Читать книгу The Israeli Radical Left - Fiona Wright - Страница 10
ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
From inside the cool, air-conditioned offices of a human rights organization in the heart of Jaffa, one need not know about the protesters squaring up to hundreds of armed police officers just a short distance away. Indeed, the fortnightly staff meeting has begun this time with a round of coffee and cake in honor of one of the team members leaving for another job, and the atmosphere is even a little festive. We have finally settled down to start the meeting, when Dina, one of the organization’s Palestinian members of staff, gets a phone call. “They’re arresting everyone,” she tells us after quickly hanging up, and we look around at each other with concern but a lack of surprise. We have all heard about the plans of a nationalist, right-wing Israeli group to march through Jaffa that morning, and we saw the heavy police presence on the way to the office, in anticipation of the counterprotests of Jaffa’s Palestinian residents and their allies. Yotam, who was speaking before Dina’s phone rang, picks up his previous train of thought. He seems to want to go back to the meeting’s agenda and not to react further to what we have just heard. Einat, another Jewish member of the staff, interrupts him, shocked, asking, “Wait, isn’t this a bit weird, all of us sitting here when we know that right there”—she points toward the door—“they’re beating and arresting people? Shouldn’t we go there?” Yotam expresses ambivalence about her suggestion, but the others quickly agree among themselves that we should leave the office and go into the surrounding streets, noting the potential effect of the presence of a number of Ashkenazi Jews on the dynamics between Palestinians and police.
We leave the office together after a few minutes, despite further expressions of doubt by Yotam and a couple of others, who suggest that we might actually increase the number of arrests and have little power to curb police violence. After less than a minute, we reach Yefet Street, one of Jaffa’s main arteries, to find a large crowd of Palestinian protesters surrounded by police fully equipped with riot gear and horses. The right-wing march is nowhere in sight. Although a few members of the human rights group have been active in demonstrations in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and are used to this confrontational dynamic, others mostly avoid such spaces and prefer the quieter activism of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) world. Einat’s face has gone pale and she looks around nervously but walks on at a steady pace. The street that we would normally traverse to get to or from the office, or to pick up supplies for lunch, seems to have been transformed into a militarized zone, and a police helicopter looms overheard. We gradually move down the street with the crowd. After a short time, protesters are pushed into a space that directs them toward a line of police horses and everyone starts to feel threatened. Confrontations between protesters and police officers start to intensify and some toward the front are arrested and led away and into prison vans.
Splitting into two groups, some continue down the street with the main body of Palestinian protesters, and the rest of us head toward Jaffa’s port area, where the right-wing march is reported to be heading. Very quickly, we have left the scrum and are walking through the town’s side streets, where a few people still sit quietly on the sidewalk with coffee and cigarettes, or are out walking their dogs. It is as if the loud noise of the nearby clashes cannot even be heard. We pass by the luxurious villas lining the seafront, as well as a newly opened coffee shop that Einat, who is calmer now, jokes that we could all visit together on a day when things are normal again.
We turn a corner and are suddenly overlooking the right-wing march, a small group of around thirty people surrounded by at least three times that number of police officers. Headed by the notoriously inflammatory right-wing member of the Israeli parliament Michael Ben-Ari, the marchers wave Israeli flags and protest the “Islamic takeover of Jaffa,” as we look on, stunned by the sheer force of such a provocation. “What is this?” Einat asks with disbelief, and she starts to comment loudly about the waste of public resources being spent on policing the event as we pass by a line of police officers on our walk back toward the office. We are blocked along the way as some streets have been closed off and Dina shouts at the officers blocking our entry, “What, the whole of Jaffa is closed now?!” Einat takes her arm and leads her away, and they start to talk about reports from those who had stayed on Yefet Street, where many Palestinians and some Jewish activists had been arrested.
Eventually we all reconvene in the office and even sit down to have the postponed meeting later that day. As we are all gathering again in the central meeting room, we hear a loud siren—like those sounded during war—and we all stop and look at each other, curious and a little worried. The siren sounds throughout Israel about once a year when there is a military “drill,” but normally it is publicized in advance. Dina exclaims, “What is that?” and Einat replies, “Well it’s a war siren. I guess there’s a war!” I ask them what we are supposed to do, and they both laugh: “Nobody really knows what you’re supposed to do. You’re just supposed to remember that there’s always a war.” We go ahead with the staff meeting as usual, discussing an upcoming conference, a report about Gaza, and the organization’s possible participation in a demonstration next month in Tel Aviv. Later, we make our journeys home through the quiet streets of Jaffa, the warlike sights and sounds of earlier that day once again an all-too-fresh memory.
* * *
Questions of what to do, of how to act, of where to be, and of how to relate to the Israeli state and its various modes of violence and oppression are those that preoccupy Jewish Israeli left radical activists and on which this book centers. Such questions regularly manifest themselves in pressing and concrete ways, and activists—as relatively privileged and powerful actors—feel compelled to do something about the historical situation in which they find themselves, creating an unsettling and unresolved confrontation with ethical and political responsibility. These are activists who, as Jewish citizens of the state of Israel, attempt to act in solidarity with Palestinians and other non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel/Palestine, but who also struggle with the challenges, dilemmas, and implications of their own actions.
The uncertainty and discomfort of this activism does not reflect a lack of commitment or resoluteness in their politics. What unites the various groups and individuals I encountered in eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine is their principled rejection of Israel’s militarist and colonial regime, and the injustice and oppression that come with it, even as they work in different organizational contexts or with varying ideological affiliations. Unlike the overwhelming consensus among most of the Jewish Israeli population in support of the state’s policies and actions, Israeli left radical activists challenge and question its most fundamental aspects: from the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the obligatory conduct of military service, from regimes of surveillance and control to racism and discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, and from how history is taught in Israeli schools to the pervasive nationalist imagery that decorates Israel’s public space. Some are active in small direct action or protest groups and influenced by anarchist or socialist political thought, while others work or volunteer in one of a handful of human rights organizations that catalog and campaign against systematic abuses of Palestinians and other marginalized groups. Many have given up on the sphere of formal party politics, feeling that even the parties that have historically represented “the Left” in mainstream Israeli discourse are unable and unwilling to challenge the violent status quo. Others cast their vote for one of the Palestinian-led parties in national elections or still have hope that one of the small socialist or left-liberal parties may have some positive, “damage limitation,” effect in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset).
