[Peace-discuss] Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation

[David Green]

Tonight at 7:30 at Hillel, 5th and John, journalist David Makovsky will be speaking on the prospects for peace between Israel and Palestine.
   
  DG
   
  From George Salzman in Oaxaca:
   
  Dennis Fox’s report on a just-concluded conference on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict provides a well-deserved criticism of academic so-called conflict resolution efforts. Fox writes, in his blog, “Some of you may think I have simply adopted the Palestinian perspective, making my account less relevant to peace and reconciliation than the more even-handed assumptions I have criticized. I know self-analysis can be unreliable, but I can only say this: I return to this issue of Israel and Palestine after years of avoidance. As a teenager and young adult I was a Zionist activist, fully conversant with the left-Zionist worldview I taught others and intent on living in Israel myself. During the three decades following my return to the United States , I focused academically and politically on a wide range of other issues related to war and peace, justice and democracy, power and resistance, and the use and abuse of both law and psychology. It is my resulting assessment of what
 justice requires elsewhere in the world that persuades me the Palestinian narrative is more accurate and more compelling than the Israeli.” Fox’s full statement is on his blog at http://blog.dennisfox.net/index.php/archives/2008/03/30/objectivity-and-neutrality-barriers-to-israeli-palestinian-reconciliation/ . His report and comments on the conference are also at http://dennisfox.net./papers/objectivity_israel_palestine.html . It begins,
   
  Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation
   
  Dennis Fox
   
  First International Academic Conference on the 
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace 
   
  New Britain, Connecticut
  Main Point
        Despite this conference's underlying assumptions, it is not likely that academic research and even-handed mediation and negotiation approaches will help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A traditional academic stance promises more than it delivers. Conventional norms highlight approaches adaptable to status quo requirements while relegating to the sidelines scholarship that challenges underlying assumptions. Efforts to extend boundaries are dismissed as impractical or irrelevant.
        So long as academic research, negotiation, and dialogue assume equality of perception and split-the-difference compromise, reconciliation is impossible. Knowing that even-handedness strengthens both Israeli resistance to justice-based reconciliation and Palestinian suspicion that the process is a sham, we should assess the conflict based on universal principles of justice, equality, and human rights. We should facilitate a process that mandates accepting responsibility and making amends for past injustice. And we should encourage the flexibility that we hope will arise on both sides once past wrongs have been acknowledged. The intellectually justifiable stance, in other words, is not to be "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine," or "pro-two-state-solution" or "pro-one-state solution," but "pro-justice."
        The declared goal of this conference is to "highlight the contribution that social scientific and humanistic research and scholarship can bring towards peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians" in order to achieve a "just and equitable solution." That sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, I come here today skeptical that traditional academic research and scholarship will bring a lasting solution that is also just and equitable. Before turning to Israel and Palestine , though, I want to make three brief points about the relevance of academic assumptions and practices to political issues more generally, and then a word about underlying assumptions in conflict resolution.
   
  Academic Assumptions and Practices
   
  First, academic research is not as objective and value-free as traditionally imagined. Even in the hard sciences, our personal, professional, and political biases inevitably come into play, from the choice of theoretical model and framing of research questions to the scramble for funding and selection of methodology to the analysis and presentation of findings and policy recommendations (Rein, 1976). Most significantly, the pose of objectivity and ethical neutrality that often masks personal preferences and institutional inertia favors the powerful at the expense of others. This point may seem obvious to those of you in disciplines where critical approaches have received significant attention, such as sociology (Levine, 2004) and anthropology (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997), law (Kairys, 1998; Unger, 1986), pedagogy (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985; Freire, 1970; Illich, 1971), and maybe even geography (Mitchell, 2000). But in my own field of psychology, which is central to much of
 this conference, endorsement of traditional values, assumptions, and practices remains particularly strong despite abundant activist, feminist, radical, and postmodern critiques (Brown, 1973; Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Fox, Prilleltensky, & Austin, 2009; Martín-Baró, 1994; Sarason, 1981; Tolman, 1994; Wilkinson, 1986).
   
  My second point is this: Despite academic norms, people still care about things. However, mandating the appearance of objectivity masks, and often dampens, the passion that initially drives many academics into contentious fields to begin with. Many of us entered academia because we thought enhancing knowledge would do some good. We often learned in graduate school, though, that impact is not the first priority. In any professional field, advanced training transforms would-be do-gooders into careful professionals who internalize the field's substantive, social, and political limits (Schmidt, 2000). It reshapes initial impulses, teaching us what is legitimate and what is not. It directs young scholars toward easily manageable research projects, often trivial variations of past work more likely to pad the curriculum vita and justify new funding requests than to advance either scientific knowledge or social justice. In the end, our research too often buries relevant values
 and allegiances beneath a deceptive patina of substantive neutrality and emotional distance.
   
  My third point: Academic norms reinforce political timidity. The phrase ending so many reports - "more research needs to be done" - too often implies no question can ever be resolved because, after all, we don't yet have enough data. Ironically, analyses replete with "on the one hand, on the other hand" qualifications bring respect and admiration. We pride ourselves on our cognitive complexity. But if years of investigation and analysis eventually lead to tentative conclusions that favor one side more than the other, we draw accusations that we don't understand the situation's complexity or that we are unforgivably biased. Only confusion is legitimate.
        This emphasis on data rather than conflicting values and imbalance of power leads in conventional rather than system-challenging directions. Ideologically convenient norms favor the status quo while marginalizing more challenging scholarship. Professional status and job demands, policy preferences of granting agencies, external political pressures and commitments, and the hope that policy makers will actually pay attention to our research channel us away from topics and conclusions that might shake things up.
   
        I believe Dennis Fox is well worth reading.
  Sincerely, George   george.salzman at umb.edu 

       
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