The Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity

By Fiona Wright

In The Israeli Radical Left, Fiona Wright traces the dramatic as well as the mundane paths taken by radical Jewish Israeli leftwing activists, whose critique of the Israeli state has left them uneasily navigating an increasingly polarized 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 that promote social justice within Jewish Israel as a means of undermining the overwhelming support for militarism and nationalism that characterizes Israeli domestic politics. In chronicling these attempts at solidarity with those most injured by Israeli policy, Wright reveals dissent to be a fraught negotiation of activists' own citizenship in which they feel simultaneously repulsed and responsible.

Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, The Israeli Radical Left provides a nuanced account of various kinds of Jewish Israeli antioccupation and antiracist activism as both spaces of subversion and articulations of complicity. Wright does not level complicity as an accusation, but rather recasts the concept as an analysis of the impurity of ethical and political relations and the often uncomfortable ways in which this makes itself felt during moments of attempted solidarity. She imparts how activists persistently underline their own feelings of complicity and the impossibility of reconciling their principles with the realities of their everyday lives, despite the fact that the activism in which they engage specifically aims to challenge Jewish Israeli citizens' participation in state violence. The first full ethnographic account of the Israeli radical left, Wright's book explores the ethics and politics of Jewish Israeli activists who challenge the violence perpetrated by their state and in their name.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9780812295351

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The Israeli Radical Left

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Tobias Kelly, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THE ISRAELI RADICAL LEFT

AN ETHICS OF COMPLICITY

FIONA WRIGHT

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-5047-3

CONTENTS

A Note on Language

Introduction

Chapter 1. Performing Complicity

Chapter 2. Love, Mourning, and Solidarity

Chapter 3. Infiltrators, Refugees, and Other Others

Chapter 4. The Violence of Vulnerability

Chapter 5. Exiling the Self

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Figure 1. Israel/Palestine.

Figure 2. Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

Comparisons to other places and times are a matter of much sensitivity among Jewish Israelis, as a pervasive anxiety about the outside world, and how Israel is seen by it, is grafted onto memories and narratives of the historical experiences of persecution and oppression of Jews. Words such as apartheid or fascism used in relation to contemporary Israeli politics provoke anger and heated debate even among those activists who themselves sometimes employ them to describe their surroundings (cf. Grinberg 2009). With the power of such comparisons and vocabularies in mind, and an awareness of their ethnographic import in the place about which I write, it is helpful to think about the challenges of writing about Israel/Palestine with Vincent Crapanzano’s account of the experience of white South Africans in the later days of apartheid, Waiting, in mind. Reflecting on the use of particular words, those words’ entwinement in ideology, and the inevitable effect this has on ethnographic writing, Crapanzano quotes Jane Kramer writing in the New York Review of Books:

The languages of South Africa have been consonant with race and caste, owner and worker, citizen and servant, for so long that language itself—the language one speaks and writes—is a weapon there, quite apart from those details of identity and ideology with which it happens to coincide. Words smother, sacrifices to apartheid, in the closed context of the expectations they arouse. They can sanction such perverse exaggerations, such profound contempt, that anyone who wants to write in South Africa is left with the home truth that language has lost its metaphoric flexibility and assumed, instead, a kind of brute synecdochic power. By now, to write in South Africa is by definition political. (Kramer 1981, cited in Crapanzano 1985: 28)

As such, Crapanzano notes, his use of terms such as white, black, coloured, and so on, is necessitated by his attempt to write the particular political arena at hand, and one can only reproduce certain powerful—sometimes uncomfortable or, quite simply, racist—constructions of reality in doing so. The same linguistic restraints present themselves to anyone writing about Israel/Palestine and one finds oneself constantly stumbling over which word or phrase to use while writing about particular people or places. It is with the acknowledgment that words are not neutral, especially in a place where decisions to use certain words over others, or to describe the political situation in a particular way, have clear political effects, that I take responsibility here for using certain words, and not others, while being clear that my writing will always be restrained by the politics of language and by the need to give an ethnographic, and not a legalistic or objective, account.