This ethnography follows the complexities and dilemmas of these clearly “political” engagements, but it also focuses on the everyday: in activists’ leisure spaces, in time with friends and family, and in the banal forms of action and communication that constitute the often invisible backdrop to what we generally recognize as activism. It is an analysis of ethics—of how these activists respond to their circumstances with care and attention—as much as it is of politics—of how structures of power and inequality shape one’s capacities for response in the first place. As begins to emerge in the scene that I described at the beginning of this chapter, taking ethical and political responsibility in contemporary Israel/Palestine entails a confrontation with the violence faced by many of its inhabitants, a confrontation that brings with it immense amounts of deliberation and anxiety, urgency and caution. These experiences seep into intersubjective relationships and into activists’ routines and ways of living, as well as find expression in moments of public protest and dissent.
While the ethical and political commitments of Jewish Israeli left radical activists are both heartfelt and in many ways all-consuming, then, they are also characterized by profound tensions and ambiguities. As Jewish citizens of the state of Israel, they occupy a position of power, both legally enshrined and socially embedded, relative to Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel/Palestine. They are also mostly highly educated, secular, and Ashkenazi (of European Jewish origin). They thus inhabit particular ethnic and class positions relative to other Israeli Jews, such as Mizrahi (in Hebrew literally “Oriental,” used to refer to Jews from non-European and often Muslim-majority countries) and Ethiopian Jews, and have historically been, and continue to be, privileged by the Israeli settler-colonial project.1 Jewish Israeli left radical activists act, therefore, in response to the oppression of others but as members of the dominating and colonizing group. They routinely find themselves politically pitted against loved ones and coworkers, as well as having to challenge the ways in which this position of power has been ingrained in their own patterns of thinking, acting, and relating to people around them. There is no simple way to continually try to remember, and to make other Israelis aware of, the systematic violence exercised toward Palestinians, when one also lives a life made “normal”—made livable—by a system of governance based on this violence. Practicing solidarity and embodying dissent are therefore neither straightforward nor self-evident but rather involve compromise, disappointment, and even, as I will explore, complicity.
* * *
The gray zones and ambiguities foregrounded in my analysis reflect and emerge from how I carried out ethnographic research with Israeli left radical activists, the empirical starting points of that research, and the ideological assumptions it both carries and unsettles. Having planned a research project on human rights and medical ethics in Israel/Palestine, I began my fieldwork by volunteering at Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), the NGO introduced in the above opening scene. PHRI was one of the handful of Israeli organizations that cooperated with the United Nations Fact Finding Mission led by Judge Richard Goldstone in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 attacks on Gaza in “Operation Cast Lead,” providing his team with information and testimony about the effects of the Israeli army’s actions on Palestinians’ access to health care during the conflict. The organization is part of the community of critical Israeli human rights groups that in the last two to three decades has persistently campaigned against the Israeli state’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as within the “green line” (the 1949 armistice lines and internationally recognized borders of Israeli territory). As such, it has been caught up in the general attack on the Israeli radical left by right-wing and nationalist Jewish and Israeli groups who police, in various ways, the legitimate bounds of public criticism of Zionism and of the state. While best known for its work on human rights violations against Palestinians, though, PHRI also campaigns on the rights of others in Israel/Palestine, primarily for non-Jewish and non-Palestinian migrant workers and refugees. A major part of this work is the open health clinic that PHRI runs from its offices in Jaffa, which mainly catered, at the time of my fieldwork, to refugees from Eritrea and Sudan. It was in relation to this work that I, as a researcher-volunteer with no medical training, was initially able to get involved with the organization.
Unlike the desk work of doing research, writing reports, speaking to patients in Gaza on the phone, or negotiating with army bureaucrats on behalf of those patients, which the staff in the shtachim (territories) department carried out, just down the corridor PHRI’s other busiest department was caught up in a daily struggle to provide refugees with the most basic care and support.2 Each afternoon, up to one hundred refugees arrived for basic medical attention in the Open Clinic, often queuing up for hours before it opened to make sure they would see a doctor. Volunteer receptionists, nurses, and physicians provided the basis of this under-resourced and struggling facility, and I was able to start right away behind the reception desk, helping to sort files and receive patients a couple of times each week. There I started to learn not only about the behind-the-scenes activities that produced the official reports and press releases on human rights violations but also about the community of refugees and migrant workers and the odd Palestinian living without a permit in Israel, who relied on the rudimentary services provided by organizations like PHRI and the network of activists that coalesced around them. I started going with these activists to other sites of protest and organization outside the office, while at the same time helping with research for a report about food insecurity in Gaza that the shtachim department wanted to produce. I quickly came to understand that the small collection of human rights NGOs in Israel went hand in hand with its equally marginal radical leftist activist groups. Staff and volunteers were also activists, and I was likely to encounter many of the same faces whether in PHRI’s offices or at a demonstration against the occupation. Although some in PHRI were not active in this radical scene, and talked of a more humanitarian motivation as well as more mainstream liberal political convictions, this kind of human rights work was, for the most part, tightly intertwined with a stringent activist critique of state violence and militarism.
