Audience Responses to Grassroots Transitional Justice: The Streets of Jaffa Project

ABSTRACT∞ This study examines grassroots transitional justice through the Streets of Jaffa project, which commemorates erased Palestinian street names within a deeply divided and asymmetrical political context. Drawing on field research with Jewish and Palestinian residents, the analysis shifts attention from civil society’s intentions to audience responses as key indicators of how bottom-up transitional justice initiatives are received and contested under conditions of enduring ethnonational asymmetry. The findings reveal that these reactions are shaped by class, national identity and lived experiences of asymmetry, producing ambivalent outcomes that both challenge and reproduce existing power relations. The study contributes methodologically by analyzing a transitional justice project embedded in everyday urban life, exposing an entire population to acts of memory activism. While the research period precedes the events of October 7, 2023, the analysis remains relevant for understanding the persistence and limits of grassroots transitional justice in the profoundly altered reality that followed.