ABSTRACT
This chapter provides concluding remarks about this study. We first argue that the extreme Othering of occupation discourse both impacts and is impacted by overlapping social cleavages. We claim that the dialectic of occupation normalization and estrangement does not appear to progress to any type of Hegelian synthesis. Thus, we characterize this discourse as a fixed discourse; the dialectic nature of this discourse is inherent to it, but also prevents any progress towards synthesis. We then provide a brief picture of the most recent shift in discourse towards occupation normalization since the formation of the current Israeli government, while illustrating that normalization discourses cannot “defeat” estrangement discourses, as the two oppositional discourses constitute one another. We then illustrate a prescriptive model for discourse based on ecological and cultural discourses, which attempts to break down the competitive nature of oppositional discourse towards a holistic cultural alternative based on the inclusion of marginalized discourses. Such an approach, when applied to our case, would move beyond the “extreme Othering” of both occupation normalization and estrangement. Finally, we suggest future directions in which our dialectic approach can be used for the study of the normalization and estrangement of various social and political phenomena.
