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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Performing Complicity
Early on a Saturday morning in Jerusalem’s well-to-do Mishkenot Sha’ananim area, the streets are quiet. A group of Jewish Israeli activists called Ta’ayush, often accompanied by some international visitors, regularly meets here to set off for its weekly activities in the South Hebron Hills area of the occupied West Bank. On one of the days I join the group in April 2011, the organizers give a brief overview of the plans for the day and then split the activists into smaller groups to travel to different spots and join Palestinian farmers in various locations. I am sent with three Israelis and an American to travel in a car rather than the minivan the other group goes in, and our part of the convoy thus skips the stop-and-check by the Israeli army patrol that awaits the group, as it does every week, en route to its destination. Our aim, as in the activities of Ta’ayush more broadly, is to witness, record, and perhaps disrupt the practices of settlers and Israeli military authorities in the South Hebron Hills, where its Palestinian inhabitants face perpetual harassment, violence, and the threat of expulsion and house demolitions. We are to travel to a thoroughly colonial space to perform an anticolonial politics, alongside and on the land of the Palestinians who Ta’ayush activists call their “partners.” The less-articulated side of this activism, though, is the field of interactions it gives rise to among the Israeli activists, settlers, soldiers, and police officers, a scenario that exposes this activism’s complexities, contradictions, and even, as I will explore, shades of complicity.
We arrive at a roadside location a few kilometers southeast of Yatta, the southern West Bank’s main town, to which the Israeli state would like to see most of the South Hebron Hills’ Palestinian residents relocate. We are greeted by five Palestinian men who come carrying tools and olive trees that we are to plant together in their land, a short walk across fields overlooked by an Israeli outpost—one of the settlements in the region officially deemed illegal even by the Israeli authorities. Ilan, the most experienced of the activists and designated our group’s contact person by the organizers, explains that the settlers often come to disrupt the farmers whenever they try to work on the land and that we are there in the hope that our presence will let them get some more work done before disruption, and to witness and record any interaction with the settlers, army, or police officers. I am assigned the task of filming the activities and Ilan gives me the small video camera the organizers have brought for that purpose, together with instructions about making sure always to get a wide field of vision so that as much as possible will be captured on film.
Two soldiers are already standing a short distance away from the field when we arrive—it is not the first time Ta’ayush activists have been there, although it is not clear how the soldiers knew we would come today, or whether there is a constant army presence in that spot—but we are able to work undisturbed for about one hour. After that time, one of the settlers, an older man, comes down the hill from the outpost and starts to shout at us. He screams in Arabic at the Palestinians, and in Hebrew at us, accusing Ilan in particular of being a traitor, stating that he is a Hamas supporter. The two soldiers stand by for the time being but call their commander, who arrives after a few minutes. He starts to ask questions of the Palestinian farmers, checking the title deeds they have brought with them to ascertain whether the land does indeed belong to them, and asks why we are there with them. In the course of this discussion, more soldiers and police officers arrive, some of whom are able to speak in Arabic with the farmers. They demand that the Palestinians come to an army office to show a different document than the one they have brought, which is in Arabic and without any map and which the commander claims is not good enough as evidence of ownership. As this is going on, a police officer is taking photographs of each of us. I continue to film the whole interaction, though the Israeli activists, the American, and I remain silent, as we were instructed to do by Ilan at the beginning of the day. The commander then declares the area a closed military zone, the settler still stands nearby shouting at the group, and the Palestinians start to leave. We walk with them, and one of the soldiers asks me (in Hebrew) if I am a journalist, and I respond that I am not. He says that in that case I should stop filming and so I lower the camera, unsure of the repercussions of not doing so, although Ilan later informs me that we are entirely within our rights to film everything and that next time I should continue.1 The soldier says, in a sarcastic tone, “Shabbat shalom ve chag sameach” (the weekend “good day” greeting and happy holidays, as it was during the Passover festival), and we continue to walk away in silence.
