Mimetic violence and wartime organ donation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians

Soc Sci Med. 2026 Apr 29;401:119344. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119344. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding how wartime organ donation can both interrupt and reinforce cycles of mimetic violence. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory, we analyze ethnographic and interview-based material collected between August 2021 and October 2022 from three cases of cross-community organ donation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians during armed conflict, examining how donor families and recipients frame bodily giving as an ethical, relational, and symbolic practice. The findings reveal a dual dynamic. Organ donation functions simultaneously as a boundary-spanning mechanism, introducing a counter-mimetic dynamic that challenges entrenched hostility by transforming the injured body into a site of moral repair and promoting restraint, renunciation, and recognition of shared vulnerability, and as a boundary-making mechanism, perceived as betrayal of the in-group or as reproducing existing power hierarchies. This contribution advances scholarship at the intersection of social science and health by demonstrating how medicalized exchanges of bodily material engage with political conflict and sacrificial logic, and suggests that acts of biomedical care can serve as mechanisms of both social interruption and social reinforcement during war.

PMID:42085798 | DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119344