Suchergebnisse

Since I began, in the early 1980s, to research Muslim-Christian cohabitation of religioussites, I have been convinced of the political importance of making practices of intercommunal 'sharing'ethnographically visible. Thirty-five years of that work, spread across the Eastern Mediterranean (Israel/Palestine, Yugoslavia and its successor states, and both sides of the Cyprus divide), have not onlyrevealed contemporary and historical choreographies of cohabitation but also their disintegration andthe forces which bring it about. While I was carrying out this research, an accelerating resurgence ofethnic, religious and nationalistic politics was taking place not only throughout the areas I was studyingbut also in the global arena. This 'identitarian' politics, its philosophical grounding, and its shaping ofacademic and popular thought and practice is the focus of the first half of this paper; in the second partI look theoretically and empirically into examples of sharing and its refusal so as to show not only howcohabitation with alterity works but also to make visible the processes which sabotage it.

The radical closure of Gaza serves here as an extreme example of a process of isolation and immiseration of national enemies that is deeply rooted in Israeli ideology and practices of state formation. I use encystation to reveal the dual meaning of the term—that of radical isolation of diseased elements and that of protecting a fetus within a womb—and to show how the two meanings connect with respective Israeli policies toward Palestinians and Jews. I suggest in closing that the Oslo Accords have put in place mechanisms for the future imposition on West Bank Palestinians of the same containment currently afflicting Gaza.*