Identifying with the enemy: learning moderation through emotional connection

My book, Judaism, Education and Social Justice, is coming out in paperback in May. If you like the sound of a challenging, academic, philosophical read about faith, education and progressive politics, this is the book for you. It’s available here with a 20% discount if you pre-order – use code GLR AT5.

Here’s today’s extract. If it whets your appetite, please be in touch (I’d love to discuss!) and share with friends and colleagues.

The ability to identify with a group of not-too-different role models also seems to have been an important aspect of the learning process. Peace educator Tamar* makes this explicit when she reports on a visit she arranged for a group of UK Jewish women to hearings involving teenage Palestinian defendants at an Israeli military court in the West Bank:

With the women there was a lot of ‘as a mother’ and there was an element of imagining what it would be like as a mother for your fifteen-year-old son to be arrested in the middle of the night by someone you don’t know and taken away from you. I think they did identify with that narrative even though these women couldn’t be more different from them.

MP: What do you think that did to them? Tamar: I think it really screwed with them. They found it traumatic because they could imagine it. They were thinking about the idea of your children being taken in the middle of the night, tied up and blindfolded and that you wouldn’t be able to locate them because they are in some police station that you can’t get to and they are not allowed to call you. The terror, there was a sense of ‘I can imagine the terror you would feel as I would feel that same terror’. …

MP: What do you think the impact of that is on the people? Tamar: On our people? I think it is massive because it becomes about being a human being and it takes away … back to the subjectivity/objectivity thing which is you see it for what it is. Whether this kid has thrown a stone or a knife they are still a kid and he will be traumatised for the rest of his childhood as a result of that experience and I wouldn’t want my child to go through that.

Tamar argues that the learning process discussed above tends to draw the participants towards nuanced, moderate political positions. Just as many people who are immersed in what she sees as uncritical, right-wing Zionist positions move to the Left , so too people from the anti-Zionist far Left have developed a more nuanced view of the conflict and a more sympathetic approach to Israel as the result of their learning experiences.

This kind of political education relates to Tamar’s belief in the importance of holding multiple, complex narratives. When asked whether the ability to hold multiple narratives leads to a particular political orientation, she responds,

I don’t know. My hunch, and it’s only a hunch, but it probably leads to a more compassionate way of being in the world. Whether that is compassionate left or compassionate right I’m not sure. I suspect it probably leads to less extremist, absolutist positions.

*All names are pseudonyms.