Paper short abstract:

In 2018-2019, I faced an ethical-moral mismatch when conducting research with Israeli settlers: allowing interlocutors whose politics I found morally repugnant become complex persons, and balancing this with the greater moral questions of the region.

Paper long abstract:

When embarking on research with traditionally non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews, I did not anticipate that a significant proportion of my interlocutors would be participants in the settler-colonial project of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Though initially tempted to exclude interlocutors on the basis of their places of residence, I dismissed this as too biased of an erasure of the reality of Haredi society today. I then faced a three-fold challenge: conducting research with people whose politics I found morally repugnant, ethically allowing those interlocutors to become fully realised, complex persons free of my moral judgement, and balancing these two oppositions with the greater moral and ethical questions of my subjectivity in the region.

In a context where voicing my own opinions could at the very least lead to the inability to continue to find interlocutors, and at worst risk my physical safety, I found innovative methodological approaches to ethnographic practice, both in the field and after, both practical and theoretical. These have allowed me to reach my goal of realising the epistemological significance of political shifts in religious communities to the Far Right, and further my goal of understanding the politically radical other in a rapidly changing world.