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Dan Bar-On and Saliba Sarsar grew up on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Bar-On is professor of psychology at Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev and co-director of PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), in Beit Jala, PNA. Sarsar is associate vice president for academic program initiatives and associate professor of political science at Monmouth University, New Jersey, US.
Palestinians and Israeli Jews are deeply committed to the same tiny piece of land, from which both generate their identities and histories. The conflict has resulted in a total separation between them, and this is expressed through their respective narratives, rituals and myths, which compress the present into the past and mobilize the future. If the 1993 Oslo Accords created the hope that the two peoples were moving out of 100 years of conflict, the current cycle of violence that began in September 2000 has created new depths of despair and frustration. The deeper both peoples descend into the abyss of dehumanization and victimization, the farther they move from the possibility of mutual acceptance, healing and hope.
Each side tries to justify its own moral superiority. Palestinians usually start from the Balfour Declaration in 1917, move through the British Mandate, the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967 (Farsoun and Zacharia, 1997). These events appear as one continuous tragedy in Palestinian minds, and are often blamed on Zionism and its exclusionary ideology (Said, 1980; Masalha, 1992). Palestinians living in Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or in exile, experience Palestine as real and its Jewish usurpers as victimizers. Rashid Khalidi writes, "...Israelis, many of them descended from victims of persecution, pogroms, and concentration camps, have themselves been mistreating another people" (1997:5). There is still a deep-felt wish among many Palestinians that the Jewish State will just "evaporate."
Jews view the return to their ancestral homeland after 2000 years of exile as a miracle. Many consider it a return of "people without land to a land without people." They see the Palestinians as an unexpected and unwelcome interference. They would like to wake up one day, to find the land empty and their memories freed from this "bad dream."
How can one move out...