Why Are Israeli Children Better at Settling Disputes Than Israeli Politicians?

Abstract

One of the most popular metaphors in political communication r esearch is the ‘game’ metaphor (Patterson 1993), whereby similarities are drawn between political practices and practices connected to sports. A related metaphor, probably unique to Israeli political culture,1 and used especially for news coverage of parliamentary debates, is politics as a ‘kindergarten’.2 For Israelis, this metaphor suggests a basic similarity in the behaviour in conflictual situations in the two communities, evoking a derogatory view of the interactions between children. In this chapter we examine conflict-resolution mechanisms in two Israeli Communities of Practice — that of politicians and that of children — against the backdrop of the metaphors of ‘game’ and ‘kindergarten’. We follow Miller (1979) in arguing that such metaphors are essential for making manifest the ‘intelligible structure’ of a political reality. According to Miller, metaphors cannot be verified by direct comparison to reality. However, using ‘metaphorical thinking’ can shed new light on the reality examined. Accordingly, we examine the nature of conflict resolution within two very different Israeli communities and their characteristic activities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.