Thus while I often refer to Israel/Palestine to underscore the intermeshing ethical, political, and historical space that encompasses the internationally recognized state of Israel as well as the occupied Palestinian areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I sometimes use only the word Israel. This is for the sake of brevity as well as to emphasize the predominantly Israeli spaces and worlds in which I was involved, and the word Israeli here is meant to imply also Jewish. I did not only interact with Israeli Jews, but I sought to understand the experience of Jewish Israeli left radical activism and, as such, lived a particular kind of Jewish Israeli life during my research. My decision to use the term Palestinian citizens of Israel, or Palestinian Israeli, however, rather than the more common Israeli Arab or just Arab, when I refer to those Palestinians whose parents or grandparents were granted Israeli citizenship but placed under military rule until 1966, marks the particular kind of politics my language seeks to convey. The use of the noun Arab is considered by many Palestinians and most of the activists with whom I worked to be part of a Zionist erasure of Palestinian history. Further, my identification of my activist interlocutors as Jewish Israeli must be broken down into two further problematic labels—Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, referring to Jews of western European origin and Jews whose origins are in predominantly Muslim and Arabic-speaking countries. Both terms essentialize and homogenize diverse groups of people but are necessary to relate the ethnic and class segregation in contemporary Israel that sees Mizrahi citizens as less powerful, less privileged, and less represented in official political domains than their Ashkenazi counterparts.

Finally, the names and identifying features of most of those whose lives and words appear on the following pages have been changed to protect and respect my interlocutors’ safety and privacy. Sometimes, when discussing public figures or statements made in public forums, I have judged it necessary for analysis or ethically appropriate to use real names. Ultimately, I have sought to represent sensitively and safely the political lives and intimate worlds of others, while bearing in mind the difficulties and dangers that writing can pose.

INTRODUCTION

From inside the cool, air-conditioned offices of a human rights organization in the heart of Jaffa, one need not know about the protesters squaring up to hundreds of armed police officers just a short distance away. Indeed, the fortnightly staff meeting has begun this time with a round of coffee and cake in honor of one of the team members leaving for another job, and the atmosphere is even a little festive. We have finally settled down to start the meeting, when Dina, one of the organization’s Palestinian members of staff, gets a phone call. They’re arresting everyone, she tells us after quickly hanging up, and we look around at each other with concern but a lack of surprise. We have all heard about the plans of a nationalist, right-wing Israeli group to march through Jaffa that morning, and we saw the heavy police presence on the way to the office, in anticipation of the counterprotests of Jaffa’s Palestinian residents and their allies. Yotam, who was speaking before Dina’s phone rang, picks up his previous train of thought. He seems to want to go back to the meeting’s agenda and not to react further to what we have just heard. Einat, another Jewish member of the staff, interrupts him, shocked, asking, Wait, isn’t this a bit weird, all of us sitting here when we know that right there—she points toward the door—they’re beating and arresting people? Shouldn’t we go there? Yotam expresses ambivalence about her suggestion, but the others quickly agree among themselves that we should leave the office and go into the surrounding streets, noting the potential effect of the presence of a number of Ashkenazi Jews on the dynamics between Palestinians and police.

We leave the office together after a few minutes, despite further expressions of doubt by Yotam and a couple of others, who suggest that we might actually increase the number of arrests and have little power to curb police violence. After less than a minute, we reach Yefet Street, one of Jaffa’s main arteries, to find a large crowd of Palestinian protesters surrounded by police fully equipped with riot gear and horses. The right-wing march is nowhere in sight. Although a few members of the human rights group have been active in demonstrations in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and are used to this confrontational dynamic, others mostly avoid such spaces and prefer the quieter activism of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) world. Einat’s face has gone pale and she looks around nervously but walks on at a steady pace. The street that we would normally traverse to get to or from the office, or to pick up supplies for lunch, seems to have been transformed into a militarized zone, and a police helicopter looms overheard. We gradually move down the street with the crowd. After a short time, protesters are pushed into a space that directs them toward a line of police horses and everyone starts to feel threatened. Confrontations between protesters and police officers start to intensify and some toward the front are arrested and led away and into prison vans.

Splitting into two groups, some continue down the street with the main body of Palestinian protesters, and the rest of us head toward Jaffa’s port area, where the right-wing march is reported to be heading. Very quickly, we have left the scrum and are walking through the town’s side streets, where a few people still sit quietly on the sidewalk with coffee and cigarettes, or are out walking their dogs. It is as if the loud noise of the nearby clashes cannot even be heard. We pass by the luxurious villas lining the seafront, as well as a newly opened coffee shop that Einat, who is calmer now, jokes that we could all visit together on a day when things are normal again.

We turn a corner and are suddenly overlooking the right-wing march, a small group of around thirty people surrounded by at least three times that number of police officers. Headed by the notoriously inflammatory right-wing member of the Israeli parliament Michael Ben-Ari, the marchers wave Israeli flags and protest the Islamic takeover of Jaffa, as we look on, stunned by the sheer force of such a provocation. What is this? Einat asks with disbelief, and she starts to comment loudly about the waste of public resources being spent on policing the event as we pass by a line of police officers on our walk back toward the office. We are blocked along the way as some streets have been closed off and Dina shouts at the officers blocking our entry, What, the whole of Jaffa is closed now?! Einat takes her arm and leads her away, and they start to talk about reports from those who had stayed on Yefet Street, where many Palestinians and some Jewish activists had been arrested.

