In an effort to explain why the audience members interpreted Sesame Street in the manner they did, in Part III I ground their responses in the multi-sited ethnographies I conducted within each of the ethno-political grouping community contexts, moving beyond my analysis relating their reception to inter-“group” stereotypes and attitudes. I link the children to their specific communities of residence and discuss how the glocalization of interstate systemic forces at that level socialized them and, in turn, how their everyday lives became quietly and discretely reshaped by their respective conflict zones, altering their readings of the text. This allows me to elaborate on what the resultant segmented audience decodings tell us about their Palestinian, Jewish Israeli and Arab/Palestinian Israeli cultures-in-the-making, and trace the pathways that altered their interpretations and why, as well as to offer redesign recommendations.

My first mission as I evaluated Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street as a PeaceComm intervention was to understand the logic behind how it was designed. In order to assess whether what the Sesame Street audiences interpreted was indeed a direct (or even an indirect) result of the producers’ intentions, and so whether the intervention was effective precisely because of the producers’ efforts, I conducted an encoding study alongside my decoding study. This additional analysis outlines what features comprise the symbols the authors of these texts (in this case, the television producers and all those involved in the Sesame Street coproductions) attempted to include in the series, and what was rendered ultimately in the finished text. An encoding study aims to achieve this inasmuch as a text state can ever be assumed to be stable, given that audiences, or readers, do not necessarily read the text as planned.

Part II describes how the audiences of practice—the stateless nation, or Palestinians, the state-bearing nation, Jewish-Israelis, and the state minority, Arab Palestinian Israelis—decoded the text, as their interpretations related to their respective conflict-resolution outcome goals of justice, security and equality. Chapter 4 outlines how the majority of the stateless nation audience did not “see” Jewish Israeli characters, referring to them as “Jews,” and negatively stereotyped them an “army of infidels.” These Palestinian children actively resisted the text regarding their Jewish Israeli others and did not observe the series’ encoded pro-social relations between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Most interpreted those characters to be “Palestinians” or “Arabs,” generalizing their positive attitudes toward all Palestinian and Arab/Palestinian Israeli characters to their wider grouping on screen and off. Cognitive imbalance explains why 20 percent who decoded good-natured “partial Jews” did not generalize them to “Jews”. Sesame Street is unlikely to alter their inter-grouping attitudes toward Jewish Israelis or their policy-relevant political beliefs, even more crucial to managing the region’s ethnopolitical and multi-state conflicts. The majority constructed Arab/Palestinian Israelis as like them but living elsewhere, and held positive to very positive attitudes toward them. But their initial attitudes render this development less important.

Describes the logic behind Sesame Street interventions’ design and goals, through the performance of concise encoding and production studies of the text of Israeli and Palestinian versions. Compares how the producers intended, negotiated, and expressed the text’s encoding with how the child audience decoded the series after broadcast, thereby revealing how the PeaceComm interventions may have “worked” on the children. The glocalized hybrid series—produced in the euphoric period of the Oslo Peace Accords in the mid-1990s by separate but intertwined Israeli, Palestinian and American teams, later joined by a Jordanian crew, in multiple zones—interpreted and negotiated the American team’s, Sesame Workshop’s, global concept to fit local concerns, incorporating original Sesame Street segments dubbed into Hebrew or Arabic during both optimistic and crisis conflict phases. They created two separate street-state sets and series, privileging the intersection of the axis of ethnopolitical “group” identity and state-based citizenship rights to populate each street-state. The closed text of a “mediated contact effects” PeaceComm model illustrating pro-social interactions between and within the two streets operated in tandem with television’s open text that allowed children to read it on different levels. This inherent contradiction complicated the series’ potential to effectively build and make peace.

For the state-bearing nation audience, Palestinian characters were absent from the series, only 25% of those who responded clearly seeing them. Chapter 5 describes how these Jewish Israeli children from Alfei Menashe argued that since Palestinians are “terrorists,” the “Israeli” producers, Jewish Israelis just like they are, would not have allowed them onto Sesame Street to harm them. They used production-based conventions to reinterpret what they perceived as the imbalance of encoded characters who were both “good people” and their partners to conflict. The majority converted both the national and civic identity of Palestinian characters: 80 percent transformed them into Jewish Israelis, or simply “Israelis”; 25 percent into Arab/Palestinian Israelis. 56% decoded their shared others, Arab/Palestinian Israeli characters. These children interpreted all the characters as “good people,” whether defined as Jewish Israeli, Arab/Palestinian Israeli or Palestinian, though none generalized their mediated experiences about their other out-grouping, or Palestinians, to additional characters and real-world scenarios. Where their shared other was concerned, Arab/Palestinian-Israelis, only a minority generalized those experiences, such that at least regarding their shared other, the series could potentially move this audience attitudes, which otherwise ranged from negative to neutral.

After entering responses to closed-ended questions from the family media consumption, ownership, preference and demographics survey into SPSS, and the responses to the open-ended questions from it into Excel, and separate of that, transcribing and translating to English the interview data, with which my research assistants assisted, I correspondingly analyzed all the data.

Explores the emerging subdiscipline of Peace Communication (PeaceComm), beginning with a discussion about the history of the practice, and the author’s ongoing quest to introduce a subdiscipline, dedicated to assessing and evaluating the critical efficacy of the practice. A methodological template for comparative global assessment and evaluation is offered, stressing the need to prioritize political conflict data and conflict zones-based context analyses, given that political conflict is caused by collective grievances related to “group”-level disadvantages and perceived disadvantages, not individual prejudice. The template is operationalized through the assessment of Sesame Street interventions into the Israeli Palestinian ethnopolitical nationalist conflict, drawn from field work in 2001, 2004-2006, and 2011. Best practices and other interdisciplinary contributions for practitioners are recommended, to understand conflict intractability where socialization, culture, and inter-“group” (mediated and interpersonal) communication intersect in glocalized conflict zone contexts, and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically. The interventions targeted children, who comprise the majority within conflict zones. The model used, mediated contact effects, is one of seven models and six subtypes of PeaceComm practiced historically worldwide the author has previously categorized, and is one of those most in need of PeaceComm scholarship, with potential to succeed but scarce evidence collected about its efficacy.

Chapter 9 depicts the community, socialization and narratives of Arab/Palestinian Israeli children of Uhm Al-Fahm. This large ethnopolitically Arab city in Israel is viewed by Jewish Israelis as the seat of Palestinian nationalism; and by Palestinians as home to ’48 Arabs who did not resist the Zionists but are culturally and politically key to pursuing justice for Palestinians. From the inside, locals see inequity of resources, and police as monitoring and targeting them. Fahmouwee children’s interactions revolved largely around other Arab/Palestinian Israelis. The majority did not position themselves as the victim, unlike the Palestinian and Jewish Israeli children; and defined themselves as a third sub-state identity, “Arab Muslim Fahmouwees.” Despite their awareness of “fighting,” these children also painted a picture of normalcy. Though their everyday conflict zone experiences also encoded them to erase their shared others in Sesame Street, theirs was a relatively more nuanced interpretation, suggesting that Arab/Palestinian Israeli children are uniquely open to the possibility of being moved by the series’ aims. Still, they also normalized and reproduced the violence, reinserting themselves into the status of state minority through their identity negotiations and protest play patterns. For them too, conflict resolution is achieved by “converting Jews to Islam.”