Islamist Challenges to the ‘Liberal Peace’ Discourse: The Case of Hamas and the Israel—Palestine ‘Peace Process’

Abstract

This article will examine the reasons behind Israel’s and the international community’s refusal to engage Hamas in the internationally sanctioned ‘peace process’. It will be argued here that more important than the ‘strategic’ challenges Hamas is deemed to pose to this process, are the epistemological and ontological challenges the movement intrinsically poses to the dominant normative framework that underpins the process. In order to understand the roots of this challenge, I will employ the three-pronged approach of what Florian Hoffman refers to as ‘epistemological relativism’. This entails a ‘complexification’ of the normative framework on which the discourse of the peace process is based; a ‘de-exoticisation’ of the normative framework in which the Other — in this case Hamas — operates; and a ‘re-exoticisation’ of the normative framework on which the process is predicated, ‘showing its contingent and idiosyncratic nature’, and therefore creating a space in which the Other may be understood and engaged. The article will conclude by arguing that it is only once this process has been undertaken that we can begin to fathom the establishment of an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine, which is considered ‘just’ by all parties to the ‘conflict’.