Transitional Justice 'from below' during intractable conflicts: Reconciliation through the Streets of Jaffa?

The concept of transitional justice (TJ) is often defined as the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society's attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation. Prominent contributions to the field of conflict resolution view TJ as a post-conflict instrument. In reality, however, TJ activities are sometimes conducted while armed conflict is ongoing. Such TJ activities carried out by civil society actors during entrenched conflicts and are often conceived as pre-transitional justice (pre-TJ) (Kapshuk & Strömbom, 2021). a key element of pre-TJ during conflicts is to use and ‘copy’ procedures from the legal arena and from official institutions, and use those in the informal sphere of civil society activities to demand that authorities claim responsibility for past wrongs. These types of bottom-up perspective have challenged top-down legalist paradigms, which determine what is emphasised and what is marginalised (Kedar & Dudai, 2018). This study focuses on pre-TJ in Israel in the context of an ongoing Israeli-Palestinian intractable conflict. Since the collapse of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, and faced with socio-political unwillingness to engage in a discourse about accepting responsibility, Israeli civil society has developed its own versions of TJ as a means to provoke crucial discussions about how to deal with past injustices. One such activity is the ‘Streets of Jaffa’ project. Jaffa is an Arab-Jewish city and its streets names were changed to Hebrew names after the Palestinian exodus (Nakba) during the 1947–48 war, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. ‘Street of Jaffa’ project commemorates Palestinian streets names by putting up additional street signs, in order to promote recognition of the Palestinian history of the area and creating partnership and reconciliation between Arab and Jewish residents in Jaffa. The aim of the study is to examine the way in which the action of pre-transitional justice is organized and its reactions and effects on different population groups. By doing so this study contributes to the scholarship on pre-TJ ‘from below’ during entrenched conflicts.