When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice

Atalia Omer is assistant professor of religion, conflict, and peace studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She is also a faculty fellow at the Notre Dame Center of Religion and Society.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00807-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00810-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00824-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Omer, Atalia, author.

When peace is not enough : how the Israeli peace camp thinks about religion, nationalism, and justice / Atalia Omer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-00807-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-00810-3 (paperback : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-00824-0 (e-book)   1. Arab-Israeli conflict—1993—Peace.   2. Peace movements—Israel.   3. Arab-Israeli conflict—Social aspects.   4. Group identity—Israel.   I. Title.

DS119.76.046 2013

956.05'4—dc23

2012044799

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

When Peace Is Not Enough

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

ATALIA OMER

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Dan Omer (1940–84) and Oscar Mareni (Herlinger) (1906–2011)

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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My late father, a journalist, a poet, and a social critic, lived a short and brave life on the radical margins of Israeli society. I am profoundly indebted to him for his legacy. This book is grounded in my memories of his struggle against religious and political coercion, against the occupation of Palestinian territories, and for social justice and equality.

As much as my father was a principled critic of Israel’s ethos, my late grandfather was a stone in its foundation—Zionist Congress delegate, celebrated veteran of Britain’s Jewish Brigade during World War II, resistance fighter against the British Mandate in Palestine, and the first post–Israeli independence treasurer of the municipality of Jerusalem. My earliest memories are of their frequently fierce opposition to one another, unyielding, but loyal. I carry this dual legacy with me today; out of a deep sense of gratitude and love I grapple with it across the pages of this book.

I have been involved with the Israeli peace movement my entire life, and I remain committed to the overarching vision of the movement. Yet it is with a desire to assess and transform the premises of peace activism in Israel that I write, realizing potential implications of this case for questions of peace and justice in other zones of conflict. Only after I completed my military service and moved away from Israel to pursue my higher education in the United States did I begin to systematically question what had consistently puzzled me earlier: What is the meaning of a Jewish national identity? How might it be reconciled with secularity? How might rethinking Jewish-Israeli nationality relate to the peace process with the Palestinians? This line of questioning led me to explore the case of Israel with the intention to think more acutely about religion, nationalism, and the transformation of conflicts largely defined by identity claims. It has been an odyssey that required developing fluency in diverse theoretical and disciplinary terrains. I am deeply grateful to the many mentors and intellectual guides I had along the way. I spent the early years of my training in Islamic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There I benefited especially from the guidance of Richard Hecht, who has remained a mentor and a friend throughout my academic development. I am grateful to other teachers who shaped my thinking during my Santa Barbara years, including Manoutchehr Eskandari, Stephen Humphreys, Juan Campo, and Barbara Holdrege.

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I was fortunate to cross paths with brilliant conversation partners, teachers, and mentors. I am particularly thankful for the conversations and classes I had with Harvey Cox, Robert Orsi, Asher Biemann, Lawrence Sullivan, Herbert Kelman, Peter Gordon, David Carrasco, Diana Eck, Luis Girón Negrón, and Francis Fiorenza. At Harvard I also encountered Professor David Little. Little’s work on religion, ethnoreligious national conflict, and peace became pivotal for this book. Most important, Little has been an interlocutor, a mentor, a colleague whose intellectual rigor, generosity, and persistence pushed me beyond what I imagined at the time. He insisted on a kind of conceptual clarity that obliged me to reach conclusions I was not able to anticipate when I began my research. It was during one of our long conversations that Little’s insistence upon a constructive approach to religion, conflict, and peace led me to shift from a focus on the obvious to the nonobvious. The obstacle for reframing the discussion of justice in Israel/Palestine was not only the standard conception of religious radicalism but also the model of which I understood myself to be an example—a peace-seeking Israeli who operated with certain discursive presuppositions (although Little would refuse to use the concept of discourse). This insight grounds this book. Professor Little continues to be a mentor and a friend. He read and reread the manuscript multiple times and offered invaluable feedback. I am also thankful to Ronald Thiemann (of blessed memory) and Stanley Hofmann at Harvard and Yehouda Shenhav at Tel Aviv University, Israel. I am indebted to my colleagues at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame who so generously read through my manuscript and offered critiques and suggestions, including John Paul Lederach, Daniel Philpott, and R. Scott Appleby. Appleby, especially, mentored me through the process of revising and editing the book manuscript. I am equally grateful for Scott’s capacious vision for what peace studies can (and should) be. Christian Smith, my colleague in the Department of Sociology at Notre Dame, also provided incisive feedback on the manuscript as well as guidance and support in the publication process.

I received major institutional and other support along the way. I am thankful for the generous fellowships from Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. I am also thankful to the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies where, as a fellow in the fall of 2011, I put the finishing touches on the book. I also had the opportunity to present various portions of this book to challenging and energizing audiences. I especially want to thank John Kelsay, Martin Kavka, Aline Kalbian, and Sumner B. Twiss for inviting me to present segments of this manuscript to the Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy Colloquium at Florida State University, and to Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society for providing another stimulating platform from which to present my work on several occasions. Far from least, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies itself has afforded support by providing a context of remarkable collegiality and interdisciplinarity and by embodying the vision of peace and justice shared by Joan B. Kroc and Father Theodore Hesburgh.

