INTRODUCTIONgrated ethnic groups, which happen to be mostly Muslim. At the same time, for the first
time in Dutch history a majority culture has emerged, which identifies itself as secular,
liberal, and white. Since the members of this larger group no longer perceive themselves
as a minority with a ‘‘mono-identity’’ (as they would have in the past), they are less
inclined to perceive and respect others as others. Cohen argues further that the process
of democratization and individualization prepared the Dutch poorly for the need to ac-
knowledge—and deal with—‘‘strangers’’ and their ‘‘difference.’’ Mounting international
conflict and tension, as well as a rise in petty crime and hostility in the streets of major
cities, have created a widespread sense of uncertainty and threat. With shared group val-
ues lost, mutual expectations become opaque, and suspicion and the pursuit of mere self-
or minority interests prevail. The result is self-centeredness, retreat from other minority-
majorities, and, almost inevitably, intolerance and radicalization.^168
Cohen focuses on the juridical checks and balances—for example, between the con-
stitutional freedom of expression and its limits—that allow citizens (individually and as
members of a group) to make and defend their claims, to articulate their grievances, and
to seek that justice be done. He concludes that the most important problems are not of a
legal but of a social or societal nature; they concern not matters of politics or policy but
a confrontation of ‘‘styles’’ or ‘‘ways of life,’’ in neighborhoods and on the street. Daily
practices seem more relevant than the appeal—however legitimate, strategic, or appro-
priate—to the judgment of the courts. Not unlike Habermas, Cohen thus warns against
a relentless ‘‘juridification’’ of society as the path to greater equality, integration, and
inclusiveness. Fear, he claims, is ‘‘bad counsel’’ and to avoid (further) ‘‘polarization’’
requires effort—the ‘‘mobilization of positive forces’’—and, especially, time invested by
minorities and majorities alike. Examples of such processes might be the creation of sites
for encounter in the public domain and in the popular media, the moderation of insults,
and the cultivation of more informed perspectives on others and, thereby, on oneself.^169
A different approach to the questions of living together among strangers and of
human rights, in an even more difficult and volatile political and cultural context, is
described by Bettina Prato, who in her contribution analyzes the peace activism of a group
of some ninety Israeli rabbis, Rabbis for Human Rights, founded in 1988 in reaction to
the military repression of the Palestinian Intifadah. Although in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict all sides seem entrenched in unmovable positions founded in two different histor-
ies and perceptions of collective trauma (the Shoah, on the one hand, and theNakbah,
the Arabic term for ‘‘catastrophe,’’ referring to the creation of Israel and the expulsion of
Palestinian inhabitants, on the other), Prato argues that the practical and ad hoc solutions
proposed by this group succeed in negotiating the more abstract and ultimately universal-
ist intent of the general declaration of human rights with the concrete and particular
ethnico-identitarian concerns that govern the every politics of exclusion-inclusion on the
contested ground of Israel/Palestine.^170
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