Participation, Control, and Dominance in Communication Between Groups in Conflict: Analysis of Dialogues Between Jews and Palestinians in Israel

Social Justice Research [sjr] pp295-sore-361403 November 9, 2001 15:42 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Social Justice Research, Vol. 14, No. 2, June 2001 (C© 2001)

Participation, Control, and Dominance inCommunication Between Groups in Conflict:Analysis of Dialogues Between Jewsand Palestinians in Israel

Ifat Maoz1

This study investigates how dominance and control are conveyed in the features ofthe discourse in structured encounters between two groups in conflict. The studyfocuses on a series of encounters between members of the Palestinian minorityand members of the Jewish majority in Israel. These encounters were designedto bring about better understanding between the sides, and were led by two (oneJew and one Palestinian) professional group facilitators. There is a significantlyunequal distribution of resources between Jews and Palestinians in Israel, with theJewish majority having more control over and more access to social, political, andeconomic resources. Based on theories of procedural justice and the role of processcontrol, the present study seeks to examine the extent to which this inequality incontrol and dominance is also manifested in the features of discourse within theencounter. Two indicators are used to identify manifestations of dominance andcontrol within the discourse. The first is based on the gross amount of talk of groupmembers and involves the distribution of conversational turns among participants.The second indicator involves controlling or challenging questions addressed byeach group to members of its own group and to members of the other group.Extracts from transcripts of meetings are analyzed to compare frequencies of turntaking and the distribution of controlling questions among Jewish and Palestinianparticipants.

KEY WORDS: social justice; intergroup dialogue; Jewish–Arab conflict; Israeli–Palestinian conflict;procedural justice; control and dominance; interaction analysis; conversational turns; challengingquestions.

1All correspondence should be addressed to Ifat Maoz, Department of Communications and Journalism,Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem; e-mail: [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION

Dialogue groups or encounter groups have acquired increased recognitionin the past few decades as venues for helping cope with intergroup conflicts ortensions. According to the notion of transformative dialogue (Gergen, 1999a,b),dialogues between groups in conflict can help reduce prejudice and hostility andfoster mutual understanding. Open dialogue is described as promoting tolerance,pluralism, and understanding of others, through expanding the scope of justiceand moral responsibility and extending considerations of fairness to membersof other groups (Gergen, 1999a; Opotow, 2001). Examples of different formsor practices of such dialogue or encounter groups, organized to help cope withliving in a conflict or living in the aftermath of conflict, can be found in NorthernIreland (Arthur, 1999), between Greek and Turkish Cypriots (Saunders, 1999)and of course, in the site on which the present study focuses: the Jewish–Arab orIsraeli–Palestinian conflict.

Encounters or dialogues between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians, andrecently organized dialogues between Israeli Jews and Palestinians from thePalestinian National Authority (Adwan and Bar-On, 2000) are included withinwhat has been labelled with some cynicism “the encounter industry.” Since thebeginning of the 1980s, more than a hundred interventions of planned contactbetween Jews and Palestinians have occurred each year. These range from onetime, single meetings to long term continuous series of meetings, from sharedactivities of preschool children through youth encounters to dialogues betweenuniversity students, university professors, and other professionals (Maoz, 2000).

When used in the context of intergroup conflict, the notion of transformativecontact or dialogue draws heavily from social psychological contact theory. Firstpresented by Gordon Allport (1954) a few decades ago, and since then re-examinedand reconstituted in large volumes of studies (Amir, 1969, 1976; Gaertneret al.,1997; Pettigrew, 1998; Stephan and Stephan, 1984), the theory states that undercertain conditions, contact between groups in conflict can reduce prejudice andchange negative intergroup attitudes.

The conditions required for such effects to occur include institutional support,cooperation, and sustained and personal contact. Perhaps, the most importantcondition required for an effective contact is equal status. That is, there should beequal status between participants in the encounter or dialogue group so that thedialogue will be effective in changing negative intergroupstereotypes and attitudes(Hewstone and Brown, 1986; Patchen, 1995). The following reasoning underliesthis condition.

Often, interventions of transformative contact are conducted between groupsthat are involved in asymmetrical power relations. Such are the planned contactsbetween Whites and African Americans in the United States, Whites and Blacksin South Africa, and the dialogues studied here, between representatives of the


Participation, Control, and Dominance in Communication Between Groups in Conflict 191

Jewish majority and the Palestinian minority in Israel. A planned contact of anasymmetrical nature—where the majority group preserves its dominant position—can help perpetuate existing power relations (Gramsci, 1971) and the stereotypesand prejudice tied to them, instead of acting as a venue for change. Because of this,organizers and researchers of planned encounters often take great care in securingsymmetry within the encounter. This is done in various ways, such as having anequal number of participants from each side, ensuring that they come from similarsocioeconomic and educational backgrounds, and so on (Kelman, 1992; Rouhanaand Korper, 1997).

