Paper short abstract:

This paper considers religiously-informed pluralist initiatives in Israel and Palestine that seek to bypass the state and typical sovereignty-focused components of the peace process. These groups believe that the national narrative promises an unrealistic ideal of “peace” free of vulnerability.

Paper long abstract:

The Israeli state has been in crisis-mode since 1948. Domestically, the state is widely understood as a nation at risk, surrounded by enemies who wish its people harm. Until recently, major peace initiatives have concentrated their efforts at the level of state politics. These have tried to bring Palestinians and Israelis together to discuss the division of land, rights to water sources, militarization, etc. The state has always been central to imagining coexistence. Common sense generally tells people there needs to be an agreement between states in order for "peace" to appear. Recently, non-liberal religious initiatives have been questioning the centrality of the state to coexistence. These groups have suggested that the secular Realpolitik state is chasing a false sense of security. They claim the national vision naively seeks to create a utopian situation that eliminates all vulnerability, something inherent to social interaction. National narratives position the state as the solution to the historical problems of a people. Nowhere is this more the case than Israel, where the state offers itself as the solution to the historic oppression of the Jewish people. Realizing the impossibility of eliminating vulnerability from human interaction, some Jewish Israelis and Palestinians have begun to bypass typical components of the peace process such as land negotiations, claiming that the land belongs to God alone, and focusing on coexistence unrelated to questions of sovereignty. This paper will explore these efforts and consider what they can suggest to our own understandings of politics on different scales.