The three case studies presented in this manuscript are part of a larger research project that examines relations between Palestinians and Israelis in the field of ayahuasca rituals. For detailed methodology section see and its supplementary section. In short, most of the data for this project was gathered in 2018-2019 through 31 in-depth interviews: 13 with Palestinians (five women, and eight men; nine have Israeli citizenship and four live under occupation in the West Bank) and 18 with Jewish Israelis (eight women, nine men, and one non-binary person), all between 28 and 59 years old, who participated to various extents in these mixed rituals. Interviewees belonged to five different ayahuasca groups, mostly facilitate by Israeli Jews. Facilitators and musicians lead the ritual with music, yet most rituals had participatory elements as well. There were moments in which the group sang together, and by the second half of the ritual participants were able to share their own music or prayers. Rituals included around 20 participants in average. The first author had an initial connection to some interviewees, which then introduced him to others through a snowball manner. However, the interviewees sample was a purposeful, so that we attempted to choose diverse informants in order to achieve reliable and generalizable data.
In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in Hebrew, Arabic, and English7. Each interview lasted from one to two and a half hours. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The microphenomenological interview technique was used whenever an interviewee reported important experiences and events from the rituals that had political implications. This technique was crucial for "zooming-in" on small details of the revelatory events presented in this paper. Author 1 also conducted participatory observations in five rituals of different such groups for complementary ethnographic data collection. Furthermore, follow-up interviews were conducted 1 year, and 2 years, after the first interview for the three interviewees described in the case studies.
The analysis was based on the grounded theory approach. This approach emphasizes hypothesis-free bottom-up generation of concepts and themes. In line with this approach, several stages of analysis were undertaken. The first phase included a thematic analysis of the interviews, which revealed thematic categories. Through a process of reading and re-reading the interviews, the number of categories was reduced by combining similar categories and focusing on those that emerged as most relevant. These categories were scrutinized again for centrality (repeated appearances across interviews and observations), for the connections between them, and for their relevance to the study and the questions it addresses. The software Narralizer was used to organize and codify the interviews. Narralizer is a simple software for organizing and structuring qualitative data, and no automatic analysis was conducted.
In a previous paper from the same dataset, fifteen conflict-related revelations were identified. Out of which five were defined as political revelatory events based on the theoretical framework of the current paper. The three revelatory events that are presented here were chosen based on having a detailed description of both the event itself and the developments that followed it. The description of the case studies is mainly based on the three interviewees, yet some information is used from other interviewees who attended the rituals in which the revelatory events took place. The ethnographic analysis of the context section above is based on all of the gathered data.
Identifying as an "Israeli Arab," Khalil grew up in the Galilee and went to a Jewish Israeli school, where he was denationalized and assimilated to become very critical toward Palestinians. Looking back, he says that he "was a person who denied his own Arabness." A supporter of right-wing Israeli politics, in his youth, he even wanted to serve in the Israeli army. Dispossessed of his national history and identity, Khalil reached ayahuasca rituals when he was in his 50s. He wanted to heal a personal trauma inflicted upon him by a childhood friend and heard that ayahuasca can help people purge their trauma. As the healing had already taken place in his first session, he became a regular member of one of the Israeli groups that organized ayahuasca rituals.
After several sessions with that group, Khalil was invited to a ritual in a private house located in a Jewish Israeli town. As was evident from the architecture, the house had formerly been owned by a Palestinian family who, like many other Palestinians, had been displaced during the Nakba. The current Jewish owners enjoyed hosting many rituals in the large and accommodating house. Guided by the Jewish Israeli shaman that Friday evening, this ritual was somewhat different, as it had a major Jewish influence involving the welcoming of Shabbat. Jewish participants were all dressed in white and were singing Jewish religious songs. Khalil came in jeans and a colorful shirt, like the other three Palestinian participants in the ritual, and was asked by the organizers to change his clothes. This contrast of colors intensified the distinction between the Palestinian minority and Jewish majority of participants, which is probably what summoned Khalil's confrontation with his self-denied Arabness from "the void."
