On September 16, at the Memorial Church of Harvard University, a memorial service was held for Herbert C. Kelman, whose 54 year career at Harvard, most recently as the Richard Clarke Cabot Research Professor of Social Ethics, came to a close when Kelman passed away peacefully on March 1 at age 94. One of the speakers at the memorial was CMES alumnus Philip S. Khoury (History and Middle East Studies PhD '80), Ford International Professor of History and Associate Provost at MIT, who delivered the following tribute to his long-time friend.
I knew Herb Kelman for more than 40 years. I first met him and Rose at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies in the fall of 1977, where I was a doctoral student. Something attracted me to Herb. I think it was the peace button he always wore on his jacket lapel. I had attended a Quaker school for 14 years where peace buttons were familiar.
I must have hit it off with Herb because in time he started extending invitations to dinners following his Thursday CFIA Middle East Seminar. That seminar would come to serve as the model for my own Bustani Middle East Seminar at MIT, now in its 37th year. The Bustani is always followed by dinner, and Herb and Rose had permanent seats at the Bustani dinner table, and for more than three decades they were my most faithful attendees.
I’m not a political psychologist nor am I an expert in conflict resolution. But, what I learned about my friend Herb over the years was just how important it was to derive research problems from the real world and the importance of lucidity in scientific writing. Someone who writes clearly thinks clearly. Herb thought clearly.
It was no secret that Herb’s commitment to understanding issues of peace and justice and his activism in their pursuit derived from the anti-Semitism he had experienced as a child in Vienna.
As a postdoc at John Hopkins in the early 1950s, Herb became very active in CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality; he helped to found a CORE chapter in Baltimore whose campaign to integrate lunch counters in that city was ultimately successful. It was through CORE that Herb made the discovery of his life: a young, beautiful University of Chicago alumna by the name of Rose Brousman. Together they spent long hours at sit-ins and other protests. They became inseparable, sharing the same strong commitment to peace and justice, and they did so for 65 years.
It was also in Baltimore that Herb nearly landed in jail for refusing induction into the military. It took a Grand Jury to rule in favor of his request for Conscientious Objector status.
A little later when Herb was a researcher at the National Institute for Mental Health in Washington his job was suddenly terminated. There, the tail of McCarthyism had slapped him down. But he fought the decision, and the case against him was overturned. He had correctly suspected that his antiwar and civil rights work, plus Rose’s associations at the University of Chicago, lay behind his termination.
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I think it is fair to say that Herb Kelman thought about the Arab–Israeli conflict for nearly his entire life. He had embraced Zionism in his youth and believed the Jewish people had the right to establish a homeland in Palestine. But from the tender age of 11 he was already on record, at least with his older sister, when he told her that "we cannot force the Arabs to leave the land in which they are now settled." In fact, his second published article ever was titled: “On the Question of Jewish–Arab Cooperation,” which he wrote in Hebrew at the age of 18. In the years leading up to the establishment of Israel he supported a bi-national state in Palestine, advocated by Martin Buber and others around the Hebrew University. Later, after much observation and study of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he came to support a "one country/two state solution, whereby Jews and Palestinians are to accept that the land belongs to both of them, that each has authentic roots in that land, but that both peoples also have the right to fulfill their separate national aspirations in that land." I believe Herb held on to this position till the end.
Herb suffered a heart attack in late 1972, when he was 45 years of age. As he was recovering in Cambridge, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War erupted. He would write later "that watching the television accounts of the war while contemplating that I might not live forever, I committed myself to placing work on conflict resolution in the Middle East at the top of my agenda and it has stayed there ever since." To that I would add, thank goodness.
Two years earlier, in 1971, Herb and a colleague had launched the first in what became series of Israeli–Palestinian workshops that stretched for more than three decades. Because he and his colleague were both Jewish, Herb was concerned from the outset that the team needed a more balanced set of third-party participants if they were going to conduct Track II work on the Middle East. If he wanted his workshops to have a fighting chance of being effective he had to recruit "ethnically balanced third party teams" that included Palestinians who clearly identified with the PLO and Israelis who clearly identified with the Zionist "enterprise."