My fieldwork thus emerged from these mixed beginnings—with ideologies and motivations of human rights, humanitarianism, anarchism, socialism, feminism, and even liberal Zionism, all implicated in the leftist community I came to consider as my “field.” It is for this reason that I use the term “radical left” to refer to the activism described in this ethnography. While most studies focus on groups clearly defining themselves as anti-Zionist (Elian Weizman 2017), “joint” or Arab-Jewish (U. Gordon 2010; Hallward 2009a; Koensler 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2009; Svirsky 2012), antioccupation (Lamarche 2010; Ziv 2010), or as focusing on human rights (Dudai 2009; Hajjar 1997, 2001) or peace (Hallward 2009b; Helman 1999; Hermann 2009; Norell 2002), I worked with a variety of people and groups who sometimes disagreed with each other on these identifications but often found themselves cooperating nevertheless. A sense of emergency about the need to act, as well as increasing attacks on these groups by right-wing groups in Israel, meant that there was as much pragmatic cooperation as there was debate and division over political differences. I therefore use the loose definition “left radical activism” to delimit the field of my research, which refers here to those who actively challenge the colonial and militarist violence of the Israeli state, even as the ways they do so may differ significantly. It is an ethnographic term, from the Hebrew haSmol haRadikali (the radical left) that was most often used by activists to describe themselves (although others in Israel mostly refer to it as haSmol haKitsoni [the extreme left]). While there are some mobilizations in Israel toward “leftist” politics in the socioeconomic sense—recently most notably in the social justice protests that took place in the summer of 2011—“the Left” in Israel has generally referred to the Palestinian question and an antioccupation or pro-peace position, as opposed to a more clearly exclusionary and colonial vision of the Israeli right. Although this “emic” definition of the Left traditionally includes the Israeli Labor Party, or groups such as Peace Now, these are generally excluded from my ethnography as they are seen by the activists I worked with as part of the nationalist, uncritically Zionist mainstream. Indeed, a suitable diagnostic for whether a particular group might appear within this loose definition of “left radical” activism is its stance on the attacks on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead and the later assaults of November 2012 and July–August 2014. Those who supported the government’s narrative that these assaults were both necessary and justified found themselves on clearly opposing sides of the political fence from the activists I came to know, for whom these acts constituted the pinnacle of nationalist and colonial violence (cf. Callan 2016).
Taking a clear stance against the broad popular consensus on the army’s actions in Gaza as with the state’s actions toward the Palestinians more broadly, the Israeli radical left has increasingly found itself under attack—in both figurative and literal terms—from a largely hostile Jewish public. Actions in public spaces are regularly met with verbal abuse, spitting, or egg throwing, as well as physical assaults by other Jewish Israelis; mainstream Israeli politicians and media outlets depict non-Zionist leftists as “extremists” and “traitors,” and their protests as violent, although they predominantly are not; and NGOs that expose state violence or advocate for Palestinians’ rights have been subject to public campaigns against their work as well as proposed legislation that would cut their funding from abroad and criminalize some of their activities. Most activists I knew would readily use the word fascist to describe the nature of these mobilizations and many consciously enacted forms of self-censorship in what they publicly said or did, out of fear of potential repercussions. Whether avoiding showing the antioccupation T-shirt they were wearing on a bus on the way to a demonstration or attempting to conceal their activism or politics in the workplace, these silencings reflected the tacit or explicit consent of a broader Israeli public to the forms of violence and domination habitually exercised by military and state authorities.
Given such a polarized context, the theme of this book, an ethics of complicity, may appear out of place. The word complicity seems to signal alignment with the state regime, silence, or participation in its violence, rather than the conscientious and active struggle to challenge it with which my activist interlocutors resolutely persist. Indeed, as one (non-Israeli, non-Palestinian) attendee suggested at a talk about my research I delivered in Jerusalem, it could even be considered as “blasphemy” to use it in relation to this small and beleaguered activist community. Although I understand these misgivings, these critiques also reflect and reproduce the bifurcated imaginaries of Israeli politics sketched here that have culminated in an oppressively narrow field of possible thought and action. They tend to hold up Jewish Israeli left radical activists as heroes in a David-and-Goliath-esque scenario, or, as in another ancient metaphor, bnei haOr ubnei haChoshech (sons of the light and sons of the darkness).3 While I am sympathetic to their aims and admire their dedication, I wish to consider how this activism is subversive and challenging but also, and simultaneously, how it marks ethical and political gray zones. Without such a perspective, we risk concealing the complexity and ambivalence of this activism. As scholars and activists, we fail to grasp the contradictions and challenges entailed in mobilizing against militarist and colonial power when one is embedded in a position of relative privilege within the dominant group. I think of this activism instead as a difficult and troubled negotiation with complicity, and wish to consider the ethnographic richness of what it means to take responsibility—to live responsibility—as a challenging set of practices and not only as an abstract ethical concept.
Complicity, here, signals the fraught nature of activists’ endeavors to act differently and to affect the actions of others in Israel/Palestine.4 It refers to the ways in which activism can be constantly pulled back into violent ways of thinking, feeling, and being in relation to others, even as it attempts to depart from that violence. Following Mark Sanders, who writes of “complicities” in relation to intellectuals in apartheid South Africa (2002), I use the idea of complicity to explore the impurity of ethical and political relations and the often uncomfortable ways this makes itself felt in Jewish Israeli left radical activism. For Sanders, advocacy on behalf of racialized Others under a political system imposing such separations can be considered “responsibility-in-complicity” (11). In Sanders’ reading, complicity takes on two meanings, the distinction between which makes it possible to address one’s implication in injustice: the first meaning is a broader, existential one that harks back to Levinasian ethics, in its sketching of a generalized condition of relatedness (“folded-together-ness” [5]) among human beings that makes possible the notion of responsibility; the second is narrower and connotes particular acts (or failures to act) within historically specific situations that result in complicity with injustice, as in the more common understanding of the term (11). It is only by rejecting the possibility of separation—apartheid’s premise—and thus recognizing the more generalized notion of complicity, Sanders argues, that one can also begin to struggle against its practices of domination by way of addressing one’s own particular acts of complicity with them. The fantasy of separateness that characterized South African apartheid politics parallels, of course, a similar denial of the intimacies of violence and unequal cohabitation of Israeli Jews and Palestinians over the last century, and it is activists’ confrontations with the impossibility of separateness—between Israeli Jews and Palestinians and between Israeli Jewish citizens and Israeli state violence—that is the focus of this book. As in Sanders’ work, the idea of complicity complicates a reading of Jewish Israeli left radical activism as simply a heroic resistance purified of its implication in the forms of power and violence it aims to subvert.