While the group was singing the traditional Shabbat song "Shalom Aleichem" (Peace be on you, in Hebrew), Khalil decided to go out to the porch. Separated from the group, he sat under a vine tree that reminded him of his grandfather's house. An intense light started flashing. Sitting outside alone, fear took over him. Khalil felt as if he was losing his mind and would never return to his usual self. He imagined himself becoming a "junkie in the streets," and was wondering "what will I tell my wife and how will I look my children in the eye." His fear intensified his sense of alienation and separation from the world, believing "that no power can release me from where I found myself." Such separation is a necessary step for an Badiouan intervention to take place (, 201, 209). While lifting his head to the sky to pray for God's help, Khalil had a vision of an old Palestinian couple in traditional Arab clothing, sitting in front of him on the same balcony and drinking coffee. They were the previous Palestinian owners of the house where the ritual was taking place. The woman told him: "I know you went to an Israeli school:you hate everything to do with Arabs, and you have anger. But the story is different. You heard only one side, but you haven't heard our side. You are in our house now and we are not here. We were evicted."
Khalil deeply identified with the old couple's pain. The revelation confronted him with collective Palestinian traumatic memories of the ongoing effects of the Nakba, which he had previously avoided. Angry at himself, Khalil felt deceived by the Jewish Israeli narrative. Loyal to his vision, he returned to the ritual with the aim of disrupting it. In anger he sang an old Arabic Andalusian song, "Lamma bada yatathanna" (When it began to unfold), in order to declare that this was "in fact a Palestinian house... whether we like it or not." The psychedelic event led to his recognition of the injustice that Israelis perpetrate against Palestinians, after which, in Badiou's terms, he felt compelled to intervene in the "structure" of the ritual and modify it. Singing in Arabic was a political act for Khalil, but the reaction of those responsible for maintaining the structure of the ritual was swift. When Khalil raised his voice, the shaman invited him to sit next to him and played the joyful song "Bint al-shalabiya" (The pretty girl) by Fayrouz, a famous female Arab singer from Lebanon. Khalil recounts the excitement: "I am mad about her [Fayrouz]. Suddenly, the shaman starts singing in Arabic. We were thirty people and everybody got up to dance and hug.... I was shocked; hugging and dancing, Jews and Arabs! It was wonderful, wonderful.... That's where the journey started."
Khalil's fidelity to his vision, as we understand it, was expressed through an angry musical interruption. However, this was not enough to change the structure of the ritual that evening. Although it seems that the Jewish-oriented ritual suddenly became Arab, as people cheerfully danced to Fayrouz's song, it became clear to us that the shaman successfully diverted attention from the national political grounds expressed in Khalil's anger to culturally safe grounds. The shaman prevented Khalil's truth from disrupting the harmony of the ritual with Palestinian memories of displacement from the Nakba.
However, Khalil considered his bringing himself to sing in Arabic at the Israeli ritual an outstanding achievement, a pivotal moment when his "journey began." "Born again" in this event, he felt his brain was "clean to receive the truth." Attuned to the universal truth that he had attained at the event, Khalil tattooed his chest with a sentence in praise of the land, taken from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet. This helped him reassemble elements of his Palestinian identity, as he confessed: "I used to be very radical right wing in my opinions.... [But] I have made peace with the Arab in me, with being a Palestinian Arab."
Khalil remained loyal to the event after the ritual was over. Uncomfortable with joining Israeli rituals in which he was part of a minority, his fidelity was directed toward the expansion of ayahuasca to Palestinians. He began organizing rituals for Palestinians only, to which he introduced Arab musical instruments, such as the oud and qanun. As a result he became a key figure in the diffusion of ayahuasca to Palestinians living in Israel. Still, he continues to hold a strong universalistic worldview, arguing that what he learned from his event is not specific to Palestinians. This conundrum can be reconciled through Badiou's conceptualization of universalism, in which existing structures are restructured to include the excluded particulars. Khalil's mission to expand ayahuasca to Palestinians led to an empowering and intimate circle, in which they are not dependent on Israeli mediation. Although open to Jewish Israelis, Palestinian ayahuasca rituals offer an alternative structure in which they can reclaim the Arabic language and culture as part of their Palestinian heritage, and not as a denationalized discourse of multiculturalism and interfaith dialog. Such an alternative structure of ayahuasca rituals, as we demonstrate in the following section, also allows Palestinians to produce a safe space with a new cultural vocabulary, where they can share the pain and anger that they experience as a result of the Israeli settler colonial structure.
