In the shadow of the state: Lived pluralism in Ramla

Abstract

The Israeli state is frequently critiqued for being insufficiently liberal, particularly in its treatment of Palestinians. But scholars have found that liberal tolerance is premised on the denial of difference through its privatization, aestheticization and trivialization, tendencies that are readily apparent in liberal coexistence initiatives targeting Israelis and Palestinians. In the context of the Israeli state, I argue that the liberal/illiberal rejection of difference creates a violent state of exception for Palestinians that is propped up by a liberal/illiberal horseshoe alliance between the Israeli right and left. This article explores persisting traces of other Jewish coexistence practices in Ramla, Israel, in which difference is understood as public rather than private, reinvigorating a wider tradition of non-liberal Jewish approaches to the challenges of living with difference that have been marginalized since the early days of the Israeli state. In Ramla, I highlight a “minor” and form of coexistence that breaks the binary opposition of Jewish supremacy and liberal multiculturalism.

The beleaguered French diplomat was just trying to wrap it up. We had already spent two hours in discussion at the European Union embassy, where a group of European diplomats met with a contingent of somewhat unconventional Jewish-Israeli religious figures. Their goal was to persuade the European delegates to adopt a different approach to Jewish–Muslim relations. The diplomat’s closing remarks carried the weary tone of someone aiming to respectfully end the conversation without opening new avenues for discussion. Diplomats are typically great at this.

French Diplomat:

We have really appreciated hearing your perspectives today…. We do hope that as time goes on, perhaps with the help of many of the coexistence programs that the European Union is funding currently and going forward, some of which I have described today, that Israelis and Palestinians will come to have a better understanding, and better appreciate what they have in common. We hope that they will be able to see themselves as, at the end of the day, very much the same, in terms of their desires, that at the end of the day, you all want the same things, for a good life and stability and opportunities, and that you share many characteristics and there are many things that unite us as part of humanity …

“Sorry, sorry. I just want to clarify…”, interrupted Rabbi Eliezer, silencing the diplomat who took on a slight look of desperation at the idea that his summation efforts were suddenly at risk. He hadn’t realized he had said anything worthy of comment, much less controversy.

You say that you hope what we find what we have in common, but in our tradition, we do not have to be the same as the Palestinians in order to be at peace. We are actually very different, but for us, in our tradition, this is ok. We do not need to be the same. We can be different, we can believe different things. We can accept people who are profoundly different, and we can live with them.”

“Yes,” the diplomat responded inattentively. “This is very good. I must apologize but I have a meeting in Jerusalem in one hour, so I must leave I’m afraid.”

This curt exchange highlights the conceptual stakes of this article: the distinct approaches to the moral meaning of “sameness” and “difference,” and the implications of designations of sameness and difference for the ability to coexist. It demonstrates two different answers to the questions, “Is difference an illusion?”, “Is difference a problem, something to be overcome?”, and additionally “Must we be the same to tolerate each other?”

As people were leaving, Udi Cohen, the CEO of the Citizens Accord Forum, the organization that had arranged this meeting, grabbed my wrist as I was putting my things in my backpack. “I don’t think they [the diplomats] enjoyed that very much.” “No, not really,” I laughed. Udi pre-emptively laughed at his own joke, “They expected something else. They thought they were going to get ‘hummus and gefilte fish’. Too bad for them!”

“Hummus and gefilte fish” is a rich figure of speech. It is an expression that Udi invented and uses in his inner circle, a term that indexes his frustration with what Euro-American funders and diplomats expect from Israeli/Palestinian coexistence initiatives, in contrast with the project that he was trying to implement. Hummus, a stereotypical Levantine food, is a metonym for “Palestinian culture,” and gefilte fish, a stereotypical Eastern-European Ashkenazi food is a metonym for “Jewish culture,” and for Udi, “hummus and gefilte fish” serves to describe a typical outsider’s reductive understanding of the people, the conflict, and its potential solution. The expression explicitly includes a cultural misunderstanding because while gefilte fish (and bagels) are the stereotype of Jewish food in America, almost no one eats them in Israel, while everyone eats hummus.

