The starting point of the paper proposal I submit for your consideration is originally founded on the theoretical analysis and the fieldwork evaluation reported on in my Ph.D. dissertation. This work is to be published by Routledge in March 2014 in the form of a book entitled Women, Reconciliation and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Road Not Yet Taken, in which I combine a study of women’s peace movements in the West Bank and inside Israel with feminist theorizations of gender constructions and peace building in a conflict environment characterised by struggling ethnic, national, religious and class backgrounds. In expanding on my previous work and, in particular, in looking at heterogeneities within social and political activism in Israel/Palestine, this paper deals with the documenting of internal relationships, differences, and challenges experienced in the most recent years by a large amount of protesters in the two major cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In pursuing this objective, I have to tackle the predominant narrative that has continued to be present in civil society (within peace-oriented, left-wing and feminist organisations as well), which addresses socio-political protest in terms of a single and homogeneous platform, without questioning asymmetries of power and privileges existing among the different components or the backgrounds of the protagonists. With this in mind, I attempt to enlarge such a discourse by examining what might emerge from observation of the so-called ‘tent protests’, also known as the ‘J14 movement’ or as the ‘Israeli social justice movement’, with specific focus on what happened in Tel Aviv in Summer 2011 and 2012. In this way, I aim to highlight rather different political as well as apolitical ways of understanding the status quo and suggesting especially social and economic alternatives. On the other hand, I have decided to explore one of the most well-known symbols of non-violent popular resistance in that land, the ‘Solidarity Movement’ based in Sheikh Jarrah (East Jerusalem) and founded on a joint struggle between Palestinians and Israeli Jews along with anti-occupation international activists. In detail, throughout this paper I have the purpose of providing a solid critique with a scope well beyond the more traditional theoretical analyses on such issues, to include diverse forms of grassroots mobilisation (regarding social justice and equality issues as well as the historic struggle to end the Israeli military occupation) along with new developments concerning insights into the fissures within the current reality of Israeli-Palestinian social and political movements.

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