The elephant is in the room: Diversity regimes,liminality and play in a dialog program for Palestinian-Arab * and Jewish students in an Israeli university

Abstract

How do higher education institutions “do” diversity in the context of protracted national conflict? The present study examines a diversity and inclusion program in an Israeli university through a case study of one of the program’s initiatives in practice: a dialog workshop for Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students. Analyzing observational, interview and documentary data, and drawing on the theoretical constructs of liminality and play, we explore the workshop as a liminal space within a de-politicized diversity regime. We contribute to critical diversity literature by exploring the unfolding of inclusion work in the context of protracted national conflict, in which the university’s policy of imposing a strict apolitical agenda resulted in benign commitment to diversity and inclusion, as well as silencing of staff and students who attempted to bring up “off-limits” topics. We also contribute to research on liminality and play in organizational contexts by examining the dialog workshop as a case of a structured and regulated liminal space. In particular, we reveal how leisure time and play, specifically role play and role reversal, serve as “small openings”: outlets for experimentation and reflection within the predetermined confines of the liminal space.

Introduction

This study addresses diversity and inclusion in higher education (HE) in the context of protracted national conflict. To this end, we present an in-depth case study of a diversity and inclusion program in an Israeli university, designed to strengthen ties between Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students and create a space for dialog between students from both groups. The study focuses on the organizational context of the program, and specifically on one activity within the program’s framework: a dialog workshop held in 2019. Using data obtained from participant observation throughout the workshop, in-depth interviews with student-participants and program staff, and content analysis of program documents, we explore the tensions and paradoxes that characterize the program’s work in general, its staff members’ preparations for the workshop, and events that occurred during the workshop. We draw on the theoretical framework of liminality (Turner, 1969, 1982) to explore the workshop as a liminal space, and we specifically build on Ibarra and Obodaru’s (2020) conceptualization of play as a key mechanism for realizing liminality’s creative potential.

The findings suggest that the operations of the diversity and inclusion program, and its capacity to fulfill its role, are substantially limited by the university’s broader policies and value systems. We suggest that these systems constitute a “diversity regime,” a term coined by Thomas (2018) to refer to institutional practices that express “benign” commitment to diversity yet effectively prevent meaningful change from occurring (see further discussion of this concept below). In particular, the university’s diversity regime, operating in the context of the protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, is underpinned by a political work of depoliticization that reinforces and normalizes the status-quo. We show how this political work affected the planning and organization of the dialog workshop. The workshop’s potential to provide a liminal space in which prevailing norms are suspended or renegotiated was limited by staff and students’ shared preference to avoid political discussions. However, we show that even within the controlled liminal space of the workshop there were “small openings” (Powers and Duffy, 2016), opportunities for experimentation and reflection. These openings were provided via two channels: (i) conviviality and socialization in the informal space of leisure time, and (ii) play, and specifically role play and role reversal. We make a threefold contribution. First, we contribute to critical diversity literature by exploring a diversity and inclusion regime in the context of protracted national conflict (Raz Rotem et al., 2021), and the unfolding of inclusion work in real time (Gonzales et al., 2021). Second, we contribute to research on liminality in organizational contexts (Söderlund and Borg, 2018) by examining a case of structured and regulated liminal space, and revealing what is or is not possible within such a space. Finally, we respond to calls to explore play in organizations (Ibarra and Obodaru, 2020; Statler et al., 2009), by studying the implications of play for challenging established social and organizational norms and structures.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. The next section reviews research on critical diversity studies in HE contexts and literature on liminality and play in organization studies. We subsequently present the empirical context, concerning Palestinian-Arab students in Israel. The Methods section provides a detailed description of the workshop setting, as well as an overview of our analytical approach. A discussion of research findings precedes the overall conclusions, which also contain implications for practice and future research.

Theoretical framework

Critical diversity and inclusion studies

Critical approaches to diversity research in management and organization studies uncover how the managerially driven agenda of organizational diversity works to conceal, sustain and reproduce existing inequalities in organizations. Critical diversity studies conceptualize diversity, inclusion, and social identities, in non-essentialist terms, as socially constructed and context-specific processes, and explore the intersection of multiple identities in everyday social practices in work settings (Janssens and Zanoni, 2021; Post et al., 2021; Zanoni et al., 2010).

Current research in the domain of critical diversity is concerned with diversity discourse analysis (e.g. Ahonen et al., 2014), with employee experiences of inequality (e.g. Van Laer and Janssens, 2011), and with the work of diversity practitioners (e.g. Schwabenland and Tomlinson, 2015) in various institutional and organizational contexts. Our research addresses the latter aspect in the specific context of HE, where there has been a growing orientation toward policies and organizational strategies whose stated goal is to promote diversity (e.g. Ahmed, 2006; Brooks, 2020; Petts and Garza, 2021).

In her influential work in the domain of diversity in HE, Ahmed (2006, 2012) asks, “What does diversity do?,” as she draws on interviews with diversity practitioners in universities in Australia and the UK. She argues that diversity can mean potentially anything, and that, consequently, diversity practitioners are engaged in strategic work of mobilizing in different ways with different stakeholders within the university. Ahmed identifies specific strategies that practitioners implement, including switching between the contradictory logics of the business model—which assumes an instrumental rationale for diversity policies—and a social justice framework; working with emotions and with the language of expertise in making diversity appeals; and working within the organizational cultures of specific universities:

In most cases, practitioners seem to work ‘with’ the term diversity, by attaching the term to the other terms that are valued by the universities in which they work. That is, they make diversity appealing by associating the term with the ideal image the university has of itself, that is, what it imagines as its primary mission or its core values as an organisation. (Ahmed, 2006: 242)

Indeed, multiple studies acknowledge the conceptual ambiguity associated with the term “diversity” in HE institutional policies. For example, Petts and Garza (2021) examined definitions of racial diversity in US universities, focusing on two widespread applications of racial diversity: as a benefit for all and as a status marker. They showed how both conceptualizations of racial diversity rely on the idea of interest convergence (i.e. benefit for all, including dominant groups), and can be reframed and understood in ways that work to prioritize White interests over the interests of racially minoritized students.

