Beyond a Collective “Victimhood”

Perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from the East Bank

Abstract

This project explores how proximity in identity to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict affects Jordanian/Palestinian-Jordanian perceptions of collective victimhood. The project therefore employs Collective Victimhood Theory (CVT), or the understanding of victimization’s effects on a victimized group’s collective relations, behaviors, and identity. The project critiques previous research on Collective Victimhood Theory and tendencies to extrapolate and assume victimhood identity beyond applicable populations. The project relies on six interviews of Jordanian and Palestinian-Jordanian individuals living within Jordan’s borders. Through thematic coding and analysis of interview transcripts, the project investigates interviewees’ perceptions of the conflict and collective victimhood. This analysis demonstrated a tendency to determine proximity to Palestinian victimization situationally. However, that act of proximation did not manifest in a collective victimhood mentality but rather in understandings of specific collective grievances that people in Jordan experience. For this reason, this paper argues, a CVT framework seems to accurately describe dynamics related to a victimized group but not always the resultant social narratives, demanding an Appraisal Theory framework to avoid erroneously prescribing communal victimhood narratives to a novel population. As a global audience anxiously follows peace proceedings in the Gaza Strip, any day-after reckoning will have to contend with the broader ramifications to the past years and decades of violence in this conflict, not only in Israel-Palestine but across the region. These Jordanian perspectives therefore begin to reveal the proximate dynamics at play in grappling with protracted grievance throughout the Middle East.