Eventually we all reconvene in the office and even sit down to have the postponed meeting later that day. As we are all gathering again in the central meeting room, we hear a loud siren—like those sounded during war—and we all stop and look at each other, curious and a little worried. The siren sounds throughout Israel about once a year when there is a military drill, but normally it is publicized in advance. Dina exclaims, What is that? and Einat replies, Well it’s a war siren. I guess there’s a war! I ask them what we are supposed to do, and they both laugh: Nobody really knows what you’re supposed to do. You’re just supposed to remember that there’s always a war. We go ahead with the staff meeting as usual, discussing an upcoming conference, a report about Gaza, and the organization’s possible participation in a demonstration next month in Tel Aviv. Later, we make our journeys home through the quiet streets of Jaffa, the warlike sights and sounds of earlier that day once again an all-too-fresh memory.

*  *   *

Questions of what to do, of how to act, of where to be, and of how to relate to the Israeli state and its various modes of violence and oppression are those that preoccupy Jewish Israeli left radical activists and on which this book centers. Such questions regularly manifest themselves in pressing and concrete ways, and activists—as relatively privileged and powerful actors—feel compelled to do something about the historical situation in which they find themselves, creating an unsettling and unresolved confrontation with ethical and political responsibility. These are activists who, as Jewish citizens of the state of Israel, attempt to act in solidarity with Palestinians and other non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel/Palestine, but who also struggle with the challenges, dilemmas, and implications of their own actions.

The uncertainty and discomfort of this activism does not reflect a lack of commitment or resoluteness in their politics. What unites the various groups and individuals I encountered in eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine is their principled rejection of Israel’s militarist and colonial regime, and the injustice and oppression that come with it, even as they work in different organizational contexts or with varying ideological affiliations. Unlike the overwhelming consensus among most of the Jewish Israeli population in support of the state’s policies and actions, Israeli left radical activists challenge and question its most fundamental aspects: from the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the obligatory conduct of military service, from regimes of surveillance and control to racism and discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, and from how history is taught in Israeli schools to the pervasive nationalist imagery that decorates Israel’s public space. Some are active in small direct action or protest groups and influenced by anarchist or socialist political thought, while others work or volunteer in one of a handful of human rights organizations that catalog and campaign against systematic abuses of Palestinians and other marginalized groups. Many have given up on the sphere of formal party politics, feeling that even the parties that have historically represented the Left in mainstream Israeli discourse are unable and unwilling to challenge the violent status quo. Others cast their vote for one of the Palestinian-led parties in national elections or still have hope that one of the small socialist or left-liberal parties may have some positive, damage limitation, effect in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset).

This ethnography follows the complexities and dilemmas of these clearly political engagements, but it also focuses on the everyday: in activists’ leisure spaces, in time with friends and family, and in the banal forms of action and communication that constitute the often invisible backdrop to what we generally recognize as activism. It is an analysis of ethics—of how these activists respond to their circumstances with care and attention—as much as it is of politics—of how structures of power and inequality shape one’s capacities for response in the first place. As begins to emerge in the scene that I described at the beginning of this chapter, taking ethical and political responsibility in contemporary Israel/Palestine entails a confrontation with the violence faced by many of its inhabitants, a confrontation that brings with it immense amounts of deliberation and anxiety, urgency and caution. These experiences seep into intersubjective relationships and into activists’ routines and ways of living, as well as find expression in moments of public protest and dissent.

While the ethical and political commitments of Jewish Israeli left radical activists are both heartfelt and in many ways all-consuming, then, they are also characterized by profound tensions and ambiguities. As Jewish citizens of the state of Israel, they occupy a position of power, both legally enshrined and socially embedded, relative to Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel/Palestine. They are also mostly highly educated, secular, and Ashkenazi (of European Jewish origin). They thus inhabit particular ethnic and class positions relative to other Israeli Jews, such as Mizrahi (in Hebrew literally Oriental, used to refer to Jews from non-European and often Muslim-majority countries) and Ethiopian Jews, and have historically been, and continue to be, privileged by the Israeli settler-colonial project.¹ Jewish Israeli left radical activists act, therefore, in response to the oppression of others but as members of the dominating and colonizing group. They routinely find themselves politically pitted against loved ones and coworkers, as well as having to challenge the ways in which this position of power has been ingrained in their own patterns of thinking, acting, and relating to people around them. There is no simple way to continually try to remember, and to make other Israelis aware of, the systematic violence exercised toward Palestinians, when one also lives a life made normal—made livable—by a system of governance based on this violence. Practicing solidarity and embodying dissent are therefore neither straightforward nor self-evident but rather involve compromise, disappointment, and even, as I will explore, complicity.

