Over the course of eighteen months of fieldwork, I lived in two different apartments, first in Jaffa and then in the southern Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentin, where the lower rents and lively streets and markets were attractive for me as they were for many of the activists with whom I became acquainted. Sharing my living space with left-leaning but ultimately apathetic Jewish Israeli flatmates, I moved between the explicitly politicized spaces I experienced with activists and the worlds of those who found such active practices of dissent unfamiliar and shocking. These movements were instructive, as I gained a sense of how nonactivist Israelis, those who serve in the army and feel more or less “at home” in Tel Aviv, and in Israel, live and perceive themselves and their surroundings, and the great contrasts between them and the activists with whom I spent most of my time. The ethnography I present here is thus of activism and activists specifically, but my description and analysis are certainly also informed by interactions with nonactivists.
Activists based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa also frequently traveled to sites of protest and contestation throughout Israel/Palestine, mostly to East Jerusalem and urban and rural locations in the West Bank but also to the cities of Be’er Sheva, Haifa, and Nazareth, and smaller towns and villages that were embroiled in housing struggles. I joined them on these journeys, as well as on many of the “alternative tours” that activists and residents gave in these spaces, and I took part in political demonstrations and meetings, sometimes informally interviewing activists while we were in these locations. These encounters were recorded in notebooks in which I sometimes scribbled while with activists; extensive field-diary entries I wrote later that day or as soon as possible thereafter; photographic, video, and sound recordings I made at public protests and events; and recordings of interviews I later transcribed. The combination of these ethnographic methods of participant observation and informal and sometimes more structured interviews made it possible for me to meet and interact with a range of activists, between the ages of fifteen and ninety years old, although most were in their twenties and thirties, and to be part of the more personal lives of some of them.
Moving from the position of researcher, to whom activists often expected to give a certain kind of interview, to being a friend and co-participant was not always simple, particularly given the heavy media and scholarly attention extended to Israel/Palestine. Many local and international researchers, anthropologists and others, as well as journalists, activists, and volunteers were constantly requesting interviews and meetings with the politically engaged people with whom I worked. It thus helped that I learned Hebrew to a high level, studying in the language school designed for Jewish immigrants—the ulpan—for the first six months of my fieldwork. Particularly by the second half of my eighteen months living in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, I had been around long enough and was able to converse in Hebrew to a sufficient level that people started to relate to me differently, and indeed spoke with me about how they perceived me when I first arrived—the slightly naïve visitor who would move on soon enough—and the different ways in which they felt they could interact with me during these later stages.
The national, class, and ethnic-cultural-religious identifications with which I came and/or was labeled during my fieldwork—a white, middle-class, Scottish woman from an elite British university, and an atheist with a Christian background—were also important to my positioning. These often arose in the ways in which I was perceived by activists and others in the field, but they were never definitive or fixed. Being the “non-Jewish Scot who speaks Hebrew” sometimes became the source of jokes or simply bewilderment about why I was there, while being a woman invested in issues of gender and sexuality-based violence often led me to relate to and share moments with feminist and queer activists.11 My interlocutors’ knowledge that I would analyze and write about their lives and politics was not generally a source of anxiety, given their habituation to being written about and objectified by so many others, but it was discussed among us as I sought to explain my position and gain informed consent for their part in my research. Access to organizations was often formally facilitated by certain gatekeepers within the institutional hierarchy, and then negotiated over time with members of these groups. Sometimes not being Jewish and being seen to represent, rather, the former colonial power, which played such a significant role in determining the course of Israeli and Palestinian histories, made relationships with activists and others difficult, while in other moments it was the beginning of deep and reflective conversations.
So while my nonnative Hebrew and my status as a researcher marked me throughout my fieldwork, reflecting on the changes in the ways in which I could relate to activists over time made me conscious of how Israeli activists would speak and act differently toward various kinds of visitors, depending on what they knew and how they could relate to their personalities, their aims in being in Israel/Palestine, and their political commitments. By the time I arrived back in the country for a one-year research fellowship in August 2015, I had come to be regularly involved with a group of Israeli activists working with residents of Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills, an area in the southern West Bank. Taking an active role in this group’s attempts to get to know and to support the residents of this region, and to fight against the house demolitions that ultimately threaten their continued inhabitation of their land, I stepped back somewhat from an explicit, “researcher” role, but I continued to absorb and to learn about the nature of this activism and the ways in which it did, or did not, change with the fluctuations of the surrounding politics over time. My participation as someone who shared many of the ideals and aims of my interlocutors, then, despite my quite different background and motivations for being there in the first place, was an integral part of building trusting relationships with many of those whom I came to know and of understanding more deeply what it means to live as a Jewish Israeli left radical activist.
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The chapters that follow describe Jewish Israeli left radical activism through various modes of organization and action, as well as moments of pause, doubt, and disappointment. Starting with a focus on activist attempts of direct action and civil disobedience, predominantly in places in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the first two chapters outline how complicity is exposed, performed, and refused as an integral part of solidarity. This happens in spatial terms, as in the movements of activists and their verbal and physical interactions with state authorities, which I analyze in Chapter 1. It also takes shape in expressions of love and mourning for the Palestinian Other with whom activists are attempting to work in solidarity, which I describe in Chapter 2 as a subversive but ambivalent affective politics. I subsequently trace shifts in activist concerns and modes of action as they turn their attention toward other Others of the Israeli state: refugees from Eritrea and Sudan in Chapter 3, and other Jewish Israelis, the systematically marginalized Mizrahi and working-class citizens, in Chapter 4. Through this ethnography, different vocabularies of activist care come into clearer view—of human rights and humanitarianism, in relation to refugees, and of class and intra-Jewish inequality, in relation to Mizrahim—which challenge the stability of a Jewish and Palestinian self and Other that otherwise dominate the radical left imaginary. I explore how a desired relation to Others that emerges in activism bases itself on an ethicopolitical framework of Jewish Israeli subjects as opposed to non-Jewish Others that is both challenged and reinforced in these particular struggles. Finally, I move in Chapter 5 to consider one of the quieter ways in which activists reckon with ethical compromise and impurity, in the form of dilemmas about whether to emigrate from Israel. Proposing the notion of an “exilic ethics” that is expressed primarily in intimate conversations and joking, artistic expressions, and ironic unwindings of activists’ affective ties to Israeli cultural and spatial forms, I analyze this ultimate form of dissent as a predominant form of activist subjectivity.
CHAPTER 1