After employing these basic recruitment or selection measures to securesymmetry, most studies of planned intergroup contacts or encounters go on toinvestigate them by examining pre- and postmeasures of changes in the attitudesand opinions of the participants (for research and reviews of research see Cook,1984; Horenczyk and Bekerman, 1997; Jackson, 1993; Schwarzwaldet al., 1992;Wood and Solteiner, 1996). Several of the studies examine the process itself,i.e., what actually happens in the encounter or dialogue between the groups. (Forexamples of such studies that relate specifically to the Israeli–Palestinian context,see Bar-On, 1999; Bar and Bargal, 1995; Bargal, 1990; Bargal and Bar, 1990; Katzand Kahanov, 1990; Suleiman, 1997). Fewer studies have explicitly examined theextent to which the interaction and the communication within the encounter itselffulfill the condition of symmetry or equality of participation of both parties in thedialogue. My own previous work (Maoz, 1997, 2000) and that of Sonnenscheinet al. (1998), have dealt with power relations in dialogue workshops but havenot systematically defined and examined indicators of such relations. Zupnik(2000) compared interruption styles of Jews and Palestinians in dialogue events,but did not explicitly define this behavior in terms of power relations or powerdifferentials.

The present study aims to fill this gap by employing notions of proceduraljustice and process control (Tyleret al., 1985; Tyler and Smith, 1998) and byexamining indicators of power, dominance, and control in the interaction andcommunication in dialogue encounters between two groups in conflict—Jews andPalestinians in Israel. Theorists of procedural justice argue that a key characteristicshaping peoples’ views about the fairness of procedures is the distribution ofprocess control among disputants (Thibaut and Walker, 1975). The notion ofprocess control refers to the extent to which each disputant has an opportunity tocontrol the communicative process (Thibaut and Walker, 1975; Tyler and Smith,1998), that is, the degree to which those involved in a procedure have a voice andan opportunity to represent their views, concerns, values, and outlook at differentphases of the process (Leventhal, 1980).

The present study employs these notions of process control and proceduraljustice and extends it in two important ways in order to apply it to the specificcontext of organized dialogues between partisans in dispute. First, process control


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is conceptualized here in terms of the opportunity to control the communication orthe dialogue between the different participants in the dispute. This reconceptualizesprocedural justice as more dialogical than it has been previously described bymajor scholars in the field (Tyleret al., 1985; Tyler, 1987). “Having a voice” and“representing ones’ view” are often interpreted in this literature in quite staticterms, that is, whether someone had the opportunity to speak or not (Tyleret al.,1985; Tyler and Smith, 1998). The approachpresented here suggests that what maybe more important as an indicator of procedural justice is not simply that peoplehave the formal opportunity for “voice,” but that they have a genuine opportunityfor participating in dialogue.

Second, most previous research on procedural justice examines peoples’perceptions of procedures in terms of their fairness or the opportunity theprocedures provide for voice, and offers little or no examination of the actualrates of participation, and thenature of that participation, in the procedure.The present research concentrates on actual interaction, employing actual ratesand contents of participation in intergroup dialogue as indicators that conveyto what extent the communicative process can be viewed in accordance withprinciples of social justice and equality. Examining actual interactions andprocedures in terms of socially just distributions of participation and controlshould provide an important addition to existing research, complementing andextending it, as well as perhaps offering an alternative interpretation of it. Thedialogical reconceptualization of procedural justice and process control presentedin the present study seeks to determine the extent to which each of the groupsparticipating in the intergroup dialogues investigated here—the Jewish group andthe Palestinian group—demonstrates participation, dominance, and control of thedialogue process.

This investigation will focus on a specific case study of a Jewish–Palestiniandialogue process—a series of meetings between students of both national groupsthat took place in an Israeli university during most of the 1998/99 academicyear. The dialogue process was conducted within the framework of a course onintercultural communication in conflict. An interaction analysis approach is usedto examine the distribution of power and control in these processes of interculturalcommunication between groups in conflict.

INDICATORS OF DOMINANCE AND CONTROLIN GROUP INTERACTION

Interaction analysis approaches seek to identify and examine those propertiesof group interaction which indicate group members’ higher status, higherdominance, and control of the communicative process. The first, and perhapsthe most widely used, indicator is the relative amount of talking time or numberof talking turns taken by each group member or subgroup. Higher frequencies of



participation are generally assumed to convey more dominance or greater controlof the group process (Bergeret al., 1973).

