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ABSTRACT
This article considers the cultural meaning of religious and community boundaries when attempting to mediate the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Here we compare two sites, one religious, the other secular, of peace-building encounters between Palestinians and Jews in Israel and in the West Bank. Through extensive ethnographic work, the study draws attention to the divergent meanings of community boundaries in liberal and non-liberal cosmologies. Whereas secular liberals view religious boundaries as barriers to the autonomous individual’s free choice, itself considered necessary for co-existence, for these Jewish and Muslim religious groups, those same boundaries safeguard a peaceful and respectful shared space. Our ethnographic insights call for a broader discussion of the meaning and use of social and symbolic boundaries beyond the liberal vision for social and moral order. Such a discussion is theoretically timely and politically pressing in view of the challenge of living together with difference in the global reality of deep diversity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Elad, a town recently established in the centre of Israel, boasts an almost completely ultra-Orthodox population.
2 At the conference ‘Different Voices, Different Visions: Broadening the Ways to Imagine Peace’, held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute on 14 March 2019, where many of these groups, including participants from the Citizens Accord Forum, gathered to share their experiences. See: https://www.vanleer.org.il/en/event/different-voices-different-visions-broadening-ways-imagine-peace.
3 As those studies indicate, working-class Mizrahi Jews and Arab Palestinians, to say nothing of the ultra-Orthodox members of those same groups, suffer from stigmatisation, although to very different degrees. They are viewed as the ultimate ‘unfit’ for the liberal democratic order and are often portrayed in the liberal secular discourse as extremist ‘fundamentalists’.
4 As expressed in the Law of Return (1950) as well as in the more-recently legislated Nation State Law (2018).
5 Consider Smooha’s term ‘ethnic democracy’ (see Smooha, ‘Ethnic Democracy’, Israel Studies, 2(2), Citation1997).
6 For a debate over the notion of ethnic democracy see Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel (Citation1998), ‘Questioning “ethnic democracy”: A response to Sammy Smooha’, Israel Studies, 3(2), Law and the Transformation of Israeli Society, pp. 253–267.
7 Historically, Arabs and Jews were educated in separate systems. This setup, existing before establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, was continued after the State’s establishment. Preservation of educational segregation was also related to geographic separation. In general, most Jews and Arabs lived in distinct towns and villages. Whereas the Arab public did not demand integration of Jewish and Arab education, it did request expansion of the Arab system’s autonomy (see Agabria, Citation2015). At the same time, structural separation between the systems allowed the ruling establishment to exert its control over Arab education and to discriminate against it (see Al-Haj, Citation1995).
8 We should note that the Arab Palestinian participants in our study all belonged to the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement, to be differentiated from the Northern Branch of the Movement, which has been outlawed by the Israeli Knesset, based on claims about their extremist positions.
9 The term ‘Sephardi’ originally referred to the Jewish Diaspora in Spain but today it is often used as a euphemism for Mizrahi Jews who have adopted a Sephardic liturgical style.
11 A term suggested by Prof. Menachem Mautner, personal communication.
12 Another major attempt in this direction was initiated by Rabbi Menachem Froman; see S. Magid (Citation2015).