In a study about UK universities’ diversity policies, Deem and Morley (2006) identify a shift from redistributional notions of inequality toward what they term a “recognitional concept of equality” that emphasizes recognition, tolerance and celebration of student and staff diversity. The authors argue that—coupled with the increasing emphasis on management, competition and audit culture in HE—recognitional approaches may produce a depoliticized diversity agenda, one that avoids discussing or addressing societal inequalities.

Scholars focusing on other national contexts have similarly argued that universities’ diversity policies are built on essentialized and neutralized notions of identities and differences, and ultimately reproduce inequalities. For example, Matus and Infante (2011) analyzed discourses of “diversity” in colleges of education in Chile, and showed how universities adopt a market-driven rationale for multiculturalism, advanced by inter-governmental institutions such as UNESCO or the World Bank. The resulting neutral and simplified discourses of diversity serve to reproduce value-free meanings about differences. Abu-Rabia-Queder (2022) points to the paradox that characterizes policies designed to promote diversity. Exploring the experience of Ethiopian Jewish students in Israeli university campuses, the author shows how the academic establishment enacts a “politics of rescue” that offers extensive full-funding scholarships and at the same time stigmatizes recipients and reproduces essentialized representation of Ethiopian immigrants as inferior, passive victims in need of rescue.

Berrey (2011) examined the University of Michigan between 1965 and 2005, and showed how university leaders adopted a “racial orthodoxy” in response to changing demographics of the student body, legal and political constraints, and the competitive market of college admissions. This racial orthodoxy consisted of a discourse and programs that rationalized “diversity” on utilitarian grounds and constructed race as a cultural identity. The authors showed that, in some cases, this racial orthodoxy advanced the goal of diversity and inclusion, but that it also had shortcomings of trivializing inclusion, downplaying problems of racial inequality, and obscuring mechanisms of resource allocation for racial inclusion.

The work of Thomas (2018) further explores how universities’ commitments to diversity often fall short in practice. As mentioned briefly above, the author builds upon Acker’s (2006) work on inequality regimes and introduces the concept of a “diversity regime” to refer to “a set of meanings and practices that institutionalizes a benign commitment to diversity, and in doing so obscures, entrenches, and even intensifies existing racial inequality by failing to make fundamental changes in how power, resources, and opportunities are distributed” (Thomas, 2018: 141). In a case study of a flagship public university in the US, the author identifies three key components of the university’s diversity regime: condensation, which disassociates diversity from race-consciousness; decentralization, which refers to the absence of institutional oversight over diversity activities; and staging difference, which centers on strategic deployment of people of color, which gives the impression of transformative change. In the current study we explore a “diversity regime” in an Israeli university, and its manifestation through a case study of a Palestinian-Jewish dialog workshop.

Liminality, liminal space and play

The concept of liminality (from the Latin word limen, threshold) was introduced by anthropologist Van Gennep (1909) in his work on rites of passage, and was used to refer to a transition from one social state to another. Turner (1969, 1974, 1986) extended the concept, defining liminality as “in between” time and space, a state of being in between statuses or social categories. Turner suggested that in such states, individuals can experience “communitas” with others, a social bond that transcends status differences. He further noted that liminal occasions provide:

[. . .] suspensions of quotidian reality, occupying privileged spaces where people are allowed to think about how they think, about the terms in which they conduct their thinking, or to feel about how they feel in daily life. (Turner, 1986: 102)

In their review of research on liminality in organization studies, Söderlund and Borg (2018) identified three main conceptualizations of liminality: liminality as process, addressing either individual or organizational change; liminality as position, relating to the liminal nature of certain individual and organizational positions and roles; and liminality as place, studies that focus on the spatial dimensions of liminality. The current study relates to the literature that explores liminal spaces, characterized by “anti-structure,” in which traditional norms and structures are suspended (Turner, 1974). In these spaces, established routine and everyday activities can be reconsidered and renegotiated, and individuals are able to transcend organizational constraints (Söderlund and Borg, 2018). Recent work has highlighted the role of liminal spaces, such as off-site projects, training programs, or business dinners, as occasions for reflexivity, creativity and experimentation (Howard-Grenville et al., 2011; Sturdy et al., 2006).

In a recent article, Ibarra and Obodaru (2020: 471) conceptualized liminality as a creative process, “a crucible for innovation, creativity, and growth.” They identified two underlying mechanisms that enable people to experiment with new approaches—both relating to play: divergent exploration and delayed commitment. Divergent exploration involves variety in ideas, knowledge, and experiences, and the opportunity to think “without boundaries.” Delayed commitment is the defining feature of play that facilitates a feeling of safety that allows individuals to experiment with alternatives.

While the concept of play is highly relevant to discussions of liminality, creativity and innovation, it remains at the margins of organizational studies (Statler et al., 2009). Based on a review of conceptualizations of play in psychological, sociological, anthropological and philosophical literature, Statler et al. (2009: 95) suggest the following definition for play in the context of organizations:

Play is a mode of activity that involves imagining new forms of individual and collective identity. Within the special frame of play, people develop emotionally, socially and cognitively, building skills and establishing ethical principles to guide actions. In turn, the skills and principles that emerge through the play activity can have adaptive or transformative effects for the individual and the collective in other contexts.