Other indicators focus on specific acts conveying dominance and control, andare concerned with who has the right to direct, delimit, and define the actions withinthe interpersonal interaction system (Bales, 1970), who will be in a dominantposition in the interaction, and who will be in a submissive position (Ellis, 1982).Acts defined as high on the control dimension include making assertions (Bales,1970; Ellis 1982), giving opinions, making suggestions, taking the initiative inspeaking, addressing communications to the group as a whole rather than toindividuals, suggesting an agenda for the meeting, and giving commands andasking directive or interrogative questions (Bales, 1970).

A similar approach, contrasting powerful and powerless interaction styles,is also utilized in studies concerned with the attributes of speech and languagein group communication (Grobet al., 1997). These studies, often concernedwith gender differences in interaction style, define powerless language as speechmarked by hesitancy and tentativeness (Hosman, 1989), language that oftencontains more polite forms, hedges, hesitations, disclaimers, intensifiers, emptyadjectives, tag questions, and hyper correct grammar than speech defined aspowerful (Lakoff, 1975). Powerful speech is therefore characterized by theabsence of these indicators, as being more assertive, dominant, and certain in itsstyle (Grobet al., 1997).

Based on previous paradigms of interaction analysis and discourse analysisdefining communicative indicators of power and control, and on studies describingpowerful and powerless communication, I chose to use two indicators toexamine the degree of dominance, control, or participation manifested by eachnational group in the Jewish–Palestinian dialogue meetings. The first is the moststraightforward one of the gross amount of talk: the number of talking turns takenby participants belonging to each national group (Bergeret al., 1973; Blum-Kulka,1997). The second indicator involves specific controlling acts and concerns the useof certain types of questions that are defined here aschallengingor examinationquestions.

Questions provide a way in which one person can compel another to speak,to him, and on a topic of his own choosing (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973, pp. 295–297). The most general thing that can be said about questions is that they compel,require, and may even demand a response. As a result, questions often convey astrong message of command, and can be used to control others in the conversation(Goody, 1978). In this vein, typologies presented by various researchers such asBales (1970) in his interaction analysis paradigms, as well as by Esther Goody(1978) and Deborah Tannen (1981) in their studies of cross-cultural patterns ofcommunication, define types of questions that convey an attempt of the questionerto control the questioned in the conversation.Specifically, Tannen (1981)discusses“machine gun questions” that are latched or overlapped onto a previous turn by thespeaker. They occur at a rapid rate and may include a sequence of several questions.


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Goody (1978) suggests the category of “control or interrogation questions.” Theseare questions that test, challenge, control, and, above all, hold the questionedindividuals accountable and responsible for specific acts and decisions. Thepractice of control questioning puts the questioner in a dominant position andthe respondent at a disadvantage.

Drawing from previous discussions of questions as acts of control (Bales,1970; Goody, 1978; Tannen, 1981), and based on primary analysis of materialfrom the intergroup dialogue studied here and from additional such dialogues, Idefined a category of questions conveying an attempt to control or challenge theother—the category ofchallenging questions. These are communicative acts inwhich the questioner explicitly or implicitly presents the respondent with personal,social, or political norms that the former regards as acceptable or desirable, andattempts to determine through questioning the extent to which the questionedmeasures up to this norm in his attitudes, emotions, or behavior.

A prevalent example of this type of challenging questions in the frameworkof Jewish–Palestinian dialogues might be called “loyalty oath” questions. Theseare questions that Jews often address to Palestinians, attempting to examinethe latter’s degree of loyalty to the state of Israel. Such questions often takethe hypothetical form of “if—then:” “if there was a war between Israel and itsneighboring Arab countries, then whose side would you be on?” More detailedexamples of challenging questions and examinations of loyalty are included in thefindings’ section of the present study.

In operational terms, then, the second indicator of dominance and controlin the present study was defined as the relative number of challenging questionspresented by each national group to members of their own group (intranationalquestions) or to members of the other group (cross-national questions).

HYPOTHESES

Since this is an exploratory study, no unidirectional hypotheses wereadvanced. Rather, the intention was to examine the validity of various plausibleoptions concerning the distribution of power, control, and participation amongJews and Palestinians in dialogue meetings.

There are three plausible patterns of Jewish–Palestinian distribution ofparticipation:

(1A) The planned dialogue or contact will succeed in creating symmetry inthe interaction process. Therefore Jewish and Palestinian participantswill show equal rates of participation and control.

(1B) The dialogue will actually replicate the external reality of Jewishhegemony or dominance (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Gramci,1971). Therefore, an asymmetry in the direction of greater Jewishparticipation and control of the discourse will be found.



(1C) The dialogue will give place to what Moscovici (1985) describesas minority influence. According to this theory, certain situations ofmajority–minority interactions, especially those where a dispute orconflict between the groups is discussed, elicit processes of dominanceand influence by the minority group over the majority (e.g., Mugnyand Perez, 1991). Therefore, an asymmetry in participation and controlwill be found in the direction of greater Palestinian participation andcontrol.