I owe gratitude to a whole cast of characters for the friendship and support without which writing this book would have been an endeavor much more solitary and much less edifying. Intellectual friends who have become colleagues and co-conspirators, and fellow travelers who have become family: Yael Kravitz, Myriam Arazi-Guy, Sarah-lé and Shabtai Gershon (Zl), Aviva and Zelig Segal, Deena Lipkies, Elena Jimenez, Paula Gray, Carla and Martine Singer, Eva and Yoel Haller, Ceila and Yoseph Marcus (Zl), Alyson Dickson, Z Kermani, Charlotte Harrison and Mark Schuster (of blessed memory), Ann McClenahan, Andy Friedman, Patrick Charbonneau, Erez Naaman, Vikram Khurana and Chee Yeun Chung, David Kim, Christian Rice, Priscilla Little, Katherine Marshall, Mary Ellen O’Connell, Gayle and David Hachen, Peter Chulak, Asher Kaufman, Slavica Jakelić, and Barbara Lockwood. I am grateful to my editors, Douglas Mitchell and Tim McGovern, and to Emily Gravett for editorial support. I am also grateful for the challenging feedback from the anonymous reviewers.

Most important, I owe thanks to my mother, Nurit Manne Adizes, who has been an endless source of support and strength. I am also grateful for the encouragement and understanding from my stepfather, Ichak Adizes, my siblings Nimi and Cnaan Omer and Topaz, Shoham, and Sasa Adizes, and my parents- and grandparents-in-law Kathy and Lance Springs and Alois and Jim Lewis. I conclude the list with thanks to Jason Springs—my partner, colleague, and soul mate—for countless conversations that enriched and fine-tuned the arguments that unfold in this book, and to our little babies born during the writing: Yehonathan Daniele and Pnei’el Alois Omer-Springs, the loves of my life.

University of Notre Dame

December 15, 2012

Earlier versions of chapters 1, 2, and 3 appeared in three distinct journal articles. I explore some conceptual limits of the Israeli peace camp in Religion versus Peace: A False Dichotomy, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 7, no. 3 (December 2007): 109–31. An earlier articulation of my theoretical approach appears as The Hermeneutics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: A Multiperspectival Approach to Justice, Journal of Political Theology 11, no. 5 (October 2010): 650–73, and as Can a Critic Be a Caretaker Too? Religion, Conflict, and Conflict Transformation, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 2 (June 2011): 459–96.

INTRODUCTION

Memories

I grew up in Jerusalem as a second-generation Jewish Israeli. My paternal grandfather came to Palestine in the early phases of the Nazi rise to power. His decision to uproot from Austria was ideologically motivated and a source of dismay to his German-assimilated family. With the exception of his young nephew, who was put on the Kindertransport and sent to Sweden, and a brother who fought with the British army, all of my grandfather’s close relatives vanished in gas chambers and crowded ghettoes during World War II. He survived and established his new life in Palestine and later in the Israeli Jewish state. My grandmother’s family had also come to Palestine before the war. Propelled by the burning desire to educate a new Hebrew generation in Zion, her relatives were among the founders of the first Hebrew gymnasium in Palestine. My late father—a writer, journalist, and cultural critic—was raised, like many of his generation, in a home haunted by the ghosts of those who had died in the Holocaust. This was a home that during the daily schlafstunde was filled with the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and occasionally even Wagner. This was a home that saw the Zionist project as a remedy to (the perceived inevitability of) reoccurring catastrophe. Zionism promised the possibility of a safe haven and was redemptive in the sense that it embodied the self-making of a new Jew or Hebrew who was normal, heroic, and finally at home, rather than sickly, passive, and dislocated. It was also a home that exemplified a fundamental yet (increasingly) ambiguous break between Judaism and Zionism, on the one hand, and between Israel and the diaspora, on the other. My grandmother’s central childhood memory was the harassment she endured in the Polish city of Lódz as a child who attended Hebrew kindergarten. The harassment came from Orthodox Jews who viewed Zionism as a profound violation of the religious injunction against human-initiated return to the land of Zion and who resisted Zionist-Hebraic initiatives that relocated Hebrew into the realm of the mundane. My grandfather eagerly followed the general trend of the early prestate years and shed his German name, embracing a Hebraic one.

By the time I was born, the Holocaust ethos had intensified and become central to processes of socialization within the Israeli state as well as, more broadly, the Jewish diasporas. I participated in the almost mandatory trip to Poland, visited ghettoes and death camps, and carried the Israeli flag proudly across the Polish streets. Shortly after my trip, I was drafted into compulsory service in the Israeli military (the IDF) as were the other kids in my cohort. We were socialized in a certain way that overlooked the tragic connections between the Holocaust and the displacement of the Palestinians. Likewise, challenging the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise as the vessel of redemption for all Jews was taboo; the myth allowed one to question only its territorially minimalist or maximalist executions. But from my childhood to my time in the IDF, I had probed what it might mean to be Jewish, Israeli, and a secularist at the same time. Why was every soldier in the IDF given a copy of the Tanakh upon completion of basic training? What precisely was the Jewish meaning of the Israeli state, considering how many people in my milieu viewed themselves as simultaneously atheist and Jewish? What might be the implications of deeply debating these questions?

