The Joys and Dangers of Solidarity in Palestine: Prosthetic Engagement in an Age of Reparations

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The Joys and Dangers of Solidarity in Palestine

Prosthetic Engagement in an Age of Reparations

S o p h i a S t a m a t o p o u l o u - R o b b i n s

Columbia University

When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and con-

stantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work.

Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy,

or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure

white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the

midst of a genocide that I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my

government is largely responsible.

—Rachel Corrie, International Solidarity Movement activist (in Stohlman and Aladin 2003, 174)1

From the perpetrator’s perspective, restitution and apologies are part of

the growing cultural trend of performative guilt. Th e cost of admitting guilt

(especially on the home front) and the difficulty of conceding that one’s own

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T h e J o y s a n d D a n g e r s o f S o l i d a r i t y i n P a l e s t i n e112 ●

identity is mired in crimes of injustice may be somewhat eased by the inter-

national trend to validate the ritual of public confession and legitimized by

recognition of the egalitarianism of imperfection. Nonetheless, the global

admission of guilt remains significant. Th is international validation of apolo-

gies transforms the ideological norm from nationalist righteousness—“my

history right or wrong”—to an attitude of reconciliation. Th is compromise

aims at gaining the recognition of others while paying for such recognition

of its victimization and the restitution of its history.

—Elazar Barkin (2000, 323)

I . I n t r o d u c t i o n

In a recent conversation with a Lebanese friend, I raised the question of

bringing a handful of PhD students from my department to a conference in

Ramallah. Her nose crinkled. She didn’t know if it was ethical—there was the

question of the boycott campaign, of non-normalization. So maybe it wasn’t

such a good idea. “Unless you make sure to make it really uncomfortable for

them,” she mused after a moment. “At least make them take the [Allenby]

bridge through Jordan. Th at way at least they can feel what it’s actually like

for the Palestinians.” Th e conversation got me thinking. What of Americans

and Europeans who do seek that discomfort—who go to Palestine precisely

to see what life is actually like? Once they have seen, and have something to

say about it, where do we go from there?

On April 23, 2006, a woman named Mary began her International Solidar-

ity Movement (ISM) journal entry from Palestine, titled “Mary’s Journal: Daily

Life in Tel Rumaida,” as follows:

Everyday but Friday, we are out on the street watching as children go to

school, which starts at 7.45 am. It’s usually quiet, though today about 15 visit-

ing settlers attacked Anna and BJ and 3 EAPPI (Ecumenical Accompaniment

Program in Palestine and Israel) people. Th ey are not badly hurt (one was

kicked and another hit on the foot by a stone) and are now still at the police

station making a complaint.

S o p h i a S t a m a t o p o u l o u - R o b b i n s ● 113

Informed by Jeff rey Alexander’s concept of “vicarious responsibility”

(Alexander 2004, 262),2 this paper seeks to theorize the increasing trend,

over the past two decades, whereby individuals from North America and

Europe have been traveling to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to stand

alongside Palestinians nonviolently resisting the Israeli occupation. Look-

ing first at how the politics of “being there” and “witnessing” shape the

political forms this solidarity has taken, I then do a reading of the electronic

archives of the ISM—one of the most important organizations enabling this

phenomenon, founded in 2001—to examine the discursive regime to which

this movement has given rise and the conceptual and political work that

regime does. Specifically, I am interested in the way activists’ subject posi-

tions are discursively formulated vis-à-vis the Palestinians with whom they

express a “solidarity.” For this, I look at both the bodily practices of travel to

and “direct action” in Palestine, and at the discourse that helps constitute

and is constituted by them. Finally, I conclude by briefly exploring what it

means for dissident American Jews, in particular, to participate in this form

of prosthetic political engagement.

At stake in understanding the conceptual work done by these bodily and

discursive practices is not only a question of strategy—that is, the extent to

which this movement can be and has been “eff ective”—but also, and perhaps

more importantly, the extent to which this politics of solidarity relies on and

reifies the same power structures it aims to take apart. Only by grasping the

particular mechanisms through which these reifications sneak their way into

eff orts to overcome them is it then possible to argue for a form of politics

that more openly and critically engages those structures of power. And only

by recognizing the present ethico-political parameters in which claims to

reparation for historical injustice are framed—since it is historical injustice

that underlies the present conflict—can the groaning machine for that argu-

mentation begin to crank forward. Th is is why, tying together components

of several zones of thought, I first bring debates about reparations to bear

on Palestinian solidarity work. My premise is that, as McCarthy maintains,

“the definition of the agent” is “central to the moral-political case for repara-

tions” (2004, 756). If responsibility for the past is thus derived “not because of


what we as individuals have done, but because of what we are” (Gatens and

Lloyd 1999, 81), how can we understand a form of solidarity politics in which

responsibility is ambiguously assigned?

Crossing space, I explore this movement with an eye toward other solidar-

ity movements between North America and Latin America.3 Crossing time, I

compare this movement with other historical moments in which solidarity

was extended and bodies moved. I interrogate the extent to which bodily

practices in this case echo organized eff orts to understand war or conflict

zones through witnessing and bodily experience, and the extent to which

these give rise to a politics of empathy or sympathy, or both. Finally, I take

up the question of dissident American Jews as one fragment of this particular

movement that can shine light on one corner of the web of circumstances

within which this broader trend operates.4

My project is in some respects similar to that of Sara Koopman, who seeks

to “decolonize” solidarity, but from a slightly diff erent angle. Although I ap-

preciate that looking at some of the mechanisms through which the figure of

the “good helper” can allow for unintended complicity with colonial projects

(Nelson 1999, 70), I am not sure how useful it is to argue that solidarity work—if

not “decolonized”—follows strictly colonial patterns, nor that it is necessarily

characterized by an “imperialism within,” as if the only options available exist

within the binary of the colonial and the anti-colonial. Koopman suggests that

people in the movement “aim to ‘become’ ever more true compañeras, that are

a voice with and are accountable” (2008b, 1, 10).5 What I hope to do with this

article is ask how it might be possible to be both with and accountable to, espe-

cially if that accountability is shaped around massive historical injustice.6 Th e

labor of traveling to Palestine and coming back with stories, new connections,

and ways of addressing an American audience having “really seen” what life is

like in Palestine is, of course, extremely important to the movement. Without

diminishing its significance, I want here to push a somewhat counterintui-

tive question into the discussion: What are the mechanisms through which

we “in solidarity” might extract ourselves from that cozy, comfortable feeling

of solidarity with the “victims,” a position so comfortable as to allow us to

lose sight of the work that may be both more eff ective and more conceptually

coherent—that is, rearticulating our relationship to the “perpetrators” while at

the same time avoiding self-sainthood?


An Age of Reparations

Th e comparison I make between this instance of solidarity and reparations

derives from a definition of reparations in which “restitution will constitute

compensation for the impact of past injustices upon present suff ering and

will provide a mechanism for healing present-day social and economic

afflictions” (Barkan 2000, 284), as posited by supporters of reparation for

slavery in the United States. Th e link between the “original sin” that consti-

tutes historical injustice and the continuing violations that can be traced

back to that moment thus figures significantly in my analysis. I aim here

to use some of the premises on which reparations arguments are made to

probe elements of what we know about this solidarity movement as a way

to begin thinking through some of the sources of its limitations. I argue

that, although in important ways the solidarity extended to Palestinians

by North Americans and Europeans shares much with the reconciliatory

politics of reparations as developed in recent decades, there are also crucial

diff erences. Th ese diff erences highlight, I suggest, the current snags on which

such solidarity can get caught, and reveal some of the discursive and other

mechanisms that result in its failure.

I ask what happens when reparations come in the form not of the dis-

tant, apologetic, giving hand of the perpetrator, but instead in the form of a

solidarity that tries at once both to stand with the “victims”—to cross over

to “their side”—while at the same time (and through the very act of crossing

over) positing a hybrid identity as perpetrator-victim? What do we make

of a long-distance solidarity linking those off ering it with those receiving it

neither geographically nor constitutionally7 but instead through a sense of

responsibility, shame, or guilt?8 Finally, how do we name the politics that

results when responsibility, shame, and guilt metamorphose and then drop

out of the narrative byproduct altogether?

Prosthetic Engagement: Bodies and the Body Politic

Th e relevance of the transnational solidarity movement with the Palestin-

ians is limited neither to debates about Palestine nor to those about repa-

rations, responsibility, and apology9 for historical injustice. In its embodied


form, it invites comparison also with traveling voluntarisms of times past,

including the International Brigades in Spain, northern whites’ travel to the

South during the American Civil Rights movement; with “battlefield tour-

ism” as it emerged in the early nineteenth century; and with more recent

emphases on bodily experience and witnessing—as expressed, for instance,

in the establishment of Holocaust museums as spaces where “authentic”

experiences are sought and “relived.” It begs investigation into the “relation

between the body and the body politic” (Nelson 2001, 304), raising questions

about the possibility of a prosthetic politics in which bodies operate as

phantom limbs, forcing themselves between otherwise calcified binaries—

between parties to a conflict, movements, or locales. Finally, it overlaps and

cross-pollinates with other movements, including anti-/alter-globalization,

queer equality, environmentalist, North-to-South American solidarity, and

socialist movements. Taken together, these conceptual tributaries can be

followed to help us think seriously about how to characterize this form of

political action framed as solidarity, its theoretical underpinnings, eff ects,

and limitations.

Th at the Palestinian struggle has become a powerful and central, even

exemplary,10 symbol within a global constellation of other movements speaks

further to the importance of understanding the movement to support it—

even when, in absolute terms, we know that American solidarity with the

Palestinians has little direct eff ect on decisions made in Washington. Sym-

bolic not only in global social movement politics, Palestine is a central issue

also because of, and through, the immense (albeit troubling) media attention

it receives worldwide (Aguiton 2004, 159). Most importantly, perhaps, as if

echoing talk around Spain in the 1930s, in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict

the “failure of the democratic nations of the world to go to the aid [of the

Palestinians has] signaled for many the demise of honor and integrity” in

the current state of aff airs (Hoar 1970, 115). Th e relationship between this

failure of states to intervene successfully and the initiation of a new mode of

individualized involvement in Palestine—what for Hemingway constituted a

“theater of individual experience” after his time in Spain—is one of the cur-

rents coursing throughout my analysis as well (Sanders 1960, 134). Indeed, in

the first year of ISM reports, we find unanswered calls from “Families of Beit


Jalla and the International Solidarity Movement . . . for a peacekeeping force

to come in and separate the sides in the conflict until a just resolution can

be reached,” as well as articles titled “What the UN refuses to do in Palestine:

Internationals help deliver food & stop bullets,” and the like (Jill Dreier, ISM

Archive, August 8, 2002, Nablus Region).

