Visioning Israel-Palestine : Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict

In this interdisciplinary book, a group of international authors strives to cultivate a better future for the people of Israel-Palestine through recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other.

Contributors to Visioning Israel-Palestine analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. They largely draw on the legacy of nonconformist intellectual Edward Said, who saw culture as a participant in the perpetuation of the conflict, as well as a vehicle capable of leading the way towards its just resolution. The chapters in the volume consider Israeli and Palestinian films, art installations, street exhibitions, photographs and oral histories to expand the conflict's historical imagination and nurture suitable cultural conditions to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

“This rich volume introduces the inspiring neologism “visioning” to make the hyphen between Israel-Palestine a sign of bonding and correlation instead of its common perception as a sign of distance and separation. Chapter-by-chapter it brilliantly demonstrates Gil Pasternak's conviction that the arts matter to the future of Israelis and Palestinians – a conviction which I share.” —Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

“This rich and innovative volume draws on a wide range of aesthetic sources to show how cultural products can review and reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We can then see that visual art, broadly understood, not only engages past trauma but also opens up possibilities for a more peaceful future.” —Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland, Australia

“The title of this remarkable collection telegraphs its fundamental message. A hyphenated “state” (in the sense of an actual condition rather than a political entity) already exists in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. This state is a fragmented jigsaw puzzle of cooperation and conflict, inequality and co-presence that eludes all one-sided nationalist narratives, most notably the long-imagined “two state solution” which now belongs in the dustbin of history. Focusing on “cultural products” (images, texts, exhibitions, films, and stories), Visioning Israel-Palestine provides an account of contemporary experiences and encounters that promise to assemble this puzzle as a compellingly legible mosaic.” —W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, USA