When Peace Is Not Enough

How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice

Atalia Omer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226008240
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The state of Israel is often spoken of as a haven for the Jewish people, a place rooted in the story of a nation dispersed, wandering the earth in search of their homeland. Born in adversity but purportedly nurtured by liberal ideals, Israel has never known peace, experiencing instead a state of constant war that has divided its population along the stark and seemingly unbreachable lines of dissent around the relationship between unrestricted citizenship and Jewish identity. By focusing on the perceptions and histories of Israel's most marginalized stakeholders—Palestinian Israelis, Arab Jews, and non-Israeli Jews—Atalia Omer cuts to the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict, demonstrating how these voices provide urgently needed resources for conflict analysis and peacebuilding. Navigating a complex set of arguments about ethnicity, boundaries, and peace, and offering a different approach to the renegotiation and reimagination of national identity and citizenship, Omer pushes the conversation beyond the bounds of the single narrative and toward a new and dynamic concept of justice—one that offers the prospect of building a lasting peace.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Francis Deng, War of Visions: Conflicts of Identities in the Sudan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1991), 387–88.

2. Rohan Edrisinha, “Constitutionalism, Pluralism, Ethnic Conflict: The Need for a New Initiative,” in Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 171.

3. The Oslo Accords are officially known as the “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements” or the “Declaration of Principles” (DOP), signed on September 13, 1993, between Palestinians and Israelis, under the facilitation of President Clinton of the United States.

4. Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 15.

5. Ibid., 16.

6. This process is “creeping” “because it is undeclared, and is being amplified by a sequence of incremental decisions about practices, such as the ongoing settlement of Jews in the occupied territories and the increasingly heavy-handed policies toward Arabs and non-Jewish immigrants in Israel” (Yiftachel, Ethnocracy, 126).

7. Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003).

8. Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 255.

9. Nadim Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 209.

10. An extensive discussion of peacebuilding appears in chapter 2.

11. Christine Bell, Peace Agreements and Human Rights, rev. ed. (2000; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 205.

12. This understanding of the term “ethnorepublicanism” draws on the analysis in Yossi Yonah, In Virtue of Difference: The Multicultural Project in Israel, rev. ed. (2005; Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2007) [in Hebrew]. For futher discussion of Yonah’s definition as it applies to the analysis in this book, see chapter 7 (especially 227).

13. Dimi Reider and Aziz Abu Sarah, “In Israel, the Rent Is Too Damn High,” New York Times, August 3, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/opinion/in-israel-the-rent-is-too-damn-high.

14. See, for example, Reuven Pedazthur, “The Necessary Cut,” Haaretz, August 7, 2011, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1237325.html.

15. For a mapping and critique of the subfield of religious peacebuilding, see Atalia Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical,” Practical Matters, no. 5, Spring 2012, http://practicalmattersjournal.org/issue/5/centerpieces/religious-peacebuilding (accessed April 24, 2012).

16. While predominantly focused on issues of race, class, and gender demarcations, this genre that explores symbolic and social boundaries as well as the related research of “borders” becomes an interlocutor with this work. Examples of works in cultural sociology that study social and symbolic boundaries include Michèle Lamont, “Symbolic Boundaries and Status,” in Cultural Sociology, ed. Lynette P. Spillman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 98–119; Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and New York Russell Sage Foundation, 2002); and Alon Lazar, “Cultural Trauma as a Potential Symbolic Boundary,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 22, no. 2 (June 2009): 183–90.

17. Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 168.

18. Ibid., 169.

19. Ibid., 187.

20. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, rev. ed. (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

21. See also Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Richard Nice, rev. ed. (1972; Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977); Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and Social Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); and Steven Peter Vallas, “Symbolic Boundaries and the New Division of Labor: Engineers, Workers and the Restructuring of Factory Life,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 18 (2001): 3–37.

22. For the earliest articulation of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” Social Science Information 8 (April 1969): 89–119. See also Bourdieu, Distinction. For an intellectual review of Bourdieu that illustrates how the concept of habitus enables the articulation of elastic interpretations of agency and the possibility of the transformation of social structures, refer to Omar Lizardo, “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus,” Theory of Social Behaviour 34, no. 4 (2004): 375–401.

23. See Lamont and Molnár, “Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” 184–88; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 6–24; Robert R. Alvarez, “The Mexican-US Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 447–70; and David Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space’: The Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” Journal of American History 86, no. 2 (1999): 481–518.

24. For an explication of this idea, see also Atalia Omer, “The Hermeneutics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice,” Journal of Political Theology 11, no. 5 (October 2010): 650–73.