Activists’ hopes and desires, their attachments to ideas of a different and more equitable life in Israel/Palestine, emerge as an integral part of their activism in this analytic of complicity. Their enduring discomfort with their own position as Jewish Israeli citizens and their attempts to refuse attachments to the Israeli state and polity even as they simultaneously underscore those very attachments mark a conflicted and an affective dimension of activist subjectivity. These aspects of activist ethics and politics cannot be explained either by a quasi-functionalist analysis of their actions (regarding whether this activism succeeds in its intended political effects) or through a discursive approach that takes activist rhetoric at its own word. Here, anthropological approaches to politics that highlight the violent and “strange intimacy between the state and the people” (Aretxaga 2003: 403), often informed by psychoanalytic theory, help to situate the political subjectivities of activists and others in more ambivalent terms. In this scholarship even when the state is revealed as a “fictional reality” (401), it maintains its sovereign, psychic hold through the anxiety produced over its secret and magical qualities (Taussig 1992, 1997) and even as people cynically critique its power (Navaro-Yashin 2002). Thus in Shattering Silence, Begoña Aretxaga’s ethnography of Catholic women in Northern Ireland and their contributions to the nationalist movements against British rule in the 1980s and 1990s, the “liberating effect of political action” (1997: 116) is not the negation of power but rather the psychological and emotional relief that comes from the troubled engagement with its very structures that emerged in women’s activism. In this way, sovereignty, whether of the state or other oppressive forces, is seen not as separate from the desires, ideals, or acts of resistance by those who challenge it but as an integral part of the very constitution of those phenomena.
Experiences of ambivalence and fractures of consciousness involved in activism and protest are thus central for political anthropologists who wish to study the nuances of how power reproduces itself in the face of constant struggle. In this vein, recent studies have considered the interstices of affect, emotion, and language in political activism in different ethnographic contexts. Deborah Gould, in her work on the American ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) movement against the AIDS crisis, writes about the affects of sadness and grief as central elements through which “the boundaries of ‘the political’ are continually made, unmade, and remade” (2009: 4). She argues that the mobilization of emotion can be a central factor in the intensification of political struggle and a key site through which to study activism (29). Pushing this perspective somewhat, Athena Athanasiou (2005), Naisargi Dave (2012), and Eirini Avramopoulou (2012) have all argued that affect marks the limits, as well as the potential, for political contestation in ways that invite us to attend to power’s enduring psychic grasp in the moments when these are named or exposed by those challenging sovereign subjugation. When considered in this way, and with the “cruel” quality of ongoing attachments to and desires for damaging forms of power in mind (Berlant 2011a), Jewish Israeli activists’ uncomfortable relation with their own complicity can be considered as sovereignty’s affective mark. The frequent moments in which they express the meaning of their deeds as a totalizing rejection of any implication in Israel’s violent politics, I suggest, are precisely those when we sense most strongly its effects on their subjectivities. Activists’ failures to be at one with ethical conflicts and psychic ambivalences emerge as disavowals of complicity that intimate “responsibility-in-complicity” (Sanders 2002: 201). But equally, as Judith Butler suggests, they may be the basis on which activists continue to act, to shift their enfoldedness with Others and complicities with violence toward different ethical and political conditions (2009: 177).
In this sense, Jewish Israeli activists’ negotiations of complicity resemble those played out in other places and at other times. In particular, accounts of cases of extreme and racialized inequality in other settler colonial societies indicate a similar discomfort of those in positions of power and privilege, including among those who have consciously attempted to challenge the political situations in which they find themselves. In his ethnography of liberal white South Africans in the final years of apartheid, for example, Vincent Crapanzano describes his interlocutors’ expressions of horror and disgust at racism and segregation as a kind of “living folklore” (1985: 23), which worked to make the contradictions of their own positions more bearable. This is more pronounced still in studies of white settlers who have made strident attempts to become “allies” working with indigenous people, as in the context of Australian supporters of Aboriginal struggles (Kowal 2015; Land 2015). In this case, it is clear that white activists invest much time and energy in guarding against perpetuating racist or colonial views and power structures, attempting to manage the ways in which they, the “good whites” (Land 2015: 244), are implicated in colonial dynamics. At the same time, gaining credit and sometimes material benefit from their activist work, as well as contributing to an exoticist picture of authentic indigeneity in their reverence for the Aboriginal individuals with whom they work, these allies remain caught up in the modes of domination they strive to disavow.
With these discomfiting dynamics a recurrent feature of solidarity activism and dissent, explorations of their specificities in particular historical situations remain important. Taking my lead from Sanders’ notion of complicity, as he elaborated in relation to the example of apartheid in South Africa, I suggest the broader value of the concept for studies of radical politics in Israel/Palestine and beyond. What needs elaboration in each case, however, are the different articulations of power and privilege, of inequality and difference, that shape and limit the form that such activism can take. For what Sanders’ framing of complicity as “folded-together-ness” (2002: 5) suggests is that, while we may—as political subjects—always be implicated in each others’ lives, the crease of the fold will lie in distinct patterns, inviting different forms of mutuality and requiring different kinds of realignment in struggles toward more equitable and less violent worlds. Attending to the ambiguities and dilemmas of particular examples of solidarity activism is therefore not a way of measuring them against some kind of benchmark of radical politics but of “seeing complicity” (Koopman 2008: 298) and asking how responsibility and struggle might, then, look different.
* * *
The shape of contemporary Jewish Israeli left radical activism, and its internal fragmentation despite its small size, traces back to the various factions and ideological groups that have been active before and since the state of Israel’s 1948 establishment. In the early years of Zionist settlement in Palestine, the yishuv, and as Zionist organizations in Europe were encouraging further Jewish immigration, the political and economic foundations for the state were laid by those nationalist, socialist bodies that dominated government for the first two decades of the Israeli state. The MAPAI (Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel), and other Zionist socialist groups that were the predecessors of today’s Labor Party, were central in institutionalizing and organizing collective Jewish settlement, transferring land ownership to national institutions, establishing the predominance of avodah ivrit (Hebrew labor) over Arab labor, and thus contributing to the displacement of the Palestinian Arab population from land acquired by Jews. Alongside these processes, military power and control was established such that the Zionists were able to gain control over the territory that was then internationally recognized as the state of Israel in the course of the 1947–1949 war (Grinberg 2004; Kimmerling 2001; Y. Shapiro 1976). As Zeev Sternhell has shown, although these transformations were framed by socialist rhetorics, the key priority for the “pioneers” and their leader David Ben-Gurion, was to build a national project and framework for the state, rather than a universalist, socialist utopia (1998). From the start, ideologies of “the Left” were secondary to, or at least deeply embedded within, the nationalist project of building a Jewish state and stabilizing distinctions between Jews and others in the settled territory.