But the hummus and gefilte fish metaphor also speaks to the superficial level of the liberal discourse of multiculturalism that many Euro-American audiences are comfortable with, and actively seek out in their encounters with Israeli and Palestinian groups. Namely, their insistence that Jewish Palestinian differences are ultimately insubstantial. As in: they have their differences—Palestinians like their hummus, Jews like their gefilte fish—but they can still get together and talk about these differences and realize that these “so-called differences” are not such big obstacles or challenges to their shared humanity. As such, it also indexes the tendency of Euro-American audiences to construe the conflict between Jews and Palestinians as a misunderstanding that could be resolved through “basic human” empathy, insight, and humanism.

By contrast, Udi and the organization started from the premise that, without denying the importance of a shared humanity, which are in fact theologically significant to all the Abrahamic religions, there are frequently deep differences between Jews and Palestinians that involve incommensurable metaphysics, ontologies, historical narratives, political claims. His organization seeks to bring these differences into public and confront them directly.

Among the most common interventions in Palestine/Israel over the previous decades are dozens of coexistence initiatives that seek to educate the local population in how to properly understand and live with difference. The European Union sponsors many of these, as does the U.S. government and private philanthropy groups. Implicit in these interventions is a claim that the designers of these initiatives hold best practices knowledge on living with difference that they seek to disseminate. And beyond this, it is assumed that tolerance is a set of known skills, competencies, and insights that can be adopted anywhere. There is also a tacit assumption that because this is a society in conflict, the peoples involved lack the cultural resources or tradition to underwrite peaceful relations with others. The cultural imperialism of these initiatives is easily apparent (Omer, 2022), and indeed, they are often are rejected or ignored by local populations (Weiss, 2022).

This article argues that the mainstream Israeli Zionist approach and the liberal approach both share an impoverished approach to difference. I present, by contrast, a Jewish alternative to the question of difference that emerges in the margins of the state. Specifically, in Ramla, I highlight a “minor” form of coexistence that breaks the binary opposition of Jewish supremacy and liberal multiculturalism. This alternative offers an approach to difference that is explicitly local, particularist and praxis-based. It represents a different lived practice of from the liberal “toleration” model.

I begin by outlining what I describe as the liberal domestication of difference, which seeks to privatize, aestheticize, and trivialize difference. In the liberal model there is no cost to tolerance, and as such, costs are not tolerated. Following this, I offer an ethnographic account of lived experiences of navigating difference in the city of Ramla (רַמְלָה, الرملة). Ramla is a working-class city in central Israel, and is bi-national, meaning that it has both Jewish and Palestinian residents. My research in Ramla examines the ways residents manifest their own forms of tolerance and coexistence. These forms are resistant to the dominant binary ideologies of Jewish supremacy and liberal multiculturalism. I suggest that in Ramla we catch a partial and fleeting glimpse of another approach that is based on public differences. I show that while this approach does not celebrate difference, it does actively assert tolerance as a positive value that is worthy of sacrifice. Ultimately, I conclude that public toleration, as opposed to liberal domestication, does not impact the essentialized understanding of difference, but does allow difference to be pluralized and thus tolerance to be applied on multiple and contradictory vectors.

The liberal domestication of difference

The limits of liberal attempt to address questions of deep difference are well known. Liberalism’s approach to difference, particularly in theories of multiculturalism, does not approach culture anthropologically but instead severely restricts its scope. In the liberal approach, cultural difference is often reduced to innocuous and superficial differences: cuisine, music, art, folklore, sartorial style, religious belief within the confines of privatized post-Protestant-style religion (Kowal, 2015; Povinelli, 2002; Seligman, 2004). It is a “Disneyfication” of cultural difference in that it transforms culture into something highly controlled and stylized, made “safe,” or curated or sanitized for safety, and often something that is able to be commercialized. I have also heard this described as “festival multiculturalism,” referring to the performative delimitation of culture as matters of difference as concerns food, dress, and dance. In the Israeli context, this Disneyfication of Palestinians was seen prominently in the 1990s as “Arab” culture became the object of capitalist consumption and tourism for Jewish Israelis who liked to eat hummus in places like Abu Ghosh and Jaffa with no moral confrontation whatsoever with questions of colonialism and occupation (Stein, 2008).