I was also the daughter of a critic of Israeli culture and religious coercion in the Jewish nation-state. My father, who died too young at the age of forty-four, publicly questioned the legitimacy of the occupation of the 1967 territories even before the euphoric celebrations were over in June of that year. His position, unpopular at the time, pushed him to the margins of Israeli society. Years later, I am proud of his consistently prophetic voice that emerged out of a profound moral outrage. My intellectual exploration of the topic of ethnoreligious nationalism, and my focus on the relevance of perceptions of citizenship and belonging to issues of peace and justice, are grounded in my recognition that the precise Jewish significance of the Israeli state still needs to be debated. Even a secularized interpretation of Judaism as mere ethnicity or nationality is not fixed or self-evident. But these concerns are also grounded in my father’s outrage and foresight concerning the corrupting nature of military occupation.

This book explores the conceptual blinders of the Israeli peace camp. By focusing on the perceptions of marginalized groups within the Israeli and Jewish contexts, I highlight how hybrid identities may provide creative resources for peacebuilding, especially in ethnoreligious national conflicts where political agendas are informed by particularistic conceptions of identity. The study highlights three such groups: the Mizrahim or Arab Jews (Israeli Jews who trace their ancestry to Arab and/or Islamic countries of origin), Palestinian Israelis (Palestinians who remained within the 1948 borders), and non-Israeli Jewish thinkers and activists from various diasporas whose voices have also been marginalized by the dominant discourse of Zionism. This dominant discourse has tended to privilege Ashkenazi, or European, Jewish identity and history. The ethos of Zionism has focused on the plight of European Jews while silencing Mizrahi histories from the Middle East and North Africa. This discourse has also silenced diasporic Jewish communities by assuming that Israel represents Jews everywhere and by glossing over millennia of Jewish learning and flourishing outside the biblical landscape. Likewise, the privileging of Ashkenazi conceptions of identity has enabled the cultivation of a self-perception of Israel as a part of the West despite its geographical location in the East. It has rendered the hyphenated identities of Arab Jews and Palestinian Israelis seemingly oxymoronic. Similarly, the diasporic Jew is construed as somewhat inauthentic since authenticity is tied to physical rootedness in the land. My focus on these hybrid identities illuminates how a radical critique exposes the conceptual and ideological constraints of the Israeli peace camp. It also gestures toward why undertaking a shift from critique to a constructive reframing of questions of identity is pivotal for processes of peacebuilding and radical change. This reframing is, in turn, highly hermeneutical, deeply embedded in symbolic vocabularies and cultural and religious imaginations.

Identity, Conflict, and Peace

In ethnonational conflicts, questions of peace and justice entail negotiations not only over resources, territory, and power but also over identity, symbols, and memory. In his definitive study of the Sudan, Francis Deng interprets the conflict between the north and the south as a contestation between competing conceptions of Sudanese identity. He consequently underscores the connections between religion, culture, and ethnicity and the definition of national identity. Accordingly, if the nation is defined through an exclusionary reliance on markers such as race, ethnicity, and religion, it is inherently discriminatory and thus fundamentally unjust:

In situations where the nation or the country is defined with reference to the racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious identity of a dominant group, whether a majority or a ruling minority . . . these factors do become bases for discrimination. And although constitutional provisions and other legal instruments might prohibit discrimination, as long as the framework is defined in terms that exclude, subordinate, or marginalize those who do not fit the definition of the nation, discrimination becomes inherent. How the country or the nation is defined or conceived is therefore critical to the status of the citizens. The way to guarantee equality among citizens is either to exclude from the definition of the national framework those factors of identity that provide bases for discrimination or to define identity in terms that are inclusive.¹

This quotation suggests that in order to rectify a discriminatory framework, the nation ought to be redefined in inclusionary terms. Similarly, in his discussion of the civil war in Sri Lanka (1983–2009) between Sinhala and Tamil conceptions of nationalism, Rohan Edrisinha highlights constitutionalism as a framework for conflict management and transformation: the creation of a plural democracy in which the various communities can live with dignity and justice must depend on a supreme constitution which upholds values and principles and acts as a bulwark against majoritarianism.²

In both the Sudan and Sri Lanka, the conflict is defined as a civil war, a configuration that implies (but by no means necessitates) unifying and integrative rather than secessionist or separationist impulses (the Sudanese civil war, in fact, led to the creation of an independent South Sudan). In view of that, both Deng and Edrisinha, in their respective contexts, articulate justice by reframing or redefining the parameters of the nation. In contrast, the case of Israel/Palestine is perceived by participants and observers alike as a conflict between two distinct nationalisms rather than two competing visions of the same nation. As a result, the separationist impulse purportedly dominates as the most appropriate logic of peacemaking.

