The Israeli Radical Left. Fiona Wright
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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