The Role of Humiliation in the Palestinian / Israeli Conflict in Gaza

Abstract

The Israeli / Palestinian conflict is a long complex unedifying story of lost opportunities, fragile truces, dashed expectations and broken agreements. In this paper I offer a social psychological lens to this conflict that complements the IR perspective, and may help to explain its intractable nature. I focus on humiliation and how it helps to define both the Israeli and Palestinian sense of identity. The emotional impact of the current situation in Gaza is discussed, and how this affects recruitment for resistance organisations. The concept of resentment and humiliation being related to enforced changes of status opens up the possibility for social psychologists to study the potential for conflict by examining status dynamics and hierarchies at a group level of analysis. Traditionally, the IR study of conflict, with its realist emphasis on power and interests, downplays the role of the psychology of individuals, their emotions and their social relations. As Scheff (2000) remarks, prestige, honour and morale are often discussed but their link to the collective emotions is never analysed. Harkavy (2000) writing in International Politics also finds it strange that compensatory revenge for national humiliation is, as he puts it, under-studied. He notes that most