Soon after the June 1967 Six-Day War, when Jordan’s rule of the West Bank and Egypt’s occupation of the Gaza Strip were succeeded by Israeli military occupation, and with Israel also occupying the Golan Heights in Syria and the Sinai desert in Egypt, fractures appeared both within the Labor government and more broadly in Israeli politics between those who sought to settle Jewish citizens in the newly conquered territories and those who believed that those areas should be kept “in custody” until they could be returned in exchange for peace (Isaac 1981; Pappe 2004: 200). As the settler movements proved successful in their ideological project, already colonizing southern areas of the West Bank in the years immediately following its occupation, early radical movements of the Israeli left emerged in opposition to the settlement of “Greater Israel” and to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. One of the most notable, Matzpen (Compass), a 1962 breakaway from the Israeli Communist Party and formed by a group of Jewish Israeli intellectuals, gave one of the first sustained and public critiques of Israel as a Western imperialist state (Bober 1972; Nahas 1976; Rubenstein 1985). The Communist Party itself was also outside the national political consensus, given its membership of both Jews and Palestinians and its clear advocacy for a two-state solution, long before this had become the norm in Israeli leftist politics (Pappe 2004: 201). In the differences between these two early radical movements, the split between those supporting the Zionist project and the validity of a Jewish state, though within certain political and ethical boundaries, and those whose relationship to Zionism was either more ambivalent or unequivocally oppositional, also emerges a distinction which would be carried throughout the history of Israeli left-wing activism, even as these and other ideologically distinct groups continued to work together at various moments over their histories (Kaminer 1996).
In the years since 1967 and the kibush (occupation) of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, dozens, if not hundreds, of peace organizations emerged in opposition to Israeli state policies toward the Palestinians. These organizations could roughly be grouped into the following historical periods: (a) 1967–1977: the last years of the dominance of the Labor Party in government and the beginnings of Israeli settlement in the occupied territory; (b) 1977–1987: the period of rule by the right-wing Likud Party under Menachem Begin, and the First Lebanon War—the first war seriously questioned as a “failure” by a large section of the Jewish Israeli population; (c) 1987–2000: the period of the first intifada (Palestinian “uprising”) and the negotiation of the Oslo peace accords; and (d) 2000 onward: the years since the outbreak of the second intifada, in which “peace” has largely been considered an elusive or impossible aspiration, and the Left has been seen to be in decline. The first period (1967–1977) consolidated the emergence of a Marxist critique of Zionism as colonialism, reflecting global political events and movements, and based primarily on the activities of Matzpen and the Israeli Communist Party, as well as the appearance of groups such as SIAH (Israeli New Left) and Moked, further breakaway student groups from the Communist Party. During this period, the early roots of conscientious objection—the Israeli refuseniks—also took shape, as the 1973 Yom Kippur War resulted in the anger of reservists and demands for accountability after misgivings about governmental and military authority (E. Weiss 2011). As Menachem Begin was negotiating with Anwar Sadat in 1978, the process which resulted in the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty of 1979, Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), one of the primary peace organizations campaigning in the 1980s and 1990s, was born off the back of an open letter to Begin signed by 348 reserve officers and soldiers from Israeli army combat units urging him to work toward meaningful peace accords (Kaminer 1996).
Peace Now continued to dominate what emerged as the “peace camp” throughout the next decade, particularly in opposition to the First Lebanon War, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians were killed, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, in Beirut by a Lebanese Christian militia under the watch of the Israel Defense Forces (Roberts and Tucker 2008: 879). Following the massacre, one of Israel’s largest ever political demonstrations took place, bringing four hundred thousand people to protest in Tel Aviv (Wolfsfeld 1988). Peace Now was criticized by other leftist groups, though, for its overwhelming concern not with the rights of Palestinians or the injustice of the occupation but with the threats to Israeli security and collective conscience that came with being an occupying power (Norell 2002). As such, groups appeared that promoted conscientious objection on different grounds, such as Yesh Gvul (There Is a Limit), or Dai LaKibush (End the Occupation). These movements laid the groundwork for those who acted in solidarity with Palestinians during and since the first intifada, and they can be considered the basis of an Israeli left-wing or peace camp perennially torn between the desire to act with and for the benefit of Palestinians resisting occupation and out of longing for a peaceful and morally acceptable Jewish Israeli home. Most Israelis who remember the period, activists and others, now talk wistfully of the period of the 1990s “peace process,” which for a brief moment in the region’s history engendered a collective “euphoria,” a belief that the conflict would end (Peri 2000). With irony as well as nostalgia, many explained to me that while they now understand that the Oslo accords in fact paved the way for the expansion of the Israeli settlement project and the further fragmentation and destruction of Palestinian life, at the time it felt like an end was on the horizon.
The start of the second intifada, in 2000, is considered by many as the definitive moment in which an atmosphere of hope, and the peak of Israeli leftist opposition to the occupation, was destroyed. Many who had previously been activists, in more and less radical groups, referred to the years since then as a time of disappointment and despair (Rosenblum 2008). The dominant Israeli narrative since then has echoed former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s infamous mantra, that “there is no partner for peace,” which was his commentary during the 2000 Camp David summit with Yasir Arafat and Bill Clinton (Ben-Eliezer 2012; Malley 2001). Israeli activism resisting this dictum has thus challenged the prevailing sense that the state of Israel is willing to make peace, while the Palestinians are not. Equally, while the “two-state solution” has nominally been accepted by Israeli politicians, including the right-wing Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the “facts on the ground” continue to make this option seem remote.5 In criticizing dominant Israeli understandings of the state’s intentions, and emphasizing instead the ongoing process of colonial expansion and suppression of Palestinian resistance, left radical activists have found themselves in stark opposition not only to the state but also to most of the rest of the Jewish Israeli population. In the light of this state of affairs, as well as a rising consciousness among Israeli activists of the buried histories of Palestinians’ expulsion and displacement in the 1947–1949 war, or Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), there is a widespread feeling among left radical activists of total alienation from a wider Jewish Israeli public. They find themselves in constant positions of opposition and rejection regarding possible ethical responses to the suffering of Others, basic understandings of history, and political imaginaries of the future in Israel/Palestine.
