Full Text

Kuriansky: Terror in the Holy Land: Inside the Anguish of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Reviewed by Simona Sharoni
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 38, no. 9 (Winter 2009), p. 101
Recent Books

Terror in the Holy Land: Inside the Anguish of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Judy Kuriansky. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Contemporary Psychology Series. xvi +261 pages. Index to p. 269. About the series to p. 272. About the editor to p. 274. About the contributors to p. 280. $49.95 cloth.

Few scholars, regardless of their field of expertise, would deny that psychological dimensions play an important role in shaping the dynamics of conflicts and impacting the prospects for their resolution. Attention to the psychological aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is likely to add valuable insights to any analysis. The core problem of Terror in the Holy Land: Inside the Anguish of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, however, lies in the pervasive sentiment, illustrated by the first contributor, that "normalization of relations remains impossible until the endemic culture of hatred is eradicated" (p. 3). The so-called "culture of hatred" is treated as a cause rather than a symptom of the ongoing conflict.

The book's thirty-one chapters are divided into four parts: "Times of Terror: Anguish on Both Sides"; "Psychosocial Issues in the Conflict"; "Women and Children Caught in the Conflict"; and "Therapeutic and Educational Efforts for Understanding, Coping, and Reconciliation." The organization of the book reveals its main pitfalls: the imposition of false symmetry on the communities in conflict ("Anguish on Both Sides" is by far the largest section), and a lack of historical and sociopolitical context to illuminate the psychological analysis. It is impossible to tell from reading this book that the conflict under examination is between the fourth-largest military power in the world (backed by the only world's sole superpower) and an indigenous population that has been colonized, displaced, impoverished, and forced to live under an illegal occupation for more than sixty years. While the authors of most chapters purport to represents both sides, the language and the analysis they employ reflect the dominant framework that has been used to analyze the conflict in the West: that of Palestinian aggression and Jewish victimhood. A case in point is the use of the term "terror." Although the term remains undefined, the book's preoccupation with Palestinian suicide bombers and neglect to include state terrorism in its examination of terror reinforces the view of Palestinians as aggressors.

The task of providing some balance, and of situating the psychological and psychosocial analyses in a broader context, was unfairly left to the handful of Palestinian contributors to the anthology. These contributors contest the book's skewed conceptualization of "terror," for example, examining military incursions and the building of the separation wall as acts of terror, as well as the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the expanding Jewish settlements on Palestinian territories. But only ten chapters in the book were written by Palestinians-and even fewer by Palestinians who have experienced life under occupation.

Despite their paucity, however, these Palestinian-authored chapters make the book worth reading. In one of the book's best chapters, Adel Hamid Afna, the head of the training and research department at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, insists that "although the objective is not to emphasize the tragic situations surrounding Palestinian uprooting from their homeland in 1948 and again in 1967, social and political contexts cannot be separated from mental health" (p. 31). He further insists that "mental health can be seen as inextricably tied to human rights because those who live in oppressive environments are at risk of developing mental ill-health problems" (p. 31). Amal Abusrour's chapter on the effects of conflict and militarization on Palestinian women provides a powerful example to support Afna's argument. She examines, among other troubling effects, the stress induced by the omnipresence of Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank. Abusrour reports that "between 2002 and 2004, more than 61 women gave birth at the checkpoints, leading to widespread anxiety among women that they would not be able to reach the hospital or a midwife in time to deliver" (p. 155). This phenomenon was mentioned in several Amnesty International reports, which stated that "women fear that they might suffer minor complications that might not be an issue under normal circumstances or worse yet, that they might lose their child or their life in delivery" (p. 155).

The book contains several highly problematic contributions. Chapter 2, titled "Girls Interrupted: The Making of Female Palestinian Suicide Bombers," was written by a graduate student who has not been to the region and acknowledges that her analysis is based on published reports from newspapers, magazines, and some academic papers that have not been independently verified. Chapter 4, titled "Raised for Jihad," written by Nonie Darwish, is equally problematic. An Egyptian raised in Gaza who was born Muslim and is now an evangelical Christian, Darwish manages the Web site "Arabs for Israel" and is the author of Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror. Chapter 7, titled "A Bomb on the Bus," was written by Yonah David Bardos, an American student who spent two years studying at Yeshiva Kerem B'Yavneh in Israel, the alma mater of Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir.

The contribution of highly ideological scholars notwithstanding, the book's chief flaw lies in the lack of historical, sociopolitical, and structural modalities into the analysis of psychological processes. The non-Palestinian contributors to the book offer very few tangible strategies to transform the current state of the conflict. In addition to a general chapter on resolving intractable conflicts, written by two scholars with limited expertise in this particular conflict, there are a few examples of dialogue groups and individual acts of compassion and a passing reference to acts of solidarity. The transformative potential of such acts notwithstanding, relying on them as the key strategy for peace-building in Israel and Palestine is not only naïve, it provides tacit approval for the current status quo of unequal power relations and oppressive policies underlying the conflict.