Yael Warshel Talks with Dylan Baun and Tory Brykalski at the Association for Middle East Children and Youth Studies’ Spring Author Series In this interview hosted by the Association for Middle East Children and Youth Studies (AMECYS) in April 2021, the Founding Director of the Children, Media and Conflict Zones Lab at Penn State University and Tory Brykalski discuss Warshel’s (2021) book, Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization, published by Cambridge University Press, the subdiscilpine of peace communication Warshel hopes to advance, and recent developments in Palestine and Israel. DB: Welcome everyone! I hope everyone is safe and healthy! My name is Dylan Baun, and I teach at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and I am the program chair for AMECYS. We really appreciate you all coming today. This is our third installment of the 2021 AMECYS Spring Friday Digital Author Series. We had a great talk last month with Majid Hanoum, who is here, and are delighted to have today Dr. Yael Warshel to talk about her recent book Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. I think most of you are familiar with AMECYS and what we do, but at the beginning of these I like to read the mission statement and just encourage anyone who is listening now or later to think of our association and other things tied to it. The Association of Middle East Children and Youth Studies (AMECYS) is a private, non-profit, international association for scholars with an interest in the study of children and youth in the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporic communities. Through interdisciplinary programs, publications, and services, AMECYS promotes innovative scholarship, facilitates global academic exchange, and enhances public understanding about Middle Eastern children and youth in diverse times and places. TB: It is a pleasure to welcome you to AMECYS’ Digital Author Series. We have with us today Yael Warshel, whose book Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is one of the most comprehensive books that I’ve read that deals both with the question of what it means to study with, for, and by youth and children; and also what it is to be doing work in a time of conflict. Part of what I will be asking about today is the relationship between pedagogy and knowledge production , and how to take different disciplinary approaches towards the ends of peace communication described in this book. Yael Warshel is Assistant Professor and Research Associate of telecommunications at the Bellisario College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University where she is the founding director of the Children, Media, and Conflict Zones Lab. She’s an expert on media and young people in the Middle Eastern and African conflict zones, specializing in this field of peace communication. In this particular book, the field of peace communication refers specifically to Sesame Street, its interventions in Palestine, Israeli, Arab-Israeli audiences, and the specific entanglements between the state and conflict with a comparative frame that can benefit not only scholars of Middle East Children and Youth (and Adults), but scholars of socialization everywhere. The book unfolds over three different modes of analysis. The first part is called “The Encoding and Production of Israeli and Palestinian Seseme Street” and it explores the production of the Sesame Street interventions and how Warshel’s intervention to peace communication on a theoretical and practical level builds on previous literature. The second part is called “Audience Reception of Israeli and Paelstinian Sesame Street” and i explores how children respond to the images they see on screens given the contexts they live within. The third part of the book is ethnographic, and is called “Situating the Reception of Israeli and Palestinian Seseme Street” in, and I love this phrase, the “mundane, intractable, conflict zone practices”. In this section, Warshel zooms out to look at the environments within which children watch Sesame Street. She uses this ethnographic frame to examine how the process of reception and childrens’ responses are shaped. The book concludes with 17 recommendations, each of which provides micro media practices and concrete suggestions on how to take this method of assessment and evaluation forward into practice. I want to begin my questions within this second part, because its methodological approach is one that we can all appreciate and think with -- as producers of text and images that appear to younger others on screens. I want to share three poignant images that Warshel shares in the book. [state minority audience, stateless nation audience, state-bearing audience from Yael Warshel’s book, photographed by Yael Warshel] These images are of how children from three different groups (state-bearing nation, ,stateless nation, and state minority) engage with the interventions proposed by Sesame Street. In the book, Warshel characterizes categorical differences in terms of these groups’ daily practices. She writes that we can see in these images how these children differently “reassert and reconstruct their conflict zone spaces - not only by becoming further coded by them but recoding the spaces themselves.” I love this focus on the micro-practices of children and I’m wondering if you could describe how these “mundane” scenes of children watching TV can teach us about codes, peace, and practices of identity. YW: I’ll begin with those categories you mentioned before I answer