In the liberal approach, that which is considered a threat to liberal normativity is not categorized as cultural difference but is rather pathologized as social dysfunction, rendering it available to liberal reform and intervention (Kowal, 2015; Povinelli, 2002; Weiss, 2022). These include a focus on women’s bodies, age of marriage and rules of modesty (Abu-Lughod, 2015), the proper content of education (Seligman, 2014), matters of hygiene (Kowal, 2015) and means of political expression (Cody, 2015). Liberalism deems difference superficial as a principled and ideological claim about the legitimate scope of culture rather than as an empirical description. The highly controlled and curated scope of culture under liberal multiculturalism allows for the apparent celebration of cultural difference without any reservation or complication because culture has been reduced to the most innocuous level.

Adam Seligman notes that participation in this post-Protestant model of coexistence necessarily means accepting a certain post-Protestant vision of selfhood and society that is not shared across the globe and across human civilizations. He explains that modern liberal-individualist societies deny the existence of difference through a number of means. One of these is the aestheticization of difference, that cultural difference is not a matter of morals but simply a matter of taste which is individual and cannot be accounted for (Seligman, 2004: 3–4). People, after all, have a right to their opinion on matters of taste. A second means of denial is the trivialization of difference, suggesting that what makes us the same is far more essential than what divides us, a technique used by the French ambassador in the opening vignette. Seligman (2004: 4) further argues that the avoidance of the challenges of difference is accomplished through an attitude of principled indifference to the conduct of others, under the banner of autonomy, that is embedded as a fundamental aspect of the social order, in the form of the legal and principled separation of public and private spheres. In short, issues that cannot be dealt with through aestheticization or trivialization are pushed into the private sphere, effectively rendering judgement of them illegitimate. I may not agree, liberals say, but it is none of my business. Indeed, the stark separation of the public and the private in liberal political theory and theology is tied historically to European efforts to enable religious toleration (Nelson, 2019). But today we see that liberalism’s universalism, and apparent tolerance of difference is accomplished through the systematic exclusion of all forms of difference that are not inconsequential or that cannot be celebrated.

The “optical illusion” created by strictly curating difference leads to Seligman’s (2004: 105) insight that liberalism’s “much-vaunted toleration” is constantly in danger of slipping into intolerance as the fragile conditions of this coexistence are under constant threat from social reality. This insight is clearly demonstrated in Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2002) work with indigenous Australians under liberal governance. In her research, she demonstrates how they are called upon to demonstrate their cultural difference, but to limit this difference to innocuous and sanitized cultural differences that do not exceed the limits of liberalism. In her words, indigenous Australians are essentially told: “You figure out how to be different enough so we can feel you are not me, but not so different that I am forced to annihilate you and thereby fracture the foundation of my exceptionalism” (in DiFruscia, 2014). It can also be seen more recently in the work of Savannah Shange (2019), in which the liberal-progressive denial of difference and focus on prejudice reduction and apparently liberatory ideology in San Francisco school systems is capable of maintaining violent exclusion of Black students at the structural level without compromising liberal values. This liberal progressivism succeeds through a resedimenting of historical and structural exclusions, largely because it is a universalistic approach, which by its nature is ahistorical and unable to address the historical sediments of power. Kristina Lyons (2023) also notes that the way liberal multiculturalism grants rights on the basis of group affiliation often has divisive consequences and weakens the political alliance-building capacity between groups.

Over the years, Israel/Palestine has seen wave after wave of European and U.S. investment in peace and coexistence initiatives that seek to bring members of these groups face to face. In their pedagogy, the liberal multicultural approach is hegemonic (Weiss, 2015). Participants are encouraged to de-emphasize their differences, and focus on shared characteristics (Mizrachi and Weiss, 2020). They are prompted to find things in common, to teach each other the food traditions of the other, to play sports and enjoy leisure time together (Kuriansky, 2007; Weiss, 2015). The presumption of these initiatives is clear: your differences are trivial and once you get to know each other you will realize there is nothing to fight over.

Liberalism and Zionism

The claim that Israel is insufficiently liberal assumes that Zionism’s ethnic exclusion betrays liberal principles. Yet scholars argue such exclusion is not unique to Zionism but a structural feature of liberalism itself, whose legal universalism has historically required the violent exclusion of difference (Mehta, 1990, 2018). Israeli liberalism, shaped by this logic, reframes difference as equality for the “Arab minority,” maintaining Zionist exclusions under the language of rights. As Sabbagh-Khoury (2023) shows, liberal Zionism reproduces republican Zionism’s exclusions, rendered semiotically invisible through democratic rhetoric but no less real. These mechanisms continue to shape political belonging in Israel today.