The ethical and emotional rejection of the Israeli state, and dominant Jewish Israeli orientations toward it, go hand in hand, among left radical activists, with the desire to come closer to Palestinians and others who have been made “enemies” (Anidjar 2003) under Israeli sovereignty. This is expressed in two key ways: first, in the idea that the key role of Jewish Israelis should be to support and participate in the struggles of Palestinians, rather than to lead and define the shape of protest and dissent; second, in the myriad ways in which activists try to struggle in the everyday against the regime of separation that the state has imposed (for example, through taking Arabic lessons or in actively seeking out encounters and friendships with Palestinians). Rather than working toward the moral purity of Jewish Israel, as did earlier and more Zionist leftist groups, the radical left as it exists now has promoted a fundamental reconsideration of the imperative for and the ethical nature of the “Jewish state” (cf. Lamarche 2010; Sela 2005).
This simultaneous affective disconnection from the Israeli state and desired relation with its oppressed Others is perhaps the key feature of the activism I analyze here. A strong and passionate rejection of predominant Jewish Israeli subjectivities, and their othering of Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel/Palestine, emerges as activists attempt to challenge and curtail state violence. Activism becomes as much about rejecting the self as it is about reaching out to the oppressed Other. Placing these dynamics at the heart of an analysis takes us far, I claim, in understanding how Jewish Israeli left radical activism takes shape as it does, why it remains rather disconnected from Palestinian struggles and forms of resistance, and the vitriolic reactions it receives from the wider Jewish Israeli public that are disproportionate to the size and influence of this rather marginal social movement. More than ideological programs or labels such as anarchist, anti-Zionist, or socialist—although these identities and political philosophies are significant, to be sure—what I found in common among all the activists I came to know was the way they vehemently rejected the broader Jewish Israeli population’s expressions of fear and hatred of the Palestinian Other, and the associated presupposition of a loving nationalist kinship among Israeli Jews.
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Relations with Others in Israeli activists’ attempts at solidarity thus appear in what follows as the site of ethics. Placing otherness at the heart of the ethical, I follow the thought of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and argue that ethics is constituted by a worldly response to Others, and thus is also tied up in that world’s politics, its troubles and its failings. Beyond processes of ethical self-cultivation (Faubion 2011; Hirschkind 2006; Laidlaw 2002, 2014; Mahmood 2005) or the tacit and “ordinary” quality of everyday ethical practice (Lambek 2010), the ethics of Jewish Israeli left radical activism entail difficult and unchosen relations with Others and practices that unsettle and disturb. How to live differently with Others was the key question for Jewish Israeli left radical activists I came to know. It was a question that they could only ask, reflect on, and attempt to answer, in response to the violence, inequality, and injustice that determines how Jewish Israelis, Palestinians, and others currently cohabit the space of Israel/Palestine. My use of the notion of “ethicopolitics” in this book, then, signals how ethics could only take shape in relation to politics—to how different subjects have been made to live under Israeli sovereign control in very particular ways.
In Israeli activists’ struggles and their almost obsessive focus on Others—Palestinians, primarily, but not exclusively—and their attempts to turn away from what have emerged as dominant ways of being Jewish Israeli, I find echoes of Levinasian ethics and the notion of the subject “interrupted” (Butler 2005, 2006) or held “hostage” (Levinas 1991) to the Other. Considered by many to have overstated both the primacy of the Other and the use of a rather pained language to refer to ethics, Levinas’ project was a critique of early twentieth-century phenomenology and of Western philosophy’s approach to consciousness more broadly. Before subjectivity, he argues, is sentience and sensibility, as well as alterity—the world that exists prior to and outside of the subject (Levinas 1979, 1991). The encounter with this otherness, through which subjectivity, and ethics, come to be, is a fundamentally traumatic one and it is to this affective rupture that the self consequently responds, or is repeatedly called on to respond (Critchley 1999: 194–195). The language of persecution Levinas uses to describe ethical subjectivity thus signals the founding violence at the heart of subjectivity. He then proposes that ethics is the relation with the Other, or with alterity in general, that attempts to recognize that otherness in its own affective and bodily forms, rather than in the categories of the self—the “ego”—that transform otherness into the already damaged realm of subjective being. There is, therefore, an impossibility about ethics, in its Levinasian sense. Ethics is an always failed attempt to relate non-violently toward Others, constantly undermined by the actual moment of response, which can take place only in the terms already laid out by the reductions and limitations of language and politics. Thus, those who in this book figure as “Others” are the subjects who become fixed as such, as Palestinian, Mizrahi, or otherwise Other, in the shadows of a dominating Jewish (Ashkenazi) Israeli self. The activist imaginary relies on these homogenized, almost phantasmatic Others, even as it attempts an openness to difference and challenges the violence of such representations.
When ethics is imagined as the difficult encounter with Others and otherness in the world, it already implicates the ways in which such distinctions and divisions between selves and Others have been shaped, governed, and restricted, by the political. Equally, subjective engagement in political life—of activists or others—is a maneuvering of one’s positioning in systems of power and domination that is, as a response to Others, already an ethics. For Levinas, “the ethical emerges,” as Howard Caygill writes, “as a fragile response to political horror” (2002: 2). In this sense, Levinasian ethics is profoundly in tune with anthropological perspectives on politics, in its understanding of the political as a realm of engagement beyond institutional, “big P,” Politics, that refers to the workings of power across intimate, intersubjective, and cultural domains.
Thinking with Levinas in the anthropology of ethics and politics, however, is not an entirely straightforward venture. As countless critics have outlined, his universalist and unyielding notion of the Other can be considered a “globally totalizing thinking” (Drabinski 2011: 9; cf. Ahmed 2000). Unwittingly demonstrating its own limits, Levinas built his ethics on notions of Same and Other with a striking lack of reference to the ways in which distinctions and categorizations of different kinds of people took shape in his own worldly context. His Eurocentric philosophy was not only revealed in notorious remarks about particular, non-Western Others (Levinas 1994, cited in Caygill 2002: 184; Mortley 1991: 18) but based itself explicitly in Biblical notions of strangeness and community that emerge in a deeply theological engagement with French twentieth-century thought (Drabinski 2011: 4–8). Perhaps most obvious and pressing in the context of this book, is the question of Levinas’ Zionism and his famous remark, when asked about Israel/Palestine, that some Others are not “neighbours” but “enemies”; that “there are people who are wrong” (Levinas 1989: 294; cf. Caro 2009; Caygill 2002: 159–198).
