10 - Lessons Learned and Their Application to Peace Communication Research, (Evidence-Based) Practice and Conflict Intractability Interpretation

Summary

This chapter parses the study’s conclusions: it took only five years for these young stateless nation, state-bearing nation, and state minority audiences to become militarily, politically, economically, and socially encoded by the global interstate system. The children unwittingly replicated the violence of the conflicts surrounding them and expressed political opinions that their partners’ elimination was the sole solution. The glocal, hybrid, open and closed mediated text imagined the achievement of what each audience defined peace to be—justice of an independent Palestine; security of a safe Israel, and equality inside Israel. But it sidestepped the structural and narrative realities of the political conflicts and so could not address and change political beliefs. While communicating peacebuilding, the text did not communicate peacemaking. And even much of its peacebuilding thrust was “lost upon” audience members when they resisted the texts pro-social depictions of friendships between and among Palestinians and Israelis, in particular, between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.