I I . H i s t o r i c a l P o s i t i o n i n g

One striking aspect of this movement is its historical overlap with the recent

surge in appeals for reparations, which in turn corresponds with the prolif-

eration of human rights discourses.11 Although the upsurge in travel activism

to Palestine by North Americans and Europeans came with the outbreak

of the second intifada (Bornstein 2007, 1), its history dates back to the late

1980s.12

In his forward to a volume on transnational solidarity activism with the

Palestinians, Noam Chomsky writes about what is historically unique in this

moment of transnationalism (2003, 1). Of course, activists travel to Palestine

for various reasons, including to be taken seriously when they advocate non-

violence.13 Th ey go to stand beside those who will bear the consequences of

following their advice. But that is not a new idea. What is new about this

movement, what makes it diff erent from the flow into Spain of brigades from

dozens of countries14 in the 1930s, is responsibility. (Th e extent to which activ-

ists’ narratives follow through with the ISM’s initial premise of American and

Israeli responsibility is precisely what needs to be examined here.) After all,

though there was great solidarity with the Vietnamese, how many American

anti-war activists do we know of who picked up and went to Vietnam, to stand

beside Vietnamese villagers who were being bombed by American planes?

Some, like Mary McCarthy, did go to Vietnam, but most did not consider the

option seriously. One can, however, imagine a historical relationship between

this new form of responsible solidarity travel originating in North America

and the Civil Rights movement, from within which more than one thousand

people (many of them white college students from the North) traveled to

Mississippi in the summer of 1964 (dubbed “Freedom Summer”) to help the

almost entirely excluded black community register to vote there.15


Since the late 1980s, a conscious sense of responsibility has increasingly

linked citizens and consumers to the people who suff er as an indirect result

of decisions made in powerful metropolitan centers.16 In terms of Palestine,

the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace is but one example. Colorado’s

largest employer, Lockheed-Martin, happens to be one of many companies

earning massive profits from the F-16 bombers that have rained death on

Bethlehem, Nablus, and Jenin. Drawing on that knowledge, the Colorado

Campaign for Middle East Peace has been sending delegations for solidarity

work in Palestine since 2001 (CCMEP 2008).

Th e same time period has seen other important changes as well. In the

wake of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel’s oc-

cupation of Lebanon in 1982—and the crumbling of the moral façade of the

Israeli state that ensued—the late 1980s saw the rise of the “new historians”

in Israel as well as the outbreak of the first intifada.17 In 1992, Edward Said

noted that the late 1960s were a turning point for Palestinians throughout

the Middle East, arguing that western awareness of Palestinian rights was

heightened “from the moment the PLO emerged as the authentic leadership

of the Palestinian people” (1992, xvii–xviii). By the late 1980s especially, the

first intifada had helped inspire growing public sympathy for the Palestinians

(Barron 1989, 71). Meanwhile within Israel, the anti-occupation movement

also grew (only to shrink again following the outbreak of the second intifada)

(Pappe 2004, 145).

Th ese changes corresponded with transformations in the ideological

landscape of the United States. Particularly transformed were the relationship

of Jews to Israel and of Jews and Americans more broadly to the memory of

the Holocaust.18 Historian of the Holocaust, Peter Novick (1999, 2003), argues

that during this period American and American Jewish attitudes toward the

Holocaust shifted, asking “why, in 1990s America—fifty years after the fact

and thousands of miles from its site—the Holocaust [came] to loom so large

in our culture” (1999). Alison Landsberg contends that this has something to

do with the passing of survivors left to testify, “when memories are no longer

guaranteed and anchored by a body that lived through them” so that “respon-

sible memory transmission becomes problematic” (1997, 64). Back in Israel,

the first Gulf War saw the conceptual “fusing of state-people-government,”


which Israel’s right wing accomplished “by exploiting the tragedy of the Ho-

locaust and by projecting it onto the Middle East and the Palestinians. . . . Th e

most overplayed image of the Gulf war—Israelis wearing gas masks—was

grist for the Holocaust demagogues’ mills” (Neimark 1992, 21). According to

many, the twenty-first century has ushered in an Israeli culture focused again

on security, leaving peace and reconciliation (after the promise of Oslo) for

an existential sense of Arab threat (Stein 2007). Th is shift coincides with a

parallel turn in Israeli academia from tolerance of revisionist historiography

(what had been the new historians) to its persecution.19

I I I . T r a n s n a t i o n a l S o l i d a r i t y T r a v e l

t o P a l e s t i n e

The International Solidarity Movement

Th is essay opened with a quote from Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old woman

from Seattle who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah, a

town in Gaza. Since the mid-1990s, there have been thousands of Rachel

Corries (though only a handful have been killed or seriously injured).20 By

today, we can estimate that over 6 thousand “internationals”21 have trav-

eled to Palestine to participate in what activists call direct action solidarity

work.22 To give a sense of the scale, the number of internationals who have

gone to volunteer in Palestine is about the same as the number of American,

Canadian, and British citizens—combined—who volunteered with the Inter-

national Brigades in Spain.23 In the summer of 2004, I traveled to Palestine as

well. Th ere I encountered a newly arrived group of international volunteers,24

including students from Stockholm and Montreal, socialists from Kentucky,

anti-globalizationists from Seattle, queer activists from Brooklyn, graphic

art designers from London, Jewish grandmothers from France, Spanish an-

archists, Puerto Rican nationalists, and tens of Jewish North Americans.25 In

all cases, “being there” was posited as the most crucial component of what

they were doing.26

In returning to Palestine’s centrality in the symbolic framing of global

social movements, the diversity of the volunteers I met set me thinking about


the way Palestine is conceptualized as a space. In addition to other corre-

lates of “being there” (including bodily witnessing and potential sacrifice;

see below), Palestine is often formulated by activists as a uniquely open

space: a space combining Hemingway’s “theater for individual experience”

(Sanders 1960, 134) and a partial inverse of Agamben’s (1998, 2005) spaces of

exception. Whereas for Agamben the camp is a space of exception in which

neither law nor resistance to oppression have a place, here we see Palestine

as exceptional, yes, but as exceptionally saturated with, and conducive to,

the possibilities for radical political change.27

In her study “ISM at the Crossroads: Th e Evolution of the International

Solidarity Movement,” Charmaine Seitz examines the movement from the

impetus that led to its conception from within Palestine itself, looking at some

of the initial calls for internationals emanating from Palestine in 2000–2001

“to provide—via their own physical presence—protection and witness for an

increasingly isolated and besieged Palestinian population” (2003, 50). Here

I am more interested in how to theorize what that international eff ort is,

not in this case from the point of view of the Palestinians, but by looking at

the conceptual work this form of transnational activism does, in hopes of

characterizing the form of politics to which it gives rise.

Giving a sense of what activists do when they get to Palestine, Avram Born-

stein describes his experience participating in an ISM campaign as follows:

We organized ourselves into “affinity groups” that would work together to ac-

company Palestinian farmers to their olive groves and help with the harvest.

Our job, should violence occur, was to use our lists of phone numbers, fax

numbers and email addresses to contact hometown local newspapers and

radio shows, political representatives and other influential people, all in an

eff ort to create accountability for Israeli violence. (2007, 5)

On its website, the ISM describes itself

“as a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupa-

tion of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods and prin-

ciples. Founded by a small group of activists in August, 2001, ISM aims to


support and strengthen the Palestinian popular resistance by providing the

Palestinian people with two resources, international protection and a voice

with which to nonviolently resist an overwhelming military occupation force.”

(2008; emphasis mine)

Other smaller, local groups like BostonoPalestine also send delegates

to Palestine.28 Th eir activities overlap with the ISM’s but are often geared

less toward direct action and more toward visits or internships: “We usually

organize 2–3 [two- to three-] week trips that include moving around the West

Bank as a part of a delegation as well as an individual internship volunteer-

ing in a particular community or two. . . . Our goal is to give participants a

first hand sense of the crisis and equip them to inform and activate their

communities” (BostonoPalestine 2008).29

Solidarity activists in Palestine often remove roadblocks, intervene at

checkpoints, stand between tanks and homes, plant olive trees, and rebuild

houses—literally changing the landscape around them as they go.30 As

anthropologist Amahl Bishara (2007) recently pointed out, these changes

are sometimes met with mixed feelings on the part of Palestinians. Th eir

ambivalence is seldom acknowledged in the ISM reports and journals that

are the textual byproducts of the activists’ work (see below).31

Solidarity, Reparations, and Apology

In important ways, this phenomenon of travel activism from the West to

Palestine can be read within a larger reparations–restitution–apology para-

digm. Most significant is the link of responsibility, but also that of apologetic

gesture.32 Th ompson (2002) argues that the perpetrator’s feeling of respon-

sibility should not be a determinant of who off ers reparations. Since in this

case there is no constitutional continuity between Americans, and Palestin-

ians in Gaza and the West Bank, a self-assigned responsibility becomes the

operative force. Predictably, expressions of responsibility vary depending on

activists’ positioning. As I elaborate in the sections that follow, when it comes

to ISM reports and journal narratives, responsibility may even drop out of

the picture entirely.