By contrast, coexistence models in early modern South India (Fisher, 2017) and Indonesia (Menchik, 2016) illustrate non-liberal pluralisms, echoed within Jewish tradition. European Zionism emerged within colonial contexts that shaped it as a project of secular self-determination prioritizing Jewish political interests over integrating diverse Jewish ethical traditions (Yiftachel, 2006). This facilitated settlement, displacement, minoritization, and spatial de-Arabification.

Bernstein (1994) warns against historical “back-shadowing” that obscures alternative paths. Often forgotten are histories of Jewish coexistence with non-Jews in the Middle East and Palestine (Campos, 2020; Evri and Cohen, 2020; Makdisi, 2019). Early Zionist immigration featured plural debates about sovereignty and structuring political life around Jewish ethics (Ha’am, 2000). Many, like Martin Buber and Ahad Ha’am, wanted these Jewish ideas to be manifested in Jewish life in Palestine/Israel in a state that would embody Jewish ethics, traditions, and ontologies, and not merely replicate (post)-Christian Westphalian nation-states and models of state sovereignty. Yet politicians like Ben-Gurion aimed to replicate secular-Christian states to ensure legitimacy, projecting power and maintaining Jewish demographic dominance, even violently. This statist Realpolitik Zionism drowned out earlier plural visions, creating today’s ideological monoculture (Agassi, 2006; Weiss, 2009).

A state of/for/by the Jews, specifically, makes the Jewish character of the state dependent not on Jewish tradition or values but on Jewish demographics. Because there is an insistence on a particular understanding and practice of Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, at the expense of all others, according to the dominant narrative the state would lose its Jewish character if there were not a Jewish majority. This demographic paranoia shifts the focus away from spiritual redemption and toward demographic competition with the indigenous Palestinian population (El-Haj, 2012; McGonigle, 2015). Thus, non-Jewishness becomes a threat by definition, shaping state institutions and right-wing politics. Within these dominant dynamics, substantive religious difference, whether it arises within Zionism (e.g. Jewish theological critiques) or outside of it (e.g. Palestinian religious traditions), is rendered intolerable: for the political right, because it threatens the ethnic majority; and for the political left, because it must be relegated to private belief rather than public life.

Ramleut: An alternative model of toleration

The dynamics described above are not hermetically sealed off; alternative patterns and interactions emerge in the gaps and fissures of the dominant Israeli national framework. This occurs for familiar reasons, such as the necessity of continually reproducing the nation-state as a project (Anderson, 1983; Foucault, 2004), but in Israel, it is further compounded by the profound cultural heterogeneity resulting from the continual immigration of Jewish populations from diverse global contexts. Ramla, in particular, serves as a site where certain logics and social interactions occasionally break free from dominant Israeli political binaries, revealing modes of coexistence and negotiation that do not always align with the prevailing national discourse.

Ramla wears difference on its sleeve, which is among the many ways the city does not conform to liberal-individualist expectations. A medium sized city in central Israel situated between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Ramla is unlike either of these major cities. It is a working-class city, and, whereas much of Israel is segregated, with Jews and Palestinians residing in separate cities and towns, about a quarter of Ramla’s residents are Palestinian Arab, making it one of only a few “bi-national” towns in the country (others include Lod, Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, and Nazareth Illit). Ramla was founded next to Lyyda (today’s Lod) in the 8th century by the seventh Umayyad caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik. Parts of ancient Ramla, like the white mosque and the Pool of Arches built in this period, remain as prominent cultural landmarks and symbols of the city. The city traded hands, like much of Palestine, to Abbasids, crusaders, Napoleon Bonaparte in his failed attempt to conquer Palestine, and the British. The city was majority Palestinian Arab and intended to be part of a future Palestinian state under the 1947 UN Partition Plan, until 1948 when more than 80 per cent of the population was expelled by the Israeli military after the town was captured in the 1948 war.

