ABSTRACT
Despite all that has been written about its imminent demise, the idea of the nationstate and its ordering of the world maintains a privileged position in international relations, struggles for liberation, and conventional peacemaking. It eclipses other possible ways of imagining the world, including already existing moral orders at many scales: market capitalism, confessional identities, local networks of kinship and barter, or the kinds of ad-hoc, informal, or ephemeral cooperation that people engage in every day independently of either nation or state. The episteme of nation-states provides the foundation for ways of narrating the past and explaining social and political conflict, as well as the basis for resolving such conflict. In this chapter, I would like to shift the ground of the social imaginary (Taylor 2002) or moral order of nation-states to focus on other conceptualizations that resist and subvert that ordering. I will focus on the case of Israel/Palestine where, as elsewhere, social and political struggles have been conceptualized in terms of nation-states: their existence, their essential identities, their legitimacy and rights, their boundaries, and their relationships with one another. There are currently two major narratives of Israel/Palestine (Dalsheim 2014), each arising from the episteme of nation-states, and each culminating in a particular set of moralizing conclusions (White 1980). According to these narratives, either two national groups are vying for sovereignty over the same territory, or the Palestinian people are resisting the colonization of Palestine. My purpose here is not to suggest that these conceptualizations are wrong, nor to engage with alternative historiographies.1
Instead, I would like to shift the ground of the moral order which gives rise to these two competing narratives and to other hegemonic contemporary narratives that order our understandings of politics, peace and potentials for social justice. Building on feminist and post-structuralist theory, I offer an alternative con-
ceptualization that paints a more complex picture of power relations and
resistances. Shifting the ground allows us to see other ways of being, believing, and acting that might not fit neatly into the hegemonic categories through which we generally analyze contemporary political struggles like the case of Israel/ Palestine. This makes room for thinking beyond conventional models and concepts that have made Israel/Palestine into a seemingly intractable conflict with a limited set of possible solutions.