The present study examines the overall participation and control of eachgroup. However, since this study concerns a dialogue process involving a series ofintergroup meetings, it will also examine changes in the distribution of turns andof controlling or challenging questions between different meetings. This will bedone in order to examine whether the process of development or change occursover time between the first dialogue meeting and those that follow.

DESCRIPTION OF CASE

This study is based on a continuous process of dialogue meetings ofJewish Israeli and Palestinian Israeli students held between December 1998and May 1999. This dialogue process was conducted in the framework of agraduate course on intercultural communication in conflict, taught by the authorin the Communication Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Thedialogue group consisted of seven Palestinian (five females and two males) andnine Jewish (six females and three males) graduate students in communication,education, and Middle-East studies. This numerical inequality, in which Jewishparticipants outnumber Palestinian ones, characterizes some of the Jewish–Palestinian encounter groups in Israel. When it occurs, it is often viewedas suggesting a lower motivation among Israeli Palestinians to participate inencounter groups that are seen by some of them as preserving the status quo insteadof acting toward social change and more equality in distribution of resources (seeMaoz 2000, for a further discussion of these issues).

In the present case, the numerical inequality resulted from difficulties inrecruiting Palestinian participants who were willing or able to commit themselvesto attending the weekly dialogue meetings. These recruiting problems mightindicate lower motivation on the part of Palestinians to participate in theseplanned intergroup encounters, as described earlier. However, as the Jewishcoordinator of the course, who did much of the recruitment (with the help ofthe Neve Shalom Staff), these problems might also reflect my own lower accessto potential Palestinian student participants. During the dialogue process itself,the Palestinian and Jewish participants did not express discomfort at this slightnumerical inequality.


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The meetings were held once a week and lasted 90 min each. They were led bytwo professional group leaders (a Jewish female and a Palestinian male), from theSchool of Peace in Neveh Shalom. Neveh Shalom is the only cooperative Jewish–Arab village in Israel. The School of Peace within this village is one of the largestprofessional organizations in Israel that conducts workshops, interventions, andprofessional training of working through conflicts using group processes. Thisschool is run jointly by Israeli Jews and Palestinians and includes a staff thatconsists of an equal number of Jews and Palestinians.

Generally, these meetings consisted of free discussions, with very littleintervention by the facilitators. The discussions focused on participants’experience of the conflict, their national group identity, their intergroup relations,political issues, and power issues. This focus followed a set of principles fordialogue meetings that were presented by the Neveh Shalom School for Peace.Generally, these principles emphasize that the discussions in meetings shouldcenter on group identity and the intergroup level of conflict, and on power relations,rather than on the interpersonal level of creating contacts between participants asindividual human beings.

All in all there were 15 dialogue meetings of the group, 10 of whichwere binational—Jews and Palestinians meeting together and guided by bothfacilitators. The remaining five meetings were uninational—each group meetingby itself, facilitated by a facilitator of its own nationality.

DATA BASE AND METHODOLOGY

The binational meetings were video recorded and transcribed. The presentanalysis is based on the full transcriptions of the first 20 min of four of the recordedbinational meetings. These meetings were sampled at time intervals so they wouldrepresent different stages in the sequence of the dialogue process. Those chosenfor analyses were the 2nd, 7th, 10th, and 15th and last Jewish–Palestinian dialoguemeeting in the series; in what follows, these meetings are designated meetings one,two, three, and four, respectively.

A coding scheme developed by the author was used to identify and categorizethe different types of questions that appeared in the dialogue. Statistical analysiswas used to determine frequencies of turns and questions. The following indicatorswere examined:

(1) Distribution of speaking turns according to speaker nationality andmeeting number.

(2) Distribution of inter- and intranational controlling/challenging questionsaccording to speaker nationality and meeting number.



FINDINGS

Distribution of Speaking Turns

The first indicator used in this study to assess the relative participation orcontrol of each national group in the dialogues was the relative frequency ofspeaking turns taken by each group, in each of the analyzed meetings. Table Ishows the relevant frequencies of turn taking per group by meeting. As specifiedbefore, the meeting numbers were transformed to represent the place of eachmeeting in the sequence of the meetings recorded and analyzed here.

As can be seen from the data presented in this table, generally, over the entireseries of meetings, we find a higher rate of Jewish participation: 64% of the turnswere taken by the Jews, while only 36% of the turns were taken by Palestinianparticipants. However, when we examine changes over time, we see a general trendof reduction of differences in participation between the two national groups, anda move or convergence toward greater symmetry or equality in participation rates.