Today Ramla carries a difficult reputation. It is poor and suffers from state neglect. It has a significant drug and crime problem. To understand the social context, it is significant that while Ramla is geographically quite central in Israel, it is situated on the margins of the state socially and economically (Das and Poole, 2004). Its Jewish population is predominantly Mizrahi—descendants of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa—who were historically settled by the state in undesirable and peripheral locations. This placement was not incidental but reflected broader patterns of structural and ethnic discrimination that continue to shape socio-economic realities today.

In what follows, I describe a tradition of tolerance in Ramla that escapes the logics of hegemonic Zionism, without romanticizing it or suggesting that the status quo is in any way acceptable. Specifically, for the purposes of preventing misuse of this research, I am not suggesting that the Israeli state or mainstream Zionism has played a positive role in the dynamics of coexistence I am seeking to capture. On the contrary, I argue that these dynamics persist, and I hypothesize (together with some of my interlocutors) that, ironically, this is possible only due to the neglect of this city by the Israeli state because of its Arab–Mizrahi lower-class character. The dynamics described here are uncommon in Israel. Drawing attention to them is not meant to suggest their sociological ubiquity in Israel, but rather to point to a minor and alternative form of coexistence. Importantly, this alternative breaks the binary opposition of Jewish supremacy and liberal multiculturalism. Here, I use minor in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari describe minor literature—not as something insignificant or peripheral, but as a mode of engagement that operates within dominant structures while subtly subverting them. Minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari argue, emerges from marginalized voices working within a major language, reconfiguring it from within. Similarly, this minor form of tolerance does not seek to dissolve difference or conform to hegemonic liberal ideals of coexistence; rather, it finds ways to endure, negotiate, and persist in the face of structural and ideological pressures.

It is furthermore significant that this dissenting conceptual and practical space is identified through ethnography, and not etic theoretical or philosophical innovation. It is rooted in the traditions of the people involved. Yet, in framing it as minor, I do not intend to reinforce the damaging center–periphery dynamic in which liberal frameworks are positioned as the normative, universal ideal, while alternative approaches are provincialized, relegated to the margins, and prevented from staking their claims to universality. Instead, I argue that minor tolerance possesses its own generative potential, offering a distinctive ethical and political grammar for negotiating coexistence—one that does not seek to eliminate or transcend difference, but rather to live with and through it.

The violent history of Ramla has left deep scars, and the ongoing realities of Israeli policies of Jewish supremacy can be felt in the city. But there is also another, pre-modern, tradition of coexistence that can be felt in daily life in Ramla, drawing on other, older modes of coexistence, that has intermittently and partially resisted the influence of mainstream Israeli politics and structural violence. It is referred to locally as “Ramleut,” literally, Ramla-ness.

Since 2023, I have been conducting ethnographic research in Ramla, frequently situating myself at the Center for Reconciliation, which is run by Aliza, an ultra-Orthodox Tunisian woman deeply rooted in Ramla’s tradition of navigating across differences. Aliza manages the center according to these local cultural logics, drawing on long-standing local practices of intercommunal relations. Her explanation for why Ramla has largely avoided the ethnic violence seen in other bi-national cities—particularly during the riots of 2008 and 2021—centers on a deliberate insistence on isolation. According to Aliza, numerous organizations and external actors approach both her and the local government, offering to implement various initiatives and programs in Ramla. Yet, despite the fact that these projects often come with free resources and services, she almost never approves them. Whether they are liberal coexistence initiatives or political programs, she sees them as introducing the ethno-national politics of the nation-state into Ramla, precisely the kind of intervention she seeks to prevent (or avoid).

One of the notable characteristics of Ramla is the absence of Ashkenazi Jews. Without being essentialist about this fact, it does imply that the majority of the Jewish residents of Ramla are only a generation or less removed from communities that lived among Muslims, and many hail from the Middle East and North Africa. Such communities have their own cultures and patterns of coexistence between Jews and Muslims that have been seen to reproduce themselves even outside their places of origin (Everett, 2020). Salim Tamari’s Mountain Against the Sea (2005) examines the layered identities of Palestinians, illustrating how Ottoman-era pluralism and local social formations complicated later national categories. More generally, Marshall Hodgson’s (1974) concept of the “Islamicate” foregrounds the civilizational space shared by Muslims, Jews, and Christians, extending beyond theological boundaries to encompass joint cultural, intellectual, and political life. Medieval Spain reflects a site where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions co-created vibrant cultures of learning and tolerance, interwoven pluralism (Menocal, 2002), revealing how diverse historical memories continue to shape affective and political life today (Hirschkind, 2020). I argue that, partly on the basis of this history, the encounter between Jews and Palestinians in Ramla differs from similar encounters in other parts of Israel.