Ilan is disappointed that we have left without the soldiers showing us a written order stating that the area was a closed military zone, which techically the army has to do before we are legally obliged to leave. Much of the aim of these Ta’ayush actions is to record occasions on which these written orders have been shown, in order to prove continued Palestinian presence on their land.2 He asks the Palestinians why they left without waiting for it, and they say they did not realize that the army has to show a written order. Ilan explains to them that next time they can wait until they see such an order, and one of the other Israeli activists, Efrat, asks Ilan why we left without it. Ilan replies, “I’m not going to tell the Palestinians what to do” and explains that because we had filmed the interactions those videos could still be used by Ta’ayush in any advocacy or legal discussions about settler and military harassment of Palestinian farmers. Thus Ilan says that he still considers the action semi-successful.
Figure 3. Ta’ayush activists interact with soldiers in the South Hebron Hills; a Palestinian man sits to the side. Photograph by Margaret Olin.
This kind of interaction was typical of Ta’ayush’s Saturday excursions during my fieldwork. Ta’ayush would travel to the rural South Hebron Hills area, a southern region of the West Bank designated as “Area C” under the Oslo agreements, and thus under full Israeli military and civil control, but because of the presence of the settlements also one of the easier parts of the West Bank for Jewish Israelis to enter and leave without breaking any laws or being conspicuously out of place.3 Many Palestinians living in this area are farmers, infrastructure and social services are poor, and the Israeli Civil Administration (an entity acting under the authority of the Ministry of Defense and officially responsible for planning and construction in Area C) carries out frequent house demolitions in the region, despite the “houses” in question often being tents or caves (B’Tselem 2013). Along with neglect by the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians here suffer much harassment and violence from Israeli settlers. In large part because of these conditions, Palestinians in the area are often more willing to work with Jewish Israeli activists than in other parts of the West Bank, where political reasons as well as fear of being considered collaborators (Kelly 2010) often prevent such cooperation. However, unlike other Israeli-Palestinian partnerships in areas such as East Jerusalem or in the villages of Bil’in, Ni’lin, and Nabi Saleh, for example, where mobilizations have taken quite a specific form following established traditions of nonviolence and civil disobedience (see Chapter 2), the form of action and Israeli-Palestinian interaction is rather more open and shifting in the South Hebron Hills region.
Thus several Jewish Israeli activist groups, as well as Ta’ayush, have been active in the South Hebron Hills over the past ten to fifteen years. Although these groups have different agendas and modes of action, all are active in the campaign against house demolitions and expulsions, which are currently among the biggest threats to Palestinian residents’ continued inhabitation of this part of the West Bank. While this activism depends on much behind-the-scenes work from activists’ homes in telephone calls, organizing transport, publicizing their actions to other Jewish Israelis, and working in Israeli NGOs, activists’ physical presence in the South Hebron Hills with Palestinians is its political and symbolic core. The focus of this chapter is, therefore, how groups such as Ta’ayush inhabit this thoroughly colonial space through their actions in order to perform an anticolonial politics and the contradictions that characterize such an engagement. Indeed, it seems necessary for these activists to expose the colonial practices in this region by physically being there themselves and providing some kind of counterpresence to the settlers, army, and police—the other Jewish Israelis in the region whose presence and actions there enforce its occupation. These practices are a fitting example through which to explore this problem, not because they are unique to this activism (this thread runs through all of the Jewish Israeli activism discussed in this book that relates to the Palestinians), but as one of the most striking cases in which the dynamics of “being there” in order to perform an anticolonial politics become apparent. In foregrounding them, I engage with the political and analytical approach toward Jewish Israeli activism, and the politics of Israel/Palestine more generally, that proposes “decolonization” as a way in which Palestinian life and resistance can be both supported in activism and reflected in scholarship (Svirsky 2012; Todorova 2015; Turner 2015). How can decolonization be practiced by members of the colonizing society, I wish to ask, and what does it mean to do this through physical presence on the land of, and at the side of Palestinian residents struggling for existence in a colonial space? In what follows I explore these questions through an analysis of the activism of Ta’ayush, as I began to describe above, and of other Jewish Israeli groups that similarly perform an anticolonial presence in the South Hebron Hills and elsewhere in Israel/Palestine.
