Intercultural empathy under mobility restrictions: insights from university students in the West Bank, Palestine

Abstract

Dominant models of intercultural competence and empathy rest on the assumption that learners are free to move, encounter differences in person, and choose their intercultural contacts. Imperiale (2021) has shown, in the context of the Gaza Strip in Palestine, that this assumption renders such models programmatically inapplicable under conditions of forced immobility. This study extends that reconceptualisation empirically to the occupied West Bank in Palestine. Drawing on semi-structured online interviews with four Palestinian undergraduates who had never travelled beyond the West Bank, this study examines how intercultural empathy is understood and enacted when encounter is structurally denied. The interviews were conducted between April and August 2024 and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants articulated empathy as inseparable from political recognition and material action; they described deliberate strategies, such as preparatory research, active listening and digital exchange, through which they built intercultural understanding without mobility; and one participant refused the expectation of empathy altogether, demanding it instead. Read through the Capabilities Approach and critical pedagogy, these accounts suggest that intercultural empathy is best understood not as an individual competence acquired through encounter, but as a relational capability whose distribution and expectation are politically structured. Implications for intercultural education in contexts of conflict and constraint are discussed.