The Materiality of Respect in Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding

This ethnographic study considers how practitioners of reconciliation, peace activists, and conflict-related bereaved Palestinians and Israelis understand their individual moral subjectivity and assess the moral subjectivity of other Israelis and Palestinians in the context of organized reconciliation and peace education programs. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research, ninety-eight interviews, and over 1,000 pages of organizational documents, I analyze how bereaved Palestinians and Israelis affiliated with a non-governmental organization, the Parents Circle-Families Forum, navigate uncertainty about the intentions underlying one another’s verbally stated commitments to reconciliation, peace, and nonviolence. Specifically, I trace how Kantian and neo-Kantian liberalism infuses dialogue-based reconciliation practices with expectations of an individual rational moral subject expected to uphold the division between mind and matter, or between rationality and the corporeal experiences of grief and daily violence. This study examines the minute and daily practices of performing and assessing respect between bereaved Israelis and Palestinians and proposes a material theory of ethics as a corrective to the hegemonic model of Kantian moral subjectivity in reconciliation theory and practice. In elaborating a material theory of ethics, I draw upon Palestinian practices of smoking, hospitality, and gift-giving in the reconciliation context to demonstrate the agential nature of materiality (Barad 2003; Bennett 2010) and highlight how items like coffee cups and cigarettes create ethical affordances (Keane 2016) where speech and human intention are decentered from assessments of moral subjectivity. In decentering human agency and intention, and linking materiality to moral subject formation, this study advances a post humanist approach to understanding and reconceptualizing the universality of reconciliation in violent contexts.<p></p>