25. As I show in chapter 1, the case of Israeli secular nationalism illustrates this argument because, even when framing its claim to the land as “historical and cultural,” it relies on biblical themes like “return” and the “ingathering of the exiles.”

26. See, for example, Judith Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press/SSRC Books, 2011), 70–91, and Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

27. For a defining example of these conversations in religious studies, see Talal Asad, Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

28. I characterize the works of David Little and R. Scott Appleby as the primary examples of this constructive approach to the study of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. See, for a succinct articulation of the constructive orientation, Little and Appleby, “A Moment of Opportunity? The Promise of Religious Peacebuilding in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Conflict,” in Religion and Peacebuilding, ed. Harold Coward and Gordon S. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1–26.

29. By the designation “land theology,” I refer here to the religious Zionist settlement movement that emerged in the 1970s and has viewed the commandment to settle the entirety of the land as one that overrides the other 612 commandments. This focus on settling the land is grounded in a particular perception of the events that led to the establishment of the state of Israel and the victory of 1967 as denoting the dawn of the messianic era. This messianic orientation and interpretation of historical events was born out of the teachings of Rabbi Kook (the first chief rabbi of Palestine appointed by the British during the time of the mandate), his son who succeeded him as the leader of the yeshiva that Kook the elder had established in Jerusalem, and the religious youth that sought guidance that would enable them to find a degree of consistency between their religiosity, their desire to fully embrace an Israeli identity, and their resentment of the secularist and often antireligious policies and attitudes of the Israeli mainstream. For an excellent overview of the settlement movement in Israel, see Gideon Aran, “Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim),” in Fundamentalism Observed, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See also Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (Or Yehouda: Dvir, 2005) [in Hebrew]. For an account of the ideological clashes between settlers and mainline Israelis within the Green Line, see Gadi Taub, The Settlers (New Haven; Yale University Press, 2010). For a radically different account that illuminates the ideological continuities between secular and religious Zionists within and without the Green Line, see Joyce Dalsheim, Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

30. By “polycentric,” I refer here to critiques that focus on the conservative underpinnings of liberal frameworks of multiculturalism, which, while broadening and diversifying conceptions of membership and participation in the polity, nonetheless maintain the underlying power dynamics (especially while presupposing the presence of a clear “majority” culture). The polycentric approach, in contrast, aims to diversify and push the centers of power and political engagements. See also chapter 2.

31. Butler, Parting Ways, 5

32. Ibid., 7

33. Throughout the book, I distinguish between the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians of the occupied territories of 1967 as well as the various refugees beyond those geopolitical borders. The Palestinians who became citizens of the Israeli state remained within the 1949 armistice lines known as the “Green Line,” and their experiences and struggles are distinctly different from those of non-Israeli Palestinians.

34. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 37.

35. Currently, only a few academically rigorous treatments of post-Zionism are available. See, for example, Ephraim Nimni, ed., The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics (New York: Zed Books, 2003); Laurence Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008).

36. For some of the most prominent examples of the work of revisionist Israeli historians, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1947–1951 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992).

37. Uri Ram, “The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology: Internal and External Comparisons,” Journal of Historical Sociology 6, no. 3 (1993): 327–50.

38. See Amnon Raz-Krakotzin, “Exile in the Midst of Sovereignty: A Critique of ‘Shelilat HaGalut’ in Israeli Culture II,” Theory and Criticism 5 (Fall 1994): 113–32 [in Hebrew], and Gabi Piterberg, “The Nation and Its Raconteurs: Orientalism and Nationalist Historiography,” Theory and Criticism 6 (Spring 1996): 81–103 [in Hebrew]. These Israeli scholars employ postmodern lenses influenced by Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Hayden White, and others to analyze and critique Zionist interpretations of history. To this end, they move beyond the arguments of the revisionist historians.

39. Prominent Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, for instance, observes that the breakdown since the 1970s of the h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ONE / Peace, Justice, and the Zionist Consensus: Peace Now and the Blind Spots of Peacemaking
• TWO / Bridging Disciplines and Reimagining “Who We Are”
• THREE / Critical Caretakers: The Hermeneutics of Citizenship and the Question of Justice
• FOUR / Returning to Sinai: The Religious Zionist Peace Movement
• FIVE / Rabbis for Human Rights and Reclaiming Alterity
• SIX / Subaltern Visions of Peace I: The Case of the Arab Palestinian Citizens of Israel
• SEVEN / Subaltern Visions of Peace II: The Case of the Mizrahim
• CONCLUSION / the Hermeneutics of Citizenship: The Missing Dimension of Peacebuilding
• Notes
• Index