DOCSLIB.ORG

Finding Palestine, Finding Ourselves: a Philosophy of Occupation, Narrative, and Peace Sarah Emma Decker Bucknell University, [email protected]

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Finding Palestine, Finding Ourselves: a Philosophy of Occupation, Narrative, and Peace Sarah Emma Decker Bucknell University, Sed021@Bucknell.Edu Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Honors Theses Student Theses 2017 Finding Palestine, Finding Ourselves: a Philosophy of Occupation, Narrative, and Peace Sarah Emma Decker Bucknell University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses Recommended Citation Decker, Sarah Emma, "Finding Palestine, Finding Ourselves: a Philosophy of Occupation, Narrative, and Peace" (2017). Honors Theses. 420. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses/420 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Theses at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FINDING PALESTINE, FINDING OURSELVES A PHILOSOPHY OF OCCUPATION, NARRATIVE, AND PEACE by Sarah E. Decker April 24, 2017 A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of Bucknell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Philosophy Approved by: __________________________________ Adviser: Sheila Lintott __________________________________ Department Chairperson: Sheila Lintott !ii Acknowledgements To my parents and siblings, for listening to me endlessly ramble about the Middle East at the dinner table, for supporting me in everything I do, and for loving me and instilling in me the importance of loving others. To my friends, for showing me the meaning of true friendship and for allowing me to travel in your many worlds. To Mary Sok and Jamie Lott-Jones for teaching me to listen to all voices and for empowering me to use my own voice to stand up for others. To Mama Naihla, Nancy, and Lama, my Jordanian host family, for teaching me what it means to be human. To Saundra Kay Morris, for serving as the Honors Council representative on my defense committee. To Martin and Dena Isleem, for teaching me the language that has changed my life. Walking into your Arabic 101 classroom four years ago, I would have never imagined the impact you would have on my career path, my morals, and my perspectives. The passion and commitment you have for your students is truly inspiring. Your lessons reach far beyond fusha grammar rules and conversational amiyya — you teach what it means to cherish and advocate for others, and to value empathy above all else. ﻟﻦ أﻧﺴﺎﻛﻢ أﺑﺪاً To my advisor, Sheila Lintott, for your limitless insight, remarkable patience, and moving dedication. Thank you for embracing my chronic habit of procrastination and for inspiring me to always dig deeper. You have taught me to see the connections in everything around me and to always learn and listen along the way. And to the world’s upstanders, may you continue to believe the unbelievable and solve the unsolvable, for as Elie Wiesel once said, To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all. !iii Preface I am interested in the Arabic language and Arab people because I was raised to associate Islam with terror and its people with violence. In my own home, although not marred by explicit prejudice, the Middle East was only ever discussed to the extent that it was a “dangerous place that produced great evil.” Like many Americans, my vision of the Arab world was limited, extending from Aladdin's magic carpet only as far as the bold typeface of headlines in The New York Times. It was an incident in high school that initially woke me up. The thing I remember most clearly is his face. While his body was twisting down the staircase of my high school’s English wing, his face was frozen in the reality of what was happening to him. The words of his attackers seemed to bounce around us, “f***ing terrorist!” I leaned back against the white-tiled walls and watched in silence. Thinking back to September 11th, 2001, when I was in the first grade, I remember the alphabet carpet I was sitting on, crisscross apple-sauce, when my mother appeared at the classroom door. She had watched the collapse of the Twin Towers from our porch. My town, just outside New York City, suffered many losses to the attack. Less obvious is how my community further suffered as intense Islamophobia became deeply embedded and frequently expressed within my community. The violence I witnessed on the staircase in high school, while frozen by fear in silence, is just one example. As a first-year student in college, I signed up for my first Arabic class on a whim. While the Arabic alphabet and its delicate script are incredibly beautiful, I soon !iv realized that the root of my infatuation with the language was not just its words, but its people. My professor, Martin Isleem, a scholar from Palestine, spent hours correcting our pronunciation and teaching us unique cultural expressions that illustrated the richness of Arab culture. I remember learning the importance of initially refusing coffee when offered and of engaging in heated debate