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The Saturday activities of Ta’ayush normally involved Israeli activists going to different locations, depending on where a Palestinian farmer was having difficulty working the land without settler harassment, or perhaps going to help dismantle a new roadblock or to clear the rubble from a water well that had been filled in by the army during a house demolition. The main outcomes of these actions were, according to Ta’ayush organizers, the documentation of enduring Palestinian presence in the region as well as settler and army violence against the Palestinians—through recording closed military zone orders or filming Ta’ayush actions or through an arrest of a Ta’ayush activist or a settler, possibly leading to the production of court records testifying to the interactions taking place on one of these Saturdays. Cooperation and solidarity with Palestinian residents of South Hebron Hills was central to activists’ self-conception of what they were doing, but it remained striking how much this activism depended primarily on interactions with other Jewish Israelis: relating both to the documentation and witnessing of interactions for judiciary processes and to the on-the-ground encounters with settlers, army, and police while physically in the region itself. In the physical space in which Israeli colonization was further entrenching itself apace, leftist Israeli activists would meet with other Israelis to perform an alternative and anticolonial politics. Most of the activists’ inability to speak Arabic, as well as a lack of time outside the intense and chaotic Saturday actions, prevented much communication between activists and the Palestinians they accompanied. Rather, a Jewish Israeli cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 1997) and its breach unfolded with a Palestinian landscape as its mise-en-scène.
Another action in which I participated illustrates well these ethical and political contours of this solidarity activism. I arrive on one of the Saturdays on which a deliberately more confrontational action is planned, after a week in which Israelis from one of the settlements considered to be the most “extreme” in the West Bank (known even to other, nonactivist Israelis as such) have attacked four children and their mother with stones on their walk home from school, badly injuring one of the girls in the head. The Israeli army did not intervene to stop the violence. We are to walk up to the settlement in protest. Alon, one of the organizers, instructs us to walk more toward the army than toward the settlers; he explains that the settlers are simply “freaks” who will not pay attention to any protest, but the soldiers have a legal duty to protect the Palestinians from such attacks. The organizers do not expect that we will actually reach the settlement but rather that the army will intercept us and that those who are willing will get arrested in the process. Alon makes clear that it is a decision to be arrested, which none of the group is to feel under pressure to make, and in particular internationals (for whom an arrest may mean deportation or not being able to reenter the country later) or Israelis who already have open police files or other reasons not to make themselves known to the authorities can stand further back and avoid being detained. We thus split into smaller groups according to who is willing to be arrested and who is not and according to walking ability, as we will have to hike across fields and hills to reach the back of the settlement without being seen in advance by the army.
I join one of the groups of mainly internationals and a few Israelis, including a friend, Ravid, who wants to avoid arrest because she works for a major Israeli company. As we walk toward the settlement, she explains to me that she is worried about getting fired from her job if she is arrested for any reason but especially for taking part in this kind of political action. Just a few weeks before, she told me, she met a work acquaintance during one of Ta’ayush’s actions; he was one of the soldiers who intervened in their activities, who was doing his reserve service (miluim) at the time. It was a shock to encounter one another in this way, Ravid reflected, and they did not say much to one another at the time. Later, at work, when they talked at length about it, he asked her what she was doing there and she explained a bit about Ta’ayush to him and her experiences in the South Hebron Hills. She said she felt something had switched in him, during the conversation, that he is “going through something,” a kind of process of reeducation that activists often talked about as the genesis of their becoming more involved in these kinds of actions. Not just through being posted in this area of the West Bank for his army service, Ravid explains, but because they had had this conversation, he had started to see Ta’ayush activists from a different perspective, and not just as an irritation, as soldiers and police commonly seem to perceive them. Still, Ravid is nervous about having had this encounter and the possibility of her activism becoming visible to others at her workplace and so she chooses to take a less prominent role in the confrontation that week.
