Friday 22 November 2019 4:15pm to 6:00pm
Edmund Leach Seminar Room, Dept of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane
About
Dr Erica Weiss (Tel Aviv University)
A parochial peace: Post-liberal democratic experiments in Israel/Palestine
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process initiated with the Oslo Accords is practically dead and the Israeli peace camp is practically non-existent. The Israeli and international left often describe this as a choice by Israeli society for conflict over peace and casts significant parts of the population as enemies of peace. However, from an ethnographic perspective this is not accurate and nearly everyone in society will say that they want peace. The answer to this riddle is that there are very diverse visions of peace. Only one of these was represented in the Oslo Accords, and it has become apparent that this vision has failed to resonate with a significant part of the population, Jewish and Palestinian alike. I will describe my ongoing fieldwork research (2012-present), with alternative (non-liberal, religious) peace initiatives which have emerged from far outside the mainstream peace camp. These initiatives have challenged me to reconsider the way I think about sovereignty, the temporal horizons of peace, as well as the relationships between religion, “fundamentalism”, and peace.