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.
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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