Indeed, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has suggested that despite pretenses to the contrary, Israeli peace efforts, most notably in the signing of the Oslo Accords³ and its aftermath, have been beholden to what Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel referred to as the ethnocratic logic of Israeli infrastructures.⁴ Accordingly, the principles for the allocation of rights and resources are based on ethnic conceptions of citizenship (jus sanguinis) rather than territorial definitions (jus soli),⁵ precipitating a system of creeping apartheid⁶ and contributing to what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling read as the gradual yet systematic politicide of the Palestinian people.⁷ In this context, the motivation for peacemaking often revolves around demographic concerns. Rather than challenging it, the Oslo configuration contributed to the general reinforcement of a Zionist consensus because not once did it involve a reevaluation of the idea of a Jewish state.⁸ Nor did it involve a consideration of the status of the Arab citizens of Israel in a future realignment.⁹ In the parlance of peace studies, this line of questioning that goes beyond a view of peace as the cessation of direct or explicit violence falls under the purview of peacebuilding. Unlike peacemaking, it is a comprehensive approach that attempts to confront and transform root causes of a conflict and also to envision peace as a process designed to tackle systemic or structural violence.¹⁰

In fact, in her comparative study of peace agreements in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Israel-Palestine, Christine Bell ranks the Oslo Accords as the least successful because they failed to address the basic questions of human rights and because they were premised on the principle of separation rather than integration. She writes:

In both their text and their implementation the Israeli/Palestinian peace agreements demonstrate an almost complete divorce between the concept of peace and the concept of justice. The concept of peace embodied in the agreements is a concept of managed separation, whose contours are shaped by Israeli security concerns. The negotiating dynamics between the parties mean that it was always unlikely that the agreements between them would include human rights constraints on Palestinian autonomy. However, it would have been possible for the entire process to have been subject to overarching international law constraints, although imagining this is difficult, and involves reimagining the entire process and international context.¹¹

Clearly, the reinforcement of the status quo in the Oslo configurations was not merely inadvertent but rather deliberate at the most or sublimated at the least. Hence, neither Deng’s emphasis on how the nation is defined or perceived vis-à-vis religion, culture, and ethnicity nor Edrisinha’s insistence on constitutionalism as a way of mediating individual rights and collective identities and grievances seems relevant to transforming the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In evaluating the Israeli peace camp, this book explores the assumptions that inform the separationist impulse underlying the Zionist peace camp. A key to this effort will amount to linking peace platforms directly to questions of justice.

This undertaking involves an exposition of the boundaries of Israeli liberalism with the intention that such scrutiny might propel a constructive reevaluation of questions of peace and justice in Israel/Palestine. My argument is that while the Zionist Israeli peace camp identifies itself as liberal in its self-perception and self-representation, the peace platforms it advances betray a commitment to illiberal conceptions of nationhood. This underlying illiberality, however, is frequently sublimated, thereby legitimating the continuous maintenance of an axiomatic claim for Jewish hegemony within the Green Line or the 1949 armistice agreements. This is clearly illustrated by the insistence on the so-called two-state solution guiding the Oslo Accords because it entails a persistent cultivation of ethnorepublican identity and practices.

The designation ethnorepublicanism underscores that Israel maintains an interrelated commitment to an ethnocentric Jewish national identity and to a particularly Eurocentric and orientalist interpretation of this national identity. Hence, the lines of exclusion are drawn internally and externally, thereby discriminating against and marginalizing non-Jews and non-Ashkenazi Jews.¹² Whether it interprets the Jewishness of Israel in terms of culture, history, or religion, the Zionist commitment to a Jewish nation-state means—even in its most liberal forms—an underlying institutional mechanism that facilitates the privileged position of Jewish Israelis. This commitment manifests itself especially in constraining the sphere of collective rights granted to the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Further, the normative adherence to a Eurocentric conception of Israeliness results in the systemic discrimination against the Mizrahim.

This ethnorepublican commitment has informed the interpretations of peace and justice pertaining to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The challenge here is not to show that those explicitly chauvinistic voices within Israeli society hinder the possibility of transforming the conflict (this is quite obvious), but rather to expose how the illiberal aspects of self-identified liberal voices within Israel truncate, however inadvertently, the possibilities for integrating peace and justice. This task highlights how internal questions of social justice relate to broader, external considerations of peace with the Palestinians.

