal set of instances, our group was available the opportunity to endeavor to establish its dwelling on the grounds of a kibbutz situated off of what was then the principal street linking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It was “midway to Jerusalem”—in the phrase soon soon after employed by singer-songwriter Paul Simon—and just a few miles to the west of what experienced been the Israeli/Jordanian border prior to the Six Day War.

Our team understood minimal about the heritage of the position apart from that it had been founded as a kibbutz prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, experienced been the website of a battle with an Arab Legion battalion in which a lot of defenders died that calendar year, and that the surviving associates had finally deserted communal everyday living, leaving the kibbutz’s households and communal structures for repurposing by the kibbutz movement.

I would really like to tell the story of our youthful group’s ordeals as an American counter-cultural incarnation of the kibbutz design of function and neighborhood, a team weighing a probably long-lasting remain in Israel for the duration of the period in which a coalition of labor-aligned politicians and establishments nevertheless dominated that region. We felt free to oppose the establishment of Israeli settlements in occupied territory. We experienced hopes that the handful of settlements that had presently begun to be planted past the Inexperienced Line to our east would be abandoned to make peace with Arab neighbors.

But I wrote the previously mentioned mainly to demonstrate my individual connection to an function that took put there, at my previous kibbutz, past week—in the midst, that is, of the latest phase of the very long downward spiral of violence in Israel/Palestine. I refer to the memorial for Vivian Silver, a peace activist who arrived at the identical kibbutz, Gezer, within just a 12 months of my group’s disbanding and remained among the its main users for sixteen many years.

A properly-identified chief of Arab-Jewish peace initiatives for extra than three decades, she had left Gezer in 1990 and finished up settling on Kibbutz Be’eri, from which she went missing six months back for the duration of the October 7 assault. Due to the fact no human remains were discovered in the charred ruins of her home, there ended up hopes that she experienced been taken to Gaza as a hostage.

But 5 months afterward, her sons had been notified that she had, just after all, been discovered amid the useless. A memorial was held for her not at Be’eri, nevertheless in ruins and off-restrictions due to the ongoing combating, but on the grounds I would generally walked at Kibbutz Gezer. Push estimates suggest that at minimum 1,500 persons crowded into the modest village, which includes her two sons, Arab, Jewish, and Bedouin mates from her decades of peace activism, and old friends and citizens of Gezer by itself who “marveled at the sheer dimension of the crowd, the number of people who arrived from close to and considerably to say goodbye” (Haaretz, November 16), as my close friends and I would certainly have done ended up we to have witnessed so a lot of individuals descend upon our little rural dwelling 50 many years ago.

The story of Silver’s a long time of engagement with the leads to of peace and empowerment of females is an extraordinary 1, now recounted amply in Wikipedia, Haaretz, and other resources. She introduced the kibbutz movement’s Division to Advance Gender Equality in 1981, served as executive director of the Negev Institute for Tactics of Peace and Growth, labored in her kibbutz to manage task coaching and other packages to enable Gazans and guarantee reasonable pay back for Gazan construction staff there, co-founded the Arab-Jewish Middle for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation, worked with Gaza residents in cross-cultural assignments prior to the 2007 closure of the Israel-Gaza border, founded a group termed Creating peace to foster small business connections involving Palestinian and Israeli artisans, was a board member of the Jerusalem-based human legal rights firm B’Tselem, and was included in the team Alliance for Middle East Peace.

Immediately after the 2014 Gaza War, the now-retired grandmother co-founded an interfaith grassroots group named Women Wage Peace and often volunteered with initiatives to transportation Gazan people to Jerusalem for medical treatment. With such a resume, it gets to be much less shocking that so a lot of gentlemen and gals of so quite a few various backgrounds came to her funeral.

There, Haaretz wrote, a extensive-time columnist who experienced been a close friend of Silver’s chatted with a team on the sidelines of the party. He later said of her: “I’ve hardly ever satisfied any individual who touched so a lot of hearts so deeply. I’ve in no way met any one who impressed so several persons to do the job for peace, for equality, and for Arab-Jewish reconciliation and cooperation.”

However, Silver and her good friends seem to be to be fairly exceptional exceptions in a landscape of hardening hatred and demonization. As Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Occasions on November 20, “In a conflict marked by comprehensive incomprehension on the two sides, the potential to see each other as human has been missing.”

Regrettably, this is not at all surprising to all those who research social psychology, such as behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists. Countless scientific tests have proven that cues of in-group/out-team distinction as negligible as telling experiment participants that some belong to “the blue team” and others to “the crimson team” or that one particular belongs to the team of persons who choose the artist Kandinsky’s perform about the operate of the artist Klee. In distinction, customers of an outside the house group favor Klee above Kandinsky, which has been located sufficient to elicit behaviors of in-team favoritism and out-group discrimination.

Utilizing the Trust Video game, in which two strangers can just about every gain bigger payoffs if just one can have faith in the other to return aspect of an expense that doubles their potential joint earnings, economists, including myself, with co-authors, frequently obtain proof of larger have confidence in in direction of these of one’s have ethnicity. Identical outcomes are now currently being found in reports of political polarization—i.e., liberals are a lot more trusting and hence in a position to enhance payoffs by cooperating with fellow liberals and conservatives toward fellow conservatives.

These tendencies are ratcheted up orders of magnitude by a century of competitiveness among associates of self-discovered ethnic teams that both assert exceptional legal rights to the same territory and maintain deep grievances about how their individuals have been addressed by heritage. If the Kandinsky vs. Klee experiments were not ample to convince a person of the “groupishness” and the tendency in direction of “othering” in the human species, then think about how a folks who forged their id about exile, otherness, and sacred texts that informed them that they need to also remember the humanity of the Egyptians who drowned although pursuing them across the Pink Sea. That was continuously urged “Do not oppress a foreigner you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners since you had been foreigners in Egypt” (Exodus 23:9), can now have put in positions of management belligerents who declare that they will “convert Gaza into rubble” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Oct 7), that “[w]e are fighting human animals and we are acting appropriately” (protection minister Yoav Gallant, Oct 9), and that “[h]uman animals need to be taken care of as such” (Ghassan Alian, Israeli Military coordinator of governing administration activity in “the territories” and quoted from Bartov, November 10, 2023).

Of study course, just one can quote innumerable comparable statements from the Hamas aspect, along with the gleeful text reportedly listened to in an eavesdropped cell phone phone by a Hamas fighter on October 7: “Search how many I killed with my very own palms. Your son killed Jews. … Mother, your son is a hero.” (IDF released audio noted in the Moments of Israel, October 25).

Although so many have opted for the unlimited cycle of hatred and violence that these men’s words convey, there stays a glimmer of hope in those, usually women of all ages, whose humanity, empathy, and sense of justice lead them to reject hatred’s simplistic and seemingly pure pull.

The phrase of Paul Simon’s 1975 song Silent Eyes, which I referenced above—”midway to Jerusalem”—is followed by these concluding lines:

And we shall all be known as as witnesses

Every single and everybody

To stand just before the eyes of God

And talk what was performed.