Overview

Joyce Dalsheim's ethnographic study takes a ground-breaking approach to one of the most contentious issues in the Middle East: the Israeli settlement project. Based on fieldwork in the settlements of the Gaza Strip and surrounding communities during the year prior to the Israeli withdrawal, Unsettling Gaza poses controversial questions about the settlement of Israeli occupied territories in ways that move beyond the usual categories of politics, religion, and culture. The book critically examines how religiously-motivated settlers think about living with Palestinians, how they express theological uncertainty, and how they imagine the future beyond the confines of territorial nationalism.This is the first study to place radical, right-wing settlers and their left-wing and secular opposition in the same analytic frame. Dalsheim shows that the intense antagonism between these groups disguises fundamental similarities. Her analysis reveals the social and cultural work achieved through a politics of mutual denunciation. With theoretical implications stretching far beyond the boundaries of Israel/Palestine, Unsettling Gaza's counter-intuitive findings shed fresh light on politics and identity among Israelis and the troubling conflicts in Israel/Palestine, as well as providing challenges and insight into the broader questions that exist at the interface between religiosity and formations of the secular.

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9780199751204

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Joyce Dalsheim conducted ethnographic fieldwork among religious settlers in Gaza before they were forcibly removed in 2005 as part of the Israeli government's redeployment strategy. The result is this interesting study comparing the beliefs and sentiments of these religious settlers with those of secular settlers in pre-1967 Israel. She shows that the distinction between the two is not as clear-cut or as stable as it is often claimed. Anyone wanting to gain a fuller understanding of the religious/secular debate in Israel will find this book useful. -- Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center Joyce Dalsheim's book is rich in critical acumen, yet closely grounded in the realities it depicts and altogether readable. It is a signal contribution to the growing literatures in Jewish ethnography and cultural studies. It directly addresses core aspects of the Zionist project and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without rancor, and it adroitly moves beyond the stereotypes of actors in that conflict as it depicts the multiform anxieties underlying what Dalsheim calls 'the desire to differentiate.' -- Jonathan Boyarin, Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill With Unsettling Gaza, Joyce Dalsheim throws a monkey wrench into the Manichaean machine of judgment, disrupting the politics of bipolarity and opening up new avenues for reconfiguring the contemporary debate on the uneasy relation of religiosity and secularity. --Anne Marie Oliver, author of TheRoad to Martyrs' Square In this fascinating and lucid examination of Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip, Dalsheim unsettles the appearance of seemingly colliding distinctions between secular and religious and left and right in Israel. Dalsheim's richly detailed ethnography and theoretically informed analysis astutely probes these discursive formations to illuminate how they appear to be starkly different yet work tog

<br> Joyce Dalsheim conducted ethnographic fieldwork among religious settlers in Gaza before they were forcibly removed in 2005 as part of the Israeli government's redeployment strategy. The result is this interesting study comparing the beliefs and sentiments of these religious settlers with those of secular settlers in pre-1967 Israel. She shows that the distinction between the two is not as clear-cut or as stable as it is often claimed. Anyone wanting to gain a fuller understanding of the religious/secular debate in Israel will find this book useful. -- Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center <br><p><br> Joyce Dalsheim's book is rich in critical acumen, yet closely grounded in the realities it depicts and altogether readable. It is a signal contribution to the growing literatures in Jewish ethnography and cultural studies. It directly addresses core aspects of the Zionist project and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without rancor, and it adroitly moves beyond the stereotypes of actors in that conflict as it depicts the multiform anxieties underlying what Dalsheim calls 'the desire to differentiate.' -- Jonathan Boyarin, Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill <br><p><br> With Unsettling Gaza, Joyce Dalsheim throws a monkey wrench into the Manichaean machine of judgment, disrupting the politics of bipolarity and opening up new avenues for reconfiguring the contemporary debate on the uneasy relation of religiosity and secularity. --Anne Marie Oliver, author of TheRoad to Martyrs' Square <br><p><br> In this fascinating and lucid examination of Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip, Dalsheim unsettles the appearance of seemingly colliding distinctions between secular and religious and left and right in Israel. Dalsheim's richly detailed ethnography and theoretically informed analysis astutely probes these discursive formations to illuminate how they appear to be starkly different yet work tog

Author Information

Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist who studies nationalism, religion and the secular, and conflict in Israel/Palestine. She has her doctorate from the New School for Social Research, and has taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Wake Forest University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In 2005, she held the Rockefeller Fellowship at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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