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Inspiring and hopeful discussion of how we can live together in a world that is both deeply divided and undeniably shared.
In a region divided by violence, walls, fences, and checkpoints, Voices of Reason analyzes critically cross-boundary initiatives that seek to affirm their own reason in the land between the river and the sea. Based on fieldwork with solidarity and human rights activists in southern Israel and its Israeli–Palestinian borderlands, conducted over the span of two decades, author Alexander Koensler traverses competing moral and political orders. While violence and war and dichotomic interpretive lenses dominate the headlines, relatively little is known about everyday life across borders or peace activism in Israeli society. Precisely for this reason it is equally important to understand more complex dynamics, those aspects that remain often overshadowed but bear a potential for change. With his call to disentangle the separatist imagination, Koensler engages the notion of polyphony to offer novel ways to move beyond zero-sum assumptions in conflicts and hardening community boundaries everywhere, giving the reader an uplifting sense of how we can live together in a world that is both deeply divided and yet undeniably shared.
"Voices of Reason makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and ethno-national conflicts more generally by exploring various cross-community interactions and convincingly demonstrating how reality is more complex than its usual portrayal exclusively as 'two sides' endlessly warring. This is an important intervention in general, and ever more so in the current climate, and it will generate much interest. Along the way it also compellingly deconstructs and complicates several other prominent images from the Palestinian–Israeli setting, e.g., the role of international activists, the meaning of solidarity, the effects of human rights, and much more." — Ron Dudai, Ben-Gurion University
Alexander Koensler is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Perugia and Visiting Researcher at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, Italy. He is the author of Israeli-Palestinian Activism: Shifting Paradigms.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on Ethnographic Ethics and Transliteration from Hebrew and Arabic
Introduction
Part 1: How Many Voices?
1. A Polyphonic Perspective on Conflicts
2. Polyphony in the Periphery
3. Transversal Dreams, Desires, and Hopes
Part 2: A Polyphonic Political Imagination
4. Acts
5. Gyres
6. Acceleration
Part III: Struggles for Justice
7. Collective Rights, Individual Lives
8. Human Rights in Practice
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index