in an attempt to pay the table’s bill at restaurants. When I decided to study abroad in Madaba, Jordan, although well aware by that time of the prevalence of Islamophobia and the fear/hate of Arabs, the disdainful reactions of my American friends and family shocked me. Who will be teaching you? ISIS? Do you have to wear a burqa? I thought about how learning about the actual cultural practices and traditions of Islam— how the hijab represents freedom to many women, and how the Quran preaches love and acceptance— allowed me to question the assumptions of my childhood. After witnessing the discrimination and hatred endured by the Arab-American community in my own town and at my university, I developed the aspiration to become fluent in the Arabic language and culture and to help dismantle the stereotypes surrounding Arab representation. Fighting Arab discrimination and Islamaphobia, which together shape everything from our presidential campaigns to our foreign policy initiatives, begins by listening to these voices. Learning Arabic taught me many words, but most importantly, it taught me how to listen. This thesis is my philosophical account of how and why listening to others, learning from others, and living with others is so crucial. My aim is to help reduce the !v number and power of dangerous stereotypes and to help foster authentic communication across difference, especially in the context of the Middle East and Western perspectives toward the region. I hope this thesis will do some good. Perhaps it will, as Mohammed says, the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. !vi Contents Introduction: On Solving the Unsolvable…..………………………………………………1 Chapter I: The Philosophy of Peace: Language and Empathy….…………………..………13 1.1 The Wittgensteinian Paradox: The Self Defined by the Other 1.2 Language and Action 1.3 Epistemic Injustice and Our Linguistic Obligations to Others 1.4 Nowhere and Elsewhere 1.5 The Epistemic Process of Empowering Lived Realities Chapter II: Israel and Palestine: A Brief History…..……………………………………..54 Chapter III: The Philosophy of Occupation: Politics and Terror…………………….….…77 3.1 “A Land without a People for a People without a Land” And Other Zionist Myths 3.2 Americanizing Zionism 3.3 A Factual Account of US Support for Israel 3.4 Naming Terrorism 3.5 Alternatives for Americans: The BDS Movement Chapter IV: The Philosophy of Intervention: Human Rights Cynicism and the Narrative Paradigm……………………………………………………………………………………….118 4.1 Human Rights Cynicism and its Theoretical Underpinnings 4.2 Humanitarian Intervention: Terminology, Usage, and Failed Applications 4.3 The Israeli-Palestinian Case Study and The Theory of Dueling Narratives 4.4 The US-Israel Narrative and its Political Implications 4.5 Palestinian Responses: Al-Haq and Hamas 4.6 Selective Humanitarian Intervention: Inconsistency as a Cause of Cynicism 4.7 Looking Ahead: The Theory of Reflective Democracy Chapter V: The Philosophy of Bias: Illusory Living, Breathing Stereotypes………………156 5.1 The Homogenization of Mass Art 5.2 Prejudice, In-group Preference, and Stereotypes 5.3 Implicit Bias: Formation, Implications, & Heterogeneity 5.4 The Relationship between Implicit and Explicit Biases 5.5 Interethnic Friendship 5.6 Media Imagery 5.7 Moral Distancing as a Product of Stereotyping and Naming Practices 5.8 Analytical Applications Toward Arab and Muslim Identities !vii 5.9 Multiculturalism and its Limitations 5.10 Quantitative Survey Analysis Conclusion: Finding Palestine, Finding Ourselves…………………………………………205 !viii List of Figures Figure 1: Loss of Palestinian land from 1946-2010. [Map]. (n.d.). In Jewish Voice for Peace: Chicago. !ix Abstract This thesis is a philosophical study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict employing feminist, epistemological, and social and political philosophy to analyze linguistic processes such as narratives, naming, and stereotype formation. The framework of this thesis is the Wittgensteinian paradox of the self defined by the other, according to which individuals are always dependent upon others not merely for the satisfactions of their needs, but for their very conception of self. Following Wittgenstein, I argue that this essential co-dependency is due to the character of our necessarily shared language conventions. Moreover, I apply this framework in an attempt to better articulate the necessary contours of any possible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Narratives, accounts of a people’s memories and experiences that function to connect the past with the present stand at the intersection of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and prospects for peace. Opposing groups often have contradicting collective narratives about the same events, a phenomenon referred to as “dueling narratives.” Dueling narratives contain and create images that other (as a verb) the opposing side, perpetuating and ingraining an us vs. them mentality. Representations of the other frequently develop into or further support stereotypes and often contribute to the formation of both implicit and explicit biases.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Chomsky and Genocide
    Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal Volume 14 Issue 1 Article 8 5-7-2020 Chomsky and Genocide Adam Jones University of British Columbia Okanagan Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp Recommended Citation Jones, Adam (2020) "Chomsky and Genocide," Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 14: Iss. 1: 76-104. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.14.1.1738 Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol14/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Open Access Journals at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Chomsky and Genocide Adam Jones University of British Columbia Okanagan Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada Introduction Avram Noam Chomsky (1928–) may be the most prominent and significant public intellectual of the post-World War Two period. His contributions to linguistic theory continue to generate debate and controversy. But two generations know him primarily for his political writings, public talks, and other activism, voicing a left-radical, humanist critique of US foreign policy and other subjects. Works such as American Power and the New Mandarins (1969, on Vietnam and US imperialism more generally), The Fateful Triangle: Israel, the US, and the Palestinians (1983), James Peck’s edited The Chomsky Reader (1987), and 1988’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (co-authored with Edward S. Herman) hold a venerated status for leftist/progressive readers.
    [Show full text]
  • Fasold R., Connor-Linton J
    0521847680pre_pi-xvi.qxd 1/11/06 3:32 PM Page i sushil Quark11:Desktop Folder: An Introduction to Language and Linguistics This accessible new textbook is the only introduction to linguistics in which each chapter is written by an expert who teaches courses on that topic, ensuring balanced and uniformly excellent coverage of the full range of modern linguistics. Assuming no prior knowledge, the text offers a clear introduction to the traditional topics of structural linguistics (theories of sound, form, meaning, and language change), and in addition provides full coverage of contextual linguistics, including separate chapters on discourse, dialect variation, language and culture, and the politics of language. There are also up-to-date separate chapters on language and the brain, computational linguistics, writing, child language acquisition, and second language learning. The breadth of the textbook makes it ideal for introductory courses on language and linguistics offered by departments of English, sociology, anthropology, and communications, as well as by linguistics departments. RALPH FASOLD is Professor Emeritus and past Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. He is the author of four books and editor or coeditor of six others. Among them are the textbooks The Sociolinguistics of Society (1984) and The Sociolinguistics of Language (1990). JEFF CONNOR-LINTON is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, where he has been Head of the Applied Linguistics Program and Department
    [Show full text]
  • THE DISINFORMATION, PROPAGANDA, REVISIONISM & CENSORSHIP COLLECTION 2 (10-16) : All the Books They Still Don’T Want You to Read…
    original torrent server account : http://1337x.to/user/ZIZBILIT/ presents THE DISINFORMATION, PROPAGANDA, REVISIONISM & CENSORSHIP COLLECTION 2 (10-16) : all the books they still don’t want you to read… ´¬ THE DISINFORMATION COLLECTION 2 (10-16) THE DISINFORMATION, PROPAGANDA, REVISIONISM & CENSORSHIP COLLECTION edition 2 (10-2016) : all the books they still don’t want you to read about matters as diverse as governmental misinformation & propaganda, inappropriate censorship, atrocious cover- ups and unsolved murders. The contents of this torrent still contains to a large extent the same set of ebooks, audio files and films about how society has been misinformed or has misinformed itself to either carry out atrocities or cover-up atrocious blunders. These include contrasting accounts of various issues such as the Iraq war and the crimes of the Bush family. For those wanting to understand the abuses made by the government, I’ve included theoretical work by authors who I consider essential; but sometimes learning truth is both a revelation and a heavy burden. Chomsky’s frank description of the disturbing relationship between how our governments are more accountable to the extremely wealthy than they are to its majority, is eye-opening but quite depressing. I’ve also included Mike Moore’s work which, although not taken seriously by many because of his ‘in your face’ comic writing style, many of the points he makes are equally (or sometimes more) valid than academics commenting on similar matters (and in contrast to Chomsky’s taxing elocution, they’re fun to read). This collection is dedicated to those people who question political propaganda and make their own decisions about what the truth is.
