When Israeli students encounter Palestinian narratives

Encountering the suffering of the others cannot be separated from acknowledging their narratives. Michael Sternberg and Shifra Sagy’s paper on the question of When Israeli Students encounter Palestinian Narratives explores the contribution to reflexive learning about conflict reality, which takes place by meeting narratives of the other in intragroup dialogue. Their paper presents dynamics triggered by dialogue within one national group (in this case, a group of Jewish-Israeli undergraduate students) in the context of a binational conflict. Their study explores the contribution of dialogue to the capacity to relate to ongoing conflict relations from perspectives that go beyond binary and oppositional assumptions and positions (“us” and “them”). The paper shows that intragroup dialogue contributes to a reflexive exploration of participants’ involvement in the conflict through an increased readiness to challenge hegemonic perceptions of conflict reality, i. e., to consider and examine alternatives to existing types of conflict engagement as valuable, and to cope with the challenges of becoming an active bystander towards the abuse of power relations.