Meet the 2020-21 Fellows in Conflict and Peace: Oriel Eisner

Hey hey. My name is Oriel. I’m an Israeli-American activist based in Jerusalem. For the last several years I’ve had the honor and privilege of working for the Center for Jewish Nonviolence coordinating delegations of Jewish activists from around the world to join and support resistance efforts on the ground in Israel-Palestine. This direct and embodied solidarity and coresistance work seeks to leverage international Jewish privilege to strengthen local efforts while also fomenting disruptive relationships between Jews from around the world, Palestinians and Israelis that are rooted in active nonviolent resistance.

I’m thrilled and grateful to be an RCPI fellow this year and have the opportunity to engage in rich, challenging, and possibility-opening conversation with other incredible and inspiring leaders, academics, activists and culture workers who are involved in Israel-Palestine justice work. I am particularly excited for the opportunity to more deeply and actively engage with the ways that religion, secularism and culture formulate, make possible, and prevent different iterations of subjectivity and identity in connection with Israel-Palestine.

I am still developing the specifics of my project, but the questions I am interested are as follows:

As a practicioner of the ‘Critical Caretaking’ Atalia Omer discusses in her book “Days of Awe”—in short, the critique and reimagining of Jewishness through Palestine solidarity—what are the future articulations of Jewishness that this practice glimpses or pulls toward?

How does the practice of relational and embodied solidarity and coresistance across/between Jews and Palestinians reconfigure what it means to live and share space within, in conversation with, and against the current regimes of subject formation and suppression which privilege and uplift certain forms of Jewish subjectivities at the expense of and counter to various forms of Palestinian subjectivities. And—even if unarticulated—how does that practice glimpse and/or make possible glimpses of imagined/imaginable future configurations of Jewish subjectivity that are more just than what we have now? What are the imagined/imaginable formations and articulations waiting at the end of joint struggle and solidarity?

This exploration will be embodied and grounded in the geographies and relationships I move through in my work as it is in and through the geographical and relational embodied practice of solidarity work that those alternate and already or as yet to be imagined futures become possible.