The NY Times article entitled ‘A Damaging Distance: For Israelis and Palestinians, Separation is Dehumanizing’ bears relevance to the SRV theme of interpersonal identification (Wolfensberger, A Brief Introduction to Social Role Valorization, 1998, pp. 118-120). Some of the facilitators of identification include positive contact between people, and helping people to experience the world the way another person does.
Some relevant quotes from the article:
• “the deterioration we are witnessing results from something else–the growing human distance between Israelis and Palestinians who once knew each other intimately and are now virtual strangers”
• “During the 1980s and ’90s, tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip worked in Israel. They learned Hebrew and built relations with their Israeli employers. They watched Israeli television … Israelis would venture on weekends into the West Bank, where they would get their cars fixed, shop for vegetables and snack on plates of unparalleled hummus. They attended weddings of their Palestinian employees and their children. Some Israelis and Palestinians even went into business together … Today in Gaza almost no one watches israeli television and the only people who know Hebrew or know any Israelis as human beings are over 40 … Israelis can now go weeks without laying eyes on a Palestinian or ever having to think about one.”