Distribution of Challenging Questions

The second indicator of control and dominance in the dialogue measuredhere involves the relative frequency of challenging questions presented by eachnational group to members of its own group (intranational) and to members ofthe other group (cross national). Two independent judges used the coding schemedeveloped by the author to identify challenging questions in the dialogue with anagreement of 95%. Questions that were not identified by both judges as challengingquestions (three out of a total of 59 questions) were not included in the populationof challenging questions analyzed in this study.

Table II shows the relevant frequency of cross-national and intranationalquestions per group, per meeting. These data show that, overall, challengingquestions were presented most frequently cross-nationally by Jews to Palestinians.The other cross-national option, Palestinians presenting challenging questions toJews, appeared with much lower frequency.Finally, we see even a lower frequencyof intranational challenging questions, and these involve only Jews presenting

Table I. Amount of Talk: Percentage and Number of Turns

MeetingFour meeting

Nationality 1 2 3 4 average

Jews 84.5% (49) 55% (45) 65% (39) 57.5% (46) 64% (45)Palestinians 15.5% (9) 45% (37) 35% (21) 42.5% (34) 36% (25)

Total 100% (58) 100% (82) 100% (60) 100% (80) 100% (70)


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Table II. Cross- and Intranational Questions: Percentage and Number of Turns

Meeting Four meetingTypes of question 1 2 3 4 average

Jew to Palestinian 50% (4) 70.6% (12) 55.6% (5) 54.5% (12) 58.9% (33)Palestinian to Jew — 29.4% (5) 33.3% (3) 40.9% (9) 36% (17)Jew to Jew 50% (4) — 11.1% (1) 4.5% (1) 10.7% (6)Palestinian to Palestinian — — — — —

Total 100% (8) 100% (17) 100% (9) 100% (22) 100% (56)

questions to Jews; there werenooccurrences of in-group challenging questioningamong the Palestinian participants.

An examination of the temporal development from meeting to meeting showsa process of convergence or increased similarity between Jews and Palestinians inpatterns of cross-national questioning. Specifically, Palestinians seem to adopt thepractice of cross-national questioning that is used exclusively by Jews in the firstmeeting. While Palestinians do not present challenging questions to Jews in thefirst meeting, we see in the second, third, and fourth meeting a gradual increase inthe ratio of challenging questions presented by Palestinians to Jews. Meanwhile theJews seem somewhat to adopt the Palestinian style of no intranational (in-group)challenging questions between the first and the fourth meetings.

Figure 1 clearly displays these two major trends in the challenging questionsdata. First, we see a gradual increase in challenging questions by Palestinian toJew from meeting one to four, and, as a result, a diminishing gap between the twotypes of cross-national questioning. Second, we see a sharp decrease in Jewish in-group challenging questions between the first and last meeting. It is also importantto recall here that the fourth type of challenging questions, that of Palestinian toPalestinian, is not represented in this figure becausenosuch cases occurred.

An interesting way to see these data is in terms of communicative patternsconveying degrees of intergroup and intragroup competitiveness. In these terms,the Jewish participants who address challenging questions both to their Jewishcounterparts and to the Palestinian participants in the first dialogue meeting canbe seen as displaying a high level of competitiveness, both on the intergroupand the in-group level. In contrast, the Palestinians, who did not engage inin-group or intergroup questioning of a challenging nature, can be viewed asdisplaying a low level of competitiveness on both levels. However, during theprocess of the dialogue, the groups change and converge to a more conventionalstyle of communication in conflict and negotiation. This style is characterizedby intergroup competition and in-group cohesiveness on both sides. It seems asthough, in the course of the dialogue process the Palestinians learn from theJews to convey more intergroup competition by addressing more challengingquestions to the Jews. At the same time, it seems as though the Jews learn



Fig. 1. Percentage of cross- and intranational questions.

from the Palestinians to show less in-group competition and more agreementby addressing fewer challenging questions inwards, toward participants of theirown national group.

Challenging Questions in Context

To illustrate the nature of challenging questions that appeared in the dialoguemeetings, and the dynamics that developed around them, I present below twoexamples of such questioning. Example 1 involves excerpts from Meeting 2 (the


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seventh meeting of the Jewish–Palestinian group, about half way through theprocess). It includes a sequence of cross-national challenging questioning andthe responses given to these questions. Most of the challenging questions wereaddressed by Jews to Palestinians, though there were also a few challengingquestions presented by Palestinians to Jews.

