When Peace is Not Enough is an ambitious book that not only explores how some sectors of the Israeli peace camp think about religion, nationalism, and social justice, but also provides a probing evaluation of different movements and organizations. The strength of this book is in its critical analysis of numerous platforms and agendas for addressing conflict and injustice in Israel/Palestine, including Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Vision of Palestinian Citizens of Israel, and the Mizrahi Rainbow or Keshet. Omer tells the reader what is useful in, and what has been missing from, each of these platforms or interventions. She then engages with a number of scholars who have offered some of the most recent critical and controversial analyses and models for change, including Yehouda Shenhav and Judith Butler. This is a careful and thoughtful book that asks people concerned with peace and social justice in Palestine/Israel to reconsider paths to peace by thinking with the different population groups directly involved and impacted by the conflict, as it also asks those groups to think with each other. Its subject is also its audience: this is a book about variously situated citizens of Israel and about the diasporic Jewish community. It calls for a reinterpretation of what it means to be Israeli toward the goal of building a more just and peaceful future for everyone in Israel/Palestine.

Omer's work builds on critical studies of identity and geography to suggest a “hermeneutics of citizenship” which might allow us to reimagine religion and nation beyond liberal secularist conceptions. It opens with a critique of the Oslo Process that the author says has been so problematic because of its focus on partition rather than assimilation (p. 5). This juxtaposition might seem odd given recent critiques of assimilation in settler societies as another form of elimination of the native population. But the presupposition of partition as the best means of resolving conflict, founded on ethno-national assumptions, has also been a basis for purifying national territory and potentially leading to more conflict, if not to ethnic cleansing. Scholars of postcolonial nationalisms are well aware of this, but Omer suggests that the field of peace studies could benefit from engaging with a broader range of scholarly work, including political theory, religious studies, and cultural theory. This book, then, not only adds to a growing body of critical scholarship on Palestine/Israel, but also seeks to bring a broad range of interdisciplinary theorizing to bear on the very practical realm of peacebuilding.

The attempt to reimagine collective identity in relation to place leads Omer to a repositioning of perspectives through which peace and justice might be considered, focusing on subaltern, hybrid, or marginalized positions in order to de-center dominant peacemaking discourse. These positions, however, are not valorized, but carefully scrutinized for what they might contribute to a more promising peacebuilding process and for what they still lack. This move is both welcome and problematic. It is welcome because shifting perspective is useful and because each position is critically evaluated (although readers might evaluate them differently from the author). Yet, while attempting to unsettle dominant discourses, this move also necessarily reinscribes preexisting categories, particularly the division between dominant and subaltern groups. Omer never questions who might be considered subaltern in a given context or how such categories work. Indeed, later in the book she switches from the term “subaltern” to “victims”: “In order to envision an ethical alternative [to the ethnorepublican model of a two-state solution] it is necessary to deploy a multiperspectival approach to justice by focusing on history as told from the point of view of Israel's Jewish and non-Jewish victims” (p. 272). One hears the voices of Ella Shohat and Edward Said echoed in these words, and thinks of the work of Amiel Alcalay as well as Ilan Pappe and the “new” historians. It also brings to mind the peacebuilding projects initiated by Israeli and Palestinian historians to write a bridging narrative or to produce side-by-side narratives for schools. But why restrict “subaltern,” “hybrid,” and “victim” status to Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jews of Middle Eastern and Northern African descent (Mizrahim, or Arab Jews)? A footnote suggests that Omer has begun thinking beyond these categories to include gender or other forms of discrimination. But the question could probe much deeper.

For those readers familiar with this case and with current debates, the strongest part of the book begins in Chapter 5 and reaches a pinnacle in Chapter 7, where Omer reveals what, if not peace, might be enough. It is at this moment that the book might have alternatively been named “When the Critique of Zionism Is Not Enough,” or more specifically, “When the Critique of Zionism as Eurocentric, Ashkenazi-Hegemonic Ethno-Nationalism Is Not Enough.” And this is what makes Omer's analysis most refreshing and productive. Omer explains that the most promising models and interventions are still missing something. Taken together, Mizrahi polycentrism (as expressed by the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow or Keshet) and Judith Butler's notion of cohabitation offer an “ethical reframing of geopolitical space.” And yet both “impose another form of amnesia, a resetting that pretends that decades of Jewish Israeliness never happened” (p. 268). Reclaiming diasporic conditions as being most authentically Jewish (Judith Butler), or relying on estranged and marginalized identities (Keshet) born of decades of Israeli statehood, is insufficient. The Mizrahim, she suggests, have overlooked their connection to Palestinian predicaments by focusing on “domestic” issues (p. 270). And valorizing the diasporic minimizes the lived experiences of Jews in Israel. One might argue that this is a misinterpretation of diasporic theorizing, which is less concerned with geographic location than with the idea of living as a minority among minorities. However, Omer seems to represent a new generation of scholars who are building on the insights of postcolonial theory but who are also deeply committed to Israel. What distinguishes this scholarship from some other critiques might be called ahavat yisraʾel. Whereas Hannah Arendt was famously criticized for lacking a particularly deep concern for the People of Israel (Jews)—although that criticism has often been misunderstood—Atalia Omer cannot be accused of the same. Her point is not just to dismantle Zionism (settler-colonialism), but it is to try to reimagine a country through multiple lenses, histories, cultures, and their relationships to each other and to the land. Ahavat yisraʾel is displayed in her insistence that the experiences of decades of Jews in Israel cannot be discounted or forgotten. It is not enough to draw on alternative pasts or to think from the “hybrid” marginalized positions of Mizrahi and Palestinian Israelis. The Israeli peace camp also needs to rethink “Jewish meanings of Israel” and “the meanings of Jewish life outside Israel” (p. 166). What exactly this rethinking means or how it would be carried out are questions left unanswered. Perhaps these will be explored in her next book.