The Israeli Radical Left. Fiona Wright
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“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