This meeting and the topic that occupied large portions of the dialogue in itinvolved a public demonstration in support of and against the authority of the IsraeliSupreme Court that was held on the day before the meeting. This demonstrationinvolved widespread participation by students and university personnel from allover Israel making known their support for the Supreme Court together with alarge number of other, mostly secular, Israelis. On “the other side” was a similarlylarge population of observant—‘charedim’ (ultra-orthodox)—Israeli Jews whodemonstrated against the Supreme Court. The Jewish–Israeli participants in thisdialogue, most of whom attended this demonstration, are trying to find out if thePalestinian participants were there too.

1. Example 1 (Meeting 2 (7); 15 February 1999)

All names have been changed in the interest of privacy. JF – Jewish female; PF – Palestinian Female.01 Dana (JF): Okay, so if we are already talking about gaps in Israeli society [laughs],02 so tell us, I am addressing one of the Arabs of course, if you were yesterday in the03 demonstration and if you were, what did you feel, and if you weren’t what did you04 feel?

05 Dana (JF): [I wanted] to ask if they were there, and if they weren’t, why didn’t they06 go?07 Gila (JF): And if they feel involved in the issue.08 Chaula (PF): Eh, I was not there. Ehm, ‘why?’ is a big question. But I wasn’t in the09 demonstration.10 Dana (JF): You wanted to come?11 Chaula (PF): No.12 Dana (JF): You did not want?13 Chaula (PF): 0 [=Shakes her head].

14 Chaula (PF): Like, you would expect that my answer would be that I wasn’t there?15 Yael (JF): Ehm. . .

16 Chaula (PF): In light of what we talked about?17 Yael (JF): First of all you did not say, you did not talk in first person. You talked18 about people that do eh, not vote. You did not say if you yourself vote or not.19 Chaula (PF): mhm.20 Yael (JF): So I don’t, not necessarily do the connection and say that you21 don’t vote so you don’t go to demonstrations, but the attitude you presented, eh,22 can explain why there are people that would not. . . ,23 that would not come. I am not arriving to conclusions about you.24 Chaula (PF): To this demonstration I did not see any need to come.25 There were lots of people [=laughs]. That is the fact. But no, really me?26 To go to a demonstration? What for?

27 Yael (JF): Okay, but the question is if you really see this dispute on the place of the28 Supreme Court or all this issue of the court system, as something that is29 relevant not only to the dispute on the reform and the conservative [Jews]30 but also to your life, and to. . . and to the place that you see for yourselves.31 this is, I think, a general question.



An examination of this first example shows that most challenging questionswere presented by Jews to Palestinians, challenging them against the norm ofparticipation in the democratic process (by asking about their participation in thedemonstration in support of the Israeli Supreme Court). Dana, a Jewish female,opens the dialogue with such a question, “Did you come to the demonstration?”on Lines 1–4. She repeats her questioning, joined by Gila, another Jewish female,on Lines 5–7, forming together a series of machine gun questions (Tannen, 1981).Dana persists with addressing questions to Palestinians about their participation(or nonparticipation) in the demonstration in a near interrogative style on Lines 10and 12. Yael, another Jewish female, joins this questioning in a long and elaboratequestion she presents in Lines 27–31.

In sum, in these portions of the dialogue three Jewish females question,in a collaborative style, Palestinian participants about their participation inthe demonstration. To a lesser degree, Palestinians also reply with their ownchallenging questions—challenging the Jewish expectation of Palestinian minoritymembers participating or supporting a system in which they are not included asfull and equal participants. These challenging questions are presented by Chaula,a Palestinian female, in Lines 14, 16, and 25–26, and answered by Yael, a Jewishfemale, in Lines 17 and 20–23. The sequence of Palestinian to Jewish challengingquestions evident in example one vividly demonstrates the loyalty oath aspect ofthe dialogue. Chaula, a Palestinian female, is questioned by three Jewish femalesin what seems like a police interrogation of a lone suspect, concerning her loyaltyto the state of Israel as expressed in her willingness to support its democraticprocesses.

Another, perhaps even more blatant demonstration of such loyalty oathquestioning is offered by Example 2, below, derived from the last meeting ofthe Jewish–Palestinian group. Here, Jewish participants question the objectionexpressed by a Palestinian female participant about serving in the Israeli army.

Example 2 (Meeting 4 (15); 24 May 1999)

01 Fida (PF): My objection is a matter of principle it’s mainly a principle (refers to her objection toserve in the Israeli army, I.M.).