Th e most prominent reason for involvement given by dissident Ameri-

can Jews, for instance, is that Israel commits violations “in their name.”33 For

other U.S. and British citizens like Rachel Corrie, responsibility links them to

Palestinians’ “distant suff ering” (Boltanski 1999) through tax dollars funding

the Israeli military. For others, the link is forged through interests in corpo-

rate responsibility, taking the form of what is now dubbed “stakeholder activ-

ism” (Robinson 2007), as in the Lockheed-Martin example. For still others,

Palestinian suff ering is read as a local example of a global problem, so that

Puerto Rican nationalists forge anti-U.S./anti-imperialist ties of solidarity

with Palestinians, while queer equality activists may seek the double libera-

tion of Palestinians from Israeli occupation and of Palestinian “queers”34 from

Palestinian “intolerance.”35

Speeches compiled for the Alternative Information Center’s 2004 confer-

ence in Bethlehem attest to some of these patterns. Speaking on behalf of

Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), Pizzeta Adelar declared that

“we want to bring the solidarity of MST by saying that all of us are Palestin-

ians. Your fight is our fight. Today the United States (US) wants to control

all the oil, but tomorrow they hope to control the Amazon. Today the he-

licopters are firing here; tomorrow they may aim at Latin America” (2004,

11). Michael Warschawski spoke of how “in the last three years [since 2000],

Palestine has been the heart of the great international movement against

capitalist globalization and war. Everywhere in the world, in the ‘South’ as

well as the ‘North,’ millions of people are demonstrating their solidarity with

the Palestinian people” (2004, 143).36

But there are also unintended eff ects of the Palestinian struggle’s having

become “a byword for emancipation and enlightenment” (Said 2004, 290)

and the epitomic site of injustice and apartheid—the most pervasive con-

necting conceptualization among disparate solidarity groups. One is that the

past risks falling victim both to an urgent present and an apocalyptic future.

In these scenarios, responsibility comes to be expressed less for the historical

injustice that brought about the Palestinian predicament per se, and more

for today’s suff ering generation and for a possibility of a better future. At the

same conference in Bethlehem, Christophe Aguiton put (what I see as) the

problem succinctly: Today, he states,


the people coming to Palestine see themselves as part of a global civil soci-

ety, and they feel responsible for the future of the world. . . . Activists I have

spoken with from civil missions generally have no opinion on the policies of

the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] or the diff erent Palestinian groups.

Th ey do not come to Palestine to support Islamic Jihad, Fatah or Hamas; they

come to stand with the Palestinians because they are part of the new world

civil society—they cannot stay silent in the face of blatant, violent disregard

for human rights. It is a global revolution, not just foreign people supporting

a local revolution.” (2004, 157)

Before proceeding to a more expanded discussion of other unintended

eff ects emanating from the ISM’s discursive regime, I want to turn to two ad-

ditional ways in which this form of “travel activism” (as a bodily practice, first)

lends itself to consideration in our discussion of reparations—specifically

insofar as apology is concerned. Th e twin points I want to make involve

two things that happen when people go to Palestine, two things that cannot

happen in the same way if they stay at home: one is witnessing, and the

other is sacrifice. Both of these processes have critical implications for what

happens in, to, and because of the space of Palestine through the solidarity

travel that characterizes this movement. Counterintuitively, it is these same

processes, moreover, upon which ISM narratives are built, through which

responsibilities are elided, and because of which a depoliticizing, dehistori-

cizing discursive regime is made possible.

Witnessing and Sacrifice

Witnessing

A group of us from the ISM office went onto the street to talk to people and

see if we could be useful in any way. We got into a position from which we

could film the jeeps from a distance. We heard they had shot someone, and

no one was being allowed close to him. By the time we got there he was

dead and the jeeps had left. We witnessed the dead and injured being taken

away in ambulances, as well as the scene of destruction left behind. A falafel

shop had been trashed so that the soldiers could use it as cover. It was on a


street I regularly walk down. I had stood near that very spot only a few days

previously as a friend bought falafel from one of the street vendors. (Noah,

ISM Archive, June 23, 2008, Ramallah Region)

Witnessing is a crucial manifestation of the full transnationalism of this

phenomenon, in the sense that it is aimed in many directions at the same

time. Witnessing is for people back home, but it has to take place “out there.”

Activists bring stories of Palestine back to their home communities, while

gaining the legitimacy to do so by having been “in the field” (Seitz 2003,

57–58). When we witness something, the implication is that something

within us has been radically transformed. Witnessing implies that we “have

seen,” emerging changed by the experience.37 Political metamorphoses as a

result of having “been there” are prominent throughout activist writings on

their work.38 It is typical to read, for example, that “After a 2002 visit to Israel/

Palestine, Herskovitz returned to Ann Arbor a changed man. His questions

had been answered by firsthand experience” (Mayfield 2004). In this solidar-

ity movement, witnessing is understood as something that cannot be done

“at home.” It is thus not enough for activists to be in Colorado watching as

Lockheed-Martin produces F-16s. It is not enough to watch on television as

those same planes are used to bomb Palestinian towns.

When we ask why this might be, there are several factors to consider. One

is that perhaps our eye is no longer trained for witnessing at home; maybe

it glazes over. Or maybe Foucault (1995) was right that, at home in the west,

the eye is seldom given the opportunity to witness anymore, even if tuned in.

Maybe he was right that the prison-industrial complex, the school, the psy-

chiatrist, the rehabilitation center, the ghetto, zoning, gentrification—most

of the modern institutions that organize life for us—are techniques of gov-

ernment that visually conceal as much as they confine. As a correlate of the

disappeared spectacle of punishment as Foucault understands it, witnessing

may have receded to the realms of TV and the imagination. After all, while it

happens “out there” in Palestine, this is a story of a relation back to America

and to Europe, back to somewhere in the West.

Something else to consider, by contrast, is the connection I drew in the

introduction between this phenomenon and the emergence in the same


moment of a renewed reliance on bodily experience and witnessing as an

avenue for accessing others’ memories. From the United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum’s production as “a site where new symptoms, new

‘prosthetic’ memories, are incorporated into the body,” Landsberg off ers a

counternarrative to the Freudian assumption that “transference is a ‘piece

of real experience’” (1997, 82). Th rough the bodily incorporated experience of

witnessing, then, one way to understand Palestine solidarity travel is as a way

of producing prosthetic experiences of Palestinian suff ering.

But transference of experience necessitates a spatial component: the

conceptualization of a “transferential space” (Landsberg 1997, 66). Part of a

“larger trend in American mass culture toward the experiential as a mode of

knowledge, the Holocaust museum,” she argues, “becomes an actual site of

sensuous as well as cognitive knowledge production . . . it provides a terrain

upon which to begin to imagine the political utility of prosthetic memories.”

Landsberg sees new mass cultural forms productive of such transferential

spaces as constitutive of “a version of experience which relies less on cat-

egories like the real, the authentic, and sympathy than on categories like

knowledge, responsibility, and empathy” (1997, 74).

S acrifice

Someone called Abdullah on his phone and said they were heading our way.

A few seconds later two humvees with approximately 6 or 7 soldiers in full

riot gear pulled up. I walked straight towards them, not really having any

plan of what to do or say, just knowing that I needed to confront them and

show them that there were people here who were not going to let them get

away with bad behavior. My heart was pounding in my chest. I was thinking

“ok, this is it, this is how it ends, you are going to get shot right here and this

is how you are going to die.” But you know, I would rather take 100 of their

bullets right now, than die of old age later because I was afraid to stand up

for what I believed in, and so I kept on walking. And of course I didn’t get

shot, of course I had nothing to be afraid of because I am not Palestinian. We

stood in front of them and Marcy told them in Hebrew they [sic] they should

go home and that they were not welcome here. Th ey told her to go home. It

was tense for a few minutes as six unarmed women and two unarmed men


stood in front of the seven or eight fully armed soldiers waving their guns

around. Th en they left. Our first victory! (Katie, ISM Archive, January 15, 2006,

Bil’in Village)

Th e second aspect I want to highlight, which again occurs as a result of travel

to Palestine, involves sacrifice, whether real or potential. Like witnessing,

sacrifice seems to depend on the sense of being implicated, of being in some

sense responsible. Activists who go to Palestine expose themselves to the

possibility of sacrificing their lives, and for a cause that is, by most people’s

standards, not even their own. As with witnessing, when we sacrifice some-

thing, the implication is that we have undergone a radical change of state,

from having something to giving it up, and the person sacrificing is changed

by the experience of that loss. Th e sacrifice Rachel Corrie made, like that

of British citizen Tom Hurndall,39 has made activists’ awareness of possible

injury or death in Palestine all the more real and pervasive.

Sacrifice40 is also related to witnessing in that it necessitates, by implica-

tion, risk of the body.41 Identifying testimonial activism as “rooted in Christian

notions of witnessing and of the body as a vehicle of suff ering,” Meg McLagen

has also suggested that

Th e body (and its pain) is a necessary medium in human-rights work, be-

cause it is what people have in common with others. Testimony is premised

on the belief that pain is universal. Th is belief in the universality of pain and

its eff ectiveness as a tool for creating solidarity in underscored by researchers

who have found that torture is the easiest human-rights issue on which to

campaign. (2007, 304)

I argue here that the performative way this risk is enacted may allow us

to read the act of going to Palestine as a kind of reconciliation or apology—a

symptom, perhaps, of what Barkan sees as the recent intensification in the

United States of “performative guilt” (2000, 316). Th e potential of sacrifice

can be seen as an off ering of physical reparations, something akin to Con-

nerton’s notion of incorporation (1989). Sacrifice of and emphasis on the


body here thus link travel in this solidarity movement with discussions

of reconciliatory justice. If we take seriously Foucault’s notion that, more

than involving simple exposure and denunciation, to make a political issue

of “what is happening entails producing grievances as ‘sites of concerns’”

(Foucault 2000, 474), we might even see this as the production of the activist

body as a surrogate site of concern (McKee 2007, 328).

However, given Palestinians’ dehumanization at the hands of the Israeli

military and mainstream American media, to posit Americans’ physical risk

as sacrifice is also to mask significant representational power diff erentials.

In being put “on the line” (precisely by “crossing” it), the American or the Eu-

ropean body becomes a means through which the activist-individual is pro-

duced as a “good,” “helping” subject. It is common knowledge that this body

runs little risk, if injured or killed, of falling into the pit of representational

warfare between sacrifice-qua-martyr and collateral damage-qua-terrorist

(as does the Palestinian body in the same position). Indeed, this exclusive

privilege of the ability to be sacrificed—to be fully human, in Agamben’s

terms (1998)—is distinctly the logic that gives internationals’ presence in Pal-

estine its rationale in the first place. Th is is not unique to Palestine solidarity

work, but rather speaks to a larger trend in the North American solidarity

movement politics of our moment. Barbara Heron has argued that women,

for example, may gain “higher” subjective positions through solidarity work:

“Ironically, women become the acceptable feminine version of the liberal Self

through self-sacrifice” (in Koopman 2008b, 9). Th is corresponds with the way

Avram Bornstein uses the term “moral selving” (see below).