As we approach the settlement, we can already see a line of Israeli soldiers standing to prevent us from entering it. We begin to split up into our chosen groups and those who are prepared to be arrested approach the soldiers and try to pass them, while the rest of us hang back. Within a few minutes, some arrests have been made while other activists are still filming the scenario and making statements on a megaphone about why we have come and that this is a nonviolent protest against the settlers’ violence against Palestinians. The situation turns out to be a bit less under the activists’ control than the organizers have anticipated, though, and some who did not intend to get arrested are unable to avoid it. As my group starts to move further back from the soldiers, an Israeli female activist gets hold of the megaphone and announces over it in Hebrew, “Don’t say you are just following orders,” directed toward the soldiers. “You know who just followed orders…. Be ashamed. I have grandchildren your age.” Ravid then takes over and continues: “When you hear about Israeli democracy, you should reflect on that. Democracy includes something called equality, and here it seems like there’s one law for settlers, one law for Palestinians, and one law for leftists!” She then beings to sing “Hero of the Defence Army” (gibor tzva hahagana) by the Israeli punk band Pollyanna Frank, which mocks the macho young soldier whose sexual conquests are cast in the light of the state’s military conquests. By this point, some settlers have arrived at the scene and the risk of arrest is accompanied by that of physical violence by the settlers against the activists, so all those who have not yet been detained start to leave and walk back toward the Palestinian village, after some negotiation with the army commander present about what path we are allowed to take.
Let us pause here to consider what is being enacted in these encounters in the South Hebron Hills. Although the name Ta’ayush means “living together” in Arabic, and activists would often explain this meaning as they talked about the group and its cooperative modes of action, what was striking to any observer of this Saturday action and others like it was the lack of emphasis on Palestinians’ experiences or Palestinian-Jewish cooperation. Rather, this activism’s orientation toward and against other Jewish Israelis—settlers and state authorities—performed a political breach of cultural intimacy as a way both to expose and to disturb how Jewish Israeli citizenship is tied up in uncomfortable ways with state violence. Both the physical movements of the activists and the ways in which they drew on culturally resonant symbolic tropes in their verbal interactions can be read here as an intimate form of communication with those deemed to be “like us” by the activists—other Jewish Israeli citizens. This emphasis on common Israeli citizenship, and highlighting of the ways in which it privileges Jewish subjects specifically, is what was enacted by activists’ approach to the soldiers blocking the entrance to the settlement: unlike Palestinians, who would be much more likely to be shot were they to approach the soldiers in this manner, the physical approach of a Jewish Israeli body toward the state apparatus is an invitation for that body to be restrained and disciplined but with the knowledge that it will be unlikely to suffer the kind of grievous physical harm faced by other kinds of subjects. The action sets in motion a chain of legal procedures that will result, in all likelihood, in the activists’ release by a judge after up to twenty-four hours in a police cell, with the possibility of a criminal charge to be tried and punished at a later date. In thus eliciting and exposing state power, the Ta’ayush activists also reveal its uneven terrain: that they, as Jewish citizens are differently subject to its workings than are the Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills as in other areas in Israel/Palestine.
This physical method of exposing the injustice of Israeli rule was then echoed in the activists’ cries over the megaphone. Addressing the soldiers in Hebrew, and thus evoking again their common status as Israeli Jews, the older female activist first alludes to the Holocaust, a common trope in all kinds of Israeli political discussions, with her statement “Don’t say you are just following orders” of course recalling Adolf Eichmann’s “Nuremberg defence” (Arendt 2006). She then draws on her age to suggest a maternal authority (cf. Handelman 2004: 111, cited in Paz 2016: 26), which, together with the common experience of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, is intended to shame the soldiers as having betrayed a shared Jewish Israeli ethos on two different levels. In Ravid’s subsequent return to the discourse of citizenship and democracy, she links the breach of morality to the discourse of inequality and injustice, finally turning to expose and mock the soldiers’ bodily incorporation into the state regime with the Pollyanna Frank song. Although Ravid had recently experienced a more sober and nuanced encounter with a colleague with whom she felt able to discuss the situation in the South Hebron Hills and individual soldiers’ roles in perpetuating injustice, in general activists’ denunciations of other Jewish Israelis’ actions and their consequent responsibility to act differently were performed in these more dramatic and confrontational ways in places like the South Hebron Hills. This theatrical mode of communication contrasted with other spaces and encounters in everyday life, where activists would more often try to “keep their head down” and to avoid difficult discussions about politics both from their fear of consequences and from a desire not to live their lives in a constant mode of argument and aggression.