this question. So rather than engage in a study that treats each of these “groups” as Paelstinians, Jewish Israelis, and Arab Paelstinian Israelis, I treat my comparative analysis categorically. What I argue is that the most important or salient construction of our identity in the modern world system has to do with the existence of states. We live in a world divided by states, no longer empire, city states, or city leagues, and the intersection between states - namely one’s state based citizenship -- and their ethnopolitical identity. This means that their politicized ethnic identity, and I’m using the academic term, whether that is one’s ethnicity, religion, sect, race, or linguistic identity or some combination thereof, is aligned with one’s citizenship identity, which is basically the result of the modern system that human rights are glocalized. This means that politicized ethnic identities are solely translated through the state. The way our human rights are protected is through this glocalization of us having citizenship from the state. So the merger between one’s citizenship identity and ethnopolitical identity, I argue, is the most important frame or borrowing from psychology schema, through which we as “groups” filter incoming stimuli. These lenses are the most accessible for a human being born into one of those categories to filter information. This also means that if one is born into positionality where being a stateless nation is that lens or filter or grid that is most accessible to them, as a Paelstinian, it is easiest to interpret conflict and the outcome goal associated with it is to define peace as justice. That’s the outcome goal. Or as someone who is born into that category contemporarily spatially of a state bearing nation, as a Jewish Israeli, it is easiest to interpret incoming stimuli through that filter and define peace as security. Security is their outcome goal. And then for someone born into the positionality of a state minority (Arab Palestinian Israelis, or Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel, depending on one’s narrative approach to that “group”), it is easiest to define in one’s daily practices of conflict peace as equality. Equality is their outcome goal. So I set up these categories where I say that when we are thinking about conflict zones or peace communications efforts to assess and evaluate uses of information to build, make, and sustain peace, that from a global comparative standpoint, considering practices and income goals together as a methodology can move us closer to understanding what peace could mean in a place like Israel and Palestine. I’m not just studying these children, in other words. I’m saying here is a methodological template for engaging in comparative analysis around the world to take these categories of stateless nation, state bearing citizen, and stateless minority. With these images, we have representatives of members of each “group” that find themselves situated in one of these three world system categories of practice, or as I call them, “audiences of practices.” Your question -- what does it teach us about codes, peace, and practices of identity -- dips into the ethnography of violence literature, and how everyday violence is normalized. I’m using two bodies of literature to think about conflict: political science and anthropology. Typically, when people think about conflict, there is a focus on the extraordinary moments of conflict: a bomb going of, people out protesting, the visible. In this conflict, people talk about the wall or the fence - in other words, the most visible. The ethnography of violence focuses on the more subtle aspects of violence, and the argument is that what you experience day in and day out is the mainstay of conflict, and it’s those things we don’t pay attention to and how people subtly adapt their lives to everyday violence. The example I like to give the most outside of this conflict, if you have a girl responsible for collecting water for her family . These are cases in sub-Saharan Africa. If the nearest path to where she would collect water is bombed, she has to miss school and walk the long way to water every day. People will pay attention to the moment the bomb goes off, but that’s not the whole story - it’s how her life is being shaped and changed. When I think with the Palestinian children for example, and ask them “tell me what you do everyday”, there are some sort of universal things that we would hear from any child like “I eat, play, go to school.” But then there are some specificities. ” I was looking at the specific village of EB. For these children, the boys would talk about going to play soccer but that they would have to pass through the checkpoint first. The girls will say “Oh well, we aren’t supposed to pass through because we’re not supposed to interact with the army, so we don't leave.” What this tells us is that their everyday lives normalize the status quo. It’s mundane. They talk about it as if it’s normal, even before they come to the Sesame Street screen. The Jewish Israeli children talk about the fact that their playroom is located in an air purified anti- biological warfare bomb shelter. These bomb shelters that were mandated by the Gulf War to be built inside israeli homes, are used as playrooms when there’s no war. They consider it a spare room. I would often interview them in that bomb shelter room, and there's no connection to the idea that it’s there to protect them against long range missile attacks. It’s just a playroom. It’s what they