Working at a regular nine-to-five job in finance, Ruqaiya kept away from politics. Although growing up in an Arab family in a village in the north of Israel, she felt an outsider in her Palestinian culture. She married young, in an arranged marriage to an older man, but fell in love outside the marriage. This led to traumatic and violent events. Divorced with two children, Ruqaiya first participated in ayahuasca rituals when she was in her 40s, or as she explains: "Ayahuasca reached me. She searched for me." During that period, Ruqaiya was at a low point in her life. She was "a person who saw everything in black, with no point in life." Ayahuasca, her "teacher," showed her that her trauma was "a gift." It taught her about "the depth of life," and that she was able to "adapt to any place and any situation." Ruqaiya soon became a therapist, "a wounded healer," as she describes it, focusing on treating trauma.
Four years into her participation in Israeli ayahuasca rituals, she had her major life-changing revelation. As recounted at the opening of this article, it was on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). She joined her regular group, her "tribe," yet was the only Palestinian in the ritual that night. During the ritual someone sang a song about Maria. She felt as if "Maria entered" her, and she soon began vomiting. She then received many insights about Amal, her elder daughter. Similarly to Khalil, Amal attended a Jewish Israeli school. Coming of age at the time of the event, she was considering joining the Israeli army. Although a Muslim, Amal also fasted on Yom Kippur that day, at the house of her Jewish friend. Strongly assimilated into Jewish Israeli society; her Palestinian identity was, to use Badiou's phrasing, on "the edge of the void." In her vision, Ruqaiya saw Amal with some darkness closing in on her, "disappearing into an abyss." She had to reach out to Amal and pull her out of that darkness and away from her confusion. At that point, as Ruqaiya recounted, "something closed and I was higher. Al-Fatiha [the opening verses of the Quran] came out, and another strong frequency was opened." This vision separated her from the rest of the group and allowed the intervention to take place.
While singing al-Fatiha to the rest of the group, Ruqaiya had a strong revelation in which she saw Palestinian and Israeli mothers sacrifice their own children to war, while ''Pachamama'' (Mother Earth, in Quechua; a term popularized in neoshamanic practices) absorbed the bloodshed. Ruqaiya experienced the pain of the land.8 The historical vision continued from past traumas into an apocalyptic warning from a potentially disastrous future. As she explained, the vision of mothers who sacrifice their children was related also to her daughter's intention to join the Israeli army.
Ruqaiya's singing and vision were simultaneous. She was singing out of agony about the vision, as she recalled: ''The voice came from the center. I cannot say it was in the voice of God, though it was the voice of a messenger.'' When she sang, she ''released a frequency of anger,'' and it felt as if she were telling the other participants to ''listen and awaken. There is a battle here between light and dark. The dark is growing stronger than the light, so understand where we are now.'' When asked about the meaning of al-Fatiha, Ruqaiya chose a universalistic interpretation. She said that it is about not getting lost: ''All those who go by certain laws, which are illusory and fake, separate from the human itself, from humanity, from what we are. We are human.'' After al-Fatiha, she sang, in Hebrew, a song that was popular among the group members, but she added a verse in Arabic.9
While she was singing, there was an intense feeling in the room, and many participants were vomiting. In relation to the group, Ruqaiya said: "I felt each one, each and every one [in the group]. Where they were with their fear, doubt, and ego. The [protecting] net that each person places himself in. The defense of the illusion." Her singing was a pivotal moment in the ritual for other group members, but only few understood the message, as she explained: "Many friends deny it [the message]. They don't want to deal with it.... So who is doing reparation [on Yom Kippur]? No one. They [Jewish Israelis] are just fasting." Ruqaiya's fidelity to her vision was counterhegemonic. As a result, she delivered anger in her song, which we believe was related to a political truth that was concealed by the structure of the ritual. Ruqaiya's critical insight regarding her own ayahuasca "tribe" was that it replicates the power dynamics that exist in larger reality. However, as in the case of Khalil, her attempts to intervene resulted in denial by the representatives of the ritual's structure.
