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ABSTRACT
Focusing on the role of hope and emotions more broadly in the two newest peace movements in Israel – Women Wage Peace and Standing Together – this paper investigates how both movements ‘work’ on their activists’ emotions and combine emotions. A comparative and gendered approach sheds light on differences between the movements. While both were established in 2014–2015 and strive for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each has distinct characteristics. Women Wage Peace is a women’s movement focused on reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians, while Standing Together is a mixed movement with a holistic mandate of reaching peace and transforming Israel into a more egalitarian society. The paper draws on qualitative methodologies – in-depth interviews with Jewish and Arab-Palestinian activists, ethnographic work, and analysis of documents produced by the movements. It suggests that both movements consciously work on their activists’ emotions, but that Standing Together combines the positive emotion of hope with the negative emotion of anger (‘moral battery’), while Women Wage Peace combines the positive emotion of hope with the positive emotions of love and joy. The paper also argues that Women Wage Peace’s combination of positive-only emotions is part of an absolute politics of positivity that contrasts with Standing Together’s more limited politics of positivity. Possible implications include the value for peace movements to actively work on their activists’ emotions and trigger hope, which can be combined with negative or positive emotions, as movements consciously place themselves along the ‘politics of positivity’ spectrum.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Prof. Ayelet Harel, Dr. Sarai Aharoni and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts. I am also grateful to the peace activists for their time and generous responses.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Generations of social movement scholarship included mass behavior theories (Smelser, Citation1963), resource mobilization theories (McCarthy & Zald, Citation1977), the political process approach (McAdam, Citation1982) and new social movement theories (Melucci, Citation1985).
2. All activists mentioned in this paper are Israelis – be they Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel or Jewish citizens of Israel.
3. This definition follows scholars who investigated the ‘emotion(al) work’ and/or ‘emotion management’ done by social movements (Flam, Citation2007; Goodwin et al., Citation2004). It is to be distinguished from other uses of these terms that relate to the act, performed by an individual on him/herself, of trying to change an emotion so that it is appropriate to any given situation (Bolton, Citation2005, p.50; Hochschild, Citation1990, pp. 117–118).
4. The ‘Knife Intifada’ was a temporary escalation of violence in Israel and the oPt (2015–2016), during which individual Palestinians launched local and sporadic attacks and were met with excessive force by Israeli military, police, and armed civilians.
5. https://www.standing-together.org [Accessed 13 Apr. 2022].
6. Johan Galtung distinguished between ‘negative peace’ – the absence of war – and ‘positive peace’ that denotes ‘the simultaneous presence of many desirable states of mind and society, such as harmony, justice, equity’ (Galtung, Citation1964; Webel & Galtung, Citation2007, p.6).
7. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in Citation1989 to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics ‘intersect’ with one another and overlap, creating specific forms of power relations and oppression. Adopting intersectional politics is about identifying power dynamics between identity groups, addressing different forms of prejudices with that in mind, and connecting struggles.
8. https://www.womenwagepeace.org.il/en/[Accessed 7 Aug. 2022].
9. ‘Ashkenazi’ Jews are of Eastern European origin while ‘Mizrahi’ Jews are of Middle Eastern and North-African origin.
10. These findings are presented in another paper currently under review.
11. All names of activists mentioned in this paper are pseudonyms.
12. https://www.standing-together.org/theoryofchange [Accessed 13 Apr. 2022].
13. In 2020 Israeli officials repeatedly vowed to annex part of the West Bank, prompting demonstrations by many organizations, including ST and WWP. Israel suspended its annexation plans in August 2020, in exchange for a ‘normalization agreement’ with the UAE.
14. https://www.womenwagepeace.org.il/women-partners-for-peace [Accessed 13 Apr. 2022].
15. Renown feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan differentiated between a masculine morality based on justice, rights, and autonomy and a feminine morality based on care, responsibility, and relationality (Citation1982).
16. Alongside the findings that both movements work on their activists’ emotions and that ST combines hope with anger while WWP combines hope with love and joy, I found that many other emotions both draw people into activism and are derived from their activism, namely duty, indignation, fear, pain, grief, frustration, guilt, a sense of valuation of one’s life, pride, pleasure and disgust. The role of these emotions in peace movements in Israel-Palestine will hopefully be the subject of a future paper.
17. https://womenwagepeace.org.il/en/mission-statement [Accessed 13 Apr. 2022].
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Liv Halperin
Liv Halperin completed her Ph.D. at the Conflict Management and Resolution Program, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is currently a Sophie Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow on Gender, Conflict Resolution and Peace at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations, Hebrew University/Jerusalem, and the Director of Research and Policy at the ECF think tank in Tel Aviv.