It is precisely the depoliticizing and dehistoricizing work done both by

the notion of a transferential, empathetic space eff ected through witnessing,

on the one hand, and on the other hand, by simultaneous equalization of

American and Palestinian suff ering and reification of the American privilege

to be sacrificed, that I examine in the section that follows. I thus turn to how,

particularly in the narratives produced by the ISM, expressions of responsi-

bility are trumped, eff aced, and metamorphosed in such a way as to obstruct

the very politics for which solidarity was off ered in the first place.


I V . T h e J o y s a n d D a n g e r s o f S o l i d a r i t y

The Joys of Solidarity: Triangulating Out

of the Perpetrator-Victim Binary

In an important sense, framed as solidarity, this form of political action

complicates binary notions of victim and perpetrator, especially when paral-

leling the rubric of stakeholder activism.42 Triangulation is also realized quite

literally through the deployment of the concept of the triangle,43 in which

internationals are positioned as mediators between two warring sides.

On what Avram Bornstein (2007) sees as an emotional level, the per-

petrator-victim binary is further complicated. For him, when activists turn

from the emotion of righteous anger over the suff ering of Palestinians to

the joy of solidarity through “direct activism,” the shift from perpetrator to

comrade is made possible, and the us-them boundary redrawn: “Th is joy of

affinity and solidarity is not just with other internationals,” he writes, “It is

also sought with Palestinians” (2007, 5). While not positing it as an issue of

triangulation, Diane Nelson too has argued that when survivors of atrocities

tell people in the West their stories and then thank us for listening, “recourse

to the politics of solidarity can off er a space of innocence for the gringa, a site

cleansed by good intentions and activist ‘politics’” (1999, 57). Th is resonates

with Sara Koopman’s point as well that “perhaps we claim guilt on one level

as a way to claim innocence on another” (2008b, 19).

In Palestine, shaming-as-politics is another ingredient in this triangula-

tion. Bornstein understands shaming—shaming by activists of Israeli sol-

diers in face-to-face encounters at checkpoints, for instance—as an act that

can move the shamer-subject’s sensibilities from guilt (as perpetrator) to

solidarity (with Palestinian victims), to mastery of fear (of Israeli aggression),

and finally to pride (2007, 8). I am suggesting that part of being “on the same

side” as Palestinians against the shamed Israelis is a shirking of the initial

responsibility that brought the activists there in the first place. In a sense

this is similar to the end goal of reparations, whereby after recognition of and

restitution for historical injustice are off ered and the perpetrators sufficiently

shamed, those off ering reparations are to some degree off the hook.44


Th is corresponds with the question of guilt among activists, the extent, in

other words, to which it is authentic or “vicarious,” as Bornstein puts it. “In

this case, it is a vicarious guilt,” he says, “because their emotional expressions

are not related to their personal actions, but actions done by others (often

their national and religious leaders) in the name of their group. . . . By joining

the campaign people mitigate their culpability for wrongdoing, thus avoiding

shame and even creating the possibility of pride” (2007, 7).45

Comparison of Bornstein’s (2007) argument about aff ective solidarity can

also be drawn with the literature on past moments of civilian travel to conflict

zones. On bodily experience—or on seeing as bodily experience—battlefield

tourism in interwar France off ers interesting parallels. From within a psycho-

analytic paradigm, historian Daniel Sherman argues that for Clymene, the

widow of a French soldier killed in battle, the trip to the battlefield “provides

the emotional closure [she] had desired, and at its end Clymene is no longer

haunted by the tragic inadequacy of her husband’s life” (1999, 35–36). For Sher-

man, battlefield tourism was as much a part of memory construction as it

was a healing activity for the war’s survivors. Similarly, for Landsberg (1997),

travel through the reconstructed conflict zone-cum-Holocaust-museum is a

mode through which memories are constructed anew. Combining Sherman’s

suggestion that seeing becomes bodily experience with Landsberg’s notion

of “prosthetic memory” produces a useful conceptual tool, I think, for ap-

proaching solidarity travel to Palestine. Th is despite the fact that in the case of

solidarity with the Palestinians, questions of memory are perhaps less urgent

than the impulse to achieve authentically lived experience and attempts at

identification with the victims through an embodiment of their authentic

experiences. Th is signals the emergence of a double work: On the one hand,

notions of solidarity, sacrifice, and authentic experience position the activist

on one side of the perpetrator-victim spectrum, toward the “victims.” On the

other hand, however, that witnessing, white-western privilege and a sense of

responsibility also characterize participants in this movement means an almost

opposite positioning: squarely on the perpetrator end of the spectrum.46

Writing about the closing scene of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List

(1993) during which the “real Schindler Jews walk with the actors and ac-

tresses who portrayed them to Schindler’s grave,” Landsberg brings our


attention to the movement not “from past to present, but rather the one

between the authentic survivor and the actor. Th is moment stages . . . the

transferring of authentic living memory from the body of a survivor to an

individual who has no ‘authentic’ link to this particular historical event”

(1997, 63–4). Here, as in Palestine travel activism, the inauthentic proximate

is posited—seemingly by virtue of her seeking to embody that authentic

experience—as a morally neutral player. More than that, as experiential

surrogate to the “victim,” this inauthentic proximate is if anything posi-

tively tainted by the virtue of the “victim,” sliding further away from any

association with the perpetrator.

In Schindler’s List, it makes no diff erence whether the actors’ grandpar-

ents were in Nazi youth leagues. What matters instead is that the actors

themselves stay true to the authentic survivors’ stories, representing them

almost as well as they would themselves. Th e authentic and the inauthentic

are thus twinned, obfuscating the possible need for accountability between

them. Similarly, as visitors enter the Holocaust museum, they are each as-

signed an ID card with the name and story of a Holocaust victim. Th e idea,

for Landsberg, is that by accessing victims’ memories prosthetically through

this twinning, visitors are able to experience what has been missed. Th ough

diff erently formulated, like the missed encounter with the real we find in

Lacan’s (1968) theory of the punktum, this too provides an escape from the

victim-perpetrator binary.

In the museum, visitors’ mimetic faculties are engaged, allowing for

the possibility of empathy. While sympathy “relies upon an essentialism

of identification,” Landsberg argues, “empathy recognizes the alterity of

identification. Empathy, then, is about the lack of identity between subjects,

about negotiating distances. Empathy, especially as it is constructed out of

mimesis, is not emotional self-pitying identification with victims, but a way of

both feeling for, while feeling diff erent from, the subject of inquiry” (1997, 81–82).

In the case of Palestine solidarity work, I want to suggest, mimesis through

“standing with the Palestinians” actually blocks a kind of radical empathy so

defined. Mimesis here thus operates to disallow the alterity necessary to fore-

front adequately the positioning of the international as de facto in (however

unwelcome) solidarity more with the perpetrators than with the victims.


The Dangers of Solidarity: Writing the Movement Out of History

In putting the workings of solidarity under a spotlight, I question the useful-

ness of Richard Rorty’s version of a solidarity “thought of as the ability to

see more and more traditional diff erences (of tribe, religion, race, customs,

and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect

to pain and humiliation—the ability to think of people wildly diff erent from

ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (1999, 192). Methodologically, I do

this partly by taking as my object of study how ISM solidarity discourses

and practices have constructed the activist-subject. It is not so much that

these discourses and practices (and discursive practices) commingle to form

one single, monolithic and coherent deployment of political engagement.

As Avram Bornstein (2007) reminds us, this is, after all, as much about the

individual activists’ personal, even emotional, experiences as it is about the

public politics of a movement.

At the same time, the collective bodily practices of travel to, witnessing

in, and standing with Palestinians in Palestine have given rise to the large-

scale dissemination of a textual and oral discursive corpus throughout

Israel, Palestine, Europe, and North America. Recorded first in the form

of reports and journal entries posted on the ISM website, international

activists’ solidarity narratives are then reproduced as “report-backs” in

churches and synagogues, on school campuses, and in community centers

“back home.”47

Reports and journal entries can be classified into two roughly distinguish-

able (though often overlapping) genres. One can be described as journalistic,

in that the author remains detached from the text as a neutral documenter

and observer, and where quantitative, minute details of what was observed

are foregrounded—including precise times of day, numbers of demonstra-

tors, exact distances in meters, numbers of bullet holes in the wall of a house,

ages of those injured, etc. A February 28, 2007, report recounted, for example,

that “A bedroom door was riddled with bullet holes, at least 7 bullets hav-

ing penetrated the two inch thick door” (Anonymous, ISM Archive, Qalqilya

Region). Th e other genre can be described as personalized, in which the af-

fect and impressions of the (foreign) author are foregrounded in the form of


descriptions of physical discomfort, fear, excitement, and the discovery of

aspects of what is presented as Palestinian culture. Th is last rhetorical move

is perhaps one of the movement’s strongest, in that it presumably lures the

“average American” reader ( family member, peer) in both its innocence and

apparent neutrality. Many journal entries of this type read like diaries of tour-

ist experiences gone terribly wrong. Palestine is a wretched, desolate place,

a place with potential tourist appeal—if only there weren’t this impractical,

violent, and humiliating occupation. Like a passage from Lonely Planet, in

“Traveling South to Hebron,” ISM volunteer Bat remarks that:

Th e market area is where I am aiming for in order to catch what is known as a

“service taxi.” Th ese things are a wonderful idea, and make the whole process

of moving about the country cheap and easy. Th e basic concept is to take the

taxi idea and turn it on it’s [sic] head. Instead of finding a taxi and telling the

driver where you are going, a service taxi is one which already knows where

it is going and sets about soliciting passengers for that destination. You find a

driver going to the place you want, agree the price ( fixed for a given destina-

tion) and you get in. When the vehicle is full it leaves. My arabic is zero, and

I cannot read the script, but by simply smiling and saying “Service Al Khalil?”