In Ramla, Jews talk about “the Arabs,” the Palestinians talk about “the Jews.” These essentialized characterizations extend to more specific ethnic groups. People will talk about “the Bukharis,” “the Ethiopians,” or “the Iraqis” just as freely, and no one is offended by this discourse. This language grates on many liberal ears. Liberals prefer terms like “Jewish”—not “a Jew”; the “-ish” making clear that about it is not the person that one is referring to but rather their beliefs. And even then, it wouldn’t be the first thing a person says about them, since really, it is their common humanity which is important and their identity is unimportant. This dependence on sameness makes it impolite to mention difference. To people in Ramla, it is obvious, it matters, and, what is more, it is public knowledge.

Ramla beyond the grammar of multicultural tolerance

In spring 2024, I sat with Haya, a long-time resident of Ramla in her living room. Haya is in her 70s and her family moved to Israel in 1970 from Tunisia, after significant attacks on the Tunisian Jewish community in 1967. I had met her in the building where the Center for Reconciliation is housed. We both speak Hebrew with accents, hers Arabic, mine American. While we were speaking, her husband, Nissim, returned home. In the morning, as he did every morning, he went to synagogue and then to a coffee house with friends, a group of men who sit sometimes for several hours to gossip and playfully debate each other in a local cultural form known as a “Parliament.” When he entered Haya introduced me, and Nissim, still in a punchy and chatty mood to talk after the coffee house, sat down to speak with us.

Haya: “Yes, people who know how things work in Ramla, they know how to get along. There is not much fighting. Especially with the older generation, the families know how to get along with each other.”

When I tried to probe the limits of this modality of coexistence, Haya and Nissim made a lot of dismissive faces, shrugged, and were not eager to engage. At some point, I decided to put a finer point on the question. I noted that most Palestinians hold different historical narratives, different political claims, and that many hold different beliefs regarding the Temple Mount, among other issues.

Another irritated face, another shrug.

A moment of silence.

Nissim: Let me explain to you how we do things in Ramla. Not just about the Arabs—it’s completely not just about them. Honestly, [it is] sometimes easier with them than with liberals from Tel Aviv. There are all sorts of reasons to fight with other people, they think you were not ok, you think they were not ok…. You wronged them, they wronged you. Sometimes they are right, sometimes you are …

Let’s say my neighbor, or even my brother, wrongs me. Between us, let’s assume that really he did something wrong, it’s not just in my head. (laughs) I go to him, I explain, I beg him to make it right between us, but he refuses. And not only does he refuse, he insists that he is right and he didn’t do anything wrong!

Erica: Ok …

Nissim: Ok! But I know that he did. And I have the right to pursue it, and I can continue to fight with him, and take him to court. Doing that would be pursuing the value of justice, which is an important value. Correct?

Erica: Indeed.

Nissim: But it would hurt another value, the value of peace. Every Jew is required to pursue peace in his life. And also, I will continue to be my brother’s brother and my neighbor’s neighbor the day after. Pursuing peace would mean dropping it. So, I have the value of justice against the value of peace.

So maybe the offense is really big, and I think that justice is more important than keeping peace, but we are neighbors, brothers, and so it would need to be very big because that will really impact our lives going forward … and my wife, and the family, and the neighborhood. Maybe then I choose to fight. So that is how it is with the Arabs. Many times, I know they think things that I cannot accept, even sometimes my friends, like my friend Iyad, I know they think things about Jews and the war and all that … but I can live with it. And like I said, it’s the same with anybody…. And many times, that is how it is in Ramla. Because it’s not only about who is right and who is wrong. We think about what’s going to happen in the future, because we live here and we can’t move anywhere.

I offer this exchange as an illustration of a distinctive approach to coexistence amid deep and multidimensional difference. Nissim’s words resonated deeply with the approach to the challenges of difference that I had heard and seen in Ramla, with the logics of Ramleut. It is possible to find at least three important themes in the above exchange which reveal key components of this approach, which goes beyond the multicultural grammar and defies the liberal/illiberal intolerance or “management” of difference. These components are a non-national framing, a particularist approach, and a praxis-based approach.

