Abstract
The struggle between Israelis and Palestinians has persisted for nearly a century and has engulfed them, as well as regional and global communities, in prolonged conflict and turmoil. Too often Israeli and Palestinian communities have sought to redress their grievances, both perceived and real, through violence—ranging from state-sponsored military strikes to non-state assaults on civilians to individual acts of personal violence. Despite the long and widely publicized history of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, there is also a historic and ever growing commitment to nonviolence and cooperative peacebuilding as a means of attaining a fair, equitable, and negotiated settlement to the conflict. Yet these movements have not received the same level of attention and study as violent forms of resistance. As a result, there is a major gap in the knowledge base in terms of understanding the full phenomenon of popular nonviolent resistance—one that in part has propagated a narrative that resistance either is an exclusively Palestinian activity or involves little or no intentional cooperation and coordination across Palestinian, Israeli, and inter-national activist groups. Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2009, this chapter will challenge the compartmentalized theorization that posits that Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists are separate agents of resistance by examining cooperative popular resistance and peacebuilding organizations and networks at work in Israel, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.
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Notes
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Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 190.
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© 2011 Maia Carter Hallward and Julie M. Norman
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Sauders, R.R. (2011). Partners for Peace: Cooperative Popular Resistance and Peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In: Hallward, M.C., Norman, J.M. (eds) Nonviolent Resistance in the Second Intifada. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337770_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337770_4
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