One stream of organizational research engages with “serious play,” defined as “situations in which people engage in playful behaviors deliberately with the intention to achieve serious, work-related objectives” (Statler et al., 2011: 236). Serious play activities include the use of Lego bricks to foster creativity or strategy planning; taking a playful attitude in design processes; and experiential process techniques such as role-playing simulations (Ashton and Giddings, 2018; Statler et al., 2011). Another way to think of play in organization studies is through the lens of the carnivalesque, the jester or the fool. Clegg et al. (2021) point to the paradoxical purpose of the social institution of the jester, which both subverts an existing order and provides a safety valve, incorporating elements of both resistance and loyalty. Together, the studies discussed above show that play has the potential to contribute to questioning taken-for-granted “truths,” both as part of designed liminal spaces of thinking and experimentation and as playful spontaneous subversion and resistance.

In the current study, we explore how these ideas apply to the context of a liminal space established to promote diversity, namely, a workshop aimed at creating dialog between Jewish and Palestinian-Arab students at an Israeli university. We examine the circumstances under which liminality and play might contribute to—or fail to contribute to—meaningful change. In doing so, we draw on the concept of “small openings.” This term was originally coined by Scott (1987) in his work on everyday forms of peasant resistance, and was subsequently adapted to the literature on critical teacher education (e.g. Groenke and Hatch, 2009), to refer to opportunities for enacting alternative educational practices. In a study about a teacher education course on culturally relevant pedagogy, Powers and Duffy (2016) defined small openings as spaces of critical reflection and incremental change that have promising opportunities for larger impact: “These small but significant transformations can lead to change on a larger scale personally and societally” (p. 62).

Palestinian-Arab students in Israeli campuses

Palestinian-Arabs in Israel are a national minority, making up about a fifth of the country’s population, and 26% of the relevant age cohort for HE. Historically, Palestinian-Arabs’ participation rate in the HE system has been significantly lower than their demographic proportion. However, the number of Palestinian-Arab students doubled over the last decade, and they currently make up about 17.7% of the total number of undergraduate students and 14% of all master’s degree students. The sharp increase is partly attributed to national and institutional programs aimed at widening participation and promoting diversity (Council for Higher Education [CHE], 2019).

Several studies have identified specific challenges faced by Palestinian-Arab students in HE institutions in Israel. These challenges include lack of proficiency in Hebrew, the language in which academic studies are conducted; lack of prior preparation for academic studies and familiarity with academic teaching methods; and adjustments to an environment in which Jewish–Western culture is dominant (Arar, 2017; Cohen-Azaria and Zamir, 2021; Hager and Jabareen, 2016). Furthermore, studies show that Palestinian-Arab students feel marginalized and unwanted, as well as alienated from institutions, Jewish staff and students. Many encounter racism, hostility and discrimination (Al-haj, 2003; Hager and Jabareen, 2016; Halabi, 2016).

Due to the segregated nature of Israeli society, in which Palestinian-Arabs and Jews study in separate primary and secondary education systems, academic campuses create the first opportunity for daily encounters between Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students. A relevant stream of research examines organized encounters between Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students, as part of academic courses or dialog programs (e.g. Golan and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019; Hager et al., 2011; Skorkowich et al., 2021). These studies show that for most of the students, these programs constitute their first opportunity to encounter one another. Indeed, some of the students in these studies referred to the importance of meeting with “others” in safe spaces that provide opportunities to engage in meaningful dialog. Yet, a recurring finding was that students preferred a de-politicized environment, avoiding discussions about the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Golan and Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) explained these findings as emanating from a prevailing sense of hopelessness, fear of causing tension in the group, and “a culture of fear,” in which Palestinian-Arab students are concerned that their views will be considered illegitimate. The authors concluded that in Israeli academia:

[..] there is a hidden message that, yes, there is a large and protected space defined as “academic freedom,” but this space is not very free, for politics is neither academic nor free in a conflict zone and hence is not encouraged or even allowed. (p. 34)

Methods

This research is based on a case study of the implementation of a so-called “Common Space” program at an Israeli public research university. “Common Space” is part of a broader, nationally funded program, initiated by Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE) for the integration of Palestinian-Arab society in HE. The program includes funding for various measures, including activities designed to create a “common space” on campuses. At the university at the focus of our study, the program was administered within a unit responsible for supporting Palestinian-Arab students at the university. We focus on a dialog workshop that was held as part of the program.

The workshop took place in 2019 over the course of 3 days, in a hotel in a Palestinian-Arab city (Nazareth). It comprised 11 student-participants (5 Palestinian-Arab and 6 Jewish) and was facilitated by two professional facilitators, one Druze and the other Jewish. We collected data from the following sources: (1) participant observation throughout the workshop; (2) in-depth interviews with 10 of the 11 student-participants, with 4 members of the program staff (the manager of the diversity unit responsible for the program and a project manager, both Jewish, and two advisors, both Palestinian-Arab), and one of the workshop facilitators; (3) content analysis of the program documents. Handwritten field-notes were taken during the workshop and later expanded in MS Word. The interviews were digitally audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participants were allocated pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

We analyzed the data according to the precepts of grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss, 1990), conducting iterative and ongoing analysis, identifying codes, categories and themes. First, each of us coded the data individually. Then we engaged in collaborative coding, discussing which codes were most relevant and devising the shared themes. We achieved data validity by triangulating the data from the different sources and comparing our individual analyses of codes and themes. During the research process we carefully considered our own positionality (Bourke, 2014), as Jewish faculty (first author) and a Jewish graduate student (second author) studying an organized encounter between Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students at an Israeli, and predominantly Jewish, university. We entered this research project with a keen interest in contributing to the research and practice that aim to foster inclusion and social justice. Yet we faced a number of challenges. First, being part of the majority group inevitably produces bias and obscures certain processes and experiences from view. In particular, we were able to more confidently interpret the statements and actions of Jewish (vs Palestinian-Arab) students, with whom we shared more cultural background.