The overwhelming inclination of Israeli liberalism to differentiate between the question of the occupation of Palestinian territories and the question of social justice became evident with the emergence of the so-called Tents Revolution in the summer of 2011 (and again in the summer of 2012). This social protest was spearheaded by young Israeli activists who became fed up with the rising cost of living and thus set up tents in the midst of the most lavish boulevards in Tel Aviv. This act of protest captivated a diverse slice of Israeli society who became disillusioned and frustrated with neoliberal socioeconomic policies and their predatory consequences. After decades in which political divides were marked by positions vis-à-vis territorial maximalism or minimalism (with maximalism associated with the right and minimalism with the left), the protest movement of 2011 advanced a nascent articulation of a sociopolitical left. However, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Dimi Reider and Aziz abu Sarah were correct to notice that there is one issue conspicuously missing from the protest: Israel’s 44-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.¹³ The outrageous cost of living in Tel Aviv and broad, deepening inequalities are not unrelated to decades of military occupation and disproportionate spending on militarism and settlement construction. The matter is one not only of reallocating resources but also of probing into the meanings of membership in the Israeli nation-state. Many protesters recognize the connections between neoliberalism, the settlement movement, and the infrastructure of the occupation,¹⁴ but they do not put them on their banner in the effort to cultivate the broadest possible social consensus and maintain the momentum of the movement. However, the conceptual distinction between domestic social justice and the occupation (despite acknowledging connections) contributes to legitimizing precisely what needs to be debated and interrogated, namely, the ethnorepublican ethos and its undergirding institutional mechanisms.

Consequently, I highlight in this book the deeply flawed form of Israeli liberalism by illustrating its continuous and rather unreflective reliance on an ethnorepublican conception of nationhood. This exposition also sheds light on the conceptual tensions inherent in the liberal framework itself. Additionally, the book explores internal resources that could enable reimagining a less flawed, more inclusivist form of nationalism. These resources include the counterhegemonic experiences of Mizrahi and Palestinian Israelis and alternative Jewish ethical traditions. It is important that the reader notes that I am not proposing simply abandoning the politics of identity (a point I revisit throughout the book). It is crucial to keep in mind that my sustained critique, reframing and reimagining the available possibilities, does not relinquish liberal norms and democratic practices (human rights, rule of law, etc.). In fact, in a certain sense, these norms and practices remain indispensable. The objective, rather, is to employ critique in ways that expand upon and conceptually enrich the capacity of such norms and practices to successfully intervene in a relational and historical context of conflict so deeply entangled with and perpetuated and exacerbated by forms of structural and cultural violence. The point is not to supersede liberal norms and practices but to historicize and conceptualize their implementation as a self-correcting enterprise that is, as such, intrinsically hermeneutical and entails multidirectional and multiperspectival conception of justice and peace. This requires a symbiotic relationship between liberal norms and practices and critique. This book aims to strike a balance between the equally indispensable constructive and critical dimensions for grappling with questions of justice and peace in any context of conflict. Critique is necessary not simply to illuminate and contest Israeli liberalism but as a tool for persistently challenging the blind spots to which liberalism itself is prone. In fact, one reason the case of Israel is particularly instructive is in exemplifying the limitations of liberalism as a set of tools for the purposes of peacebuilding.

A Multidisciplinary Lens

This book contributes to a range of disciplines and fields of study. The intended audience of this work includes those who are interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Israeli peace movement specifically, as well as readers in cultural sociology, religious studies, political science, and cultural theory more generally. I purposely venture to bridge these academic disciplines and put them in direct conversation with questions of peace, justice, and conflict transformation that have preoccupied peace studies. I demonstrate that the Israeli-Palestinian case illuminates both the contributions and the limitations of each of these disciplines in providing resources and conceptual frameworks for transformation.

The field of peace studies has focused on the analysis of conflicts and the study of the practices of peacebuilding, including human rights advocacy and specialization, humanitarian assistance, international law, peacekeeping efforts, NGO management, negotiation and mediation efforts, and conflict analysis. I contend that these need to be further enriched by conversations with the field of normative political theory. Normative political theory, and especially the literature that explores questions of multiculturalism, has focused on ethnocultural justice. Therefore, political theory, in its preoccupation with justice, identity, and mediation among competing conceptions of the good within the political framework, needs to become an interlocutor with peace studies. Likewise, religious studies, and the critical analytic tools that recent challenges to a simplistic secularism paradigm have brought to the fore, could bring nuance to the enduring reliance of peace studies on rigid analytic distinctions between identity indices such as ethnicity, nationality, culture, and religion. Additionally, the focus of cultural theory on the relationship between power and conceptions of identity could help peace studies with the analysis and transformation of structural and direct manifestations of violence.

Bridging cultural theory, religious studies, and peace studies would also embolden existing works and approaches already subsumed under the sub-genre of religious peacebuilding. Whereas this subgenre has studied the potential contribution religion could make to conflict transformation, it has not sufficiently theorized how religion could contribute to reframing and reimagining national narratives or how, even in their secular varieties, these narratives draw on selective interpretations of antecedent ethnic, cultural, and religious resources.¹⁵

At the heart of my discussion is the assumption that how people understand their identity is open to interpretation and challenges from within and without the boundaries of the community. In fact, it is precisely those boundaries that are subject to investigation and redescription in light of the demands of peace and justice (demands that are likewise open to scrutiny and contestation). In this regard, the book resonates with and contributes to the study of boundaries (and a related focus on borders) in cultural sociology.¹⁶

