Summary
Lev Grinberg’s term, as presented by Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, for the depoliticized, ahistorical understanding of peace in the Oslo era: peace imagined as separate from any concrete political action, so that the illusion of a continuously approaching peace can be cherished while the old political order of military occupation, including the expansion of settlements, is not modified (Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, PDF p.161-162 / printed p.152-153).
Details
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A symbolic gesture like the signing of the Declaration of Principles on September 13, 1993 (Oslo I) is enough to spark peace euphoria, as if peace would arrive by virtue of a ceremony at the White House alone, while the core questions of the conflict remain untouched in favour of first building trust (PDF p.161).
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The occupation is deemed to have ended, with the borders of 1967 representing the final state lines, and the Zionist Left’s discourse of the “irreversibility of the peace process” shifts the debate from a conflict-laden to a post-conflict-laden agenda (PDF p.162).
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Grinberg: “Israelis succeeded in imagining peace, in turning it into an illusion, because they managed to ‘disconnect’ themselves from what had really happened behind the Green Line” — but for the Palestinians, the settlers and the Israeli army disconnecting was all but impossible (PDF p.162).
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In Moments of Resistance, Grinberg gives the term’s setting in his own research program: the imagination of peace was facilitated by the demarcation of the borders by the Intifada and the PLO’s 1988 resolution to establish a state in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, which made it possible to imagine the Palestinian state and the so-called two-state solution, but immediately opened the internal Israeli arena of post-conflict agendas; the imagined peace helped many ignore military occupation and transformed the peace process into an illusion serving to prevent decolonization (PDF p.33).
Related pages
Lev Grinberg, Security Myth, Peace Ideology, Oslo Accords, Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, Imagined Democracy, Moments of Resistance