While the prophetic interventions of Palestinians channel political anger during rituals, we noticed that New Age spirituality often comes to support the Israeli structure of political denial. For example, Nir, an Israeli shaman, suggested that if political revelations take place during the ritual, they are part of the "shadow work" that one needs to go through. In his instructions, Nir meant that once the political "shadow" becomes conscious, a person will be less guided by it. In this sense, a political revelation is personal, meant only to reveal restrictive identities and traumas to oneself, and through this awareness one can work toward liberating oneself from such restrictions. This argument could be used to reverse Palestinian revelatory truths, as it suggests that their expression of anger was needed for their cathartic personal healing, but not as a message to the group. This reversal is supported by New Age ideology in which "the self" is at the center of transformation.
Nevertheless, the revelation that Ruqaiya had during this ritual developed into a sense of mission and meaning in her life. However, we observed that the intensity of her fidelity to the event was reduced, in comparison to the initial intervention, and remained mostly related to the setting of the ayahuasca practice. She explained: "I feel I am an ambassador of the Arabs in that I started to say, 'Yes! We are here. We have a voice and opinion. We have life. We are allowed to live. Not only if the Jews allow it."' Ruqaiya took her destiny in her own hands and began singing to liberate the Arabic language from the oppression of the Israeli state and patriarchy. According to her, it is "the woman who brings revolution and change." This realization came in fidelity to her vision, yet her self-inquiry is still in process: "How to do this? I am checking, receiving answers, in order to extricate the woman who is the educator of all ages and the one who brings children into the world." Ruqaiya's transformation was reflected in Amal, her daughter, who eventually decided not to join the Israeli army, conceivably owing to the event. Considering her singing an empowering political act, Ruqaiya encouraged other Palestinian women to join her rituals and "find their voice." Similarly to Khalil's fidelity, she sought to expand and diversify the ayahuasca rituals, to make them more egalitarian and inclusive for Palestinians.
Her politicization did not, however, happen at once. Worried that people would not understand her, it seems that she was divided between fidelity to the event and belonging to the structure. As time passed, and as she remained in fidelity to her vision, the structure around her changed, and she was able to admit to herself that her revelation was political. Throughout her process of political self-exploration, she met like-minded people who could understand her mission. Furthermore, two Jewish Israelis who participated in the Yom Kippur ritual received the message of her song and became musical companions in the rituals that she facilitated.10 Gathering a small group of people around her, Ruqaiya has not only kept her fidelity alive but has been seeking further connections to form a larger social movement. In this sense, she has been trying to establish a politicized collective that she hopes will have a larger impact.
On a few occasions since her event, Ruqaiya has attempted to deliver explicit political messages during rituals. For example, during a magic mushroom ritual, which Ruqaiya co-facilitated with a small group of spiritual activists, Adi, a Jewish Israeli woman, announced to the group that she has just decided not to move to Portugal. Addressing both Israelis and Palestinians, she declared: "This is my home and these are my people." Soon after, in a moment of inspiration, Ruqaiya sat in the center of the circle and spoke in archaic Hebrew, which resembled a biblical text. Accusing the "children of Israel" of losing their way, she stated that "those who were liberated by Moses in the past, have now became Pharaoh [to the Palestinians]." Such direct verbal phrasing of the duality of the oppressor/oppressed is a radical break from the previous structure, which sanctified oneness. As part of the inquiry into her truth, we believe that Ruqaiya has been replicating her event and her initial intervention in other contexts. In doing so, she reconnects with the excluded Palestinian identity, by using other parts of which are in either the Israeli structure (Arabic language and music, Islamic religion) or the void (right to the land, historical injustice). Hence, according to Badiou, she became a "subject" through which the restructuring occurs. She admits though that this is not a simple task and that the integration of her event is challenging as it requires replacing the "old language" with a "new language" that fits the event. Such tension is inherent to the truth procedure, as the restructuring cannot be dependent only on the language of the previous structure.
Ruqaiya's politicized prophetic deliverance in rituals suggests that she is seeking the reformation of New Age culture so as to make it more politically engaged. While borrowing and decontextualizing different religious practices is central to New Age spirituality, Ruqaiya reconstructs ayahuasca rituals in Palestine/Israel in a political frame. As she puts it, she seeks to "wake up" those who "prefer not to see." Her belief that "all is one" is now aligned with a mission, as her call for action is mobilized to achieve equality at large, beyond the Israeli ritual structure.
