Abstract
Reconciliation is commonly viewed either as a step toward peace, taken in the aftermath of violent conflict, or as a closing note of the move from war to peace, constituting a definitive feature of a just peace. This article posits an alternative role for reconciliation during times of conflict and suggests that, in certain cases, it may be a necessary first step out of hostilities. We suggest three elements – recognition of asymmetry, determination of victimhood, and, most crucially, a narratively based acknowledgment – to distinguish such peace-less reconciliation from its more conventional counterpart in the context of transitional justice. Using the Israeli-Palestinian ongoing, violent conflict as an illustrative case in point, we investigate these factors at work in current attempts at reconciliation before the cessation of violence and claim that the dearth of such efforts may explain the persistence of that unattenuated enmity. Whether the specific idiosyncrasies of the Israeli-Palestinian story can be generalized to a more comprehensive theory of peace-less reconciliation remains an elusive question.
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Notes
- 1.
The International Journal of Transitional Justice, puts its agenda “to effect social reconstruction in the wake of widespread violence.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, under the entry “Transitional Justice,” makes it even more explicit. It begins with a temporal description, “Once violent conflict between two groups has subsided,” and goes on to define transitional justice as a field which is involved with an “investigation of the aftermath of war.” Most writers on reconciliation and forgiveness or reconciliation as being a mainstay of transitional justice invariably use that coinage – “aftermath of war/conflict” – in any analysis of reconciliation.
- 2.
I do not refer here to the minimalist sense of political reconciliation that Griswold (2007, 193) mentions.
- 3.
See e.g., Griswold (2007, xxv). Long and Brecke (2003) talk of “reconciliation – mutually conciliatory accommodation between former antagonists,” but interestingly, in an earlier working-paper version of their book (Brecke and Long 1998), they had written “reconciliation - returning to peace, harmony, or amicable relations after a conflict.” See also Walker (2006, 384) on restorative justice – rather than reconciliation, but still dealing with “re” – as not “assuming a morally adequate status quo ante.”
- 4.
This personalized nature of reconciliation does not preclude its political character. It may be somewhat similar to Alice MacLachlan’s (2013b) elaboration of “political forgiveness,” applying the structure of her type (2), and perhaps then type (3), political forgiveness to political reconciliation.
- 5.
- 6.
More precisely, scholarship on political reconciliation takes one of two directions: (a) the categorization of civil and international reconciliation based on traditional political thought, international relations, and history. See e.g., Long and Brecke (2003), who provide separate treatments of “international war and reconciliation” and “civil war and reconciliation”; (b) the very contemporary and up-to-date discussion which appears to be focusing on reconciliation within societies (e.g., Schaap 2005).
- 7.
Indeed, one of the most common but, to my mind, supremely inadequate explanations for the conflict’s persistence holds that it is extreme, fundamentalist, religious elements on each side to the conflict that are ultimately to blame for its intractability.
- 8.
I continue to name this conflict the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict – merely for convenience of usage, adopting conventionality for ease of reference. In essence it is the Zionist-Palestinian war.
- 9.
It is an oft-remarked truism that at any time in the past 60 years, any 20-year old could report on five wars that she had personally lived through.
- 10.
See Biletzki (2007) for a view of the inanity and insignificance of that specific term, “peace-process.”
- 11.
A political history of the last two decades can discern the deterioration – from the 1993–2000 supposed peace-period of the Oslo accords (which included nary a sign of the elements at issue here) to shorter and shorter periods of “cease-fires,” “truces,” and other fictional attempts at “peace.”
- 12.
See Biletzki (2008).
- 13.
The de facto founding of the state was a domestic decision of local powers that be in the Jewish community in Palestine (under the British Mandate); the international establishment of the new state is legally ambiguous since General Assembly decisions, such as that of the partition of Palestine, are not binding, but de facto recognition (custom) by the international community is, as is the General Assembly’s acceptance of Israel as a member of the U.N.
- 14.
There are interesting complexities here having to do with the option of indirect victimhood. For instance, Van Evera (Memory and the Arab-Israel conflict: time for new narratives, unpublished manuscript, 2003) has written that Palestinians are indirect victims of Christian anti-Semitism, since Zionism was a reaction to and a result of anti-Semitism. The unsurprising vernacular rejoinder has the Palestinians saying “why should we pay for what the Germans did to the Jews?”.
- 15.
See Jacob Schiff (2008) for a compelling connection between narrative and acknowledgment (albeit in the context of structural injustice).
- 16.
This is reminiscent of MacLachlan (2013a) where acknowledgment is called upon to negate the founding myths of a state.
- 17.
See Trudy Govier (2003) for a view of apology as a form of acknowledgment. As explained above, we focus on the cognitive, epistemic essence of acknowledgment, rather than its performativity as evidenced in apology.
- 18.
There are affinities, to be investigated elsewhere, between this view of acknowledgment and Hannah Arendt’s political forgiveness.
- 19.
By “authentic” I do not make a turn here from political reconciliation to the personal reconciliation between (all) individuals of the warring sides. Authentic reconciliation is acknowledgment-bearing.
- 20.
- 21.
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Biletzki, A. (2013). Peace-less Reconciliation. In: MacLachlan, A., Speight, A. (eds) Justice, Responsibility and Reconciliation in the Wake of Conflict. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5201-6_3
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