With regard to the non-national or non-statist framing, the approach I am describing in Ramla reflects a stubbornly local prism and intentionally sidesteps nation-state patterns and dynamics. In trying to elicit or needle for a response about the experience of Jews and Palestinians living together in Ramla, I made a profound error of methodological nationalism in my engagement with Nissim, which he corrected me on. As an example of potential tensions, I brought up Al-Aqsa and other “conflict” issues, points of national tension between Jews and Palestinians, but these are not Ramla issues. Rather than answering the “wrong question” that I had generated from my own perspective instead of being attentive to his concerns and understandings, Nissim had the restraint to ignore my set-up and tell me about coexistence in Ramla specifically. He did it by bringing the example away from a symbolic material struggle over a sacred place, to a dispute between brothers/friends. This response resonated with other examples of this localism. A Christian Palestinian I met in the Greek Orthodox Church told me that Ramla-ness, makes the residents of Ramla particularly resistant to the waves of extremist right-wing politics that have swept to prominence and power in other parts of the country but have failed to gain a significant political foothold in Ramla.

Furthermore, Nissim did not give a universalist explanation; it was particularist. His justification about justice and peace was his own, and idiosyncratic in the sense that it is not common knowledge that in Ramla people balance between the sometimes-competing values of justice and peace (although he did later tell me that this idea was based on advice he received from his rabbi years ago during a Saturday Minha service in connection to a dispute he had). His explanation was also particularistically Jewish, and not only because of the parable genre. Nissim does not offer an approach to coexistence that is applicable to everyone, or that can be made into a set of best practices and then exported to other places. Nor is it understood to capture human psychology in a broad way as do many liberal coexistence initiatives. Of course, Judaism has its own forms of universalism, but his is not one that seeks conformity, universalism, or hegemony. Rather, he offers an approach that resonates within his own ethical community. In this way, this approach can be seen as an example of efforts to develop local peace in the face of Western liberal hegemony (Džuverović, 2024; Omer, 2022).

Finally, the explanation Nissim gave resonated directly with a mode of addressing the challenges of living with difference that characterizes the common-sense praxis of the city more broadly. A few rationalities specifically inform this praxis. One is that difference is inevitable but also challenging, something people told me on a regular basis. It is the inevitability of difference that makes demands of you, in contrast to the liberal grammar that denies the cost. What people in Ramla describe is an ethics of attunement, described by Ghassan Hage (2021) as “negotiated being,” a mode of living with others in conversation with others, by negotiating one’s way in a world of other people with other claims and aims. Hage describes this negotiated being in contrast to the modern tendency to try and forcibly shape the world according to our own will, to avoid direct engagement, to use the law to live impersonally and transactionally. As Nissim said regarding his recalcitrant neighbor/brother, he was within his rights to take him to court, but that would not be the right thing to do.

Difference is not particularly celebrated in Ramla. It is a social fact and one that often presents many challenges to be overcome. Furthermore, what Nissim told me resonated with what people regularly described as the value of “letting things go” or letting things slide, or “ignoring things,” which is considered a positive social value. The refrain, “this is where we live” or variations on this such as “We’re both still going to live here tomorrow,” were invoked frequently. This is not a discourse of moral relativism. One’s moral position can be maintained, but in terms of social action it defers to another competing moral value which is keeping the peace. These statements clearly reflect a recognition of the interdependency of the communities as residents of the same city and the same space. Peace as a value is a logic that defies modern Zionist logics. Jacqueline Rose argues that it is the failure to understand this interdependence that has resulted in Israel’s “spiral of destruction” towards the Palestinians, and also ultimately towards itself (2020: 203).

My conversation with Nissim took place during the Israeli assault on Gaza. Nothing about our conversation, or his approach, really presents a challenge to the Israeli state violence against Palestinians. I have described the approach as a minor form of tolerance, and as such, it is tolerance as a mode of engagement that operates within other dominant and often violent structures. They offer only “patchy,” and often very local, results. Sometimes these minor forms of tolerance can be subversive, but they are also often fragile, they bend under pressure, be it structural or ideological. Despite the generally local orientation I describe above, many Jewish families in Ramla have sent soldiers to Gaza, and many Palestinian families have family there. This is a painful daily reality that few people cared to address directly with me.