Sociologists Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár’s distinction between symbolic and social boundaries is especially helpful to the kind of analyses I undertake in this book. These authors view symbolic boundaries as constituting the conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. In contrast, social boundaries, the authors continue, are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities.¹⁷

Significantly, symbolic boundaries are located on the intersubjective level, whereas social boundaries manifest in actual patterns of social interactions and group classifications.¹⁸ Lamont and Molnár underscore the importance of analyzing the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries, arguing that it is only when symbolic boundaries are widely accepted that they can inform the actual patterns of social interactions. Hence, they call for further development in the study of how the content of symbolic boundaries informs the construction and reproduction of social boundaries.¹⁹

But simply because symbolic boundaries are accepted does not mean they are just and/or justifiable, although they may appear to be so through a variety of social and cultural mechanisms. My study of the Israeli peace camp and its conceptual blinders (born out of a sustained commitment to an ethnorepublican conception of citizenship) illuminates what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu meant by symbolic violence.²⁰ This concept denotes that social structures are often unself-consciously violent in that they enable, normalize, and inhabit discriminatory and dominating practices.²¹

Symbolic violence is usually not even acknowledged by those captivated within it as constituting violence. Instead, it remains unnoticed, misrecognized, and inculcated in the practices of daily life: through what Bourdieu terms habitus, or internalized cultural dispositions, the effects of symbolic violence translate into social (class) boundaries.²² The analysis of the Israeli peace camp I offer in this work exposes how the symbolic violence inherent in the ethnorepublican ideological orientation of Israel delimits the possibilities of imagining justice vis-à-vis the Palestinians. I also suggest resources for challenging and deconstructing symbolic forms of violence that inform and naturalize social boundaries, making them seem natural and legitimate. The process of denaturalizing and reimagining such boundaries is highly interpretive and therefore may necessitate calling upon marginalized and eclipsed historical, cultural, and religious resources, as well as upon those groups and individuals that occupy spaces of hybridity, which challenge rigid conceptions of social boundaries as fixed and impermeable.

This focus on change that calls upon the retrieval, appropriation, and empowerment of marginalized perspectives suggests the link between symbolic and social boundaries. This line of research necessitates an exploration of the substantive meanings of symbolic boundaries and how they emerged into a position of acceptability and legitimacy, in addition to a recognition of symbolic boundaries as spaces that can challenge the seeming rigidity and permanence of social (national) boundaries. Actual physical border zones have long been recognized as spaces of hybridity, liminality, and creolization.²³ My study will show how hybrid identities within and without Israel—those identities that challenge the bifurcated construal of Arab vs. Jew and Palestinian vs. Israeli, along with those (primarily diasporic) voices that challenge the conflation of Israeli and Jew—could potentially confront the symbolic boundaries that constrict the visions of justice put forward by the Israeli peace camp.

The bridging of otherwise disparate disciplinary conversations in peace studies, religious studies, cultural and political theory, and cultural sociology, therefore, enables a descriptively thick analysis of conflict that includes a substantive exposition of symbolic (or in the terminology of peace studies, structural and cultural) violence as well as a constructive imagining and reimagining of social and political boundaries. This constructive reframing of boundaries is normatively oriented and challenged by a multiperspectival approach to justice, one that calls upon and centralizes the voices of oppressed and marginalized groups as resources for deconstructing and reconstructing social and symbolic boundaries.²⁴ This book pushes beyond an analysis of symbolic violence to an interpretive or reinterpretive engagement with the seemingly axiomatic hold of certain conceptions of identity, which subsequently informs conceptions of peace and justice as they pertain to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Plan of the Book

This book is divided into three sections. Each section addresses central theoretical points as well as specific sectors of the peace movement. The first section explicates the theoretical framework and introduces a history of the Zionist peace movement. In chapter 1, I outline how the liberal self-perception of the secular Israeli left restricts discussions of peace and justice to the interrelated formulas of land for peace and the two-state solution. This chapter focuses on the Peace Now (PN) movement because it has come to represent most widely the Israeli secularist consensus on peacemaking. Despite its energetic, colorful, and (formerly) wide appeal, PN, I argue, traveled across a rather limited ideological landscape. It affirmed the construal of Israel’s Jewish character along ethnic or national rather than religious lines, highlighting the demographic imperative for striking a peace agreement and downplaying alternative modes of imagining Judaism vis-à-vis Zionism. In fact, the possibility of imagining alternative Zionisms was never even contemplated.

An axiomatic and narrow interpretation of Israeli Jewish identity has guided PN’s conception of peace and justice. Since its birth on the eve of the Camp David Accords, PN has reaffirmed rather than challenged the conceptual reinterpretation of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 as reclaimed rather than conquered land. This maneuver, chapter 1 explains, is consistent with the ambiguities inherent in secular Zionism and its choice to return to Palestine—a choice that entailed violent repercussions for the indigenous Palestinian population as well as clashing with particular interpretations of the resources of Judaism. Secular Zionism also puts forward an ahistorical argument in support of peacemaking. Indeed, the eventual adoption of the two-state formula indicated a growing awareness of the devastating effects of the occupation as well as a recognition that the ongoing de facto annexation of East Jerusalem and large areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip threatened the integrity of Israeli democracy. But this realization did not catalyze a substantial reorientation or new formulas for thinking about peace as a comprehensive process that entails the transformation of underlying structures, ideologies, and relational patterns. Turning the discussion to a more theoretical level, chapter 2 focuses on the aforementioned importance of bridging gaps among the various disciplines and fields of political science, religious studies, and peace studies in an effort to think constructively and strategically about the transformation of ethnoreligious national conflicts.