Herb began to immerse himself in all things Middle Eastern, attending all sorts of related conferences and frequently traveling to the region, and always with Rose who became a full partner in this work. Their Middle East work also became the center of their social life. Herb got to know Egypt quite intimately as well as Lebanon and Jordan, and there and in Israel he began to develop a large set of contacts and networks of political figures, journalists, academics, and PLO and Israeli officials. Over the decades, many would find their way to Harvard to present at his Weatherhead Middle East Seminar and/or to participate in one of his somewhat closeted Israeli–Palestinian workshops. Herb’s Middle East Rolodex was about as extensive as they came.
Herb and Rose often managed to be in the right place at the right time, perhaps most memorably when they got to Jerusalem in time for Anwar Sadat’s surprise visit there in 1977, which ended up changing the balance of power in the Arab–Israeli conflict in truly dramatic ways. What Herb took away from it all was that a full peace between Egypt and Israel could not happen without a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and so he decided from then on to concentrate on that dimension of the wider conflict.
Herb organized and facilitated over the years about 80 problem-solving workshops, mostly with Israeli and Palestinian participants. What were their purpose? First and foremost, the workshops were "to generate new ideas for resolving the conflict and then to get the Israeli and Palestinian participants to transfer these new ideas to the political debate and decision-making process" in their respective societies, and ultimately to get the parties to the negotiating table.
Herb was the consummate teacher/scholar/practitioner.
His first published analysis of the conflict appeared in 1978, the very year his Harvard colleague Walid Khalidi published his bold Foreign Affairs article: “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State.” Their friendship grew from then on.
Of course, one thing that helped to put Herb on the Middle East map were his various meetings with the PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, first in 1980 and in 1981 in Beirut, and then several more times in Tunis, Algiers, Amman, Ramallah, and, after Oslo, here in Cambridge. After writing about his conversations with Arafat, Herb was heavily criticized for helping to legitimize Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian people. One thing is certain: his writings about Arafat began to earn Herb the creds he needed to proceed, both in important Palestinian circles and at least among those Israelis "who were interested in seeing whether negotiations might be possible."
The secret negotiations leading to the Oslo Agreement of 1993 looked something like what Herb and his third-party colleagues had been conducting here in Cambridge. And I think the common wisdom remains that Herb’s efforts laid some of the groundwork for Oslo. It’s hard to think of anything else that may have influenced the way Oslo was negotiated more than what Herb had been doing quietly, almost secretly, since the 1970s.
Oslo marked a new phase of Herb’s work that focused on how to implement a partial, interim agreement and move toward final status negotiations. Lots of gatherings occurred and jointly written papers emerged in this period and were available for the Camp David summit in 2000. After those negotiations collapsed, and accusations as to who was to blame were hurled back and forth, Herb concentrated on rebuilding mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians. This was the hardest phase of all given what we know about the dramatically diminished level of trust between the conflicting parties these past two decades.
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In the discipline of psychology, Herb Kelman was especially well-known for his contributions to understanding the parameters of social influence on the formation of and changes in belief systems. In the arena of Middle East conflict resolution, Herb was principally known for his workshops and writings focused on influencing the Israelis and Palestinians toward some sort of workable peace, a lasting peace. Herb made significant contributions to both psychology and conflict resolution.
I’ve never met anyone who was more self-aware than Herb Kelman. He had extraordinary powers of self-analysis. One needs to read his personal reflection titled “Looking Back at my Work,” published in 2010, to understand what I am alluding to. Herb identified the five personal qualities that characterized his work: "humor," "continuity," "empathy," "persistence," and "identity." His work was laced with these five qualities.
I’d like to conclude by saying a few words about the quality I knew him best for—the quality of "persistence." Herb’s “persistence” was legendary; it was fed by what he called his "strategic optimism." I know that some accused Herb of being terribly naïve in his commitment to finding a solution to the world’s most intractable and certainly its most visible conflict. But Herb wasn’t naïve and nor was he grandiose in his claims. Rather, he always tried to achieve small concrete steps in the pursuit of peace, and it was his willingness to continue to see the glass half-full that was at the very foundation of his work.
I confess, in recent years it became harder and harder for me to understand how Herb maintained his "strategic optimism" given how little momentum existed toward building legitimate peace between Palestinians and Israelis. But then I am reminded of the late Emile Habibi, the Israeli–Arab novelist and Israel Prize winner, who wrote The Pessoptimist. I think Herb might be called a "pessoptimist." A pessoptimist is someone at once imbued with a forward-thinking optimism coupled to an educated acceptance of a basic level of pessimism. I can tell you that for my dear friend Herb Kelman the accent always fell on the “optimist” side of the pessoptimist equation.