    [Show full text]
  • Humanitarian Intervention and the Liberal Embrace of War in the Age of Clinton, Bush and Obama 改めて知識人の責任を問う クリントン、 ブッシュ、オバマの時代における人道的介入とリベラル派の戦争承認
    Volume 11 | Issue 24 | Number 1 | Article ID 4132 | Jun 16, 2013 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux: Humanitarian Intervention and the Liberal Embrace of War in the Age of Clinton, Bush and Obama 改めて知識人の責任を問う クリントン、 ブッシュ、オバマの時代における人道的介入とリベラル派の戦争承認 Jeremy Kuzmarov Samantha Power at the United Nations In a New York Times op-ed following the With colleagues such as Nicholas Kristof of the public’s rejection of president Barack Obama’s New York Times and Samantha Power, US call for air strikes on Syria, Michael Ignatieff, a ambassador to the UN and author of the book, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and “A Problem From Hell,” which criticizes the US former leader of the Canadian liberal party, for failing to intervene historically to halt sought to reaffirm the doctrine of humanitarian genocide, Ignatieff has for years been an intervention, stating that while the public had influential liberal intellectual championing become weary over the failure of wars in Iraq, military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Afghanistan and Libya, Western democracies He and his associates in the “cruise missile had a responsibility to protect civilians when left,” as Edward S. Herman labeled them, have they are threatened with mass killing. In his often been more hawkish than neo- view, the use or threat of force may be “illegal conservatives, championing wars in Libya, but legitimate,” and the US sometimes needs to Syria and initially Iraq as well as escalation in “go at it alone to stop atrocity Afghanistan-Pakistan. In their race to “protect,” crimes…..Rebuilding popular democratic they seem oblivious to the mass killing that support for the idea of our duty to protect inevitably accompanies each of these civilians when no one else can or will,” thus interventions.
    [Show full text]
  • Download The
    NATURE / BIRDING Birds of the World Les Beletsky SEPTEMBER 528 pages, 6.8 x 11” 187 colour plates; 1,690 images 0-7748-1358-X / 978-0-7748-1358-7 cloth $55.00 UBC Press This stunning collection of art and text captures the grace, beauty, and flamboyance of the world’s birds. In more than 500 pages, ornithologist Les Beletsky has gathered over 1600 original paintings that reveal the form, posture, and plumage of all the avian families, with featured illustrations of 1307 species. The paintings are from eleven of the world’s leading bird artists, with many being published here for the first time. Beletsky’s detailed, yet eminently readable, descriptions are paired with the vivid images to show the diversity of the world’s approximately 200 bird families. Backyard birdwatchers, avid birders, and professional ornithologists alike will find in these pages everything from the everyday to the exotic, from diminutive hummingbirds to massive ostriches, from Antarctic penguins to tropical parrots. Comprehensive, authoritative, and beautifully illustrated, Birds of the World will amaze and inspire everyone with an interest in this remarkable fauna. Les Beletsky is series editor of the Travelers’ Wildlife Guides and Visiting Scholar at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of Washington. Illustrators include David Nurney, John Sill, Frank Knight, Brian Small, H. Douglas Pratt, John Gale, David Beadle, Diane Pierce, Dan Lane, John O’Neill, and Norman Arlott. The layout and design is being produced by famed designers Scott & Nix, whose clients include David Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds.
