Jewish Politics: Democracy or Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel

In anticipation of a research/writing leave in the AY 2025-6, I seek seed funds to launch my next book project focusing on competing models of what I have termed hitmazrehut or becoming of the East (see Omer 2017), specifically the region of Palestine/Israel. Through archival work and interviews with pivotal activists, I intend to trace three multifaceted and often contradictory conceptions of hitmazrehut concurring during the Oslo “peace process,” which spanned over thirty years before the events of October 7th, 2023, forced a regional reassessment. I named the models of hitmazrehut: the settler colonial/messianic, the political/regional, and Mizrahi left. These are heuristics with some overlaps between the Mizrahi left and the political/regional visions of hitmazrehut. The research will involve archival work at The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, where I will review archival collections of the Israeli settlement movement, the Alternative Information Center, and the Israeli left, focusing on the following issues: “Judaizing” of Jerusalem, the West Bank and the rest of historic Palestine; the question of a “Jewish democracy”; perceptions of Palestinians, ethical sources for regional thinking, and the links between hitmazrehut and gendered and feminist justice. The overarching research question will investigate how religion connects to exclusionary and chauvinistic discourses of belonging and to the democratic imagination and ethical and political justice in Palestine/Israel.