Veranstaltungsdetails

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Prof. (em.) Dr. Benjamin Gidron, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

The societal changes in Israel since the Hamas attack and mass murder of civilians on Israeli soil on October 7, 2002, and the ensuing Gaza war have received little media or academic attention outside of Israel.

Benjamin Gidron's talk is dedicated to this neglected topic. In particular, he will focus on the role of civil society organizations before and after October 7. Many of these organizations were active in the protests against the weakening of the independent judiciary initiated by the Netanyahu government. After October 7, these protests came to a halt, but the civil society organizations that had supported them remained active. In his presentation, Benjamin Gidron analyzes the interplay between organizational continuity and a radical change in fields of activity and patterns of action. Within a very short period of time, Israeli civil society organizations moved from supporting a protest movement to supporting humanitarian aid for those affected by the Gaza war, crossing ethnic and religious lines.

Benjamin Gidron is professor emeritus at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva. Gidron is a pioneer in international comparative research on the relationship between civil society and conflict resolution. He was the founding president of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), and his book "Mobilizing for Peace: Conflict Resolution in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine" (Oxford University Press 2002), co-authored with Stanley N. Katz and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, won the Virginia A. Hodgkinson Prize for the best research publication in the field of nonprofit organizations and philanthropy.