grew up with, not exceptional. For Arab Paelstinian Israeli children, who are always asked, “are you Isareli or Paelstinian?” and there is an approach that they’ve developed that’s against the dyad. One or the other. The lesson for those of us to study children is that question contains and implicit assumption that it’s biologically impossible to be both Palestinian and Isareli at teh same time. It’s not. This is a construct of the conflict. When I would ask these Arab Palestinian Israeli children about their identity, unlike the other two groups, they would become so flustered. They are so tired of facing the socialization in their daily life that demands they be one or the other. These kids get really angry and assert their substrate level identity. “Neither!” they would say. I interviewed children from Oum al-Fakhem and would focus on the Arab Muslim Fakhemawi-ness of their identity. One kid I often think about named Ibrahim normalized what he dealt with every day in this really interesting way. In response to people who insist that you have to be one or the other; that you are either with us or against us, Ibrahim said, “I’m not Isareli, but then I’m Fakhemawi.” His favorite thing about Oum al-Fakhem was eating Bomba, a quintessential “Israeli” national snack. I write in the book that with the same peanut smelling breath from his Bomba that makes him Isaraeli, he says, “I’m not Israeli.” At the same time, he says, “I’m not Palestinian.” But then he and other Arab Palestinian Israeli kids would play what they call the shooting or war game. They would adopt the position of offense like the Palestinian children. The Jewish Isareli students would adopt what they would define as a position of defense. This child would adopt a position of offense to protest the state or state bearing nation. In their play, they replicate the conflict. This game was about playing for equality and protesting the state or state bearing nation. So as they are saying “I’m neither Israeli nor Palestinian,” the fact of the matter -- the facts on the ground -- is that they are being socialized and replicating and normalizing how they’ve been socialized as both. So at the same time they form this third identity, this different population. TB: You write several times this profound statement -- “it would appear that human beings only have to have lived on this earth for five years to be successfully encoded to find such areas of separation and inequality normal.” You repeat this fact a few times: that by five years old, we can assume that children have learned war. My next question is about thinking through knowledge production as it relates to peace communication given this fact. Hearing you talk about the photographs and knowing that we have several children present with us, thinking about what an audience of practice is for us conceptually, I wonder if it’s possible for adults steeped in war to teach about peace. On page 27, you write about accountability, applicable scholarship should determine more broadly how to meaningfully improve the utility of peace communication efforts through evidence based practice, that this is the best solution moving forward particularly because these practices have continued full steam ahead [...] Accountability is a requisite for helping ensure effective practice. I extend its meaning not only argue (1) we need broader measures; but, further, (2) when considering context, we must zoom out critically beyond the scope of a single state as has been the limit to the context and design school to the world system as a whole. So I was wondering if you could speak to us a little bit about accountability and knowledge production, within this framework of peace communication and the en/coding of children’s sense of the social. YW: I will begin with the concept of accountability. I struggled with coming up with a word representing what I’m trying to encourage by fostering this subdiscipline. One easy answer is both empirical assessment evaluation and critical inquiry. The longer answer is important to unpack. The history of these kinds of peace interventions, and the source of my concern, is that there’s little to no research. We have had these kinds of efforts since the 1940s and by and large we don’t know their impact. The one exception is the form of intervention that models the “contact hypothesis”, which people might be familiar with as dialogue groups. I call the Sesame Street intervention mediated contact, because they are trying to mediate contact by putting different groups into contact with each other with a specific theory of how that might help manage conflict. Four schools of thought developed around the contact hypothesis and apply its assumptions to the field of peace communication as a whole. One school is what I call the peacemaker school. This tends to include all the practitioners who think dialogue is the greatest thing ever and that intervening in conflict zones can only help build peace. The idea of assessment or evaluation is rarely there. Even though most of the evidence is associative, practitioners see it as effective. They are practitioners, but the inevitability of war is not questioned. Furthermore, these studies are often not conducted in conflict zones, but in places where there is more equality or equality. As a result, these practitioners tend to focus only on attitude change. They focus on whether an intervention can change individual level attitudes to get people to stop hating each other. Then there’s the structural inequality school, which