On my way back to Tel Aviv after the action, I receive a phone call from a friend, Yifat. She calls to check with me that I am okay, having heard through social media about the arrests in the South Hebron Hills, as she knows I had planned to go that day with Ta’ayush. I assure her that I am fine and that I had been able to make the choice not to get arrested—“the others intended to get arrested, you know, they had planned it that way,” I explain to her. She replies, “Of course they did!” I did not need to explain the tactics to her; she is involved in this activism and knows how Ta’ayush and similar groups work. She understood that when such activists got arrested in this way, it was likely to have been intentional. At the time, I did not reflect on the way in which she had taken for granted the intentionality of the arrests: activists tended to narrate reports of these arrests as the shocking enactment of a heavy-handed and authoritarian state in the face of nonviolent political action when recounting these occasions in the press and on social media. Anybody involved in this kind of activism, however, knew that these actions were more often than not intended to provoke a certain reaction and that the army and police could be relied on to use physical violence and/or to detain activists. The gap, though, between the intentionality of these actions and the performance of surprise at their unfolding deserves further consideration. Jewish Israeli activists invite and meet the force of the state in the form of military and police violence and arrests and yet profess shock when they indeed receive such reactions. In the same moment, they partially shift the focus of both their and their audience’s attention from what the Palestinians face to ethical and political relations among different Jewish Israelis.
* * *
Here I want to examine more closely the idea of complicity and its relation to this activism’s elements of performance and staging. Anthropologists and others considering the dynamics of social movements, including those deploying similar tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience, have considered the theatrical elements of protest in various ways. These analyses question any approach to activism that would narrowly consider its efficacy in positivist terms or propose a functionalist analysis of social movements, focusing instead on the symbolic resonances and phenomenological experiences of activist displays within specific cultural and political contexts. A significant thread of such interpretations emphasizes the creativity of these protests, which often use music, art, or humor to expose or symbolically invert dominant power relations (Haugerud 2013; Reed 2005; Spellman-Poots et al. 2014), and often create alternative or “liminoid” spaces which imagine or “prefigure” (Juris 2014) different cultural and political forms. Here confrontations with state authorities are understood as political performances that enable not only the envisioning of these utopian political futures (Juris 2008) but also the development, or “self-cultivation” (Flynn and Tinius 2015) of subjectivities that bring energy and motivation to these movements. The Jewish Israeli activism I consider here certainly shares the element of staging or performance with these other examples and, on some occasions, also the affective qualities of joyfulness and play that contribute to the sense of a creative horizon of different potential worlds, as well as feelings of solidarity and connectedness within the group that enable the members of the group to continue with their often challenging practices. Central to this activism, however, is not so much a creation of different worlds to the one in which they live, I contend, but rather an exposure of the violence and injustice of activists’ own reality as well as the crucial centering and challenging of their entanglement within this political domain. Contrary to those accounts of activist performances that emphasize the creation of alternative realities through performance and storytelling, I propose the notion of a “theatrics of complicity” as a key feature of this particular case of nonviolent activism and civil disobedience.
