Supporters of Hamas and radical religious Israeli settlers seem to serve one purpose in the international peace process: to provide an excuse for its failure. High-level diplomatic negotiators and grassroots peace activists alike blame religious extremists for acting as spoilers of rational negotiation, and have often attempted to neutralize, co-opt, or marginalize them. In Producing Spoilers, Joyce Dalsheim explores the problem of stalled peacemaking by viewing spoilers not as the cause, but as a symptom of systemic malfunctions within the concept of the nation-state itself, and the secular constructs of historicism that support it. She argues that spoilers are generated as internal enemies in the course of conflict and used to explain why processes of peace and reconciliation fail. In other words, peacemaking efforts can work to produce enmity. Focusing on the case of Israel and Palestine, Dalsheim shows how processes of conflict resolution, diplomacy, dialogue, education, and social theorizing about liberation, peace, and social justice actually participate in constructing enemies, thus limiting the options for peaceful outcomes. Dalsheim examines the work of politicians and diplomats as well as scholars and grass-roots level peacemakers, drawing on her research and her own experience as an activist for peace. She identifies a number of common techniques and assumptions that help to produce spoilers, among them the constraints of the narrative form and how storytelling is employed in conflict resolution, and the idea of anachronism, which prevents theorists and activists from seeing creative possibilities for peaceful coexistence. Dalsheim also looks at the limits of territorial solutions and the consequences of nationalismthe context in which spoilers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are produced. She contrasts that nationalism with current theorizing on flexible citizenship and diasporic identity. The book culminates by moving beyond national enmity and outside conventional peacemaking to clear a space in which to think about alternative forms of negotiation, exchange, community, and coexistence.

The terms Israel, Palestine, and conflict conjure up a set of images of struggles between two peoples over territory and sovereignty in the heart of the Middle East. However, there are conficts within that confict that contribute to the seemingly endless violence in the region. This book examines one of those conflicts, between Jewish Israelis, focusing on the case of right-wing religious settlers in Israeli-occupied territories, and the liberal left-wing public that vehemently opposes the settlers and their project. This is a conflict that has taken on central importance in the current political climate as the settlers are seen by many in the region as a threat to both democracy and peace with the Palestinians. At the same time, those religiously motivated settlers question the limits of liberal democracy and deem liberal Israeli practices as threatening to the very future of the State of Israel. In Israel the socio-religious-political scene tends to be depicted in sets of binary oppositions: right/left, religious/secular, in favor/opposed to settlement in post-1967 occupied territories. Arguing that these binaries are not the most useful conceptualization, Dalsheim employs recent fieldwork to place the two sets of apparently incommensurable discourses and practices in a single frame. During the year preceding the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, or "disengagement," she carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Israeli settlers on both sides of the Green Line in that region. She argues that this conflict between Israeli settlers arises from the suppression of sameness, rather than difference, focusing on the commonalities among settlers in the Gaza Strip and liberal Israelis (often from kibbutz communities) in the Western Negev across the Green Line. By shedding light on the roots of this intractable conflict, Dalsheim makes it possible to examine lesser known socio-religious-political positions and constellations of identity that challenge the limits of what appear to be the currently available options for Israel/Palestine.

Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as "the nation" in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the meanings and practices of being Jewish. Based on years of ethnographic engagement, the book employs Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens in order to frame the seemingly bizarre and self-contradictory processes it describes. While other scholars have explained Jewish identity conflicts in Israel in terms of a dichotomy between the secular and the religious, this book suggests that such an analysis is inadequate. Instead, it traces these struggles to the definition of "religion" itself. It suggests that the problem lies in the way modern identity categories at once disarticulate "religion" from "nation" and at the same time conflate those categories in the figure of the Jew. The struggles over Jewishness that are part of the process of producing the ethnos for the ethno-national state call into question the notion that self-determination in the form of the nation-state is a liberating process. Modern democratic nation-states are meant to liberate citizens because they are understood to be ruled by "the people" and for "the people." But if "the people" exists for the state and its projects, then there is little liberating about the formula of sovereign citizenship. Instead, self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness. The case of Israel demonstrates that the classic "Jewish Question" in Europe has been transformed but not answered by political sovereignty.

Israel is a place of paradoxes, a small country with a diverse population and complicated social terrain. Studying its culture and social life means confronting a multitude of ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges. The first-person accounts by anthropologists engage contradictions of religion, politics, identity, kinship, racialization, and globalization to reveal fascinating and often vexing dimensions of the Israeli experience. Caught up in pressing existential questions of war and peace, social justice, and national boundaries, the contributors explore the contours of Israeli society as insiders and outsiders, natives and strangers, as well as critics and friends.

Israel is a place of paradoxes, a small country with a diverse population and complicated social terrain. Studying its culture and social life means confronting a multitude of ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges. The first-person accounts by anthropologists engage contradictions of religion, politics, identity, kinship, racialization, and globalization to reveal fascinating and often vexing dimensions of the Israeli experience. Caught up in pressing existential questions of war and peace, social justice, and national boundaries, the contributors explore the contours of Israeli society as insiders and outsiders, natives and strangers, as well as critics and friends.