argues that conflict has nothing to do with individual level prejudices. Rather, conflict is about group level access to resources and perceived access to resources. This school believes that when interventions don’t address resource distribution, they can’t help. Because they can’t help, there’s no reason to assess and evaluate them. Research for this school is a waste of time. The third school is the ethics school, which like the structural inequality schools argues that these interventions are by definition ineffective. They say that Interventions can’t manage conflict because there is no evidence based theory of conflict. They take the argument a bit further than the second school to argue that the persistence of peace communication interventions is therefore unethical. They argue that by asking people to like their enemy and in the ultimate best outcome, become friends with them, while ignoring their structural inequalities, these interventions reinforce the status quo and existing inequality. This school of thought boycotts these interventions. These positions are important unpack, because if we position peace communication in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we’ll see that there are stereotypes even within the literature. Because of the structures of fields, if you engage in these interventions or study them you are believed to be part of the peacemaker school and pro the state-bearing nation (Jewish Israelis). The same idea if you are boycotting these interventions. The stereotype is that if you are a part of or supporting the stateless nation (the Palestinians), you should boycott them. I say this is a mistake. I locate my intervention on accountability within the fourth school of context and design to explain my position. The fourth school says that it is not the interventions that are the problem, but their design and performance. How they’ve historically been practiced is the problem, not the intervention itself. What I mean by that is that historically, most of these interventions have focused on the outcome goal of changing inner group attitudes. They haven’t focused on changing structural inequality. That’s where my work fits. I start the book by describing the different tools we have to manage conflict and how communication is the most cost effective. Especially compared to peace keepers or people who use the military, peace communication is a good cost effective method, ubiquitous, more accessible than other tools, and is something worthy of exploration. And because we have no evidence of outcomes in conflict zones, we have to assess and evaluate them. From the process of evaluation itself -- and this methodology of category making I described above -- we can learn that there is a difference between design practice and how design could be practiced. If we had evidence providing recommendations on how to design them, peace communication could work. I am arguing for two and a half things as it relates to accountability. The first is for empirical evidence. I disagree with the idea of boycotting research because these interventions are going full steam ahead, and are continuing irregardless. I give an analogy from a more dominant subdiscipline in my field of health communication of why we need assessment evaluation. If you grew up in the US under Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No to Drugs campaign, the evaluations of these campaigns found that students exposed were more likely to do drugs than those who weren’t. So when people say that we should boycott the intervention or evaluation process, I don’t buy it. At the same time, people doing the evaluations aren’t being critical. We have to be critical. We can’t just evaluate inner group attitude change. We have to evaluate if and how when specific people are exposed to an intervention their political beliefs surrounding policy and institutions change. The whole book is arguing that we have to incorporate measures for how political beliefs change. The people who are using the contact hypothesis are not experts in conflict management. They assume that individual attitudes are related to conflict causation. The literature on conflict within political science shows that it is not caused by individual level prejudice. It’s all about ressources - not having access, or perceiving not to have access, or benefit for more access beyond equality. What we need to look at is unequal access to resources, perceived access to resources, and incentives/ drives to obtain oil, non-fuel minerals, and illicit drugs. I am saying that we have to incorporate measures for these causes of conflict, which are at the group level. The way we as human beings think about communication and relation to resources is at the group level. The question, ‘do I have access?’ is mediated by the group in a complicated way. I’m interested in how perception plays a role, as well as the ability and desire to go out and protest. We have to incorporate measures that in turn focus on political beliefs in order to change existing structures. In the critical school, I am arguing with one scholar who might have been doing this longer than I have. We both advocate for the use of ethnography, and she says that we can’t measure everything. I disagree. I think we need to come up with creative measures. The problem for me isn’t that we can’t measure everything, but that we choose not to. The greatest example of this is the work Peter Uvan (1998) did about development aid into hte Rwandan genocide. He effectively shows that all the aid interventions pre-genocide inadvertantly aided the genocide. He says that when all these interventions were operating, they couldn’t or didn’t know how to measure access in terms of equality and histories of inequality. They needed to look at whether they were supplying resources to those who already had an incentive to enact revenge. They didn’t know how to pay attention to whom they were distributing resources. We find the same thing in the field of peace education. Peace educators find it commonly that in programs where teachers work in bilingual or conflict zones, they are supposed to be teaching “peace education” which is different than “multicultural education”. They are looking at whether they’re contributing to cooperation across ethnopolitical groups, in their students. What often happens is that when their administrations evaluate them and their work, they aren’t evaluated on how well they taught cooperation, because there isn’t a measure for that yet in education, but according to the reading, arithmetic, and traditional standards of the state curriculum or equivalent measure. It is here, in the moment of evaluation, that we can see that it is possible to measure things we just choose not to. So when we talk about accountability, it is about assessment and evaluation of these choices. People who evaluate without being critical are copping out. They aren’t looking at the actual causation of conflict and what happens when children absorb well intentioned but badly designed peace communication messages. When organizations who run the programs do the assessment and evaluation themselves, often they are only looking for what they know they can achieve. So if they find they didn’t do well in a certain area, they won’t release these results to the public, or they will limit the questions they ask next time. At the same time, I also see boycotting as a cop out. People who are running peace communication interventions desperately need critical scholars to advise them on what the causes of conflict are. “If you’re going to be involved in this,” they need us to say, “these are the measures you need to incorporate.” We will only know if peace communication interventions are effective once we’ve assessed and evaluated them, but we need the evidence first. TB: I love your approach on ‘stereotype’ and the work of communication to ‘unfold” the kinds of assumptions that are built into the different categories with which we work. I’d like to orient my next question towards the specific stereotypes we engage with in our writing and teaching of Middle East Children and Youth Studies. Our explicit mission, as Dylan read, is to advance the study of Middle East Children and Youth. These are other categories constructed in times and spaces of conflict. We are interested in how our work can open up categories within thought and practice of related fields like Middle East Studies and Children and Youth Studies. So thinking with your self reflective critical theory of practice and arguments about the utility of intervention, which I wonder if we can conceptualize not only as a Sesame Street episode but also as a scholarly article, how can we understand the relationship between the author and the identity category. In the point about stereotypes that you made just now, you described a binary: either you are with the state or you’re against it. On the ground, the stereotypes you describe are also really entrenched. One of the most surprising results in your study is of course that most of these audiences of practices don’t recognize the characters in the Sesame Street episode as what they are. You give a recommendation about how Sesame Street could design an episode that could teach children to unfold the stereotypes they have about the other. You write that they could start with the stereotypical character and then show that underneath the stereotypes is a person. I appreciated this as an example of what ethnographic knowledge could do, not only on the ground for children as they're learning to encounter differences on screen, but also as knowledge producers writing texts for younger people. If you could speak about how you developed this approach towards the stereotype and teaching children to unfold stereotypes? YW: As you said, there are three parts to the book, and four parts to the study -- the fourth is recommendations. The first is the production study, the second is the audience study and the third is the ethnographic component explaining why the audience interpreted the program or intervention the way they did. By and large, the Jewish Israeli and Palestinian children didn’t see each other in the series. The Palestinian children steretotyped not just Jewish Israelis but anyone who was Jewish as a member of the army. Their argument was basically that when they’d watch the show, they’d say “I didn't see any armies or soldiers, so no there were no Jews on the show.” So this idea that the program is trying to teach them to have pro-social interaction with the other isn’t what they saw. They saw interactions with the not-other. The Palestinian children are stereotyping Jews as members of an army and the Jewish Israeli children are steretotyping Palestinians as those who commit terrorist attacks. The Palestinian children wouldn’t recognize Hebrew, and would say instead, “oh, they are speaking English”. They might even see the other characters as Paelstinian. Rather than seeing a Palestinian playing with a Jewish Israeli, they saw a Palestinian playing with another