Description
In recent years, Palestinian citizens of Israel (‘48 Palestinians) have witnessed an unprecedented surge in gun violence and organized crime, with homicides more than doubling in 2023 alone. Despite comprising only 20% of Israel’s population, Palestinians bear a disproportionate share of this violence, while state investigations remain largely ineffective, resolving only 8% of cases. Rather than addressing structural drivers, Israeli state discourse pathologizes Palestinian society as inherently violent, deflecting attention from systemic neglect and racialized policing. My research interprets this violence not as a community failure but as a symptom of settler-colonial governance, in which state complicity operates through fragmentation, criminalization, and depoliticization.
Against this backdrop, my ethnographic research examines Afsha al-Salam ("Spreading Peace") — a grassroots Islamic peacebuilding initiative launched in 2022 by the Higher Follow-Up Committee under Sheikh Raed Salah. I explore two central questions: How is organized crime entangled with structures of settler-colonial governance? And how does Islamic peacebuilding, as practiced by Afsha al-Salam, function both as a communal response to violence and a form of decolonial resistance?
Drawing on fieldwork across the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Naqab, my research combines participant observation, interviews, and engagement in sulha (customary reconciliation) gatherings, school visits, and volunteer initiatives. Afsha al-Salam mobilizes diverse actors — Muslims, Christians, Druze, mayors, and youth leaders — across gendered and generational lines. It revives Islamic and Arab traditions of conflict mediation, prevention, and deterrence to restore social cohesion and reclaim indigenous frameworks of justice.
This approach challenges the artificial divide between “security” and “resistance,” showing how peacebuilding can assert political agency in colonized spaces. Building on decolonial theory, critical peace studies, and everyday peacebuilding literature, I argue that initiatives like Afsha al-Salam illuminate how Palestinian communities reimagine safety, justice, and solidarity beyond the settler state