A “theatrics of complicity” describes the way in which this activism operates by staging a certain confrontation with state authorities. This confrontation allows activists to exploit the cultural intimacy between themselves and the police officers or soldiers with whom they come into contact, in order to expose their own privilege as Jewish Israeli citizens and thus their complicity with the Israeli state regime. This is enacted through physical presence in Palestinian areas, presented as an act of cooperation and solidarity with the Palestinian residents: subjects who, however, appear only in the background of this activism. They can only appear as such because the potency and reverberations of this activism depend precisely on a Jewish Israeli cultural poetics of complicity with colonial domination. It is the very spaces in which this domination is most visibly in the making that give a certain opportunity for these relations to be exposed in the ways I describe. What this activism also highlights, then, is the uncomfortable symbiosis of state sovereignty and activist mobilizations, a distinction that some scholars of social movements tend to take for granted and to draw with crisp and clear lines. It is precisely through employing their own status as Jewish Israeli citizens in these confrontational performances that these activists unsettle and place into question the ethics and politics of a militaristic and colonial political culture more broadly. They make the distinction between themselves and state authorities through the dramatics of their activism by rendering visible how close and familiar they are to them.4 This complicates the conceptualization of this activism as decolonizing, I suggest, because it relies on a mutual implication of both activists and soldiers or settlers in the ongoing force of the colonial project. It does this, moreover, precisely through activists’ physical presence and interactions in colonized spaces that foreground interactions among Israeli Jews, while Palestinian residents’ agency and subjectivities remain in the shadows.
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More than three years later, in the summer of 2014, I was visiting Israel/Palestine for a few weeks when Israel’s military operation in Gaza that the army called “Operation Protective Edge” began. On the second day of the attacks, long before the high death toll was finally counted over two months later, and as activists were still hoping that perhaps this would be a relatively short and thus less deadly incursion (as had happened in November 2012), I traveled with activist friends from Tel Aviv to the South Hebron Hills region. The drive there was long, and we were accompanied both by our growing frustration at the radio news and by the frequent interruption to broadcasts by alerts warning of rocket attacks across the country. We stopped at a kibbutz in the south to pick up two fellow passengers, Daniella and Dagan. For most weeks of the past decade they had been visiting Palestinians in their homes in the South Hebron Hills, as part of a small circle of mainly Jewish Israeli activists who engaged in a quite different form of activism to that of Ta’ayush, but who similarly aimed to create different and anticolonial relationships with Palestinians and to strengthen their struggle against the house demolitions and expulsions. We arrived at Daniella’s home to find her angry and despondent about the situation. “I won’t go to the shelter when the siren sounds,” she said, “I’m not moving.” Refusing to be part of what she considered the collective hysteria and persistent misinformation that served to justify the killings, Daniella had come to associate the sound of the sirens with injustice and complicity. We did not have to put her statement to the test, though, as we left the kibbutz to continue our journey, before the sirens again sounded across southern parts of Israel.
I wish to focus on Daniella’s remarks here, to further elaborate on an ethic of refusing complicity that is most succinctly captured in the often-used activist slogan “not in my name.” When even the sound of sirens warning of rocket attacks becomes an object of refusal because it is a mark of complicity with a hated regime, what is being resisted is not only injustice but also one’s (bodily) inclusion as a Jewish Israeli citizen and thus incorporation into the Israeli state. “Not in my name”—lo bishmi in Hebrew—circulates as a way of refusing such incorporation particularly in times of heightened violence, perhaps, because it is in such moments that the distinctions between Jewish Israelis and Others in Israel/Palestine become even more visible than usual and sensed in auditory and other embodied ways. In such a context, the push against the claiming of Jewish Israeli subjects by the state feels increasingly urgent and complicity an ever more anxious state that activists seek to address. Thus, having analyzed the performative elements of refusing complicity in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, as described above in the actions of Ta’ayush, here I elaborate on the acute sense of complicity that is an enduring feature of Jewish Israeli activist subjectivity and that permeates motivations, experiences, and relationships within this activist community. The phenomenology of activist presence in Palestinian areas—where this sense of being implicated in the perpetration of injustice is often most clearly confronted—tells of the difficulty of inhabiting an ethical space of resistance when one’s very person has been made to represent that which one resists.