Palestinian. Jewish Israeli children, similarly, would define Palesitnians as someone who commits a terrorist act. They would say, “the producers who made this show are Israeli, and Israelis care about us so of course they won’t allow terrorists on the show.” They would say, “duh” as if it was a stupid idea to let terrorists onto the show. “It’s a kids show!” they wouldn’t let a terrorist on it, therefore none of the characters are Palestinian. As you’d expect, they gave really astute answers and aren’t misunderstanding. They had very good arguments derived from their stereotypes. The Arab Palestinian Israeli children tended largely to only see themselves. They were arguing against this question of “are you Israeli or Palestinian?” to say, “everyone is us, screw you! Everyone is Arab, Muslim, Fakhamawe.” But at the same time, they were more nuanced. One of the children defined Jews as a member of the police. This fits the framing of stateless nation, state bearing nation, and stateless minority and their outcome goals. The stateless nation is stereotyping the members of the state bearing nation as members of an army, and the state bearing nation is stereotyping the stateless nation as terrorists. The state minorities are stereotyping the state bearing nation as members of the police. Keep in mind my comparative lens to compare with state minorities in other countries. The Arab Palestinian Israeli children who were more nuanced tended to read the show more commonly as good natured. They saw good natured Jewish Isarelis and Palestinians playing together. They did see that and generalized it. This is a point of the theory of mediated contact and the contact hypothesis. It’s not important if you meet someone from another group and realize that they’re nice and that you like them. What happens is that people don’t generalize that. That person becomes an exception, but the rest of the group is still terrible. They’re horrible, but this one person is an exception. So what we want to see is if their attitudes change so that they learn to generalize to the wider out group. The Arab Palestinian Israeli children did that, and even differentiated between characters. They explained which Jewish Israeli characers and which Palestinian characters they liked and they would generalize that. They were likely to take the good natured encoding in Sesame street and say, “there are some good Jewish Israelis” or “there are some good Palestinians.” That said, the Sesame Street intervention largely failed. It didn’t achieve what it was trying to even at the level of changing inter group attitudes. It didn’t try to change political opinions, which is my critique, but even at the level of attitudes, it largely failed. I measured these children’s political beliefs and outcome goals for the conflict, which kind of policies or change or retainment they’d like to see. What came out is the Palestinian children and Arab Palestinian Israeli children would say “the only way to resolve this conflict is to convert Jews to Islam because only Muslims are peaceful.” The Jewish Israeli children would say “the only way to resolve this conflict is to get rid of Palestinians by imprisoning them, evicting them, or disappearing them.” I argue that in a sense we can see the Palestinian and Arab Palestinian Isareli political belief at its most extreme as advocating a cultural genocide. The Jewish Israeli children at their most extreme are arguing for prison, forced displacement, or politicide. It’s important to keep these beliefs side by side with their attitudes. Whereas the intervention created this utopian vision where peace had already been made, I argue we should depict reality as it is and perceived, first. Sesame Street created two separate Sesame Streets side by side that stood for Israel and Palestine existing next to each other as separate states. In mimicking statehood as streethood for the Palestinians, they didn't actually represent the structural reality. The Palestinian team argued that they wanted to have a separate street. But the show couldn’t represent the fact that the separate street wasn’t a state, it was a subpolitical unit to a state in its structural relations. We have to incorporate structural reality and narrative interpretations of that structural reality within the design of the intervention. Among the 17 recommendations I make at the end of the book, this is two of them. This question about stereotypes shows up in the narratives that kids absorb. The kids didn’t see what the show was trying to show them because it didn’t fit their stereotypes. There was therefore this inherent tension that for both the Palestinian and Arab Palestinian Israeli production teams. They wanted to show their “groups” non stereotypically. They wanted to have white collar laborers to empower their child audience. There were so few popular media representations of Palestinians and Arab Palestinian Israelis that they wanted to use the opportunity to give their audience of practice a more expansive vision of what’s possible for them t obecome. This is a great goal, but I argue that it might not work together with a peace communication intervention. If the other children couldn’t recognize the Palestinian or Arab Palestinian Israeli characters as “other”, the whole point of the contact hypothesis is nullified. It may seem counterintuitive, but this is why I found that it is important to start with their stereotypes. When I would ask Palestinian children, for example, about what someone who is Jewish is, they would draw a soldier