Second, language emerged as a major issue in the research process. We do not speak Arabic, and therefore the interviews with Palestinian-Arab students were conducted in Hebrew rather than in these students’ native language, which may have hindered their ability to express themselves. Our lack of knowledge in Arabic also affected the observations, as we were not able to understand conversations that took place in Arabic. ¹ The language barrier relates to another effect of our position, as members of the majority group in the context of protracted conflict. In an interview that took place after the workshop, Emil, a Palestinian-Arab student, confided to the second author that during the workshop he had joked with his friend that the researcher was a secret agent of Israel’s internal security service:

It was a joke, but I kept telling him: “He is from the Security Agency. Look, he is watching us, Look, he is writing.” It was funny.

Q: But this laughter was based on something real, wasn’t it?

Yes, it was. Actually it was.

Thus, while conducting the research, we were constantly mindful that the research process was embedded in structural power relations, and strived to engage in critical and reflexive engagement while collecting, analyzing and writing.

Findings

Organizational diversity regime: The politics of depoliticization

HE institutions in Israel are declaratively “apolitical,” and academic culture is shaped by political pressures, self-censorship and an internalized ideology among faculty members that involvement in political and moral issues impairs their academic neutrality (Shenhav, 2008). As Golan (2019: 295) notes, “the decision not to address the ‘war out there’ is as much a political statement as addressing it would be.” And yet, in interviews with members of the diversity program, it became clear that the apolitical stance adopted by the university at the center of this study is extreme even within this national-institutional context. The statement “This institution is defined as apolitical; we do not go into political issues” was repeated multiple times in interviews with program staff.

The significance of apoliticism as a key component of the university’s diversity regime was elucidated during the preparations for the dialog workshop. Although the workshop was part of a national program, funded by the CHE, the preparations were conducted in an atmosphere of caution and heavy concern. The manager of the unit explained:

The university is very conservative in its approach, so we are going into something that is very non-standard, uncommon, unusual. (. . .) This is the reason that I was very involved in instructing the facilitators (. . .) [I asked them] to take it very slowly and handle it with “kid gloves.” (. . .) I’m really scared it’s not going to end well.

The project manager expressed similar concerns:

First of all, [I wish] for the students to return safely. Not only physically, but in terms of their emotional, mental place. (. . .) What am I afraid of? That things will evolve in such a way that it will be very difficult to manage them. That there will be accusations, that there won’t be any listening, that there will be closed-mindedness and that God forbid something will happen.

The processes of planning the dialog workshop exposed the profound differences in staff members’ conceptualizations of what should constitute “common space” for Jewish and Palestinian-Arab students. The unit’s management, whose primary goal was for the workshop to proceed peacefully, advocated a careful approach. In contrast, the unit’s advisers argued that in order to create a meaningful process, it was necessary to adopt a conflictual approach that stressed the disputed issues between Palestinian-Arabs and Jews in Israel:

She [the manager] is afraid that as a result of the workshop the students will say that the unit is organizing these groups, that they [the unit] are political, that they are left-wing (. . .) There are several dimensions here. First of all, there’s the internal political dimension of the university, which is an apolitical institution. Second, there is anxiety about really talking about sensitive issues in the unit here. She doesn’t want us to talk about sensitive issues. She’s afraid it will draw unnecessary attention, will raise all kinds of questions. But I don’t agree. I think it will actually boost the unit, it will enrich our work, take us to a better place.

In planning the workshop, setting its goals and instructing the workshop’s facilitators, the manager envisioned a “common ground” based on social and cultural events:

I’m looking for the common ground (. . .) it’s an explosive subject and it could bring out something that we do not know how to control, so I say: do as many active outdoor activities as possible—an escape room, go to nature, do a church tour, do laughter yoga. And in the end, we will talk a little. I also suggested: let’s share pictures of the family, start with these things. I think that jumping too fast into the deep water has a price, because then it’s hard to go back.

Thus, the guiding vision in planning the workshop was to create a safe space for a contained and controlled dialog between Jewish and Palestinian-Arab students, to focus on cultural and social activities and to avoid political discussions. In terms of models for dialog workshops, this approach draws on psychological models that seek to promote interpersonal relations between majority and minority group members, reduce hostility and prejudice, and develop personal awareness and empathy for the Other (Skorkowich et al., 2021). In terms of diversity management, this approach relates to diversity’s “happy talk” (Bell and Hartmann, 2007), and the politics of “feeling good” (Ahmed, 2006), with an emphasis on cultural issues, celebrating cultural artifacts and representations.

The strategy of framing diversity activities in these terms is a prerogative of the majority group that can create a sense of alienation and “othering” among members of minority groups who face exclusion and discrimination as part of their everyday experience. A Palestinian-Arab student who participated in the workshop coined a term that encapsulated this approach to diversity: a “Knafeh approach,” referring to the popular Arab sweet cheese pastry. One of the activities at the workshop was indeed a Knafeh baking class, but “Knafeh” symbolized something bigger:

If I imagine myself as a Jewish student, “I have a heavy workload at school, I have a lot of things on my mind, and [a trip to Nazareth] seems like a cool idea.” But [the approach adopted in the workshop] doesn’t challenge my thinking (. . .) This classic approach, the Knafeh approach, it reduces the experience (. . .) As if the Arab is the Knafeh, he is the food (. . .) It is an orientalist approach, and it is not right. It is simply not right.

In sum, the preparations for the workshop reveal how the university’s diversity regime is constructed and practiced in the everyday work of the diversity unit: how the fear of engaging with politics results in benign commitment to diversity and inclusion, which creates frustrations among staff members, and does little to dismantle existing inequalities.

