הפיל שבחדר: ישראל, פלסטין ועלייתה מחדש של האתנו־לאומיות ברחבי העולם

This article examines the current global polarization around Israel-Palestine through the lens of long-term ethnographic research on Palestinian–Israeli co-resistance. It argues that the dominant framing of the situation as a binary conflict between two distinct and coherent entities—“Israel” versus “Palestine,” “pro-Israel” versus “pro-Palestine”—is analytically misleading and politically harmful. Such binaries obscure profoundly unequal power relations, flatten the heterogeneity of lived experience, and divert attention from what the author identifies as the “elephant in the room”: the global reemergence of political ethnonationalism. Building on fieldwork with joint Palestinian and Israeli activists, the article proposes that the primary fault line does not run between “Israelis” and “Palestinians,” but between those who organize around universal human and citizenship rights, and those who anchor rights and belonging in ethnonational categories. Situating Israel-Palestine within broader histories and theories of nationalism, settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, the article advances political ethnonationalism as a complementary interpretive framework rather than a replacement for existing critical paradigms. It further reflects on the internal crises of critical academia itself—especially the conflation of positionality with identity and the rigid policing of intellectual camps—which risks reproducing the very binaries scholars seek to dismantle. The article concludes by calling for renewed scholarly engagement that resists fraudulent dichotomies, critically interrogates ethnonationalism wherever it manifests, and remains accountable to the complex everyday realities and co-resistance practices of those who refuse to be enemies.