Hope and Contemporary Israeli Peace Movements

This book investigates and compares two contemporary Israeli peace movements through the angle of collective emotions, and specifically of hope.

Drawing on empirical qualitative research combining interviews with Jewish and Arab-Palestinian activists and ethnographic work, the work provides unique documentation of the birth and development of Standing Together (a mixed-gender peace movement) and Women Wage Peace (a women’s peace movement). It explores the meaning of hope for Israeli peace activists, and shows the concrete efforts that both movements undertake to trigger hope, as part of an intersectional peace politics and of a non-partisan women’s peace politics, respectively. The book also engages with the post-October 2023 developments in the Middle East, showing how both peace movements, now followed by others in the Israeli peace camp, continue to invest in their politics of hope amid devastation, fatigue and fear. Offering a gendered typology of hope-related emotion work useful beyond the cases at hand, the book proposes that collective hope-based action, combined with other emotions, might be powerful in all contexts of despair and protracted conflicts.

This book will be of interest to students of peace and conflict studies, social and peace movements, gender studies, nonviolent resistance, international relations, and Israel-Palestine/Middle East.