‘We do not want to assimilate!’: Rethinking the role of group boundaries in peace initiatives between Muslims and Jews in Israel and in the West Bank

This article considers the cultural meaning of religious and community boundaries when attempting to mediate the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Here we compare two sites, one religious, the other secular, of peace-building encounters between Palestinians and Jews in Israel and in the West Bank. Through extensive ethnographic work, the study draws attention to the divergent meanings of community boundaries in liberal and non-liberal cosmologies. Whereas secular liberals view religious boundaries as barriers to the autonomous individual’s free choice, itself considered necessary for co-existence, for these Jewish and Muslim religious groups, those same boundaries safeguard a peaceful and respectful shared space. Our ethnographic insights call for a broader discussion of the meaning and use of social and symbolic boundaries beyond the liberal vision for social and moral order. Such a discussion is theoretically timely and politically pressing in view of the challenge of living together with difference in the global reality of deep diversity.