Figure 4. “Not in my name” social media profile picture. This image was posted by many activists as their profile picture on social media accounts during attacks on Gaza and afterward. Image creator unknown.
Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where considerable numbers of Jewish Israeli activists regularly protested house evictions from 2009 to 2011, was a space in which these dynamics emerged quite strikingly. Although the protests had begun in August 2009, they grew to numbers above a few dozen people only after twenty-one activists were arrested on December 10th of that year (the day internationally marked as human rights day, no less). From this date, activists were no longer allowed to protest directly outside the homes of the Palestinians; rather, they were restricted to stand and shout from a park area at the top of the street in which those homes were located. Many of the Israeli activists and the Palestinian residents were unhappy about these restrictions and continued to try to lead the protests past the lines of border police, who had also started to arrive regularly and punctually on Friday afternoons in time for the demonstrations. Some of those who had started to come to take part in the demonstrations remained in the park, however, unwilling to go with the other activists to put themselves up for arrest or to enter into direct physical confrontation with state authorities. Resentments quickly developed among some of the more experienced activists who had been coming to Sheikh Jarrah for many months by now, and had perhaps been arrested on several occasions. Many felt that the demonstrations were becoming a modish, habitual affair and disconnected from the political imperatives and strategies from which they had developed in the first place.
On one Friday afternoon in May 2010, for example, the atmosphere leading up to the demonstration was particularly tense, given events earlier in the week around Jerusalem Day, an Israeli marked holiday celebrating the “reunification” of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. In recent years, the day had become one of provocative marches of Kahanist and other right-wing and ultra-nationalist Jewish groups through the old city and of the clearing of Palestinians from its streets as well as police violence toward Palestinian protesters.5 On the bus on the way from Tel Aviv to Sheikh Jarrah, one of the experienced activists explained to newer participants what might be expected that day, as was common during those journeys. As he explained that, although the organizers were not expecting arrests or violence, there was a chance this could happen but that there was no need to be anxious, one of the other activists prompted him to tone it down a bit, that he was probably scaring people. He laughed, and continued: “This is not to worry anyone, we’re not expecting anything to happen, but in case it does just stand back and nothing will happen to you. The important thing is just to be there and to be joyful, standing together with the Palestinians there, let’s not be sad. In any case, nobody ever died from being arrested at a demonstration. Well, no Israeli.” He paused, and then added, “Well, no Jewish Israeli,” checking himself once again. The contradictions in what he had said—to stand back and not to worry, on the one hand, but to stand together with the Palestinians, on the other—were underscored by his stumbling over his words about what danger is or is not imminent, and for which kinds of subjects, in the demonstration.
Over the course of the demonstration, the political positioning of the Israeli protesters (who were the majority of participants, with only a few Palestinians and internationals taking part) further developed as an issue of tension. All the protesters remained on one side of the road in the park for some time at the beginning of the demonstration, holding their banners and chanting slogans against the evictions and against the occupation more generally. But after about half an hour a few people crossed over and started taking photographs and approaching the line of police blocking the entrance toward the houses in question. A quarrel between two of the officers and one of the activists began and soon more activists crossed the road to join the confrontation, before the organizers urged everybody to approach the police and to bring the demonstration closer to the contested area. Many of the protesters did so, mostly those more experienced or affiliated with other groups, such as Ta’ayush and Anarchists Against the Wall—the kind of activists who were interested in challenging the injustice written into Israeli law and who saw the Sheikh Jarrah evictions as a stark demonstration of that injustice. Others, however, held back and looked nervous about the unfolding confrontation, particularly as police managed to push the advancing demonstration back and were quite aggressive in the way in which they did so. One organizer stayed in the park and reassured those protesters that it was fine if they did not want to cross the road and encouraged them to chant loudly in support of those who had. At other moments, however, activists were gesturing for more people to come and join the push against the police and, at one point, one of the activists who had been arrested several times in Sheikh Jarrah and elsewhere cried out in frustration at those who stayed in the park, “OK, I see more or less the demographics here.” His remark spoke to discussions that had been going on within the organizing group and among other radical activists who were unsure about the large number of more liberal and Zionist participants in the demonstration: they were concerned that for some of those who had arrived at Sheikh Jarrah only after the outcry about the arrest of Jewish Israelis in protests there, the issue had been framed as one of a threat to Israeli democracy rather than the ongoing oppression of Palestinians.
