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.
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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,