02 Ronit (JF): Why? What is the principle?03 Fida (PF): My principle to serve the state?04 Sara (JF): And will it also be in your state? Let’s say that—05 Fida (PF): We were conquered.06 Ronit (JF): But you are part of a state.07 Fida (PF): I am part of a state now, there are facts, but there is an occupation08 here.09 Nimrod (JM): But when I asked you—10 Ronit (JF): And you got the rights that every state gives, like telephone,11 electricity and water.12 Fida (PF): No, there is a principle.13 Ronit (JF): Just a minute, then will you contribute to your community? Volunteer14 in a community center in your village, is this problematic?15 Fida (PF): Disconnect all this from the principle, there is a mental principle


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16 from within.17 Ronit (JF): Yes. . .18 Fida (PF): I cannot serve in a state that it’s so difficult for me to accept what19 It . . . the situation that I am in, because the state did it to me, it is not easy.20 Eli (JM): But in order to change it, you will have to sacrifice something.21 Yael (JF): right.22 Fida (PF): To change what?23 Eli (JM): To change what? You will have to–24 Dana (JF): We will not get anywhere this way.25 Yael (JF): What to change is the state.26 Eli (JM): You will have to trust that if you are promised that you will27 get all your rights, that you will participate in giving all the duties, so you will28 have to trust that, if you don’t trust that you–29 Ronit (JF): No, I am quite listening to what she is saying, that she has a principle30 that she is not at all interested in this state. That is, it is a state that conquered31 her, and in no way is she willing to contribute to it, right? (to Fida) because32 you don’t acknowledge the state as legitimate, this is what you are saying?33 Gila (JF): No, she has her–34 Ronit (JF): Just a minute, I want to hear what she is saying. Is this what you are35 saying (to Fida)?36 Eli (JM): But her argument, her argument. . .

37 Ronit (JF): (to Fida) Why are you not answering?38 Sara (JF): She is not answering.39 Ronit (JF): (to Fida) Just a minute, why are you not answering?

As in Example 1, Example 2 also includes a teaming up by several Jewishparticipants, in questioning Fida—a Palestinian female participant. Though thequestioning at the beginning involves serving in the Israeli army, it becomes cleareras the questioning proceeds (beginning at Line 29), that the real underlying issueis Fida’s loyalty to the state of Israel. The structure of questions presented by theJewish participants to Fida (see especially Ronit’s questions at Lines 29–32 and34–35) seems to be one in which the questioner communicates that there is anappropriate answer, one she believes is normatively correct, but that she suspectsthe respondent does not really agree with it.

In effect, this sequence demonstrates a dynamic in which questioners arecreating a classic double bind for the respondent. If Fida gives the answer whichthe questioners believe is normatively correct (i.e. that she will serve in the armyand thus prove her loyalty to the state of Israel), the questioners might well remainsuspicious, believing that she may be trying to hide something (in this case, herfailure genuinely to acknowledge the state of Israel as legitimate), that she is notsaying what she believes. If, on the other hand, Fida does not give the normativeanswer, the questioners have evidence that confirms their initial suspicions thatshe does not really share the norms they endorse. Either way, Fida will be caughtout. In effect, she is pressed into taking a loyalty oath. Not surprisingly, peopleoften take offense at being asked to take such oaths, as they imply a lack of trustin their loyalty. In such cases, the respondent may feel that the only dignifiedresponse is a refusal to answer. This is in fact the strategy Fida uses in thesequence cited here (see Lines 34–39). Fida’s abstaining from answering canbe understood as a refusal to continue participating in an unjust procedure, in



which she is evidently not accorded neutral, even-handed, and nondiscriminatingtreatment (Tyleret al., 1996).

DISCUSSION

The psychological components of changing beliefs and attitudes, and ofbuilding relationships, have been noted as essential in intergroup reconcilia-tion processes (Lipschutz, 1998; Wilmer,1998). The present study investigatedcommunication patterns in planned dialogue events between Jews and Palestiniansin Israel, events aimed at bringing about the psychological changes involvedin reconciliation. Reconciliation also requires formation of equal opportunityfor different groups in society and often a more socially just distribution ofresources among members of these groups (Lipschutz, 1998; Opotow, 2001;Wilmer, 1998).

One of the major resources in a dialogue situation is participation or speakingin the dialogue. Equal distribution of this resource in an intergroup dialogue canmean that each group gets an equal chance to sound its voice or to control thecommunicative process. Following this line of thought, this study examined theextent to which Jewish–Palestinian dialogues aimed at reconciliation actuallyfulfill the requirements of equal or symmetrical distribution of process controlresources between members of the two groups.

Comparisons between the Palestinian and the Jewish subgroups on bothindices of process control, frequency of speaking turns, and of controllingquestions, yielded interesting results. As could be expected given the Jewishposition as a sociopolitical majority, and consistent with Hypothesis 1B, theoverall data show that Jewish members of the group used a higher proportionof the speaking turns, and asked more cross-national controlling questions, thandid their Palestinian counterparts.

However, a more detailed examination of changes over the course of a seriesof individual meetings yields a general pattern of convergence or accommodation.Between the first meeting of the group and its last, Jews and Palestinians movedtoward greater equality or symmetry, both in number of speaking turns and inthe distribution of controlling questions, though still with some dominance by theJewish participants.