In chapter 3, I develop the notion of the hermeneutics of citizenship as a method of understanding the challenges to building peace. This method shows how religion fits into the invisible lines of identity formations and how it may inform an ethnonational agenda. Hence, the hermeneutics of citizenship focuses on the experiences, resources, and writings of myriad marginalized voices as a way of analyzing conflict and peace. This approach pushes the conversation beyond the bounds of one group’s narrative toward a multiperspectival approach to justice. Such an approach deeply challenges one group’s narrative of victimhood and perception of injustice in light of the narratives of other affected groups.

Hence, this approach is thoroughly contextual without being relativist. To contribute to processes of conflict transformation, such an inquiry needs a creative reimagining of identities. In the Israeli case and other areas where ethnoreligious nationalism is rife, such a reimagining cannot bracket religion as an auxiliary factor or as a mere repository of symbolic resources but rather needs to negotiate the underlying mythology of the nation and how it appropriates religious motifs.²⁵ The cases of the Palestinian Israelis and the Mizrahim, by virtue of occupying hybrid locations, provide potential resources for renegotiation. The hyphenated groups of the Arab Jews and Palestinian Israelis challenge the dominant construal of Israeli Jewish identity as antithetical to Arab and Palestinian identities. The retrieval of nonnationalistic Jewish ethical traditions²⁶ also challenges what may constitute an axiomatic reduction of Judaism to Zionism. Broadening the conversation in such a way situates the analysis of justice in a thick hermeneutical questioning of subjective perceptions of identity—a questioning that may result in redrawing the thresholds of inclusion and exclusion. Hence, denaturalizing the perceived connections between religion and national identity through a focus on marginalized narratives could expand the (re)interpretive possibilities available for religious peacebuilding in zones defined by ethnoreligious national claims.

Acknowledging the ramifications of debates over citizenship for the conflict with the Palestinians does not preclude recognition of and sustained engagement with the legacy of Jewish persecution, displacement, and extermination, most recently during the Holocaust, or with the profound fear of extermination by the hostile countries bordering the Israeli state. Rather, the hermeneutics of citizenship captures the tragic interlocking narratives of Palestinian and Jewish uprootedness and sufferings and demonstrates how those narratives are embodied in the authentic experiences and perceptions of both Jews and Palestinians. The security argument so often pronounced by Israeli and non-Israeli Jews regarding their commitment to the ethnocratic project—namely, that Israel is a place of Jewish refuge and self-determination—is born out of genuine experiences of existential threats.

Chapter 3 then explains how the hermeneutics of citizenship expands on existing theories of religion and peacebuilding and extends important conversations in the academic study of religion that center on power analysis as a means of critiquing decontextualized modes of studying religion.²⁷ A primary constructive approach that already defines the study of religion, conflict, and conflict transformation²⁸ highlights, as I reread it, not only how religion may relate to chauvinistic interpretations of nationhood but also how religion’s internal plurality could be related to reimagining ideological formations and reified identities. I expand on this constructive approach by pointing to its continuous privileging of liberal conceptions of religion as an interiorized mode of being and as relating to the ultimate or the sacred. This orientation permeates the practical dimensions of the field of religious peacebuilding. I argue that a framework for conflict transformation needs to engage alternative conceptions of the place of religion in public life.

The second section of the book studies the explicitly religious Zionist peace camp and examines issues of pluralism and synagogue-state relations in Israel. In chapter 4, I map the conceptual contours of the religious Zionist camp, situating it within the broader spectrum of explicitly religious responses to Zionism and Israel. I then highlight the positions of prominent thinkers and activists, such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz, David Hartman, and Aviezer Ravitzky, who represent alternative articulations of the relationship between religion and nation. In doing so, they underscore the irreducibility of religion to the formulation of the nation. The chapter also links this discussion of religious thinkers to a broader conversation concerning state-synagogue relations in Israel. Specifically, I examine a document titled A Comprehensive Proposal for Dealing with Issues of Religion and State in Israel. Drafted by Israeli professor of law Ruth Gavison and Rabbi Yaakov Medan, the Gavison-Medan Covenant, as it came to be known, constitutes a collaborative attempt by a religious leader and a secularist jurist to recognize internal pluralities within the Jewish public and to reflect on the implications of such plurality for questions of religion and state. For example, the Covenant expands the definition of a Jew to include those who converted within the context of Reform Judaism. This entails a direct challenge to the monopoly of the rabbinate in Israel and the halakhic definition of a Jew as the child of a Jewish mother or a person converted through Orthodox Judaism. Although the Gavison-Medan Covenant represents an attempt to renegotiate the meanings of Jewish life in Israel, its vision of pluralism is limited by an axiomatic commitment to Jewish hegemony. Thus, I show how the Gavison-Medan document, with its focus on internal Jewish pluralism, is abstracted from a consideration of the relevance of this discussion to broader intergroup questions of justice. In doing so, I hope to illustrate the conceptual limitations of the liberal discourse of multiculturalism.