While the event site is related to the Israeli subjugation of Palestinians, Jewish Israelis can also experience revelatory events that lead to political awakening. Today in his 30s, Amos grew up in a middle-class Jewish Israeli family with a left-wing orientation. Never politically involved himself, he ended up joining the Israeli army as a soldier in an elite unit. He decided to join a combat unit not for patriotic reasons, but "to be a man." During his service, Amos went through a few traumatic events in the West Bank, in which his life was under threat and his comrades were severely injured. After his army service, he felt "very tense" when he heard Arabic spoken near him. After some of his classmates from high school died in combat in the Second Lebanon War (2006), he decided to leave the country to travel. Like many other Israelis, he went on a long journey to India and elsewhere to overcome the harsh memories of military service. Amos had his first experiences with psychedelic drugs as a backpacker-musician. Regularly returning to Israel for occasional jobs, he then became part of the ayahuasca milieu there.
Looking back to his first encounters with Palestinians at Israeli rituals, he confesses that he was initially judgmental toward their appearance. Not conforming with the Israeli hippy dress code, they were, according to him, too neatly dressed and showed off their high socioeconomic status. As he recounts half jokingly: "I remember a [Palestinian] guy who came to a ceremony in leather shoes, jeans, cell phone, BMW keys, pack of cigarettes, and even when he changed clothes, everyone else was in hippy clothes."
His life-changing revelatory event took place in a session in which he came across Palestinians from the West Bank for the first time in such a setting. As the Palestinian participants began to cry during the ritual, Amos's vision was triggered:
Suddenly, the ayahuasca showed me them [the Palestinian group] as a separate unit within us [the Israelis in the ritual]. Another one [Palestinian] began to cry. It took me automatically to the madness of the pain of a whole people.... I felt connected to that pain. I caused the pain of their people. I began to break. I couldn't stand to hear them crying. She [ayahuasca] began showing me so much. I can't describe it visually, just this crazy pain, and hate, and crying for the evil they experienced. It built up and up, until there was a cut.
The collective cry of the excluded group of Palestinians separated Amos from the room into his own vision, whereby he had a very detailed flashback of his army service. He saw himself making a casual house arrest of Palestinians, "one of dozens, maybe hundreds," as he confessed. He saw himself with his unit breaking into the house, interrogating the Palestinian family, and then leading a man into a military jeep. Soon Amos had a "cut" in the revelation and he re-experienced the same incident again. This time, however, he experienced the moment from the side of the family, feeling their pain, panic, and heartbreak. Observing himself from the other side, he described himself as looking like "Robocop," or "like someone from a film about Nazis." When the revelation ended and Amos returned to the ritual, he felt intense anger and guilt. "That was the point in my life where I most hated myself," he later admitted.
After recognizing the pain that Palestinians go through, Amos became devastated during the ritual. He began singing with much confidence, even though until then he had been embarrassed to sing by himself in rituals. Delivering the message through song broke the barriers of his shyness. Amos was taken up in fidelity. He requested from the facilitators permission to sing relatively early in the ritual. Thus, he intervened in its regular structure. Amos remembers that he did not sing beautifully, but that there was something authentic and honest in the moment. Amos considers the song to be a direct continuation of the revelation. He mentioned that it felt like the "room was electrified," and "the world vibrated with me." He felt as if he embodied the role of a "preacher" delivering a crucial message of truth to the group. "I felt it [the song] was strong, stronger than me, and it came from a black void in the ritual," Amos's words interestingly resonate here with Badiou's terminology.
The song that Amos sang was "Mekomi kadosh" (My place is sacred), a Hebrew song influenced by Native American peyote-ritual music. The lyrics had a universal message for him, stating that everyone's connection to the land is sacred and everyone's voice should be heard. Amos, however, gave it also a localized political meaning, in which he expressed his relationship with Palestinians and their mutual connection to the land. Up to that point most of the songs in this specific group were in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, since the facilitator was European. Singing in Hebrew, Amos felt that the song was "stronger than me." Although participants are usually encouraged to stay in their place during the ritual, two of the Palestinian participants came and lay down next to him. According to Amos, this was when "my journey of healing my relations with them [the Palestinians] began." The song ended with a long silence, which allowed people to reflect.