As John Drabinski argues, however, Levinasian ethics can also be a politicized intervention into thinking about subjectivity, and one which gives up even on its own impossibly purist models and colonial epistemologies that erase the violence on which they are based. “Decolonizing Levinas,” Drabinski writes, “corrects that constrained sense of identity, restoring the entanglement of empire back at the center of identity talk” (2011: 8). Equally, I propose, we can take up Levinas’ ethics both on and against its own terms as a useful corrective to the writing of violence and politics out of the anthropology of ethics.6 On the one hand, its focus on otherness and the fraught nature of responding to Others, allows us to widen our theories of ethics beyond the self.7 On the other hand, however, and as a “broken theory” (9), Levinasian thought also echoes and reiterates the limits of practicing ethics. Just as the Israeli activists whose “responsibility-in-complicity” I analyze here constitutes a fraught, compromised, and unsettled kind of lived ethics, our conceptualizations are also always “broken,” imperfect, the work of “ruination” (Navaro-Yashin 2009). Theory can fail just as practice can. Shaking our epistemological as well as ethical certainty, Levinasian ethics demonstrates its own violence, paralleling how worldly responses to Others can appropriate or injure them in troubling ways.8 Broken theory may, in fact, be precisely the way to think through and with imperfect lives.
The notion of complicity, then, may not be a perfect tool for thinking about Jewish Israeli left radical activism. It wavers on the line of certitude that would be misplaced in relation to this ethnography. Through writing of an ethics of complicity, though, I mean to signal its ambivalence. Tied up with violence and colonialism in various ways, this activism is also a response to Others, a response that expresses care but is not divorced from the political context in which it takes place. Thinking about Jewish Israeli left radical activism in terms of complicity does not therefore deflect critique away from the Israeli state and toward those who seek to challenge and disrupt its violent rule. Rather, it shifts our analytical gaze toward understanding how such violence permeates even these attempts to curb and contain it. Through the notion of complicity I aim to inhabit the discomfort of this ethnographic-analytical space, just as living ethics is uncomfortable. Perhaps this can even be considered as an act of solidarity with the activists I write about and the ways in which their endeavors to shift their ethical and political conditions manifest an intense and enduring disquiet.
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Starting in November 2009 and ending in May 2011, with subsequent visits of several weeks each year, I lived and conducted research in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, as the city in which many of Israel’s left-wing activists not only undertake their political activities but also navigate the conflicts and contradictions of living as Jewish Israeli citizens within a polity and social surroundings from which they feel alienated. Getting to know activists through PHRI and later other groups and contacts, I accompanied them to protests and meetings, and I gradually became personally closer to some of them, spending time together in activists’ homes and at the bars, cafés, and political centers in which they spent their “time off.” This book, therefore, incorporates an ethnography of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, from the particular perspective of left radical activism, but paying attention to the lives and rhythms of the city more broadly. Dissonances between specifically activist events and sites and the rest of Jewish Israeli life in the country’s urban metropolis were stark, and they inform my attempt to reflect the discomfort of living in a place where one is surrounded by those who oppose, if not detest, one’s politics, in the particular context of the “first Hebrew city” (Azaryahu 2007).
I chose Tel Aviv-Jaffa as my base, rather than, for example, the “mixed city” of Haifa, or Jerusalem, with its prominent religious population and obvious conflicts over territory, not only because many leftist activists choose to live and work in the city but also because it is in many ways the urban pinnacle of the Zionist project and Israel’s desire to be seen as a “normal,” liberal, secular, democratic state. The affluence and self-styled cosmopolitanism, the beaches and bars, and the sexualized hedonism of the place are all reasons that the activists with whom I conducted research decided to live there but also felt uncomfortable doing so. Their uneasiness stems, also, from the unequal and racialized space of the city that this image plasters over, both historically and in the current period. “Tel Aviv-Jaffa” is the official municipal name given to an area that was historically dominated by Jaffa, the main port city of the region and home to a thriving commercial, cultural, and intellectual community (Levine 2005). When Jewish immigrants started to build the neighborhoods of Tel Aviv in nearby plains in the early twentieth century, this was the beginning of the colonization of an area which has ultimately turned Jaffa into an impoverished and rapidly gentrifying suburb of Tel Aviv. While Jaffa is still associated with Palestinian Arab identity, Palestinians there now constitute a minority of around 30 percent of the population, with further demographic shifts threatened because of continuing gentrification as well as aggressive moves of private organizations to “Judaise” the town (Monterescu 2015). While some Palestinians—citizens of Israel, as well as some living there illegally without a permit—reside in Tel Aviv, they are largely not seen or perceived as being there, erased from view to effect a strikingly homogeneous Jewish space.9 Equally, the association of the city with elite Hebrew-language cultural production and public spaces, as the center of a middle- and upper-class Ashkenazi hegemony, obscures the deeply divided racial and class-based geography of Tel Aviv, with migrant workers and undocumented migrants from parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America settling since the early 1990s in the marginalized neighborhoods in the southeast of the city, where various southern- or non-European Jewish communities have lived since the early twentieth century. These inequalities are hidden from view in the city’s self-image and in the image promoted to tourists and investors, the “white city” (Rotbard 2005) modeled on its wealthy northern quarters, which appeals to an Ashkenazi and anglophone secular elite.
These urban divides also reflect the sociological composition of the left radical activism I analyze. For while I met some activists with different ethnic, class, or religious identities and backgrounds, the movement as a whole was overwhelmingly white Ashkenazi, secular, and highly educated. Many of my interlocutors were academics or studying for second or third degrees, worked in Tel Aviv’s civil society organizations or in the arts, and had spent extended periods of time abroad (primarily in Europe or North America), in countries where they perhaps also had citizenship or the ability to acquire it. Although most activists were conscious of structural inequality and their privileges, this awareness did not often translate into creating different kinds of activist spaces or rethinking how they might engage in ways that did not alienate or neglect large swathes of the Jewish Israeli population who did not share their social capital. I analyze these dynamics later in this book, but it is important to emphasize here that this study is about activist ethics as they are embedded in this particular privileged Jewish Israeli lifeworld, and it does not attempt to represent experiences of those who have been Othered and marginalized by it, beyond the extent to which activists related to them as I describe in the chapters that follow.10
Over the course of eighteen months of fieldwork, I lived in two different apartments, first in Jaffa and then in the southern Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentin, where the lower rents and lively streets and markets were attractive for me as they were for many of the activists with whom I became acquainted. Sharing my living space with left-leaning but ultimately apathetic Jewish Israeli flatmates, I moved between the explicitly politicized spaces I experienced with activists and the worlds of those who found such active practices of dissent unfamiliar and shocking. These movements were instructive, as I gained a sense of how nonactivist Israelis, those who serve in the army and feel more or less “at home” in Tel Aviv, and in Israel, live and perceive themselves and their surroundings, and the great contrasts between them and the activists with whom I spent most of my time. The ethnography I present here is thus of activism and activists specifically, but my description and analysis are certainly also informed by interactions with nonactivists.