(the arabic name for Hebron) to various drivers I soon find myself sitting in

the back of a car awaiting other passengers. (Bat, ISM Archive, April 25, 2007,

Hebron Region)

Having hooked us with user-friendly advice on getting around Palestine, the

same entry goes on to explain how Palestinians’ freedom of movement is

curtailed:

A direct drive from Ramallah to Hebron would be a short trip down to

Jerusalem, and then south through the countryside. But this is, of course, not

possible. Th e barrier encircles the Palestinian part of Jerusalem, “reuniting”

the city, and cutting off a large chunk of land to the east. So all the traffic

between the two halves of the west back [sic, bank] must detour round it

on a single route, passing through Container checkpoint. Although this area

is completely Palestinian, the Israeli’s [sic] block the road here and check


vehicles driving through, despite the fact that this is not checking anyone

passing into, or out of, Israeli territory. It does, however, act as an eff ective

throttle to communications between the two halves of the country.

In a sense, this move can be read as a personalized, lay version of the more

formal “human rights observer” mode of description in that both purport to

step outside the political and cultural milieu from which they (physically, at

least) write. It is not uncommon to read about “all Palestinian families” as

universally, even essentially, hospitable, kind, generous, and gracious. Com-

ments like “according to my experience . . . these families were like all the rest

of the families here, kind kind kind. I swear I have never drank so much coff ee

and tea in my life” (Jill Dreier, ISM Archive, August 8, 2002, Nablus Region)

abound throughout the archive.

Over the past seven years of ISM report- and journal-writing, some shifts

are also worth noting. Th ese consist especially in an increased emphasis on

the journalistic genre. Often at the expense of the more personalized ac-

counts (though these persist as well), this increase has corresponded with an

important change in the language used to describe foreign solidarity activ-

ists. Whereas in the archive of the earlier years, they were variously called

“internationals,” “peace activists,” and “foreign volunteers,” and whereas their

nationalities in most cases were also identified, during the latter period of

the ISM’s work in Palestine, reports have consistently used the term “Inter-

national Human Rights Workers (HRWs)” with little to no further descrip-

tion. Whereas earlier reports largely resembled “My Arrest and Detention

by Israeli Police” by University of Michigan graduate student Andrew Clarno

(ISM Archive, August 11, 2001), later reports have appeared more in the form

of the detached and anonymous “Israeli soldiers desecrate Koran, rob vil-

lagers, during Beita invasion marked with arrests, house occupations, and

injuries” (Anonymous, ISM Archive, February 22, 2008). I am not arguing

here that the ISM has actually become more neutral, whatever that would

mean. Rather, what is interesting is how, on the one hand, activists with

foreign passports have come to appear as an undiff erentiated group, yet on

the other hand, that group is identified with the language of human rights,

the naturalizing language of international neutrality, of prepolitical truth.


As HRWs, American citizens, whose government is the most vehemently

and uncritically supportive of Israeli policies, are thus extracted from their

own political contexts; that is, they are detached from the taxes, votes, and

purchases that structure their complicity to the injustices they observe.

To understand this it is worth returning to solidarity as an analytic tool.

Conceptually, I complicate Rorty’s formulation of solidarity by examining

how international Palestine activists’ narratives have been increasingly

structured within a human rights framework that, on one register, seeks to

humanize Palestinians in the public domain by bringing attention to the daily

devastations brought upon them. Intertwined with a framework of origi-

nating responsibility—because of which the ISM was initially formed (Seitz

2003)—the move to render Palestinian suff ering equal to any other suff ering,

as human suff ering, and to focus primarily on that equation, does a kind of

triple work.

One, it depoliticizes the category of “the Palestinian,” constructing “in that

depoliticized space an ahistorical, universal humanitarian subject” not unlike

that constructed in the now-famous case of humanitarian administrators in

Hutu refugee camps in Tanzania (Malkki 1996, 378). Palestinians are framed

as a mass identifiable mainly by its need to be saved. Few Palestinians are

named, and when they are, their names are posited as another quantitative

“fact” to be reported. Th e subjective, actual experience of human suff ering

is left to be described by their foreign, surrogate counterparts. Th is double

depoliticization and dehistoricization undermines the very humanization it

attempts to help bring about by sucking out of “the Palestinians” the politi-

cal and historical contexts that would render them eligible for justice, and

not merely for bare survival. Spectered here of course is Agamben’s concept

of “bare life” (homo sacer) as both object and subject of modern power. In

stripping Palestinians of what then appear as mere historical and political

appendages to their existences-as-bodies to be protected, international

activist narratives stop short of arguing for much more than human—read:

bodily—survival for the Palestinians.

Two—and here is the crux of the matter—it allows for the construction of

an activist-subject whose connection of responsibility to the conflict dissolves

in the very moment of her hopeful constitution as an observer-reporter of


human rights violations. At the same time, Palestinians’ depoliticization as

bare, human victims is not a process brought to full fruition. It is precisely the

ambiguous positioning of solidarity activists as both neutral observers and as

friends of the Palestinians—in the face of acts of Israeli military brutality and

humiliation—that undercuts the progressive aims of this solidarity politics.

Th is can come in the form of explicit appeals to friendship between activists

and Palestinians, as in Suneela’s report on January 10, 2006:

It was raining and of course me and my fellow internationals cut the line

with our wonderful blue passports, but we waited right at the other side in

solidarity with our Palestinian friends, even though several diff erent soldiers

yelled at us to move here and move there, stand here and stand there, why

are you standing here, go away, etc. (ISM Archive)

Added to this is a third, crucial complicating factor: that these narratives

originate in the form of bodily witnessing in particular; that their conditions

of possibility are the activists’ physical presence in and experiences of Pales-

tine. Activist narratives hinge on the activists’ own personal, individualized,

bodily experiences of literally going “through the motions” that a Palestin-

ian would go through on a daily basis, something we saw in Bat’s posting

on “Traveling South to Hebron.” Th e following Qalqilya Region report from

February 15, 2008, off ers another example of bodily witnessing:

At around 1pm, the Border Police once again raided the apartment of Human

Rights Workers (HRWs) in Azzoun, although this time they were not violent

and did not ransack the apartment. Th e Border Police came into the apart-

ment demanding to see the HRWs’ cameras, although they did not confiscate

them today. . . . Th ree HRWs followed orders and returned to their apartment

and started to film from their window. After a few minutes they saw, and cap-

tured on video, one border police officer pulling a Palestinian man out of his

car and assaulting him. . . . Th e officers were screaming as they ransacked the

apartment and dragged one HRW around by his t-shirt, repeatedly banging

his head against a wall. [Th e report is accompanied by a photograph of blood

smeared on a white door.] Th ey confiscated their cameras and took the HRWs


down to the street. Th ey were forced to wait whilst the officers checked their

details in their jeep. After about 20 minutes the officers released the HRWs

and continued aggressively enforcing the Azzoun curfew. (Anonymous, ISM

Archive, Qalqilya Region)

Th ere is a kind of stepping into the shoes of Palestinians that becomes

essential to the production of these reports. In being thus constituted, the

narratives quickly slip into a language of shared discomfort, humiliation,

and even suff ering that positions the international activists less and less

as empathetic “friends” of the Palestinians than as, in some sense, their

similarly victimized, sympathetic international brethren. Steve’s 2003 report

illustrates this slippage exactly:

Th e trip Saturday morning from Jenin to Qalqilya was another exercise in

roadblocks, humiliating checkpoints, and 5 shared taxis for what should have

been 1 short trip. Th e racism at the checkpoints was blatant; at one point all

the Palestinian men in the car were forced to get out and stand in the sun

while their IDs were checked. I was allowed to sit in the car with the women.

No soldier asked spoke [sic] to me or looked at my passport to ascertain

who I was; I was apparently judged not in need of checking by virtue of my

appearance alone. (Steve, ISM Archive, July 20, 2003, Jenin Region)

Although Steve’s emphasis is on racism against Palestinians that he did

not experience at the checkpoint—indeed, his entry is titled “Racism Run

Amok”—that the narrative structure of his entry relies on what he did experi-

ence traveling from Jenin to Qalqilya, and that he simultaneously remarks

on the humiliations and inconveniences of his own journey, produces a

seamless continuum between himself as an American activist-subject and

the Palestinians whose reality this is year-round. It also represents another

moment in the sanitization from the ISM’s discursive output of financial,

political, and historical links—links that may, however, not be represent-

able as “experiential” in the same way—between an American activist and

Palestinians under occupation.


What I want to suggest here—and what the reparations literature

teaches us, I think—is that failure to attend to the historical particularities

of what happened (crudely put: who has done what to whom, and how that

doing continues) beyond advocating for a common-denominator humanity

based on the possibility of shared experiences of suff ering, spells failure for

a true reconciliatory justice. Furthermore, the triangulation permitted by

the notion of “solidarity”—shoving a wedge in the binary between victim

and perpetrator—obfuscates the multiple ethical, political, and economic

links of responsibility that tether Americans to the state of Israel and its

practices.

Instead of highlighting specificity, in other words, these solidarity

narratives run the risk of advocating sameness. In critiquing this way of

drawing political alliances, I join the company of Geraldine Pratt (2005)

via geographer and long-time solidarity activist Sara Koopman, who argues

that “We do not need to move into another person’s skin to draw lines of

connection” (Koopman 2008a, 16). Indeed, “to try to move homo sacer back

into citizen through seeing sameness does nothing to change the ongoing

process of abandonment” (16). But sameness is not all that is imagined.

In certain forms of Palestine solidarity work, we find a slippage between

universalist human rights arguments (“we are all human”) and support

for fundamental diff erence (i.e., Palestinian nationalism, framed in part

around historical injustice).

Th e process of narrative identification with “the Palestinian experience,”

too, thus never reaches completion. And this is because activist narratives

have proven unable in another way to escape the structures of privilege on

which the possibility of their being written (that is, the possibility of travel to

Palestine to provide international protection for Palestinians dehumanized

by the Israeli Defense Forces) perpetually rely. As “hooks” into most reports

and journal entries, more often than not internationals’ experiences are ei-

ther headlined outright or told as the primary focus of the story. Early on in

the movement’s history, on Sunday, October 27, 2002, one Nablus Region re-

port described the injuries of international activists in great detail (going so

far as to provide the name of the hospital where injuries were being treated


and phone numbers at which the injured could be reached), clearly making

a statement of the fact that even U.S. and British citizens could be attacked

by Israeli settlers. Among them:

James Deleplain—US citizen, 74 years of age—repeatedly hit in the face,

wound under his left eye and massive swelling, kicked in the back and both

the right and left rib cage, with a possible broken rib. James had pneumonia

two weeks ago and has been coughing since, therefore the beating, especially

in the rib cage has left him in a very weak state.