*  *   *

The gray zones and ambiguities foregrounded in my analysis reflect and emerge from how I carried out ethnographic research with Israeli left radical activists, the empirical starting points of that research, and the ideological assumptions it both carries and unsettles. Having planned a research project on human rights and medical ethics in Israel/Palestine, I began my fieldwork by volunteering at Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), the NGO introduced in the above opening scene. PHRI was one of the handful of Israeli organizations that cooperated with the United Nations Fact Finding Mission led by Judge Richard Goldstone in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 attacks on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, providing his team with information and testimony about the effects of the Israeli army’s actions on Palestinians’ access to health care during the conflict. The organization is part of the community of critical Israeli human rights groups that in the last two to three decades has persistently campaigned against the Israeli state’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as within the green line (the 1949 armistice lines and internationally recognized borders of Israeli territory). As such, it has been caught up in the general attack on the Israeli radical left by right-wing and nationalist Jewish and Israeli groups who police, in various ways, the legitimate bounds of public criticism of Zionism and of the state. While best known for its work on human rights violations against Palestinians, though, PHRI also campaigns on the rights of others in Israel/Palestine, primarily for non-Jewish and non-Palestinian migrant workers and refugees. A major part of this work is the open health clinic that PHRI runs from its offices in Jaffa, which mainly catered, at the time of my fieldwork, to refugees from Eritrea and Sudan. It was in relation to this work that I, as a researcher-volunteer with no medical training, was initially able to get involved with the organization.

Unlike the desk work of doing research, writing reports, speaking to patients in Gaza on the phone, or negotiating with army bureaucrats on behalf of those patients, which the staff in the shtachim (territories) department carried out, just down the corridor PHRI’s other busiest department was caught up in a daily struggle to provide refugees with the most basic care and support.² Each afternoon, up to one hundred refugees arrived for basic medical attention in the Open Clinic, often queuing up for hours before it opened to make sure they would see a doctor. Volunteer receptionists, nurses, and physicians provided the basis of this under-resourced and struggling facility, and I was able to start right away behind the reception desk, helping to sort files and receive patients a couple of times each week. There I started to learn not only about the behind-the-scenes activities that produced the official reports and press releases on human rights violations but also about the community of refugees and migrant workers and the odd Palestinian living without a permit in Israel, who relied on the rudimentary services provided by organizations like PHRI and the network of activists that coalesced around them. I started going with these activists to other sites of protest and organization outside the office, while at the same time helping with research for a report about food insecurity in Gaza that the shtachim department wanted to produce. I quickly came to understand that the small collection of human rights NGOs in Israel went hand in hand with its equally marginal radical leftist activist groups. Staff and volunteers were also activists, and I was likely to encounter many of the same faces whether in PHRI’s offices or at a demonstration against the occupation. Although some in PHRI were not active in this radical scene, and talked of a more humanitarian motivation as well as more mainstream liberal political convictions, this kind of human rights work was, for the most part, tightly intertwined with a stringent activist critique of state violence and militarism.

My fieldwork thus emerged from these mixed beginnings—with ideologies and motivations of human rights, humanitarianism, anarchism, socialism, feminism, and even liberal Zionism, all implicated in the leftist community I came to consider as my field. It is for this reason that I use the term radical left to refer to the activism described in this ethnography. While most studies focus on groups clearly defining themselves as anti-Zionist (Elian Weizman 2017), joint or Arab-Jewish (U. Gordon 2010; Hallward 2009a; Koensler 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2009; Svirsky 2012), antioccupation (Lamarche 2010; Ziv 2010), or as focusing on human rights (Dudai 2009; Hajjar 1997, 2001) or peace (Hallward 2009b; Helman 1999; Hermann 2009; Norell 2002), I worked with a variety of people and groups who sometimes disagreed with each other on these identifications but often found themselves cooperating nevertheless. A sense of emergency about the need to act, as well as increasing attacks on these groups by right-wing groups in Israel, meant that there was as much pragmatic cooperation as there was debate and division over political differences. I therefore use the loose definition left radical activism to delimit the field of my research, which refers here to those who actively challenge the colonial and militarist violence of the Israeli state, even as the ways they do so may differ significantly. It is an ethnographic term, from the Hebrew haSmol haRadikali (the radical left) that was most often used by activists to describe themselves (although others in Israel mostly refer to it as haSmol haKitsoni [the extreme left]). While there are some mobilizations in Israel toward leftist politics in the socioeconomic sense—recently most notably in the social justice protests that took place