The dialog workshop: A structured liminal space

In analyzing the events in the workshop—which, as noted above, took place over the course of 3 days in a hotel—we consider it as a liminal space, a temporary space characterized by a lack of clear rules and familiar hierarchies, which allows experimentation with new possibilities (Turner, 1969). As a liminal space, the workshop was not entirely removed from the experiences of everyday life. We observed that overall, Jewish students seemed to be more at ease than Palestinian-Arab students. In the brief instances of the more intense discussions, described below, Palestinian-Arab students were more apprehensive and careful, and also expressed more frustration than Jewish students. The extracts in this section are taken from the observation field notes.

Raising and silencing the elephant in the room

The activities in the workshop included discussion groups, identity workshops, games involving physical contact between participants, role playing, a Knafeh baking class and a tour of the city. To address the dynamics and contents of the workshop’s guided sessions and formal discussions, we employ the metaphor of the “elephant in the room,” which is “evocative of any object or matter of which everyone is definitely aware yet no one is willing to publicly acknowledge” (Zerubavel, 2006: 1). From the first day of the workshop until its conclusion, the term “elephant in the room” came up in several activities, and had different interpretations. The issue first came up in the middle of the first day:

At noon, after the coffee break, the facilitators divide the students into two groups: Palestinian-Arabs and Jews. The group of Jewish students move with the Jewish facilitator to another room and she asks them: “Why are you here?” One of the students says that he is here to talk about the elephant in the room and that he is looking for partners for this discussion. He adds that the Arab students are partners in this discourse, and that they are “not from Gaza.” Another student replies that he does not agree that they are not from Gaza. A third student says that they should be seen and accepted, that they feel like guests in Israeli society and we should respect them.

Thus, the first mention of the elephant in the room does not explicitly name the elephant, but it does trigger a discussion regarding Palestinian-Arab identity. “Gaza” is a code word among Jewish participants that frames Palestinians as enemies, particularly in reference to the 2014 Gaza war, in which some of the students participated as part of their mandatory military service. From the discussion it emerged that in order to be partners for dialog, Palestinian-Arab students had to be “not from Gaza,” meaning not enemies. And whether or not this is the case is a question on which there is no agreement.

When the two groups return to a joint meeting, the Jewish students bring up the subject of the elephant in the room. At first, some Palestinian-Arab students do not understand the term “elephant in the room” [in Hebrew] and it is translated. At this point the facilitator asks: “Why not just say conflict instead of elephant?”

The question remained unanswered, and the discussion drifted to other subjects. Toward the end of the session, the facilitator raised the question again:

The facilitator returns to the question of “What is the elephant in the room?” The students avoid direct answers. Omer, a Jewish student, gives an example that he is afraid to go to an Arab’s house and he asks himself if they will accept him. Sheerin, a Palestinian-Arab student, says that she was surprised by her first visit to a Jewish home because she was received wonderfully. Mustafa [a Palestinian-Arab student] loses patience and seeks to open the matter of the elephant. A Jewish student gets courage and answers: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Mustafa replies that for him it is the government’s discrimination against Arab citizens. Another Palestinian-Arab student reinforces his words and says: “Look at the Nationality Law ² .”

Omer and Sheerin addressed the personal level, the context of interpersonal relations between Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, and feelings of uncertainty about the reactions of the other side. Mustafa, on the other hand, and the Jewish and Palestinian-Arab students who spoke after him, addressed the socio-national level, from different angles: The Jewish student defined the elephant in the room through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the Palestinian-Arab students talked about discrimination against Palestinian-Arab citizens in Israel. The discussion around the elephant in the room continued:

One of the Jewish students suggests finding the common denominator to promote peace and find a solution to the conflict. The facilitator asks what the elephant in the room is on this subject, and the Jewish student answers that there are Arab Members of Parliament who are against the state and support the terrorists. Mustafa gets really upset and says it’s fake news and immediately gets up to drink water. The facilitator tries to calm the discussion by saying that the elephant is the fear that we will fail in an attempt at dialogue and discourse. There is a lot of tension in the air. The students sit with crossed legs, arms crossed on chest, gaze at the floor, without eye contact. During the discussion a number of students choose not to speak at all.

On the second day of the workshop, the subject of the elephant in the room came up again. In the morning, participants had engaged in a workshop activity of choosing words with personal meaning; this activity gave rise to discussions around questions of identity, especially that of the Palestinian-Arab students. Palestinian-Arab students shared their thoughts and difficulties about their identity conflicts, trying to reconcile their Palestinian, Arab and Israeli identities. When the facilitators gathered the students to summarize the activity, the atmosphere was serious and a bit tense:

Omer opens by talking about the “elephant in the room,” which is actually the question of identity. The facilitator asks him how he felt, and he answers: “That there is more to talk about.” There is silence in the room, and the facilitator asks the students to share. Mustafa says that it made him happy to say what was on his mind to Jewish students, and that in Arab society this topic usually does not come up. Emil identifies with him and says that no one in school or even in the family is talking about the issue of identity: “I’m not ashamed to say that even after 22 years I still have to think about my identity. I never had the space to think about it and talk about it.”

The last discussion about the elephant in the room took place on the third day, in the concluding session of the workshop:

Omer concludes that the most significant point was the discussion about the elephant in the room, and he was surprised to learn about the identity crisis among the Arabs. Emil corrects him: “We do not have a crisis—it’s just that we don’t talk about it.” Omer adds that it seems to him that it is much more difficult: whether one is a Palestinian or an Israeli Arab. Mustafa agrees with both of them: first, because it’s something that they did not talk about at school or at home, and also because there is indeed an identity crisis and he thinks, for example, about this question when he is abroad: what to answer [when asked where he is from], Palestine or Israel. “The question of belonging, where do I belong - this is a dilemma.”

Although controversial issues arose among the group members, such as discrimination, racism or loyalty to the state, the group—Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students alike—chose to avoid discussing them and focused on the identity of Palestinians of Israeli nationality as the elephant in the room. The question of Palestinian-Arab identity that arose among Jewish students (“Gaza or not Gaza”) at the beginning of the first day was re-framed as an identity problem of Palestinian-Arab citizens in Israel. “The elephant” was framed as a personal identity issue, not a national or structural one, as a problem that Palestinian-Arab citizens need to work on, and with which Jewish citizens can sympathize.