for me. There are five color crayon options and I picked them specifically. Each Palestinian child, one after the other, would pick up the green crayon and start coloring it in. Then, they’d say, “it’s not done - this is not a Jew”. They would continue, pick up the brown crayon, and it wasn’t until they merged the brown with the green to make the Israeli military uniforms that they then, really pleased with themselves, held up their drawings to say, “I drew a Jew!” It was the same with the Jewish Israeli children. Most of them, when asked “what is a Palestinian?”, would say “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I would keep pushing them -- “are you sure?” or “you don’t know?” and then they’d say, “Oh you mean a terrorist! Yeah, I know what a terrorist is,” and that’s what they’d draw. One girl drew a person in a mask in response to the question “what is a Palestinian.” Because most people who design edutainment for children don’t design them in conflict zones, there is a tendency to avoid showing conflict, violence, or narratives of it. But if this is what kids draw when asked, we return to the idea of ethnography and the importance of attending to the mundane daily conflict zone life. These are the interpretations children making from their everyday life that they are being socialized into and reproducing. Their political opinion is already developed by the ages of 5-8, which is the age group of the children I interviewed. The Palestinian children define Jewish Israelis as one professional category: members of an army. They aren’t a nation, religious group, or people. Jewish Israeli children also define the Palestinians as one “professional group”: as terrorists. They also aren't a nation, or ethnic group. So you need to start from this fact and literally help them to remove the terrorist uniform, the Isreaeli military uniform, the police uniform episode after episode, so that they can learn to read the characters multi-dimensionally. My recommendation is to start the show or text from the audience or readers’ own stereotypes. Most people are so caught up in non-stereotyptical portrayals. My findings draw on social psychology to show that we need to begin with the stereotypes and critically deconstruct the stereotypes in episode after episode. I specify at the level of media practice to describe how one might sequence that, including the speed at which you might do that and the stories you might want to tell. I want practitioners to create this and use my hypothesis. Then, we need to evaluate it. TB: You write in particular about the value and role of Arab Palestinian Israeli children in this, because they are situated between the binary. This approach that you describe as seeing everyone as “us” is really interesting in the context of what you are talking about in terms of stereotypes. Many of the children you studied are now of voting age. I know that you are particularly concerned about the Israeli elections and ongoing Israeli and Palestinian politics. In the book, you recommend encouraging, empowering, and supporting these particular children - the state minorities - who you describe as the “bicultural intersectional population who are the product of the conflict” to become peacemakers in the making. They are particularly poised to become regional peacemakers because of their more nuanced positionality. Do you see that this nuance plays out at the more formal political or general social level? What’s the role of peace education in that dynamic? In the current Israeli election process, how can what you’re advocating for help manage conflict? YW: There’s a whole part in the book where I talk about states. These children who I’ve been interviewing over the years are now of voting age. They are thinking about what it means in a world divided by states and how to affect the political process. I talk about the definitions of states and have a lot of problems with them, in the sense that they are the evolutionary political unit that houses human beings. They are better than many of the other precursor units and I really hope that we are housed in different political units. I talk about how states are centralized and mutually exclusive. Their rule ends at the border and they are predicated on exclusivist rule. It is inherent in the design of the state that it is meant to be the material expression of the nation, the one state bearing nation. This expression is encoded in the state’s design. Most people are either pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, though there are some people who are pro- both. Regardless, the argument is always “which group should have a right to a state.” There is an inherent problem in living in a world divided by states. This biases the world system against people who have historically been semi-nomadic or would like to be global nomads and live in a world without visas and passports. The problem is that the only way to have human rights is to have a state, and to sedentarize within a single border. People who are historically nomadic, if they want human or citizenship rights, have to sedentarize. One of the things I problematize about the state is the commonsense understanding of ethnopolitical national conflict as contestation over the control of states. I question whether groups should even own space: land, sea, air. We so often skip over this assumption and presume that groups have a right to own space, going down the rabbit hole of nationalism so far that we forget the nation state itself is a contested