“Smaller Goals Were Achieved”: Feminist Peace Archives in Israel and Communal Methods of Repair

Abstract The article engages with the potential of feminist archiving-as-activism as a communal method of repair that can enable a more responsible research agenda toward women’s resistance to armed conflict. The study is based on a local, dialogical approach and on qualitative data obtained through a series of 35 interviews with Israeli feminist peace activists, scholars and archivists and on an ethnographic survey of 11 Feminist Peace Archives (FPAs) conducted in 2019–2022. The analysis is embedded in a reparative logic of imagining future FPAs in Israel/Palestine by listening to stories about endurance and failure. We discuss four themes: (1) the types of materials produced by feminist peace organizations; (2) the current location of historical records; (3) decision-making processes regarding preservation and archiving; and (4) the overall importance of creating feminist peace archives even under conditions of long-term failure. We find that “archives of failure” are characterized by silences that are manifested in parallel practices of preservation and erasure of materials and reverberate the activism failure, and the fear of being forgotten altogether. As such, the act of questioning is by itself a form of reparative archival work that involves an effort to subvert the silencing of everyday stories of peace and cooperation.