Bar-Tal: ‘there is no partner’ in the narrative of ‘endless conflict’
The Israeli academic and scholar of “intractable conflicts” talked to AsiaNews about the way the Gaza war is going and its consequences for Israeli society. Talking about peace today is considered a threat. Seventeen-year-olds “don't know what the Green Line is”. The families of the hostages are “the most important voice”.
Milan (AsiaNews) – “For some time now, the word occupation has not been used in Israel when talking about Palestine. Now even peace has become a subversive term in public opinion. We can no longer even envisage that there is someone on the other side with whom to make it,” said a disenchanted Daniel Bar-Tal, professor emeritus of political psychology at Tel Aviv University.
The Israeli scholar is currently in Italy to talk about his book La trappola dei conflitti intrattabili (The trap of intractable conflicts) recently published by Franco Angeli, the Italian edition of Sinking Into the Honey Trap: The Case of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, an in-depth study on how people build exclusive narratives that prevent them from seeing things from the other’s perspective, which is the main obstacle to conflict resolution.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict tops the list. Just this morning, after two months of a fragile ceasefire, the horror of bombings, deaths and rubble is back in Gaza, and so is the anguish of the families of the Israeli hostages that remain in Gaza despite claims by Israeli authorities that they still want to free them.
For Prof Bar-Tal, “Narratives colour reality. It doesn't matter if what they say is true or not. People act on the basis of what they think is true. We are linked to interactions, to stories that constitute reality for us. And if leaders have power, they shape reality, which becomes the one accepted by the people.”
Why can't Israel and Palestine move away from the logic of an endless conflict? “The ethos of conflict has dominated Israel since the Ben Gurion years,” the Israeli academic replies. “It was the unchallenged narrative until the 1970s, when something began to change: Israeli society became more open.
“When Rabin recognised the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, 35 per cent of the country supported the peace process, another 35 per cent were firmly against it, and the rest were in the middle. But everything changed in 2000.
“When a man like Ehud Barak, a Labour Party prime minister, elected as a man of the peace front, went back to that narrative by saying that there is no partner who wants peace in Palestine to justify the failure of the Camp David negotiations, the result was not only physical, but above all psychological.
“About 65 per cent of Israelis do not want to look at those on the other side, forgetting that what we are witnessing is an asymmetrical conflict: Israel has all the levers of the balance of power with the Palestinians firmly in its hands.”
Professor Bar-Tal, who arrived in Israel in 1957 from Poland at the age of 11, together with his mother, whose entire family was killed in the Treblinka extermination camp, was personally engaged in the attempt to build a different narrative.
“In 1994,” he says, “the then Minister Arnon Rubinstein called me to work in the Ministry of Education. He told me: You have to start working on peace education. It was a huge responsibility. For years, we had all learnt that the Palestinians were terrorists, Nazis. Suddenly we had to present something different. We told ourselves that we had to start with short-term changes, and then come up with those that require more time, such as rewriting textbooks.
“We started collecting stories that showed cooperation between Arabs and Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. We began to provide information about the Palestinians and their history. Then in 1995 Rabin was killed, and the following year Netanyahu won the elections. The new Minister of Education told me: It’s over, you're fired.”
Today the climate in schools has completely changed. “My granddaughter goes to kindergarten and is greeted by a map of Israel that goes from the river to the sea,” he says. “You don't need a teacher to tell them; that's the pattern in which our kids grow up. I conducted a survey of 17-year-olds in Israeli high schools. They don't know what the Green Line is, for them it is established that Hebron or the settlements of Samaria are part of Israel.”
But this collective removal pollutes Israel itself. In his book Bar-Tal cites the prophecy of his teacher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a great Jewish public intellectual, who lucidly spoke as early as November 1967 of the harm that would come to Israelis if they took control of the territories inhabited by the Palestinians.
“The occupation penetrates more and more into the State of Israel every day, you have to accept its narrative. To those in power, even if only a small minority offers an alternative narrative in favour of peace, it is something unacceptable. Israel needs soldiers, those who work to propose something else must be stopped. So it is no longer allowed in schools. Laws have been approved by the Ministry of Justice that limit freedom of expression, freedom to demonstrate.
“It's a different kind of occupation. Paradoxically, even the head of Shin-Bet, the internal security services that have always been at the forefront of the repression of Palestinians, has been accused of being a traitor, simply for daring to open an investigation into the relations between some of Netanyahu's close aides and Qatar.”
The only counter narrative is offered by the pain of the families of the hostages who remain in Gaza. “They are the most important voice,” says Bar-Tal. A poll a few days ago found that 70 per cent of Israelis support their cause, and only 20 per cent said that the fight against Hamas comes first.
“Netanyahu does not want to end the war. He would like to extend the first phase of the ceasefire, without entering the second because, as long as the war goes on, he will not have to take responsibility, unlike what Israeli military leaders have done.”
Can the families of the hostages be the start of a different path? “Immediately after the war in 1973, only one person began to demonstrate. Day and night he stood in front of the seat of government. Slowly, people joined him and in 1977 those who had always governed lost the elections. Will it happen again?
“In a year and a half, Israel will go to elections. But the opposition is made up of very different groups. Even if they were to defeat Netanyahu in November 2026, they would still not address the Palestinian issue. Especially with Trump allowing Israel not to do so.”
Is it impossible to get out of the trap of intractable conflicts? “It's very difficult," Bar-Tal replies. “Look at Rwanda, Sri Lanka with the Tamils, Chechnya. These conflicts were resolved militarily with one side prevailing over the other. But are these conflicts really resolved? And what countries have they become?
“The other way is that of those who try to take charge of the problems of those on the other side by offering solutions. It happened in Spain with the Basques, for example. They gave up the armed struggle, but Madrid conceded practically everything they asked for in terms of autonomy. It happened, but it's a rare fact.”
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