    [Show full text]
  • Noam Chomsky’S 90Th Birthday I
    Revolutionary New Ideas Appear Infrequently Essays for Noam Chomsky’s 90th Birthday I (Or Don’t They?) Collected & edited by Michael Schiffmann Tabula Gratulatoria 1. David Adger 2. Nicholas Allott 3. Adriana Belletti 4. Robert Berwick 5. Thomas Bever 6. Manfred Bierwisch 7. Akeel Bilgrami 8. Hagit Borer 9. Zeljko Boskovic 10. John Collins 11. Tecumseh Fitch 12. Robert Freidin 13. Angela Friederici 14. Naoki Fukui 15. Angel Gallego 16. Lila Gleitman 17. Peter Graff 18. Giorgio Graffi 19. Günther Grewendorf 20. Kleanthes K. Grohmann 21. Marc Hauser 22. Norbert Hornstein 23. Riny Huybregts 24. Ray Jackendoff 25. Samuel Jay Keyser 26. Howard Lasnik 27. David Lightfoot 28. James McGilvray 29. Matthias Mahlmann 30. Robert May 31. John Mikhail 32. Shigeru Miyagawa 33. Andrea Moro 34. Andrew Nevins 35. Frederick Newmeyer 36. Dennis Ott 37. Barbara Partee 38. Orin Percus 39. David Pesetsky 40. Jean-Yves Pollock 41. Eric Reuland 42. Luigi Rizzi 43. Ian Roberts 44. Tom Roeper 45. Anna Roussou 46. Michael Schiffmann 47. Neil Smith 48. Wolfgang Sperlich 49. Beverly Stohl 50. Patrick Trettenbrein 51. Juan Uriagereka 52. Deirdre Wilson 53. Dieter Wunderlich 54. Mihoko Zushi Introduction Chomsky at 90 – We’re Here for You, and You for Us by Michael Schiffmann As this project started to kick into high gear a couple of days ago and I sent the first results around to confirmed and po- tential contributors as well as some others, I received an ex- cited phone call by an ex- student who I had cc-d these first essays to: “Man, what are you doing again – this is some really, really crazy stuff!” Having myself gotten into this, I could hardly disagree, and I told Iwo that everything was go- ing well way beyond my expectations, with one excellent con- tribution after another reaching my mailbox day by day.
    [Show full text]
  • Language and Mind, Third Edition
    Language and Mind This is the long-awaited third edition of Chomsky’s outstanding collection of essays on language and mind. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This new edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new pref- ace, bringing Chomsky’s influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1–6 present Chomsky’s early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system (Universal Grammar), through the rules and principles of which we acquire an internalized knowl- edge (I-language). Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the “biolinguistic” approach that has guided Chomsky’s work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind. noam chomsky is Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His many books include New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and On Nature and Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Language and Mind Third Edition Noam Chomsky Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge ,UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridg e.org /9780521858199 © Noam Chomsky 2006 This publication is in copyright.
    [Show full text]
  • Human Nature Working.Indd
    Human Nature Human Nature DAVID BER LINSK I Seattle Discovery Institute Press 2019 Description Conventional wisdom holds that the murder rate has plummeted since the Middle Ages; humankind is growing more peaceful and enlightened; man is shortly to be much improved—better genes, better neural circuits, better biochemistry; and we are approaching a technological singularity that well may usher in utopia. Human Nature eviscerates these and other doctrines of a contemporary nihilism masquerading as science. In this wide-ranging work polymath David Berlinski draws upon history, mathematics, logic, and literature to retrain our gaze on an old truth many are eager to forget: there is and will be about the human condition beauty, nobility, and moments of sublime insight, yes, but also ignorance and depravity. Men are not about to become like gods. Copyright Notice Copyright © 2019 by Discovery Institute. All Rights Reserved. Library Cataloging Data Human Nature by David Berlinski 330 pages, 6 x 9 x 0.7 inches & 1.0 lb, 229 x 152 x 17.5 mm. & 0.445 kg Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951015 ISBN: 978-1-936599-71-4 (Paperback), 978-1-936599-73-8 (Kindle), 978-1-936599-72-1 (EPUB) HIS049000 HISTORY / Essays SCI080000 SCIENCE / Essays SCI075000 SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects SCI027000 SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution Publisher Information Discovery Institute Press, 208 Columbia Street, Seattle, WA 98104 Internet: http://www.discoveryinstitutepress.com/ Published in the United States of America on acid-free paper. First Edition, First Printing, November 2019. Dedication Pour les pompiers de Paris Advance Praise Polymath David Berlinski’s appraisal of a transcendent human nature is really a military history, a discourse on physics and mathematics, a re- view of philosophy and linguistics, and a brilliant indictment of scientific groupthink by an unapologetic intellectual dissident.
    [Show full text]