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.