Discussion/conclusion

Taking these three characteristics together, localism, particularism, and praxis, we can begin to consider what it means to conceptualize coexistence outside the framework of liberal grammars of multiculturalism, toleration, and individualism. One moment in my exchange with Nissim highlights this shift in perspective, a moment that repeated itself in various conversations and, I believe, is particularly revealing. As we discussed coexistence between Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) in Ramla, Nissim chose to illustrate his point using a hypothetical example of a neighbor or a brother. This choice was significant. Rather than treating Jewish–Arab relations as a singular, exceptional site of tension, his framing made clear that the challenge of living with difference is not exclusive to ethno-national divides.

For example, theological and practical differences between religious and secular Jews also present profound dilemmas of coexistence. Difference is not rigidly bound to ethno-national identity, then, but encompasses religious, political, cultural, and ideological divergences. This perspective gains coherence precisely in the margins of the ethno-national state, where identities and affiliations tend to be more fluid and negotiated. As a result, the mode of coexistence that I am describing is a dynamic, multi-spectral phenomenon that informs an approach to social life as a whole, rather than being limited to a particular group. Crucially, this model does not erase, trivialize, or aestheticize difference in the way that liberal frameworks often do. Instead, difference is recognized, engaged with, and pluralized, allowing for forms of coexistence that do not rely on sameness or assimilation.

This approach cuts across different vectors of affiliation, eroding the dominance of the majority/minority framework of liberal Zionism. Affiliations and alliances reorganize themselves contextually (for example, the voting patterns of communities in Ramla are often confounding to outsiders, often bucking the logics of state-level politics, with people apparently voting “against” their own interests if understood only according to state-level political platforms). By contrast, mainstream Zionism handles difference with a violent binary between Jews and non-Jew in which Arabs are cast as the perpetual minority. In How Things Count as The Same, Seligman and Weller (2018) remind us that sameness between people is a process of singling out one characteristic around which to define sameness (and difference), and seeking to understand how we “count” or come to perceive and feel things as shared or having the “same” class, ethnicity, religion, etc., a basic question of representation (2018: 7). For us, this opens the conceptual possibility not of dissolving difference, but of understanding the ways it comes in and out of focus in daily life. In the brief ethnographic vignette above we see that the “relevant differences” in non-liberal Ramla can be dynamic and contextual and also fluctuate in prominence. In the liberal approach, sameness is an ideological commitment. What makes us the same must be bigger than what makes us different because tolerance depends on sameness. But in Ramla pluralism is not an ideology but a social fact.

We have now come a long way from the “hummus and gefilte fish” model. Our opening ethnographic vignette at the embassy of the European Union illustrated how many Western observers frame the challenge of difference through a liberal lens, perceiving ethnic and religious distinctions as ultimately superficial within the broader context of a shared humanity. From this perspective, the primary challenge of coexistence is one of misperception rather than substantive conflict. The proposed liberal solution, then, lies in shifting perspectives: correcting the misunderstanding that difference is problematic and educating people to recognize that differences are minor and should be celebrated, resulting in a patronizing form of conditional acceptance. Within this liberal framework, difference is presumed not to require negotiation. It also quietly allows the stunning violence of the Israeli assault on Gaza to exist outside the discourse of questions of coexistence.

And yet, the response of Rabbi Eliezer, that people do not need to be the same to be tolerated, demonstrated that strands of Jewish tradition are prepared to tarry with a more robust understanding of difference that it does not require its elimination to generate an ethical response.

So too in Ramla, the praxis of living together across ethnic and religious lines is not just an abstract ideal but a source of concrete material, political, and spiritual dilemmas. Yet it is precisely through grappling with these challenges that the question of difference can be absorbed into the broader moral and ethical traditions of the group.

By drawing attention to underexplored Jewish approaches, this article offers a critique of both liberal and illiberal Zionist ideologies. These findings suggest that there is space for alternative political and ethical imaginaries in the public sphere in Israel that challenge the hegemonic frameworks governing Israeli-Palestinian relations. As such, they hold important implications for both theoretical discussions of multiculturalism and the practical pursuit of coexistence.