Mary Hughes-Thompson—US and British citizen, 68 years of age—

repeatedly hit in both arms. Possible broken arms. Speaking to Mary while

she was on her way to the hospital, she stated “I am convinced they were

trying to kill me.” (Anonymous, ISM Archive)

Th is report, titled “Massive Israeli Settler Attack on Foreign Volunteers in

Palestine,” is concerned mainly with the details of this attack. Only in one

sentence of its last paragraph (of eight) does it address why the foreign vol-

unteers may have needed to be there in the first place, explaining, “Last week

the villagers of Yanoun left the village, not able to withstand the repeated

attacks and denied protection by the Israeli police and military.”

Th roughout, activists’ stories of having helped or even “saved” Pales-

tinians from humiliating or violent experiences at the hands of the Israeli

military figure prominently and are rarely countered with stories of failure

or Palestinian ambivalence, if at all. “If anyone is looking to save the world,”

wrote Lucretia R. in a June 2006 Nablus Region posting, “I urge you to come

to Balata [refugee camp] and start a summer camp there for the kids. Th ey

need it so much” (ISM Archive). Another activist described the experience of

protecting Palestinians as “cool”: “Th e cool part is being in the streets with

the Palestinians and feeling their energy as they clap and chant (they get

loud—they chant ‘god is great’) and stand with us, knowing the tanks and

such won’t fire at them with us there” ( Jill Dreier, ISM Archive, August 8,

2002, Nablus Region).


V . C o n c l u s i o n : D i s s i d e n t J e w s

a n d I s r a e l / P a l e s t i n e

My relationship to Israel: it’s the cousin I don’t speak to. And even though

we don’t speak, I must speak about her. Th at she is not me. And that I have

the responsibility to apologize—for everything. ’Cause I know she never will.

’Cause I’ve known racism more than I’ve known Judaism, known oppression

more than I’ve felt part of the chosen race. And maybe that’s why we don’t

speak anymore. ’Cause I’m not pure, or complacent. I say out loud that I don’t

agree with what she’s doing. ’Cause when people meet me, and find out about

my heritage, they assume I’m with her. My Jewish faith is in people who see

themselves as citizens of the world that were everywhere. People who love

and respect all people. So it’s ok that me and my cousin don’t speak, ’cause

there are so many other Jews out there. And we have enough to do. (American

Jewish woman in If Not Now, When?)

Holocaust Identities and Recognition of Historical Injustice

Everything feels much more personal as I struggle with this complicated

aff air; bearing witness to multiple narratives, feeling complicit, confused,

guilty, and outraged all at once. (Rothchild 2007, 218)

Much of the already sparse recent work on solidarity with the Palestinians

stops short of providing a sense of exactly who feels the joys of solidarity

and what the context and implications might be for the range of emotions

felt by international activists and Palestinians alike. Considering only a frag-

ment of the larger movement, it is the ambiguity with respect to American

Jewish solidarities that I hope to begin interrogating by way of a conclusion.

Citing Allahyari, Bornstein (2007) posits that participation as an activist in a

social movement entails a process of “moral selving” in addition to its goal of

transforming the world. As reparations debates have taught us, moral selving

does not happen in a moral, historical, or political void. By examining more

closely the workings of a particular group of solidarity activists, we can get

at how the imaginative horizons of moral selving can be formed. Th e move


I am trying to make asks solidarity to do both historical and identity work,

but without resorting to hard binaries and without allowing it to become an

excuse for no work at all.48

So why organize solidarity as Jews? While it may seem obvious, the fact

that there is such a variety of auspices under which Americans and Euro-

peans organize around Israel/Palestine should make us wonder.49 As I have

mentioned, most dissident Jews express an aversion to Israel’s policies being

promulgated in their name. Israel extends an open and very proactive invita-

tion, moreover, to any Jew worldwide to immigrate and acquire citizenship,

further enlisting all Jews, as Jews, into its larger political orbit.50

Writing on “American Jews and Palestine: Th e Impact of the Gulf War,”

Marilyn Neimark argued in 1992 that within the United States, “most Jews

working on Israel-Palestine issues believe[d] that they need[ed] to be an-

chored in the mainstream peace movement in Israel . . . if they [were] to have

any legitimacy and credibility within the organized Jewish community” (21).

Th us, while some progressive American Jews actively opposed the Gulf War,

launching emergency food and medical relief campaigns to assist Palestinian

communities under wartime, in the end the American Jewish mainstream

peace movement joined the Israeli national consensus on the war—and

those who opposed it kept silent (22). Sixteen years later, and two years into

the second intifada, there seems to have been a rift between American Jews

working on Israel/Palestine and Israelis doing the same. In 2002, Edward

Said commented that the American Jewish public’s

refusal to see, much less hear anything about, the existence of “another side”

far exceeds the fanaticism of anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis. . . . To judge

by the recent antiwar demonstration of sixty thousand people in Tel Aviv, the

increasing number of military reservists who refuse service in the Occupied

Territories, the sustained protest of (admittedly only a few) intellectuals and

groups, and some of the polls that show a majority of Israelis willing to with-

draw in return for peace with the Palestinians, there is at least a dynamic of

political activist among Israeli Jews. But not so in the United States. (Said

2004, 178)


My sense is that the new form of solidarity politics that now involves literally

standing with Palestinians—often at the expense, it seems, of challenging

and bolstering (where possible) the elements of the Israeli Left most critical

of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories—has allowed for weakened

alliances with Palestinian liberation in the long-term. Bypassing not only the

Israeli Left but also the mainstream American Jewish public, this version of

alignment with Palestinians runs the risk of losing sight of loci of power that

might actually eff ect change, loci with which American Jews are uniquely

positioned to have a direct eff ect.51

By looking in particular at Jewish solidarity, we are also better able to

explore another important component of what we find in the reparations

literature: the relationship between apology for historical injustice and the

identity of the perpetrators. In one sense, organizing as Jews extends the

responsible community outward spatially and temporally. It may, however,

be that same logic of guilt and responsibility that serves as an incapacitating

mechanism for the movement’s reconciliatory reach.

Th e argument I develop in this section ties into the analysis of Jewish

dissidents the above discussion of travel activism as incorporated apology,

on the one hand, with solidarity’s complication of the perpetrator-victim

dyad, on the other: I am interested in how, with Israel/Palestine as the most

tenacious point of contention between dissident and more mainstream lib-

eral Jews today, the Holocaust has in recent decades become the memory

on which a more unified American Jewish identity has been centered.52 Th is

has intensified for dissident Jews who appeal to their mainstream liberal

counterparts53 to join them in criticizing the occupation. Th is because their

identification has become a double one: first, with the Holocaust (whether or

not this is largely rhetorical), and second, with the very act of dissenting from

that mainstream. As Habib (2007) recently noted, some Jews speak of feeling

“more Jewish” at vigils in solidarity with the Palestinians than they do at

synagogues or Seders. Th at this intensification has led to a further elevation

of Holocaust memory as a unifying factor54 among Jews when arguing about

Israel has had critical eff ects on the way criticism of Israeli policies has been

framed. We see this often in dissident Jews’ explanations for how they came

to criticize Israeli policies:


Th ree months ago I went to Auschwitz. I had wanted to go to Auschwitz for

years. . . . I suppose you can walk out of Auschwitz and say “Nobody’s ever

doing that to us again, we will kill everybody in sight before this ever happens

again.” Kay? Or, you can walk out and say “We are the people who know what

happened. We, above all, know what it feels like, and that we, above all, have

an obligation to fight against it.” (American Jewish woman in her sixties in

If Not Now, When?)

It is not so much that the Holocaust is given center stage in activists’ argu-

ments, but that it seems to necessarily figure in every discussion, as a kind

of disclaimer to whatever criticism of Israel will follow. Th is likely speaks

more to what Jewish dissidents have deemed the threshold of the main-

stream liberal Jewish public sphere than to the identifications of dissident

Jews themselves. Nevertheless, the work it does can, as I explain below, be

counterproductive.

Dissident Jews’ identification with other Jews through Holocaust remem-

brance, on the one hand, and identification with Palestinian victims of cur-

rent Israeli policies, on the other, has made for a version of what theologian

Marc Ellis calls the “boundary position” of Jewish life. For Ellis, however, the

“boundary position was [historically] the province of those Jews who were

fully integrated neither in Jewish nor in European society, those who lived

the tension between involvement and distance that allows for—indeed, that

makes necessary—the development and maturation of critical thought”

(1990, 53–54). While I concede the importance of the boundary position

vis-à-vis political and religious power as Ellis advocates, I remain uncom-

fortable with the implicit assumption that the boundary is necessarily to be

found squarely between two positions, producing a neat binary. What I am

arguing for is the creative and engaged deployment of several boundaries,

not just one. One needs of course to be forged between those critical and

those less critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. But another

can also be erected between American Jewish activists and Palestinians, a

boundary that will necessarily serve as a reminder to both “sides” of who is

responsible for what—my concern here being Jewish Americans’ awareness

of complicity with the mechanisms through which Palestinians continue to


live under occupation. Th e drawing of this second boundary would, the hope

is, then reinforce the link between Jewish Americans and Israelis, further

underlining both groups’ positioning within the locus of power over change

with justice.

Parallel Sufferings

Th e problem at bottom is that as human beings the Palestinians do not exist,

that is, as human beings with history, traditions, society, suff erings, and am-

bitions like all other people. (Said 2004, 180)

. . . our cultural legacies are parallel, reflections from opposite sides of the

same mirror, and thus inextricably glued together. (Rothchild 2007, 11)

By highlighting Jewish Holocaust suff ering, dissident Jews juxtapose Pales-

tinian suff ering with historic Jewish suff ering, calling for equal recognition for

both. Although with this juxtaposition a link back to the history of the 1940s

is made, it is not made to the establishment of the state of Israel envisioned

and planned as a Jewish-only nation-state whose birth as such catalyzed

what was to become the Palestinian catastrophe (nakba) and the massive

Palestinian suff ering that has since ensued. Rather, discussion turns to an

(apparently) disconnected “sin” perpetrated by a force identifiable only by

its human rights violations, to which the now strong Jewish community can

attend, as a humanitarian aid worker might attend to a malnourished child

(Malkki 1996). In other contexts in which similar appeals have been made at

the level of generalized human suff ering, it is by now widely accepted that the

eff ect of such a discourse is often to depoliticize the cause of that suff ering.