The discussions about “the elephant in the room” are representative of the wider discussions that took place in the workshops’ formal activities. Our findings in this regard are in line with those of previous studies of dialog workshops involving Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students. Those studies showed that workshop participants tended to create an apolitical space, avoiding discussions about political issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Golan and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019). This tendency ultimately limits the workshop’s potential as a liminal space, in which some of the boundaries between groups that characterize daily life are crossed and undermined.

Leisure, play, and reversal

Alongside its limitations, the workshop provided moments that served as small openings (Powers and Duffy, 2016), opportunities for questioning the taken-for-granted “truths” of everyday life. These processes took place in two main contexts: (i) in the informal space of leisure time, which allowed students to break free from the representation of collective identity, and (ii) in sessions that included role play and role reversal.

Informal spaces: Leisure and conviviality

During most of the day, the workshop activities were held in the hotel’s meeting rooms and under the guidance of professional facilitators. During the evenings, once the official activities were over, the students spent their leisure hours together. On the first evening, students played card games and board games together for several hours. On the second evening, five students—two Palestinian-Arab students and three Jewish students—went out together to spend time in the city, while the others stayed in the hotel and played a board game until 3:00 a.m. In the morning, they reported that it was fun, “with lots of laughs.”

In the final meeting of the workshop, when students were asked to share their experiences, some of them talked about the informal time. One Jewish student said: “I sat with Mustafa and we talked freely for a couple of hours without considering words.” Another Jewish student told the group that for him, the highlight was talking with the Arab participants until dawn. In the interviews, students pointed to the free time during breaks and especially in the evenings as the main factor in breaking down the boundaries between the two groups. Some argued that the free time was the most significant experience in the workshop.

Shai, a Jewish student, explains:

It was very dramatic, you know, [before the workshop] I barely had the opportunity to have a conversation with an Arab my age, and suddenly I was sharing a room with an Arab student I had just met, so in that sense it was very dramatic. And beyond the formal discussions, we spent time together. Most of the conversations were in the rooms, in the informal time, between the formal parts [of the workshop].

Emil, a Palestinian-Arab student, describes his experience:

The most significant thing is that although there were heated discussions in the workshops, at night we all sat and played cards and laughed together and forgot what we said a few seconds ago (. . .) and really it teaches me that this is a good example, maybe there will be arguments and we will not agree, and sometimes things will be said that should not have been said, but in the end we can live together, laugh together, and work together. (. . .) In my opinion, it was not obvious, the very fact that it happened. And it shows that there is hope, there is hope.

It seemed that once the students were “released” from their “role” as representatives of a national group, they were able to connect through informal conversation, mealtime socialization, games and other leisure activities. It was in these informal spaces, the in-between time of the structured workshop, that the communitas, a social bond in which social hierarchies and differences are less relevant (Turner, 1974: 96), could be formed.

Role play and role reversal

In the interviews, students mentioned only a few transformative insights, or small openings (Powers and Duffy, 2016), that were directly associated with the various workshop activities. But there was one powerful activity that seemed to make a profound impact. It occurred during a role-playing session. The students were divided into four mixed groups. In each group, students were asked to share a personal story about a conflict that they experienced, and then each group was asked to choose one of the stories and present it to the other groups.

The first three stories chosen for role-playing were told by Palestinian-Arab students. The first story concerned patriarchy and discrimination against women in Arab society, and presented a scene from the family life of the student who had told the story. Specifically, the scene portrayed a father refusing to allow his daughter to meet with friends, while allowing his son to do so. The second was about bias and stigmas against Muslims in Israeli workplaces, and presented how Christian Arabs are treated differently from Muslim Arabs. The third concerned checkpoint encounters between Palestinian-Arab citizens and Israeli soldiers, and presented a case in which a Palestinian-Arab student was detained for a security check. The fourth story, related by a Jewish student, concerned the common perception in Israeli society of the impossibility of romantic relations between Palestinian-Arabs and Jews, and was about a case in which he approached a girl at a campus party—not knowing she was Palestinian-Arab—and was rejected (“sometimes Arabs can also reject Jews!,” commented a Palestinian-Arab student).

While all role-playing scenarios provided significant opportunities for reflection, in this section we focus on the third story, the checkpoint encounter. Mustafa—a Palestinian-Arab student—and Eyal—a Jewish student—chose to present an event that happened to Mustafa on his way to Jerusalem:

An Israeli Jewish border patrol policeman (played by Mustafa) detains a Palestinian-Arab student (played by Eyal) and asks him for an ID card. The policeman begins to interrogate the student, and reports his ID number on the radio. He begins to do a bodily security check on him. He makes the student stand against the wall and checks him and his belongings. Everyone in the room is completely silent. Mustafa, the Palestinian-Arab student who plays the border guard, is a very tall and broad guy, while Eyal, the Jewish student who plays a Palestinian-Arab student, is thin, and speaks Arabic during the scene, which adds to its authenticity. The scene ends when the policeman receives indication over the radio that the Arab is “clean.” The policeman returns the equipment and offers him a drink of water. The scene ends. Mustafa and Eyal join the group and sit down. For a while, nobody speaks.

Omer, a Jewish student, is the first to speak. He tells Mustafa: “What a performance! It suits you to be a Border Police officer.” Two Jewish students tell him that he is a “soft and gentle” Border Police officer.

