7 - Pursuing Justice

Summary

Chapter 7 is one of three to describe controlled multi-sited ethnographies the author conducted to reverse-path trace the noise that obfuscated the Sesame Street interventions’ effects and impacts. The ethnographies link the children to their specific communities, looking at how glocalization of interstate systemic forces socialized them and how their everyday lives were reshaped by their respective conflict zones, altering their readings of the text—key to understanding their Palestinian, Jewish Israeli, and Arab/Palestinian Israeli cultures-in-the-making. They also shed light on the children’s dialogical critical intra- and cross-cultural mundane conflict zone experiences and perspectives. A detailed layout describes the lives of the Palestinian audience members, residents of the stateless nation village of East Barta’a—how they are perceived by Jewish Israelis seeking security, Arab/Palestinian Israelis seeking equality, and as they see themselves, seeking justice, as an island cut off from the rest of Palestine/the PA by a “wall” and gate to the east and Israel proper to the west. At age 5, they had already become acculturated to their ethnopolitical grouping’s interpretation of conflict zones structures. They symbolically transferred the meaning of “Jew” into an “army of infidels,” preventing them from achieving independence, “correcting” the imbalance they perceived that could not accommodate their interpersonal contact with Israeli soldiers, with Sesame Street’s encoding of civilian and good-natured “Jews.” They normalized the conflict, adopting protest play patterns and explained that the only resolution is “converting Jews to Islam,” eliminating the other party to “the conflict.”