entity. As far as the existing non-state political institution of Palestine within the Israeli state, I use also the term Palestinian Authority to designate that it is a non-state institution so that we can think about unequal structures and human rights. It is important to me to draw attention to what it means when your citizenship is drawn from a political unit that is not a state. So I start off by thinking about this site that we are arguing and contesting over. For these children, who are no longer children by legal definition, but were more open attitudinally. As the hybrid population, they are a product of both worlds and can mediate both worlds -- linguistically and culturally. What happened when I came back when they were tweens and gave them a survey, is that they were the only ones who said they wanted to live in a binational state. These have the most to gain from a binational state. They are also caught between a rock and a hard place. They are also the most able to be the mediators and entrepreneurs of the two cultural realities they bridge, experientially. I did follow up research with the Arab Palestinian Israelis in 2011. I could see that if there ever was able to be a composite peace crystallizing justice, security, and equality, they would be the ones who will make it. The sad reality is that Jewish Israelis and Palestinians don’t allow them to do it. Most people are readily familiar with individual level prejudices Jewish Israelis have towards Arab Palestinian Israelis and margionalization and discounting of them. But I found this prejudice against Arab Palestinian Israelis in the Palestinian children too. They were also prejudice at the individual level against Arab Palestinian Israelis. “They aren’t Palestinian enough!” They are imagined to be freak biological entities when they are not. Their dyadic identity is constructed. It is worth keeping in mind that at the time of the Oslo Accords, Arab Palestinian Israelis were written out of the problem. For Arab Palestinian Israelis, Oslo is bittersweet because it leaves them under or non-represented. But they speak and understand Arabic and Hebrew and as a result, can mediate between both worlds. I don’t have hope for this conflict until we can get to a point where they are allowed to mediate it. Let me share a picture of my book cover. This is a photo I took of some Arab Palestinian Israeli tweens playing on the street. [Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict cover page, shared by Yael Warshel] They are out playing, normalizing the status quo and doing their thing. They have some snacks in hand and toy guns. This was 2006 and the poster was for the United Arab List. These posters were everywhere. There have been five Israeli elections over the last two years, and in the third one you had the Joint List developed. This United Arab List is the precursor to that. The many “ethnopolitical Arab parties” and one Arab Jewish party united into one list. They managed to get 15 seats of 12.5% of Israeli parliament. The head of this Joint List, Ayman Odeh, once said to the Jewish Israeli leftist parties that if they could “do their part”, the Joint List could get everyone to unite and deliver a voting block. He called on them to incorporate the voices of the Joint List. The problem with coalitional politics is that there is an established norm that Jewish Israel parties do not incorporate Arab Palestinian Israeli parties in coalition. I call this “shooting themselves in the foot”, because by refusing to incorporate Arab Palestinian Israeli parties in coalition, they are effectively refusing their greatest chance at peace, justice, equality, and security. Arab Palestinian Israelis are the greatest asset for peace building. So the fact that the United Arab List was able to unify and get 15 seats is important. But until the other groups recognize and value the presence of state minorities in coalitional politics, peace is not going to happen. When it comes to the youth, we need to encode peacebuilding into childhood education. We can’t just throw the burden o the conflict on Arab Palestinian Israelis and expect them to balance everything. We need to give them the resources for that, and we can begin with schooling and health. The last thing I’ll say about this is that there are states in the world that allow diasporic citizens to vote in their elections. Tunisia allows even diasporic citizens to serve in that state’s parliament. Israel doesn’t allow that. There is obviously all this debate around Jerusalem Palestinain and whether they will be allowed to vote in Palestinian elections. The Oslo accords allowed for that. What if Arab Palesinians Israeli were allowed to vote in Palestinian elections? What if they were allowed to serve in both parliaments? To think conversely, if the Joint List were allowed into the coalition and became able to make an overture from within the Israeli parliament to the upcoming Palestinian elections and the PLO elections, I see possibility. Because I’m a comparativist, I can step back from the region of the Middle East to think about experiences in places like Subsaharan and Northern Africa. This allows me to think about and imagine other options. I study behavior change. That is what these interventions are trying to change - people’s voting or protest behaviors. Within the context of this conflict, I know it sounds crazy to propose that Arab Palestinian Isarelis vote in both states and serve in both parliaments. But until it can happen, we are where we are: a conflict zone.