Activists based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa also frequently traveled to sites of protest and contestation throughout Israel/Palestine, mostly to East Jerusalem and urban and rural locations in the West Bank but also to the cities of Be’er Sheva, Haifa, and Nazareth, and smaller towns and villages that were embroiled in housing struggles. I joined them on these journeys, as well as on many of the “alternative tours” that activists and residents gave in these spaces, and I took part in political demonstrations and meetings, sometimes informally interviewing activists while we were in these locations. These encounters were recorded in notebooks in which I sometimes scribbled while with activists; extensive field-diary entries I wrote later that day or as soon as possible thereafter; photographic, video, and sound recordings I made at public protests and events; and recordings of interviews I later transcribed. The combination of these ethnographic methods of participant observation and informal and sometimes more structured interviews made it possible for me to meet and interact with a range of activists, between the ages of fifteen and ninety years old, although most were in their twenties and thirties, and to be part of the more personal lives of some of them.
Moving from the position of researcher, to whom activists often expected to give a certain kind of interview, to being a friend and co-participant was not always simple, particularly given the heavy media and scholarly attention extended to Israel/Palestine. Many local and international researchers, anthropologists and others, as well as journalists, activists, and volunteers were constantly requesting interviews and meetings with the politically engaged people with whom I worked. It thus helped that I learned Hebrew to a high level, studying in the language school designed for Jewish immigrants—the ulpan—for the first six months of my fieldwork. Particularly by the second half of my eighteen months living in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, I had been around long enough and was able to converse in Hebrew to a sufficient level that people started to relate to me differently, and indeed spoke with me about how they perceived me when I first arrived—the slightly naïve visitor who would move on soon enough—and the different ways in which they felt they could interact with me during these later stages.
The national, class, and ethnic-cultural-religious identifications with which I came and/or was labeled during my fieldwork—a white, middle-class, Scottish woman from an elite British university, and an atheist with a Christian background—were also important to my positioning. These often arose in the ways in which I was perceived by activists and others in the field, but they were never definitive or fixed. Being the “non-Jewish Scot who speaks Hebrew” sometimes became the source of jokes or simply bewilderment about why I was there, while being a woman invested in issues of gender and sexuality-based violence often led me to relate to and share moments with feminist and queer activists.11 My interlocutors’ knowledge that I would analyze and write about their lives and politics was not generally a source of anxiety, given their habituation to being written about and objectified by so many others, but it was discussed among us as I sought to explain my position and gain informed consent for their part in my research. Access to organizations was often formally facilitated by certain gatekeepers within the institutional hierarchy, and then negotiated over time with members of these groups. Sometimes not being Jewish and being seen to represent, rather, the former colonial power, which played such a significant role in determining the course of Israeli and Palestinian histories, made relationships with activists and others difficult, while in other moments it was the beginning of deep and reflective conversations.
So while my nonnative Hebrew and my status as a researcher marked me throughout my fieldwork, reflecting on the changes in the ways in which I could relate to activists over time made me conscious of how Israeli activists would speak and act differently toward various kinds of visitors, depending on what they knew and how they could relate to their personalities, their aims in being in Israel/Palestine, and their political commitments. By the time I arrived back in the country for a one-year research fellowship in August 2015, I had come to be regularly involved with a group of Israeli activists working with residents of Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills, an area in the southern West Bank. Taking an active role in this group’s attempts to get to know and to support the residents of this region, and to fight against the house demolitions that ultimately threaten their continued inhabitation of their land, I stepped back somewhat from an explicit, “researcher” role, but I continued to absorb and to learn about the nature of this activism and the ways in which it did, or did not, change with the fluctuations of the surrounding politics over time. My participation as someone who shared many of the ideals and aims of my interlocutors, then, despite my quite different background and motivations for being there in the first place, was an integral part of building trusting relationships with many of those whom I came to know and of understanding more deeply what it means to live as a Jewish Israeli left radical activist.
* * *
The chapters that follow describe Jewish Israeli left radical activism through various modes of organization and action, as well as moments of pause, doubt, and disappointment. Starting with a focus on activist attempts of direct action and civil disobedience, predominantly in places in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the first two chapters outline how complicity is exposed, performed, and refused as an integral part of solidarity. This happens in spatial terms, as in the movements of activists and their verbal and physical interactions with state authorities, which I analyze in Chapter 1. It also takes shape in expressions of love and mourning for the Palestinian Other with whom activists are attempting to work in solidarity, which I describe in Chapter 2 as a subversive but ambivalent affective politics. I subsequently trace shifts in activist concerns and modes of action as they turn their attention toward other Others of the Israeli state: refugees from Eritrea and Sudan in Chapter 3, and other Jewish Israelis, the systematically marginalized Mizrahi and working-class citizens, in Chapter 4. Through this ethnography, different vocabularies of activist care come into clearer view—of human rights and humanitarianism, in relation to refugees, and of class and intra-Jewish inequality, in relation to Mizrahim—which challenge the stability of a Jewish and Palestinian self and Other that otherwise dominate the radical left imaginary. I explore how a desired relation to Others that emerges in activism bases itself on an ethicopolitical framework of Jewish Israeli subjects as opposed to non-Jewish Others that is both challenged and reinforced in these particular struggles. Finally, I move in Chapter 5 to consider one of the quieter ways in which activists reckon with ethical compromise and impurity, in the form of dilemmas about whether to emigrate from Israel. Proposing the notion of an “exilic ethics” that is expressed primarily in intimate conversations and joking, artistic expressions, and ironic unwindings of activists’ affective ties to Israeli cultural and spatial forms, I analyze this ultimate form of dissent as a predominant form of activist subjectivity.
