Conflicts

More about the book

Liron Mor’s book interrogates the notion of conflict within the Palestine–Israel context, challenging the traditional view of conflict as a singular “original sin” that legitimizes statehood and political dynamics. By revealing the colonial implications of this universal concept, Mor argues that conflicts are politically constructed and must be understood in their specific forms. The work examines sites of poetic and political strife by integrating a comparative analysis of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Utilizing an extensive archive from the 1930s to the present, including prose, poetry, film, and television, Mor critiques the framing of the Palestinian–Israeli situation as merely a conflict and exposes the colonial history behind this characterization. Instead, he proposes locally specific modes of understanding the antagonisms, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that shape this region. The book introduces five figurative concepts derived from the poetics of conflict: judgment (ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifā ʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). Ultimately, it aims to create a theory-making approach that intertwines historical and geographical contexts with poetic expression.