Th e idea is that, because as Jews we know what suff ering is, and we know you

suff ered and we are now well, we have an obligation to help you.

Th e argument that necessarily follows is then that responsibility stems

from Jews’ self-appointed role as guardians against holocausts of all kinds,

with Jewish identity reformulated as blossoming from a position of strength

and security (Habib 2007). At best, Jews and Palestinians are most often por-

trayed as “joined at the hip,” having a “common story” and sharing “the same

fate,” much as Nathan Irwin Huggins described the relationship between


whites and blacks in the United States (McCarthy 2002, 636). But this sutur-

ing of suff ering, this tracing of commonality, falls short of recognizing what

may be politically necessary: causality.

Dissent against mainstream liberal Jewish support for Israel’s policies as

one basis for a new self-identification as Jews seems today to necessitate that

dissenting Jews find another formula within which to maintain solidarity

with other American Jews—a formula that will be legible and acceptable

to them within certain imaginative horizons. To date, that formula has not

managed to place “the Holocaust in its historical framework,” which would

liberate “Israel from the throes of redemption, a function it cannot fulfill”

(Ellis 1990, 54–55). Th e politically powerful (vis-à-vis the American public)

choice some American Jews make to organize their dissent along the lines

of their identities as Jews thus enables some of the very mechanisms of their

failure, at the same time as it emerges as the only possible avenue for mobi-

lization against this injustice in this moment.

Humanizing the Enemy, Dehistoricizing Injustice

. . . it may even be possible to see the face of the Palestinian “enemy” as equally

human and equally entitled to what we would want for ourselves and our

Israeli brothers and sisters. (Rothchild 2007, 238)

Dissident Jews’ alternative, dissenting identity is not only framed in opposition

to the mainstream. It is also formulated with a basis in principles of “Jewish

humanism” (Rothchild 2007), that is, in principles of justice and equality.55 We

often hear that, for example, “to be Jewish in America [has] meant being an

outsider and a survivor as well as a defender of the disenfranchised” (Rothchild

2007, 4–5). Th ough Jewish humanism may have long-standing historical roots,

in the contemporary legal-political climate, it takes the form of a discourse

of human rights, producing an even, dehistoricized plane on which (Jewish

and Palestinian) humans should engage in practices of “mutual acceptance,”

“tolerance,” and “dialogue.”56 Two of the most prevalent ways this framing takes

place, as parallel past suff ering and through a language of human rights, are

also the elements of this solidarity that most distance it from the reparations

debates, both based on the blind spot known as historical injustice.57


One difficulty lies in the dual directions in which Jewish solidarity must

be forged, two directions that interestingly parallel the directions in which

witnessing must be aimed as part of traveling solidarity activism, and that

underline the problem of triangulating between perpetrator and victim.

Th e first is the direction of the Palestinians, and the second is that of other

American Jews “back home.” With Palestinians, on the one hand, solidarity

is expressed through the immense narrative attention paid to current (since

1967) violations suff ered by Palestinians on a daily basis under occupation.

Th is discourse, informed by a more palatable language of human rights,

delves deep into the details of the Palestinian experience of occupation,

down to the minutia of how many hours an elderly Palestinian woman may

have to wait at a checkpoint, not knowing whether or not she will be allowed

through. Unlike the post–Cold War language of reconciliation and amending

historical crimes as Barkan describes it—a language that explicitly aims at

righting historical wrongs—the focus here is on “the loss of political free-

dom, personal liberty, cultural identity, and human rights” (2000, 317) in a

synchronous historical void.

Solidarity with other American Jews, on the other hand, is expressed

through recognition of Jewish suff ering at the hands of the Nazis. Drawing

on Novick’s argument that, in the 1980s and 1990s, “as large numbers of

American Jews no longer saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in black-and-

white terms, the Holocaust off ered a substitute symbol of infinitely greater

moral clarity” (1999, 168–69), we come to see how this is the case precisely

because Israel has in recent decades become such a point of contention

among American Jews. Th at the Holocaust begs to be invoked in this context

shifts the focus of the conversation to one of comparative—finally equal, and

at best “intertwined”—historical suff ering that seems to preclude the pos-

sibility of recognizing the complicity of the Zionist project with Palestinian

suff ering in the first place.

By way of concluding, I want to return once more to the reference I made

in Section IV to Richard Rorty’s hopeful but only selectively useful, I think,

formulation of solidarity. Rorty posits a version of solidarity that should be

strengthened by its appeal to specificity, so that “‘one of us’ means something

smaller and more local than the human race” since “‘because she is a human

being’ is a weak, unconvincing explanation of a generous action” (1999, 191).


Th e kind of human camaraderie Rorty describes may characterize solidarities

felt, say, by Puerto Rican nationalists or Brazilian landless workers who fly to

Palestine to stand in solidarity with fellow victims of imperialist aggression.

On the one hand, for Jewish dissidents triangulating between identification

as perpetrators and victims—sometimes joining the Palestinians as victims

of the Israeli state’s hijacking and monopolization of suff ering58—this ac-

count makes some sense. On the other hand, when activists slide across to

Palestinians’ “victim” end of the spectrum, the “us” is expanded to such a

universalizing extent that the humanity joining them (re)emerges a drained,

pale version of its original self, now emptied of the political analysis required

for what would count as recognition of historical injustice.

My concern thus lies less with Rorty’s notion of specificity than with

two other assumptions underlying his point: First, that the will to political

engagement can and should derive only from the “victims’” safe subsump-

tion under the “one of us” umbrella. And second, that that engagement need

be explained as an explicitly “generous” action. Rather, it is precisely partial

identification by Americans (and American Jews) with the Palestinians as

“one of us” that sets the conditions of the movement’s limitations: Shared re-

sponsibilities between activists and direct “perpetrators” in the United States

and Israel are in this way glossed over, obfuscating what will, in the end, need

to be a series of explicitly ungenerous battles—to be waged “at home” in the

United States and Israel, and to be felt, the hope is, “out there.”

{

n o t e s

Th is article is a combined meditation on several papers presented over the past year at the

Annual Conference of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., Novem-

ber 29, 2007; at the Annual Graduate Student Conference titled “Solidarities through History”

organized by the Center for International History at Columbia University, March 30, 2007; at

the 7th Annual Graduate Humanities Forum Conference titled “Travel” in Philadelphia at the

University of Pennsylvania, February 22–23, 2007; and at the First North American Conference

on Radicalism—Global Radicalisms: Beyond Left and Right, organized by the new Journal for the

Study of Radicalism in East Lansing, Michigan, at Michigan State University, January 25–27, 2007.

It also draws from a longer paper written in the context of a course with David Scott at Columbia


on reparations, titled “Culture, Politics, Ethics” (2007). I would like first to thank Professor Scott

for his many incisive comments and suggestions along the way. Extended conversations with

Lisa Bhungalia, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Bruce Robbins have also been invaluable in the develop-

ment of this project. All shortcomings are, of course, my own.

1. Th is passage is from an email written by a 22-year-old woman named Rachel Corrie.

It was written in the spring of 2003, about a month before she was killed by the Israeli

military in Gaza. She was a student from Olympia, Washington, and had gone to Gaza

as a volunteer with the ISM. She made her way into the American papers when an Israeli

military bulldozer drove over her twice as she stood in front of a Palestinian home to

prevent it from being destroyed (Stohlman and Aladin 2003, 169). For more details, see

also Anonymous (2003) and Rickman and Viner (2006).

2. “Vicarious responsibility” can be compared with, but is not necessarily the same as,

Elazar Barkan’s concept of “liberal guilt,” for which he provides a brief and useful geneal-

ogy (2000, 315).

3. Questions within this project were provoked by work done in part on solidarity in the

Americas, which took off in the 1980s. Although geographer Juanita Sundberg laments

that “we know little about what moves people to stand in solidarity in the Americas,” we

know even less about Americans’ solidarity work in Palestine. How, it is worth asking,

“do the embodied performances of solidarity activists, who hail from diff erent social,

economic, and geographic locations, simultaneously counter and (re)inscribe the power

inequalities that are constitutive of those diff erences?” (2007, 148).

4. My decision to focus on Jewish Americans arises in part from the fact that the recent

publication of several works on this issue has renewed public interest in critical Jewish

stances on Israel. Th is paper is also inspired by and seeks to build upon very recent work

in the making by anthropologists Avram Bornstein (2007) and Jasmin Habib (2007), who

look at the aff ective element of transnational “direct action” solidarity work with the

Palestinians and at dissident Jewish positions and identifications, respectively. Shatz’s

Prophets Outcast (2004), Kushner and Solomon’s Wrestling with Zion (2003), Rothchild’s

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams (2007), and Habib’s Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes

of National Belonging (2004) are but a few examples. See also Gordon (2005) and Niva

(1990).

5. In the words of Abi, a compañera and former U.S. prisoner of conscience (POC) in the

movement to close the School of the Americas, the conundrum is this: “How can we

(POCs) be in solidarity when others have convinced us, even subconsciously, of our own

sainthood? How can we (as US activists) be in solidarity when we see those in Latin

America as removed and special because of what they’ve been through?” (quoted in

Koopman 2008b, 11).

6. Th e “with” and the “to” seem mutually exclusive: is there some way for the attention to

particularity in reparations dynamics to inform the willingness of individuals to put

themselves “on the line” in direct action solidarity work?

7. Most of the reparations literature relies on a baseline understanding of what social

formations can engage in the politics of reparations, especially on the side of the


perpetrators. Whether stated explicitly or not, most have supported the notion of some

kind of constitutional continuity (see for example McCarthy 2002, 636; Th ompson 2002;

Barkan 2000, 317). Th ompson, for instance, argues that the state of Athens cannot apolo-

gize to or off er reparations for the Helots because the state of Athens no longer exists.

In the case of Israel/Palestine, the atrocity (the Palestinian nakba) took place in the mo-

ment of the birth of a new constitutional order, and the solidarity activists—Americans,

French, British, Canadian—may never have had anything to do with that state. In some

sense, many American Jews are a diff erent version of the immigrant-citizens figured in

these arguments about constitutional continuity, except they do not enter their respon-

sibilities spatially/legally but rather by birth into a certain “family” (or nation) of Jews.

