The Materiality of Respect in Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding

This ethnographic study considers how practitioners of reconciliation, peace activists, and conflict-related bereaved Palestinians and Israelis understand their individual moral subjectivity and assess the moral subjectivity of other Israelis and Palestinians in the context of organized reconciliation and peace education programs. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research, ninety-eight interviews, and over 1,000 pages of organizational documents, I analyze how bereaved Palestinians and Israelis affiliated with a non-governmental organization, the Parents Circle-Families Forum, navigate uncertainty about the intentions underlying one another’s verbally stated commitments to reconciliation, peace, and nonviolence. Specifically, I trace how Kantian and neo-Kantian liberalism infuses dialogue-based reconciliation practices with expectations of an individual rational moral subject expected to uphold the division between mind and matter, or between rationality and the corporeal experiences of grief and daily violence. This study examines the minute and daily practices of performing and assessing respect between bereaved Israelis and Palestinians and proposes a material theory of ethics as a corrective to the hegemonic model of Kantian moral subjectivity in reconciliation theory and practice. In elaborating a material theory of ethics, I draw upon Palestinian practices of smoking, hospitality, and gift-giving in the reconciliation context to demonstrate the agential nature of materiality (Barad 2003; Bennett 2010) and highlight how items like coffee cups and cigarettes create ethical affordances (Keane 2016) where speech and human intention are decentered from assessments of moral subjectivity. In decentering human agency and intention, and linking materiality to moral subject formation, this study advances a post humanist approach to understanding and reconceptualizing the universality of reconciliation in violent contexts.本民族志研究旨在考察和解实践者、和平活动家及巴以冲突中的遇难者家属，在有组织的和解与和平教育项目框架下，如何理解自身的个体道德主体性（moral subjectivity），并评判其他巴以民众的道德主体性。本研究基于18个月的民族志调研、98次访谈与逾千页的机构文档，分析了隶属于非政府组织“父母圆圈-家属论坛”（Parents Circle-Families Forum）的巴以遇难者家属，如何应对彼此口头宣称的和解、和平与非暴力承诺背后的意图所带来的不确定性。具体而言，本研究追溯了康德主义与新康德主义自由主义如何为基于对话的和解实践注入预期：即个体需成为理性道德主体，恪守心灵与物质、理性与悲痛及日常暴力带来的肉身性体验之间的分野。本研究考察了巴以遇难者家属之间践行与评判尊重的细微日常实践，并提出物质性伦理学理论（material theory of ethics），以矫正和解理论与实践中占据霸权地位的康德式道德主体性模型。在阐释该理论的过程中，本研究借助和解语境中巴勒斯坦人的吸烟、待客与馈赠习俗，论证了物质性的能动本性（agential nature），并揭示了咖啡杯、香烟等物品如何创造出伦理可供性（ethical affordances），使得言语与人类意图不再是道德主体性评判的核心。通过去中心化人类能动作用与意图，并将物质性与道德主体性的形成相联结，本研究提出了一种后人文主义路径，用以理解并重构暴力语境下和解的普遍性内涵。