Strategies for Grassroots Activism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an ongoing crisis originating from the ethno-religious struggle between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews over the land of Palestine. There have been several attempts to create peace in this conflict, including foreign intervention and aid. However, one of the most overlooked methods is grassroots activism: civilian movements that work for social and political change on a local, regional, or international level. While there have been sociological analyses and other studies conducted on grassroots activism in the conflict, there has been a lack of comprehensive approaches analyzing these qualitative studies and the effectiveness of this activism. Thus, the purpose for this project was to find which strategies were most effective for grassroots movements that focus on creating peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. It was hypothesized that nonviolent activism would emerge as most effective. A mixed methods approach incorporating both a qualitative meta synthesis and a quantitative frequency analysis was conducted through a thematic synthesis. Line-by-line coding was completed on six journal articles obtained from JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, and Sociological Collection; descriptive and analytical themes based on strategies for grassroots activism were created based on this coding. A statistical analysis was completed displaying the frequency of each strategy coded as low, medium, or high success. Joint activism emerged as the most effective strategy based on the coding completed with 57% coding under high success: this suggests that joint activism should be utilized most often for conflict resolution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.