Rashid, who went to lie down next to Amos while he was singing, also found the courage to sing later in the same ritual. It was the first time that a Palestinian sang in Arabic in this particular group. As with Khalil and Ruqaiya, the introduction of both Hebrew and Arabic to the singing indicates that the fidelity to truth led to the expansion of the ayahuasca ritualistic practice to include local identities, as well as to greater universality. Eventually, Amos befriended the Palestinian group in the ritual. He left the reserve army and began to learn Arabic. He also developed great interest in Palestinian culture and history. However, in addition to his connection to Palestinians, Amos argues that this specific ritual made him less judgmental and more compassionate toward all humans. This inductive reasoning suggests that through a particular recognition, something universal was revealed to Amos.
Another indicator of an essential restructuring of rituals toward universality is related to the connection to the land, a theme that appears in all three of the events and fidelities described in this article. In her vision Ruqaiya identified with the pain of the land; Khalil's new tattoo expresses his belonging to the land; and the lyrics of Amos's song were about everyone's sacred place on the land. Reestablishing the connection of Palestinians to the land is a crucial diversion from the Israeli structure, toward both a particular acknowledgment and a more inclusive universalism. Such universal aspirations require resistance to the Israeli settler-colonial project that supports the Zionist narrative calling for the "redemption of the land" from the Palestinians who "occupy" it.
Although Amos was initially in full fidelity to the event, like any other subject he later became divided between his fidelity to the event and his belonging to the structure. As with any Badiouan event, the forces of the structure are always at work to reverse the event's truth. In Amos's case, such a reversal is exemplified by his later reinterpretation of the event based on the previous structure. In the first interview with him, he interpreted the song "Mekomi kadosh" as an expression of Palestinian and Israeli connection to the land. This interpretation is loyal to the event, as it recognizes the Palestinians' right to the land, which is something that the structure denies. However, in a second interview with him, that took place a year later, Amos gave the lyrics another interpretation associated with self-acceptance. He explained: "There is this thing from the North American Dakota tribe about being a man. OK, so you cried, apologized, and you are also evil... now it is time to move forward. What does it mean? Exactly like in the song, your place is your place and you cannot even control it. You are part of a story and your part is sacred." We argue that this new interpretation is a diversion from the truth attained during the event, and does not challenge the structure, as it frames the song in a holistic interpretation that accepts good and evil as "sacred." Thus, the later interpretation waves off Amos's feelings of guilt and desire for reparation. In this sense, it is also compatible with Ruqaiya's critique of Jewish Israelis who prefer "not to see."
Aligned with this interpretation, Amos also said that he learned from "the medicine" that friendship with Palestinians is valuable for him, as "peace occurs human to human," so that he need not "worry about the macro." While he indeed overcame some of his stigmatization and fears of Palestinians, it seems he maintained an apolitical position that is centered on harmony and friendship, without actively taking responsibility for and acting against the structure of injustice against Palestinians that he is part of. For example, he was upset every time one of his Palestinian friends from the rituals critiqued the "Zionist occupier" on social media. He felt that such outspoken criticism was not aligned with their friendship with him. Instead, such Palestinian expressions of anger seemed to him a contradiction of the harmony and unity that they experienced together in the ritual.
We must ask then, what happened to Amos's fidelity to his event. Why was he diverted from his initial conviction in a politicized universal truth to a more comfortable position that does not challenge the Israeli structure? It is important to note here that Amos has been a helper and musician in the Israeli rituals. Hence, he is a central representative of the structure, unlike Ruqaiya and Khalil, who were marginal to the structure at the moment of their event. In this sense, we argue that the structure was stronger than the event for Amos, so that his fidelity was eventually reversed. Moreover, while Khalil's and Ruqaiya's fidelity was ignited by anger, Amos's fidelity as a Jewish Israeli was ignited by guilt. As such, guilt carries a strong psychological burden, especially when not directed toward reparation. Six years after the revelatory event, Amos went to an MDMA-assisted therapy session and revisited the haunting memory that appeared to him at the event.11 A few weeks after the MDMA session, he said that it had helped him to overcome the memories and to continue with his life.