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.
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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,