Editor's Note

Work on Martin Kemp's ‘Dehumanization, guilt and large group dynamics with reference to the West, Israel and the Palestinians’ has spanned two years. In this Note I want, necessarily briefly, to chart the context of exceptional sensitivity which has framed its development. As Editor in Chief I supported a project of this kind, in principle, from the start. I was aware of the difficulty in thinking constructively and non-reactively about the situation in the Middle East. I was keen that the BJP should publish an article, accepted through the peer review process, that addressed these themes, and that could hopefully be ‘received’ by the different constituencies in the conflict.

To that end, it was important that the different constituencies were represented in the selection of peer reviewers. Reviewers of the initial submission were briefed that the BJP wanted to be confident that one or other reviewer might differ from the author in allegiance, but still consider that the author had represented the reviewer's own position fairly, and without projecting on to, ‘or demonizing the “other”’. In the ordinary course of things, divided opinions between reviewers are an acknowledged feature in peer-review systems (Hames, 1997, pp. 89-92), and procedures exist for managing them. Here, the peer reviewers were also divided, but the depth of criticism in one reviewer's response to the initial version, and continued opposition to the revised manuscript, showed us - figuratively speaking - that the conflict on the ground was now inside the Journal and that we needed to find an effective and thoughtful way of navigating it.

The structures and processes within which the Journal operates, both formal and informal, proved indispensable in this. The informal, in email and in person, was well described by a colleague, acknowledging the ‘explosive nature of the topic’, as ‘the careful steady approach’. The formal process was that the article was read by Wiley-Blackwell's legal team, given