This month a new flotilla is scheduled to set sail to Gaza. As will be recalled, in May 2010 a violent confrontation at sea between Israeli naval forces and pro-Palestinian activists led to the death of nine people and many more injured; before a Turkish vessel aiming at breaking the Israeli blockade of Gaza was escorted to a port. As a consequence, relations between Israel and Turkey dramatically soured and Israelis standing in the international community further eroded. Judging by the rhetoric of the parties involved today another collision seems imminent, with more flotillas forthcoming in the future.
As scholars of conflict resolution, we believe that such situations call for constructive adaptation on the part of those involved. To that end we propose the IDF take initiative and create the first ever Conflict Resolution Commando unit.
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For the better part of 2011, I have, due to much self-interest, bugged Roi Ben-Yehuda to write a piece for Unrest. Roi is a colleague and a fantastic writer who even when I firmly disagree with him, still manages to push the boundaries of my own assumptions about the meaning, purpose, and practice of conflict resolution. You can imagine my excitement then when Roi proposed publishing a piece he had co-written with Andrea Bartoli, world-renowned scholar, practitioner, and now Dean of The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. You can also imagine my, shall we call it surprise, when I read the following article on the creation and deployment of conflict resolution commandos (or CRCs). Were they serious? I felt like I had walked in on the middle of a joke and was about to make Unrest the butt of it by publishing a piece that sits uncomfortably between deadly seriousness and total absurdity.
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Judith Bulter’s (2004) Precarious Life, in particular the essay “The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the risk of public critique,” is worthy of reflection in the wake of the flotilla crisis. Throughout the work Butler attempts to illustrate the vulnerability we face as social creatures dependent upon one another for the maintenance of our health and safety. Our fear of violence drives us to place a premium on safety while failing to critically investigate the very causes of violence. Butler focuses in a number of sections on the the anti-intellectualism plaguing the public sphere in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the essay is a response to Lawrence Summers (now Obama’s chief economic advisor) on the ease at which being charged as anti-Semitic can lobbed against those who reject Israel’s use of violence. The comments of Helen Thomas and her subsequent retirement are a not so subtle reminder of the potential costs to a person chooses to vent their frustration over this particular conflict. Thomas’ comments were of little critical or factual value, yet they somehow garnered a more harsh response from the Whitehouse than the actual killing of nine Turkish citizens. While the substance of her statements was surely poor, her frustration with the situation is certainly justified. What are we to do when faced with the continued use state violence perpetrated in the name of freedom and security?
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