Identity and Violence

Source: Monstera Production / Pexels

At the height of the American counterculture era that had then recently spawned the "summer of love," Woodstock, and other outpourings of alienation from Cold War era normalcy, I joined a group of late teens and early 20-somethings trying to build a community based on physical labor, mutual support, and financial and social equality.

The nucleus of our group arose from friendships formed in American Jewish summer camps and in one of the first American "havurah" communities (a word deriving from the Hebrew for friendship). Through an unusual set of circumstances, our group was offered the opportunity to attempt to build its home on the grounds of a kibbutz located off of what was then the principal road linking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It was "halfway to Jerusalem"—in the phrase soon after used by singer-songwriter Paul Simon—and just a few miles to the west of what had been the Israeli/Jordanian border before the Six Day War.

Our group knew little about the history of the place except that it had been founded as a kibbutz prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, had been the site of a battle with an Arab Legion battalion in which numerous defenders died that year, and that the surviving members had eventually abandoned communal life, leaving its homes and communal buildings for repurposing by the kibbutz movement.

I would love to tell the story of our youthful group's experiences as an American counter-cultural incarnation of the kibbutz model of work and community, a group weighing a potentially permanent stay in Israel during the era in which a coalition of labor-aligned politicians and institutions still dominated that country. We felt free to oppose the establishment of Israeli settlements in occupied territory. We had hopes that the few settlements that had already begun to be planted beyond the Green Line to our east would be abandoned to make peace with Arab neighbors.

But I wrote the above mainly to explain my personal connection to an event that took place there, at my former kibbutz, last week—in the midst, that is, of the latest stage of the long downward spiral of violence in Israel/Palestine. I refer to the memorial for Vivian Silver, a peace activist who arrived at the same kibbutz, Gezer, within a year of my group's disbanding and remained among its core members for sixteen years.

A well-known leader of Arab-Jewish peace efforts for more than three decades, she had left Gezer in 1990 and ended up settling on Kibbutz Be'eri, from which she went missing six weeks ago during the October 7 attack. Since no human remains were discovered in the charred ruins of her home, there were hopes that she had been taken to Gaza as a hostage.

But five weeks later, her sons were notified that she had, after all, been identified among the dead. A memorial was held for her not at Be'eri, still in ruins and off-limits due to the ongoing fighting, but on the grounds I'd often walked at Kibbutz Gezer. Press estimates suggest that at least 1,500 people crowded into the small village, including her two sons, Arab, Jewish, and Bedouin friends from her years of peace activism, and old friends and residents of Gezer itself who "marveled at the sheer size of the crowd, the number of people who came from near and far to say goodbye" (Haaretz, November 16), as my friends and I would undoubtedly have done were we to have seen so many people descend upon our small rural home 50 years ago.

The story of Silver's decades of engagement with the causes of peace and empowerment of women is an extraordinary one, now recounted amply in Wikipedia, Haaretz, and other sources. She launched the kibbutz movement's Department to Advance Gender Equality in 1981, served as executive director of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, worked in her kibbutz to organize job training and other programs to help Gazans and assure fair pay for Gazan construction workers there, co-founded the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation, worked with Gaza residents in cross-cultural projects before the 2007 closure of the Israel-Gaza border, founded a group called Creating peace to foster business connections between Palestinian and Israeli artisans, was a board member of the Jerusalem-based human rights organization B'Tselem, and was involved in the group Alliance for Middle East Peace.

After the 2014 Gaza War, the now-retired grandmother co-founded an interfaith grassroots organization called Women Wage Peace and frequently volunteered with projects to transport Gazan patients to Jerusalem for medical treatment. With such a resume, it becomes less surprising that so many men and women of so many different backgrounds came to her funeral.

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There, Haaretz wrote, a long-time columnist who had been a friend of Silver's chatted with a group on the sidelines of the event. He later said of her: "I've never met anyone who touched so many hearts so deeply. I've never met anyone who inspired so many people to work for peace, for equality, and for Arab-Jewish reconciliation and cooperation."

Unfortunately, Silver and her friends seem to be relatively rare exceptions in a landscape of hardening hatred and demonization. As Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times on November 20, "In a conflict marked by complete incomprehension on both sides, the ability to see each other as human has been lost."

Sadly, this is not at all surprising to those who study social psychology, including behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists. Innumerable studies have shown that providing cues of in-group/out-group distinction as minimal as telling experiment participants that some belong to "the blue group" and others to "the red group," or that some prefer the artist Kandinsky's over the artist Klee whereas others prefer Klee over Kandinsky, is sufficient to elicit behaviors of in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination.

Using the Trust Game, in which two strangers can each earn higher payoffs if one can trust the other to return part of an investment that doubles their potential joint earnings, economists, including myself, with co-authors, repeatedly find evidence of higher trust towards those of one's own ethnicity. Similar results are now being found in studies of political polarization—i.e., liberals are more trusting and hence able to increase payoffs by cooperating with fellow liberals, conservatives with fellow conservatives.

These tendencies are ratcheted up orders of magnitude by a century of competition between members of self-identified ethnic groups that both assert exclusive rights to the same territory and hold deep grievances about how their people have been treated by history. If the Kandinsky vs. Klee experiments were not enough to convince one of the "groupishness" and the tendency towards "othering" in the human species, then consider what has happened to a people who forged their identity around exile, otherness, and sacred texts that told them that they must remember the humanity of the Egyptians who drowned while pursuing them across the Red Sea, that they "must not oppress a foreigner; for you know how it feels to be foreigners, as you were foreigners in Egypt" (Exodus 23:9). Among those of their descendants who chose to return to the land of their ancestors after two millennia of exile culminating in victimhood in the world's worst genocide, remembering the humanity of the other soon has become a dwindling luxury. Their voters have now placed in positions of leadership belligerents who declare that they will "turn Gaza into rubble" (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, October 7), that they "are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" (defense minister Yoav Gallant, October 9), and that "[h]uman animals must be treated as such" (Ghassan Alian, Israeli Army coordinator of government activity in "the territories" and quoted from Bartov, November 10, 2023).

Of course, one can quote countless similar statements from the Hamas side, along with the gleeful words reportedly heard in an eavesdropped phone call by a Hamas fighter on October 7: "Look how many I killed with my own hands. Your son killed Jews. … Mom, your son is a hero." (IDF published audio reported in the Times of Israel, October 25).

While so many have opted for the endless cycle of hatred and violence that these men's words convey, there may be a glimmer of hope in those, often women, whose humanity, empathy, and sense of justice lead them to reject hatred's simplistic and seemingly natural pull. Still, the spiral of mutual animus will probably be impossible to break unless outside parties including the United States and its European allies decide to put equal pressure on both sides of the conflict, assuring that the avowed racists and annihilationists are pushed out of positions of authority in both Israel and Palestine.

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

And we shall all be called as witnesses

Each and everyone

To stand before the eyes of God

And speak what was done.