In chapter 5, I anchor the analysis using the case of Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR). This rabbinical organization (founded in 1988) grounds its human rights advocacy and protest in the humanistic Jewish tradition and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I examine RHR not only because, as a religious organization, it offers the most systematic challenge to the land theology of the messianic settlers but also because it contests some of the defining dimensions of the Zionist paradigm of citizenship.²⁹ In particular, RHR legitimates pluralistic interpretations of Jewish identity in the contemporary world and thus rejects the monopoly of the rabbinate in the Zionist secular nation-state. Similar to Gavison and Medan’s rationale, RHR also presents an important case for examining the efficacy of liberalism as a framework for articulating questions of peace and justice in ethnoreligious national contexts and for reviewing the relevance of polycentric critiques of the liberal thread of multicultural theories of citizenship.³⁰ This is due to what I identify as RHR’s basic affinity with American revised liberalism, specifically its explicit reliance on Jewish American liberal thinking and orientation.

But, unlike the Gavison-Medan Covenant, RHR substantially engages the meanings of return as an opportunity for rethinking Judaism, the nature of covenantal relations, and the promise of the land. A contextualized analysis of Jewish return (one that is attentive to marginalized and repressed voices and histories) would challenge and redefine the deployment of a messianic and metahistorical concept in light of human and historical realities. Accordingly, the notion of Jewish chosenness and divine election would be conditioned entirely on just practices.

While RHR has indeed exemplified liberal interpretations of Israeli nationalism or Zionism, this is an insufficient tactic for peacebuilding because the very inability to question Zionism as Israel’s theory of political legitimacy constitutes a root cause of the conflict with the Palestinians. Drawing on the prophetic Jewish tradition, advocating religious humanism, and performing radical acts of solidarity with the victims of Israeli political practices, while indispensable, fall short of challenging the basic Zionist frame that perpetuates the conflict. Peacebuilding requires confronting the history of modern political Zionism and its victims (including Zionism’s Jewish victims) as well as a substantive rather than a cosmetic reconfiguration of the Jewish meanings of Israeli citizenship. I therefore highlight the case of RHR in chapter 5 to develop a focused discussion of both the theoretical and the practical aspects of religious peacebuilding. Outlining the conceptual and ideological limitations of RHR clarifies the strategic effectiveness of the hermeneutics of citizenship and of the religious peacebuilder, in addition to the scholar of religion, as a critical caretaker of tradition, challenging the interrelation between power, national identity, and religion.

Broadening the discussion concerning the interrelation between Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel entails integrating alternative nonnationalistic Jewish voices and ethical-philosophical traditions into the conversation concerning the Jewish meanings of Israel. Here I focus on the reflections of Jewish thinkers and activists, such as the philosopher Judith Butler who retrieves the thoughts of the Jewish German philosophers Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, among others, to argue that the condition of liminality and nonbelonging is more Jewish than land ownership. While Arendt and Benjamin are now widely read by political philosophers and religious ethicists, their voices do need to be retrieved in the context of the discussion of Jewish nationalism. Butler underscores Benjamin’s indebtedness to a particular interpretation of the Jewish kabbalistic tradition. On this basis, she highlights a different Jewish orientation that gestures toward the possibility of a multiperspectival approach to justice—one that cannot tell the Jewish narrative without recognizing its inherent connections to a Palestinian one—and the possibility of coexistence in Palestine/Israel. Arendt’s condemnation of the Zionist construal of the Jewish people as unitary and homogenous further enables Butler’s critique and revalorization of the category of diaspora. At the same time that her appealing to nonbelonging or alterity retrieves Jewish resources, Butler’s imagining of questions of justice as the reframing of ethical relations to non-Jews is thoroughly relational (or what I call multiperspectival). Her notion of relationality coheres with Palestinian cultural critic Edward Said’s recognition, toward the end of his life, of the ethical potentialities enfolded in connecting Palestinian and Jewish experiences of dispersal and dispossession. Relinquishing relationality as the foundation for imagining ethical cohabitation in Palestine/Israel, Butler underscores, would merely reaffirm the exclusive cultural framework of Jewishness.³¹ Certainly, I concur that relationality is a condition for reimagining justice. However, I argue that Butler’s proviso that coexistence projects can only begin with the dismantling of political Zionism³² may posit the goal as a precondition and thus counter the creative potentialities of the relational model. In chapter 5, I further examine the indispensable innovations and conceptual and practical limitations of this model of ethical cohabitation.

Chapter 5 also presents other diasporic voices that offer a critique of Israeli policies and signal countercultural currents that celebrate Jewish diasporic life. This trend