However, these data are open to alternative interpretations that cannot be ruledout at the present state of understanding. Aside from the optimistic conclusion thatthe dialogue actually produced a move toward greater symmetry in participationand process control between the two groups, there are two other perspectives fromwhich the present findings can be viewed.

The cross-cultural communication perspective describes different styles ofJewish and Arab communication and participation in discourse. Studies of Arabconversational styles describe the “Musayara” communicative ethos (Feghali,


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1997; Griefat and Katriel, 1989; Hatim, 1991). This term refers to the importanceof accompanying one’s partner in the conversation. The Musayara style is aimed atpromotion and maintenance of social harmony and is manifested in communicativepatterns that are relatively indirect, rhetorically complex, and concerned with thepreservation of thelistener’sface (Griefat and Katriel, 1989).

In contrast, Katriel (1986) describes the “dugri” (straight talk) style of IsraeliJews which places emphasis on activism and assertiveness and is direct, simple,aggressive, and concerned for thespeaker’sface. Analysis of Jewish–Israeliconversational style further shows that this style is characterized by cooperativeprompting, a fast rate of speech, rapid turn taking, and multiple participation(Blum-Kulka, 1992). In contrast, conversational analysis of Egyptian Arabic showsthat conversational control is characterized by a predominance of one speaker ata time, with longer turn taking in the form of monologues (Hafez, 1991).

In a recent study, Zupnik (2000) found evidence that Palestinians usethe Arab Musrya conversational style (although the same researcher reportsethnographic data suggesting the possibility of erosion in the use of this styleover time, particularly among the younger generations). Hence, it is possiblethat the differences in participation style of Jews and Palestinians found inthis study are due not to power differentials but to cross-cultural differencesin styles of communication. Therefore, what was previously described as a movetoward greater symmetry or equality of Palestinians in the interaction processcan be interpreted differently in terms of cross-cultural communication styles.In these terms the present findings can be seen as reflecting a process in whichthe Palestinians gave up their own less competitive style of communication infavor of accommodating to the more aggressive communicative style of thedominant Jewish culture. Additional research is obviously needed to assessthe validity of this explanation, including more detailed analysis of Jewishand Palestinian communication patterns in dialogues between the two groups.(For a related discussion, see Hubbard’s study of a Palestinian–Jewish dialoguegroup emphasizing the importance of taking cultural differences between theparticipating groups into account when considering status differences in the contactsituation (Hubbard, 1999).)

A second interpretation of the present findings might question the equationof more participation with power or control of the communication process.Several discourse researchers point to the multiple and different meanings ofsilence (Blum-Kulka, 1997; Gal, 1989). Though it might sometimes convey lackof power and control, in some cases silence can also convey an exertion of poweror control (Lakoff, 1990). If we take this idea further, refraining from participationcan also be seen as a device for controlling the dialogue and its outcomes (cf.Cohen, 2001). This device can be highly effective, as indicated by results from arecent study (Bavelaset al., 2000), that demonstrate the importance of momentto moment collaboration between participants in shaping and maintaining face toface dialogue.



Prior research has shown that Israeli Jews and Palestinians differ in theirmotivations for participating in a transformative process intended to reducetensions between the groups. While Jews often support the ideal of findingintergroup commonalties, Palestinians may reject this notion of togetherness(Wethrell and Potter, 1988) as not representing their interests as a discriminatedagainst minority (Maoz, 2000). Against this background, the Palestinianparticipants’ lower rates of participation can be seen as conveying coercive powerthrough refusal (Cohen, 2001; Raven, 1990), refusing to accommodate to thenorms desired by the Jewish majority.

Furthermore, silence might be seen as a reaction to injustice (Cohen, 2001).In these terms the Palestinian silence, or less frequent participation in the dialogue,can be understood as their reaction to the social injustice they perceive ascharacterizing the situation between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. According tothis interpretation, members of the Palestinian minority are conveying a messageto members of the Jewish majority, both on the microlevel of participation in thedialogue and on the macrolevel of political participation. This is a message ofrefusal to participate fully in one domain where the Jews (at least liberal, left-wing Jews) desire and want it (participation in the dialogue or in demonstrationssupporting the democratic system), when in another crucial domain, Palestinianfull participation as equal citizens of the state of Israel, is undesired and thereforeblocked by Jews.

Further research is also obviously needed to assess the validity of thisexplanation. Such research would involve examining dialogue participants’subjective perceptions of what constitutes power for them in the dialogue, andwhich practices they view as conveying dominance and control in communicationbetween the sides.

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Participation, Control, and Dominance in Communication Between Groups in Conflict: Analysis of Dialogues Between Jews and Palestinians in Israel