Though these tensions often appeared around debates about ideology—Zionist versus anti-Zionist approaches to activism, for example—another way to consider them is as a struggle among the different Jewish protesters as to how far their participation in these demonstrations involved their refusal to be complicit with Israeli state violence. It recalls the effort invested also by more liberal, Zionist Israeli leftists to differentiate themselves from the settlers in the Gaza Strip, which Joyce Dalsheim describes on the peripheries of her ethnography of the latter (2011). For the left radical activists in Sheikh Jarrah who felt that civil disobedience toward the police was necessary during those demonstrations, it was not only a question of political tactics or strategy but also an ethical refusal to grant legitimacy to and thus be complicit with the actions of the state. It was this that those protesters who were reluctant to put their bodies on the line, to be arrested, to confront the state in this embodied way, seemed to be doing. It was an anxiety about complicity, I suggest, as much as a disagreement about political strategy or principle, that brought out these tensions at this and other demonstrations and political events. Hence the sense of embarrassment or cowardice that those remaining in the park at Sheikh Jarrah reported feeling, and the urgency with which other protesters were keen to enter into confrontation with the police, even though there was confusion and disagreement within the movement as to whether this was an intentional, or wise, strategy. This aspect of the activism was underscored for me when one activist, Guy, who had been heavily involved in the Sheikh Jarrah protests told me: “Today [as opposed to earlier experiences of activism] there are people for whom to get arrested, from their point of view, it’s respectable—for all of us. It’s not pleasant. But in a moral, political sense, we’re happy to be arrested, because it gives us the chance to show that we’re not part of the story.” The desire to demonstrate a disconnection from or a rejection of the “story” of Israeli state violence and domination was what was expressed in many of the more dramatic moments of antioccupation activism, but it also appeared in other spaces and settings in which the confrontation with the state was more subtle and perhaps therefore even more pressing. During the 2012 and 2014 attacks on Gaza, when Qassam rockets were fired toward cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, sentiments like Daniella’s about refusing to heed the siren’s warning to take shelter were common among activists. A disavowal of one’s implication as an Israeli citizen in the army’s assault manifested in these refusals as well as in the bravado of those who deliberately went onto rooftops in Tel Aviv to watch the “Iron Dome” missile defense system shoot down the incoming rockets. In more mundane ways, it manifested as activists’ careful and pointed use of language—talking about “Palestinian citizens of Israel,” rather than “Israeli Arabs” or just “Arabs,” for example, or rejecting the increasingly common Israeli use of “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the occupied West Bank—or in seeking out alternative cultural spaces and forms of schooling for their children, as well as many more often small and everyday attempts to extricate themselves from unwilled support for, or compliance with, Israeli state power. Often this took the form of a kind of resentment that other Jewish Israelis did not feel the same discomfort. One activist told me, for example, “I want Israel to be humiliated. I’m not a big fan of punishment, in general, but Israel should be punished. I want Israelis to feel uncomfortable when they go abroad and have to admit to having done army service.” In this sense, “not in my name” was a myriad of more and less dramatic practices and forms of expression that mediated an affective relation to activists’ Israeli citizenship and what this meant in terms of ethical responsibility. The moments of solidarity activism that I consider in this chapter are among the most visible and theatrical ways that activists routinely attempt to address the ways in which their lives have been made complicit in violence and oppression.
Figure 5. Activist drummers at a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. The drummers are dressed in pink masks, mocking and mimicking the black masks worn by armed police in previous weeks. Photograph by author.
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