"Unsettling Gaza is an extremely welcome addition to the literature on Israel and the Israeli Palestinian conflict...There should be no doubt that Unsettling Gaza is a significant contribution to our understanding of this painful, tortured conflict and perhaps, as the reader will discover, to its hoped-for resolution." —International Journal of Middle East Studies
"Joyce Dalsheim conducted ethnographic fieldwork among religious settlers in Gaza before they were forcibly removed in 2005 as part of the Israeli government's redeployment strategy. The result is this interesting study comparing the beliefs and sentiments of these religious settlers with those of secular settlers in pre-1967 Israel. She shows that the distinction between the two is not as clear-cut or as stable as it is often claimed. Anyone wanting to gain a fuller understanding of the religious/secular debate in Israel will find this book useful." —Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center
"Joyce Dalsheim's book is rich in critical acumen, yet closely grounded in the realities it depicts and altogether readable. It is a signal contribution to the growing literatures in Jewish ethnography and cultural studies. It directly addresses core aspects of the Zionist project and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without rancor, and it adroitly moves beyond the stereotypes of actors in that conflict as it depicts the multiform anxieties underlying what Dalsheim calls 'the desire to differentiate.'" —Jonathan Boyarin, Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
"With Unsettling Gaza, Joyce Dalsheim throws a monkey wrench into the Manichaean machine of judgment, disrupting the politics of bipolarity and opening up new avenues for reconfiguring the contemporary debate on the uneasy relation of religiosity and secularity."—Anne Marie Oliver, author of The Road to Martyrs' Square
"In this fascinating and lucid examination of Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip, Dalsheim unsettles the appearance of seemingly colliding distinctions between secular and religious and left and right in Israel. Dalsheim's richly detailed ethnography and theoretically informed analysis astutely probes these discursive formations to illuminate how they appear to be starkly different yet work together to accomplish the continuing colonization of Palestine and its moral legitimacy. By examining what discourses conceal and what they accomplish, this penetrating, provocative, and brave book transcends the dichotomy of secular and religious narratives." —Julie Peteet, author of Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps
"Scholars will find the abundant valuable information on ethnic and national identity from 'ordinary' Israelis to be helpful..."—CHOICE
"Dalsheim's anthropology of the religiously motivated settlers of the Gaza Strip, a rare and discomforting contribution toward a new 'portrait of the colonizer,' is demanding and literally... unsettling... Dalsheim works very much against the grain and demonstrates that a terrifying achievement of colonial power is its capacity to differentiate itself from itself, to operate in a dis-integrated manner, as it were schizophrenically, while nonetheless achieving with ruthless efficacy the singleness of its devastating and destructive purpose." —Gil Anidjar, Columbia University in the Journal of Palestine Studies