Mustafa tells the group about this occurrence, describes great fear, helplessness and lack of control, and states that he carries this event with him to this day. A Jewish student says the policeman eventually offered water as a way to apologize (the student seems to be talking about his own experience from military service). Mustafa says he tried to dress like a Jew when he traveled to Jerusalem: “bright jeans, a Bayern Munich shirt and big headphones.” Later he adds that when he dressed like a Jew he was racist towards himself. He also adds that it felt so strange and different to be in the position of power, in the position that you are the one who inspects the other.

In an interview that was held after the workshop, Eyal shared his experience from the role play:

The very act of playing, and the very act of standing in front of him, a big guy who speaks in a deep voice and in a language that was a bit foreign to me. . . It made me identify with the situation he was in; it made me understand where the pain comes from, this feeling of. . . like, “Why are they doing this to me? Why do I deserve it?”

Role playing mimics real or realistic situations. In educational or training settings, it is primarily geared toward engaging participants in recognizing different perspectives, and exploring potential ways of behaving (Fryer and Boot, 2017). By role-playing the security check, students simultaneously “burst the bubble” of the liminal space of the workshop—that is, the suspension of the real world—and enacted an inversion of reality. Through role playing, Jewish students (all male, who had served in the army) were able to see themselves in the border policeman. They were also able to identify with the Palestinian-Arab student, and they were able to “see” the Palestinian-Arab detained at the security check as a student, like them.

This collective liminal experience had several effects: it manifested the reality of the conflict in the everyday life of Palestinian-Arab citizens, it suspended the rules and roles of Israeli society, and it provided a space for reflection about established norms and the routines of everyday life in the context of the protracted conflict. Thus, while the workshop as a whole contributed to nurturing sympathy and empathic concern for others’ experiences, the role-play session contributed to students’ perspective-taking, “the active cognitive process of imagining the world from another’s vantage point or imagining oneself in another’s shoes to understand their visual viewpoint, thoughts, motivations, intentions, and/or emotions,” which has been repeatedly found to reduce stereotyping and prejudice (Ku et al., 2015: 79).

It seems that part of the significance of this role-playing scene was the inclusion of role reversal, the inversion of normal role and status structures, blurring boundaries and disturbing the prevailing power hierarchy. In this sense, the role-play scenario resembles the symbolic inversion of established hierarchies in Bakhtin’s (1984) depiction of carnival. Bakhtin described the carnival, referring to diverse festivities of the carnival type, as “the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life” (p. 123).

Carnival is a liminal space in which official rules, norms, and values are temporarily suspended. In the liminal space of the workshop, role playing provided the carnivalesque qualities of a temporary alternative reality, a world turned upside-down, in which the powerful and the least-powerful exchange roles. In this sense, the workshop not only brought the elephant back into the room but also provided a reversed image of the elephant, in which the symbols of authority were in the hands of the marginalized.

Aftermath Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students experienced the liminal setting of the workshop differently. When reflecting on their experiences in the workshop, Jewish students talked about new insights and perspectives they had gained. For example, Nadav, a Jewish student, talked about his realizations concerning the status of the Arabic language in the Israeli public sphere:

Suddenly you see that there’s an entirely different culture, a world that has been next to you all your life, and you didn’t notice, and. . . it makes you think. (. . .) Even when you see a sign in the street or something, it happened to me recently: there were only signs in Hebrew. There weren’t even signs in English, not to mention Arabic. So you know, there is something in what they are saying, in what they are experiencing.

However, Palestinian-Arab students experienced the workshop as a liminal space with a temporary and deceptive effect. In interviews conducted in the aftermath of the workshop, these students reported feelings of disillusion and frustration. Youssouf, a Palestinian-Arab student, said in retrospect:

I came without expectations (..) After the workshop I said to myself that maybe I was wrong, maybe there is someone to talk to. (. . .) Sadly, as time goes by [I realize that] it was a euphoria built on dreams. It is very difficult to make such things happen. (. . .) The situation is very complex. Right now I really don’t think that what we discussed is realistic at all.

The transition to the post-liminal phase, to everyday life in the university campus and the prevailing diversity regime, was a sober reminder of Palestinian-Arab students’ lived experience of marginality and alienation.

Discussion

This study contributes to the literature about how HE institutions “do” diversity and inclusion, and how these concepts are defined and implemented. Our case study of a Palestinian-Jewish student dialog workshop provided an opportunity to examine a manifestation of a diversity regime (Thomas, 2018) at an Israeli university and, more broadly, enabled us to explore organizational diversity management in the context of protracted national conflict. We have shown how a de-politicized diversity regime, informed by a policy of declaring “politics” to be outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, had a crucial impact on the operations of the organizational unit responsible for diversity and inclusion. Diversity work concerning the inclusion of Palestinian-Arab students was prevented from addressing the core issues that necessitate this work: Israeli-Palestinian conflict and structural discrimination. The study reveals what happens behind the scenes of the construction of the “Knafeh approach” to inclusion: how the fear of engaging with politics leads to activities focused on interpersonal relations and cultural expressions.

It is appropriate to acknowledge that the decision of the diversity unit’s management to comply with the university’s policy of avoiding political discussion—and thus to uphold the university’s diversity regime—might not have been straightforward, but rather was likely to have been informed by several complicating factors. As Gonzales et al. (2021: 457) note, “diversity work is more comfortable than inclusion work.” This statement refers to the idea that, whereas diversity work might be defined as increasing the participation of individuals from underrepresented groups, inclusion work aims to make such individuals feel a sense of belonging inside an organization, and inevitably requires the unsettling of established norms and practices. The ability of the program’s unit manager and projects manager to engage in such inclusion work may have been constrained by their positionality: as part of the university’s administrative staff, especially as women managers, they were situated in low-status positions within the hierarchy of the academic institution (Szekeres, 2004), and thus had limited capacity to challenge institutional power structures. It is also worth noting that, as critical diversity literature has demonstrated, benevolent framing of diversity initiatives by diversity professionals can prevent them from realizing how well-intended efforts to promote diversity can contribute to reproducing inequalities (Romani et al., 2019).

