"...the image of an empathetic Israel minus a reckoning with the material colonial situation serves to normalize the Occupation." Excellent commentary on the problems with focusing on empathy as a solution for collective violence - resonates w/ debates in social psychology,🧵1/5

https://twitter.com/JournalGenocide/status/1890395085604356214

Vollhardt & Twali (2016): Critique of social psychological models of reconciliation interventions that focus on emotion regulation in contexts of ongoing violence, including settler colonial violence in Israel/Palestine, ignoring power and structure , 2/5tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Germany's new "Resolution against Antisemitism" is a self-serving joke: full of contradictions, abusing Holocaust memory to legitimize repression, racism, xenophobia, geopolitical interests, undermine Jewish pluralism & harm Jews it claims to serve. 🧵(1/)spiegel.de/politik/deutsc… In addition to legal problems , from a social science perspective there are at least 4 categories of issues with this resolution: its claims, the tools it uses, whom it targets, & thereby the functions it serves -certainly not countering antisemitism (2/28)verfassungsblog.de/who-gets-to-de…

Fascinating essay about Jewish Americans' Oct 7 tourism to Israel and its effects on a particular kind of victimhood - resonating with social psychological research on the topic, which also shows that these perceptions are not inevitable. A 🧵with relevant articles and concepts.

https://twitter.com/JewishCurrents/status/1808512987323388165

The essay discusses the silence during these visits about violence committed close by against Palestinians, related to Wohl & Branscombe's findings that reminders of ingroup victimization reduce guilt & increase justification for ingroup harmdoing: 2/20psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-06…

Central quote in this rich essay: "The belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time."🧵w/ related research

https://twitter.com/LRB/status/1799352590309695786

Without wanting to psychologize the issue, stark differences in 1) perceptions of threat/safety, 2)time, 3) collective memory & moral lessons of historical victimization, 4) inclusive vs exclusive beliefs about suffering help explain the completely opposite responses to Gaza 2/16

Excellent article on the cultural, political, affective & identity work of the IHRA def. of antisemitism that helps make it a tool of repression. Links to social psych analyses of beliefs (eg siege mentality, centrality of victimhood) - that are not inevitable. A few sources in🧵

https://twitter.com/nevegordon/status/1772618963358236876

One crucial psychological idea here is the centrality of the group's victimization to the self or the ingroup's identity. However, this is not true for all - many (including Jewish Americans like in this study) also reject this centrality... (2/8)onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…

The volume I edited on The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood is finally published! Table of contents in the link below and here a long thread with very short summaries of all 20 chapters of the book. (1/22) global.oup.com/academic/produ… Ch.1: In the introduction, I discuss the need to consider the context, power of groups involved, and diversity in experiences of collective victimization as well as how people make sense of it, to avoid a deterministic and simplistic view. (2/22)