This anthropological research project addresses the ethics and politics of Jewish Israeli solidarity with those oppressed by Israeli state violence, confronting the ways in which radical activism may reproduce aspects of colonial domination even as it subverts prevailing nationalist and militarist tropes. I broach these questions through ethnographic engagement with Jewish Israeli leftist radical activists who challenge the violence perpetrated by their state and in their name. Through an exploration of Israeli leftist activists’ attempts at solidarity with Palestinians, asylum seekers and Mizrahim, my analysis frames responsibility for others as a central element of contemporary dissent in Israel/Palestine that remains tied up with dominant, colonial politics. The research demonstrates the ways in which various kinds of Jewish Israeli anti-occupation and anti-racist activism become both spaces of subversion and articulations of complicity. The concept of complicity works here not as an accusation, but as an analysis of the impurity of ethical and political relations, and the often uncomfortable ways this makes itself felt in this kind of activism. Even as the activism described specifically aims to challenge Jewish Israeli citizens’ participation in state violence, activists persistently underline their own feelings of complicity and the impossibility of reconciling their principles with the realities of their everyday lives. Questions of ethical subjectivity thus come to the fore in this exploration of how Jewish Israeli dissent emerges and is shaped in its relation to state power. Indeed, I argue, that these forms of solidarity and dissent are expressions of a troubled negotiation of activist subjects with ethical and political responsibilities.
Using ethnographic methods, I follow the mundane and more dramatic paths of Jewish Israeli left radical activists, whose critique of the Israeli state has left them ever more isolated in the wake of a failed peace process and an increasingly violent public atmosphere. This activism is manifested in direct action solidarity movements, the critical stances of some Israeli human rights and humanitarian NGOs, and less well-known initiatives at promoting social justice within Jewish Israel, as a means of undermining the overwhelming support for militarism and nationalism that characterizes Israeli domestic politics. In tracing these attempts at solidarity with those most injured by Israeli policy, this analysis considers dissent as a fraught negotiation of a politics in which activists feel simultaneously repulsed and responsible. This negotiation takes place in the personal and private spaces of activists’ homes, leisure spaces and family lives, as well as in the public and semi- public settings of protests, planning meetings, offices and awareness-raising events. I argue that these everyday and affective negotiations of practices of solidarity and dissent are manifested in activists’ conflicted ethical subjectivity. They show how a challenge to state violence is not enacted through a clear-cut distinction from hegemony, but rather demands that activists struggle with their positions as Jewish Israeli citizens in their attempts to transform relations with oppressed others. By developing the concept of an ‘ethics of complicity’, I demonstrate how Jewish Israeli left radical activism remains entangled in the power structures it aims to oppose. A nuanced exploration of activist ethical subjectivity helps us understand why even the most critical Jewish Israeli solidarity movements, and attempts at dissent, reproduce elements of the violence activists abhor. Thus, the concept of an ethics of complicity opens up a way of thinking about resistance as an imperfect, troubled, and even violent, grappling with responsibility that throws into sharp relief the interweaving of ethics and politics.
This analysis takes shape in contrast to accounts of Jewish Israeli anti-occupation and anti-racist activism, that laud it as the opposite of the Israeli state’s violent militarist ethos. While acknowledging its subversive character and important political effects, I argue that such manifestations of solidarity and dissent instead remain bound to Israel’s racial and colonial violence in ways that complicate our readings of resistance. I illustrate that the complicit ethics of Jewish Israeli left radical activism, works within Zionist logics and the effects of national kinship, ethnic othering and citizenship (and gains its potency precisely by doing so). The challenge to state power that emerges in this activism lies not, therefore, in a distinction of its compliant and its dissident citizens, but rather in the exposure of activists’ own complicities in violence and responsibility for those who bear its mark. This analysis helps to explain both why this activism provokes vitriolic reactions from the wider Jewish Israeli public, that are massively disproportionate to the size and influence of this rather marginal social movement, and why there remains such a disconnect between Jewish Israeli dissent and Palestinian struggles against the occupation. Beyond the oft-rehearsed image of Israel/Palestine as a place of clear dichotomies and seductively stark annunciations of right and wrong, this research explores the grey zones of responsibility and resistance that permeate processes of social and political transformation.
The fieldwork that informs this analysis was conducted over 18 months from 2009 to 2011. As an ethnographer I was based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the city in which many of Israel’s left-wing activists not only undertake their political activities, but navigate the conflicts and contradictions of living as Jewish Israeli citizens within social surroundings from which they feel ethically alienated. I spent time with activists whom I got to know, in the first place, through volunteering at a Human Rights NGO; and later via different activist groups, accompanying them to protests and meetings, and gradually becoming personally closer and spending time together in activists’ homes and at the bars, cafés and political centres in which they spend their ‘time off’. I also travelled 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 many of the ‘alternative tours’ that activists and residents gave of these areas, as well as taking part in political demonstrations and meetings. Through a combination of ethnographic methods (participant observation, and informal and semi- structured interviews), I met and interacted with a range of activists, aged between 15 and 90, and became part of the more personal lives of some of them. Thanks to the CBRL Visiting Research Fellowship, I was able to conduct follow-up ethnographic research from 2015 to 2016 and to complete my monograph, ‘The Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity’ (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018).