Our findings regarding the diversity unit’s avoidance of political topics are generally aligned with previous research acknowledging the depoliticized nature of current diversity discourse and policies in HE (Ahmed, 2006; Deem and Morley, 2006). Still, the diversity regime explored in this study is an extreme case of such depoliticization. In Israeli HE, the very need for diversity and inclusion work is rooted in politics—including structural inequalities between Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, which are intertwined with the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The university’s strict apolitical agenda effectively constituted denial of these core issues—contributing to naturalization of their outcomes, and resulting in the silencing of staff and students who wished to discuss them. Thus, the policy of depoliticization emerges as a political policy, that leads to hidden, and effective, exclusionary practice. More specifically, our findings demonstrate the political dimension of “benign” depoliticized diversity initiatives. Activities such as identity workshops, ethnic food cooking classes or role-playing exercises are inherently political in nature.

This conspiracy of silence, defined by Zerubavel (2006) as a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth, was maintained by controlling the agenda of the workshop and guiding the facilitators to avoid political discussions. It was nevertheless intriguing to observe that when charged political issues came up during the workshop, students from both groups jointly redirected the discussion to topics that were easier to process, such as interpersonal relationships between Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, or the identity conflict of Palestinian-Arabs in Israel. These findings resonate with previous research about Jewish-Palestinian dialog workshops (Golan and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019), and show that the depoliticization of the campus also infiltrates the liminal space of the workshop. As Sturdy et al. (2006) argue, liminality is not isolated from deeply embedded organizational or social norms and structures, but rather is colored by them.

This study also responds to calls to explore means of introducing liminality (Söderlund and Borg, 2018) and play (Statler et al., 2009) into organizations and organizational research. We contribute to liminality theory by exploring the limitations of liminal space as a tool to promote change, and identifying potential strategies to overcome these limitations in the context of diversity initiatives. The dialog workshop at the center of the study was a liminal space, removed from the traditional structures of the university and everyday life. Yet it was a liminal space that was carefully organized, structured and controlled. The findings show how these characteristics worked to confine and limit the “liminal” potential of the workshop: the ability to be a space for creativity and new ways of thinking. Thus, while conventional boundaries and norms may be temporarily suspended within liminal spaces, they are replaced by new rules that either emerge organically, or, as demonstrated in our case study, are explicitly designed. Importantly, these rules can exert oppressive, restrictive, or controlling effects.

Nevertheless, our study also demonstrates the presence of small openings (Powers and Duffy, 2016), cracks within the confined liminal space, which provided opportunities for reflection and introduced small but significant transformations. We contend that the concept of small openings is valuable for understanding the possibility of transcending the limitations of controlled liminal spaces. These small openings are especially important within the realm of planned diversity initiatives, which have been shown to naturalize and reproduce the inequalities they are presumably designed to address (e.g. Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2022; Thomas, 2018).

In the dialog workshop examined in our study, we identified two main instances in which small openings occurred: during leisure time and during role-playing activity. The leisure time of shared meals and conviviality provided opportunities for unstructured informal meetings and for breaking the boundaries that exist in everyday experience. Dining together, playing card games and board games, going out for a night on the town, and having one-on-one conversations allowed for free and familiar contact between students from both groups. These activities enabled the formation of a communitas (Turner, 1969) that transcended everyday hierarchies. Students’ reflections on these convivial occasions as “dramatic” and the “most significant” events in the workshop emphasize the extent to which such encounters contrast with everyday life on campus. In other words, the informal interactions around food, entertainment and laughter were the most effective diversity encounters—to a greater extent than the planned, formal, crafted discussion circles and dialog activities. These findings resonate with Robinson’s (2020) argument that, instead of relying on classical diversity management tools, those seeking to foster effective multicultural encounters should strive to set up semi-curated public spaces that create conditions for togetherness and conviviality.

Role playing provided the second outlet for experiencing liminality within the confined liminal space of the workshop. Ibarra and Obodaru (2020) argue that play is a key mechanism for realizing liminality’s creative potential. Our findings suggest that play can also provide a space for small openings, because it enables the articulation of what is left unsaid, silenced or denied. Role playing offers an opportunity to reflect on reality, but at the same time it “provides a distance from the real” (Fryer and Boot, 2017: 118). In the workshop, it provided a safe space in which the enactment of a significant power-laden scenario of the ethno-national conflict brought politics (“the elephant”) into the room. The experience was intensified by the incorporation of role reversal into the activity. It was not only an enactment of reality—but also an inversion of power relations that characterize familiar everyday life. Thus, play, in the form of role play and role reversal, provided an opportunity for experimentation with different identities, triggering perspective-taking, critical reflexivity, affective connection and reimagining of social roles and power structures.

The question of whether such small openings are mere safety valves for social tensions or opportunities for reflection and questioning taken-for-granted structures remains open for debate. However, if programs that promote intercultural encounters and dialog embrace the opportunities provided by sociality and play in the context of liminality, they may be effective tools of inclusion even within diversity regimes characterized by conspiracies of silence.

This research is not without limitations. First, we provide a case study of a single institution. While our focus provided an opportunity to delve deep into some of the social and organizational dynamics at play, further research should be undertaken to explore diversity regimes in other HE institutions, in the Israeli context and beyond. Second, the study focused on the preparations for, and the processes of, a single 3-day workshop. Future research could take a longitudinal approach and examine everyday diversity and inclusion work over a long period of time. Another worthwhile research direction would be to explore mechanisms with the potential to promote inclusion in institutions. The present study identified role playing and leisure time in dialog workshops as such mechanisms. Additional studies could look, for example, into the effectiveness of policy measures that target inclusion. Finally, future studies could further explore the relations between liminality and play in organizations, and their potential to encourage critical reflection, experimentation and challenges to the status quo.