8. As early as 1984, writing about the plight of the Vietnamese boat people, “Foucault set

forth some general reflections on the contemporary proliferation of activist projects

carried out by ‘an international citizenry’ whose claims were not legitimized by govern-

ments, political constituencies, or even ideological programs in the typical sense, but

rather by a ‘certain shared difficulty in accepting what is happening’ ” (McKee 2007,

327–28).

9. Th e most recent example of a fruitful series of such debates is the groundbreaking deci-

sion by the Australian government on January 30, 2008, to issue a formal apology to the

Aborigines, “aimed at the ‘Stolen Generations’—Aboriginal children taken from their

parents to be raised by white families” (BBC News 2008).

10. At a 2004 conference in Bethlehem, one solidarity activist explained, “For those who

are here in solidarity with the Palestinian people, the Occupation is the epitome of the

world that has been constructed and a glimpse of the world that has yet to come. . . . It

is the symbol of segregation, injustice, apartheid” (Fuentes 2004, 9). Like transnational

solidarity in the Americas, it would seem, Palestine solidarity activism “is envisaged

as activism in one location—geographical, socio-economic, political—that works to

‘defend the interests, rights, and identities’ of people in other locations (Passy 2001, 5–6;

Olesen 2005)” (Sundberg 2007, 147).

11. In the period between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the events of September 11,

2001, human rights became the dominant moral narrative by which world politics was

organized. “Inspired by the momentous political and cultural transformations taking

place at the time,” writes McLagen, “from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the spread of

global communications technologies, promoters of human-rights discourse optimisti-

cally predicted that a transnational public sphere dedicated to democratic values would

emerge” (2007, 304).

12. Bornstein traces this back through the broader history of the global justice movement:

“Very briefly and in gross terms, when the US became the hegemonic center of empire,

small wars and ‘free’ trade broke out, (including in Palestine,) driving many activists

together into today’s global justice movement. Within this larger movement is an End-

the-Occupation movement, including Christian Peacemaker Teams (1995), the Israeli

Committee Against House Demolitions (1998), and Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch

(2001). In the summer 2001, with creativity and courage, ISM leaders were able to tap

into this larger international network of activists at a time when the peace process had


collapsed and the lack of hope among Israelis and Palestinians was becoming desper-

ate” (Bornstein 2007, 3–4). For histories of the movement see also Ekin (1979), Seitz

(2003), Akawi et al. (2004).

13. Th is is perhaps commonsensical—and characteristic of solidarity movements within

the Americas as well. In North American solidarity with Latin America, for example,

“the self-sacrifice of liberty in this case does lead to a larger public self,” writes Koop-

man (2008b, 10). Assumptions underlying the proverbial “street cred” gained by putting

oneself on the line in these movements are what interest me here.

14. Th ere is still much debate about why people from diff erent countries joined the legions

they did during the Spanish Civil War. See Rosenstone (1967) and Richardson (1976).

15. Whether or not a direct relationship can be traced, some of the parallels are worth

noting. One is that, as in Palestine, in Mississippi that summer three civil rights activists

were murdered, two of whom were white (Jewish, in fact). Although activists traveled

to raise awareness about others’ suff ering, their deaths in both contexts may have done

more to raise awareness about the suff ering of activists themselves than of the people

with whom they stood “in solidarity.” Commenting on the frustrations he faced in mak-

ing his film Freedom Summer: Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed America (2008),

director Marco Williams explains: “When I decided to make this film, I thought that I

was going to be able to use the day that these three guys went missing to tell the story

of the eff orts of black civil rights workers and leaders—the grassroots movement of

Mississippi. . . . But the minute you start talking about the white kids who went down

to Mississippi, and the minute you start talking about the white guys who get killed in

Mississippi, that becomes the story. I tried to bury the lead, as they say in journalists’

terms. I tried to make the disappearance of the three guys the middle of the story, not

the most significant moment. But I actually got caught in the same trap. It’s now the

tease. It opens the story. And in fact, it is the story. Th at’s why America cared about this

moment. So it became much more challenging for me to still make sure people knew

that there were many whites who were committed to the cause, but at that moment in

our history, it was the eff orts of black Americans that was making the diff erence.”

16. Especially geared toward Latin America, North American “delegation” solidarities have

come in the form of School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) and the Colombia Support

Network (CSN), for instance, the latter of which has, since 1988, taken “groups of Colom-

bia activists to visit various threatened communities across the country. Th ese trips give

activists an eyewitness view of the violence being waged on the people of Colombia,”

writes their official website, “supported by U.S. aid, and motivate them to come back to

the U.S. and work to stop aggression against the Colombian people” (CSN 2008).

17. Alice Rothchild, like many others, notes having been influenced by the emergence of

the new historians (2007, 10). It is interesting that in this same period the historians’

debate about World War II in Germany kicked off . McCarthy tells us that with the rise of

the historians’ debate in the mid-1980s “in addition to ‘normalizing’ and ‘historicizing’

the Holocaust . . . historical work from this quarter also promoted a shift in perspective

from solidarity with the victims of Nazism to solidarity with the valiant German troops

fighting on the Eastern front and with ordinary Germans suff ering through the war’s


grim end” (2002, 625). In Israel, the “new historians” wrote controversial and ground-

breaking revisionist histories of the years around 1948, bringing to light for the first time

in Israeli historiography the role played by Jews in the demise of the Palestinians.

18. According to Jewish historian Harold Torper (as reported in Habib 2004), the changing

relationship of Jews to Israel can be understood in three rough periods: Th e first (“the

classical Zionist era”) saw significant support for and pride in Israel’s achievements.

Th e second ( from 1967 to 1982) was characterized by diaspora Jews’ celebration of

Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967 and subsequent increased eff orts by Jewish

community organizations to raise funds for projects throughout Israel. During this mo-

ment, “Any criticism of Israel by non-Jews was characterized as anti-Semitism; Jews who

uttered the same criticisms were accused of self-hatred” (165). Th e third era (“the era of

fragmentation”) emerged with the Israeli war in 1982 with Lebanon, mounting tensions

with the Palestinians and the beginnings of the “who is a Jew” debate. Jews’ perspectives

in North America shifted vis-à-vis the Israeli state toward increasingly polarized views.

Getting diaspora Jews’ attention, Israeli peace groups such as Peace Now and Yesh Gvul

(Th ere is a Limit) began to demonstrate dissent publicly and with far reach. Now, Harold

Torper argues, “the new generation of Jews (Jewish youth in particular) may no longer

be ready to support Israel.” Explaining why this may be the case, he suggests that “this

group is temporally removed from the crises of the Second World War and the formative

years of Israel as a state struggling to survive. Moreover, not all of them have endured

the anti-Semitism that their parents or grandparents experienced” (165–66).

19. Th us, upon publishing Th e Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and becoming involved in the

academic boycott of Israel, Ilan Pappe was eff ectively ousted from Israel and moved to

the United Kingdom (Paul 2007). Benny Morris, for his part, famously “revisited” the

Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

20. For an account of the beginnings of the ISM in particular, and of its precursor, Interna-

tionals in Palestine, see Seitz (2003).

21. Within the movement, the word “international” has been used to identify any foreigner,

generally excluding the Palestinian diaspora, who travels to Palestine for solidarity work

with the Palestinians. From here on, I will drop the quotation marks and simply refer

to them as internationals. As I discuss in following sections, internationals has recently

been replaced with “human rights workers,” which, I argue, has important implications

for the extent to which responsibility continues to be posited as a crucial component

of the movement.

22. Crucially, although by 2003, ISM had “support groups” in some 35 countries, Seitz also

found that high percentages (up to 70 percent) of new ISM volunteers arrived in the

Bethlehem area’s Bayt Sahur “with no prior connection to any external group” (2003,

64). One question to ask is, then, what does this mean about the extent to which Pales-

tine is conceived of as a “theater for individual experience” separated from notions of

political organizing altogether?

23. “In the eighteen months between December 1936 and June 1938,” writes Rosenstone,

“some 3,000 Americans sailed the Atlantic and then crossed the Pyrenees to lend their

strength to the fighting forces of the Spanish Republic” (1967, 327). We also know from


Hoar that “Two-thirds of the group were in their twenties, the greatest numbers came

from New York, California, Pennsylvania and Illinois although 42 other states were

represented; nearly a third were Jewish. Th e two most ‘productive’ occupations were

seamen and students while there was, among others, a roughly equivalent representa-

tion of artists and truck drivers.” (1970, 118).

24. My first reaction when I talked with these people was that they seemed a relatively

random group. Th ey seemed like people who, outside of Palestine, would have very

little to do with each other. But something else struck me even more: most of them

were well educated and more or less news-savvy. So they were well aware that their

own governments in the West provided financial and even military support for the

Israeli occupation. Like other activist impulses, solidarity with the Palestinians can

be and often is satisfied closer to home. Th ere are “divest from Israel” campaigns to

sign onto, there are demonstrations to march in, there are teach-ins to attend, there

are strongly worded letters to write. So why pay $1,000 and fly halfway around the

world, risking injury and even death, to prevent a single Palestinian home from being

demolished, instead of targeting the governments and companies that make that

demolition possible?

25. One central question leading out of this section into the next is thus: what does it mean,

in light of the great variety of auspices under which people in America and Europe or-

ganize against the occupation and its correlates, to do so as an American Jew? For links

between this solidarity movement and the anti-war movement, and for a brief explora-

tion of the European countries from which many delegations originate, see Aguiton

(2004). For connections between people participating in the transnational solidarity

movement with the Palestinians by traveling to Palestine, and North American solidari-

ties with Latin America, see also Sara Koopman’s work on the SOAW: “Th is movement

is a hub and spokes network of groups involved in many other peace and solidarity

projects. Activists from this movement struggle against the prison-industrial complex,

against welfare ‘reform,’ and for low-income housing. Activists from this movement

have also fasted in front of Guantánamo, gone on peace delegations to Iran, and served

as accompaniers in Palestine” (2008a, 9).

26. Jeff Halper (born a Jewish American citizen), who moved to Israel, founded the Israeli

Committee Against House Demolitions, and stayed is a good—if extreme—example

(ICAHD 2008).

27. Th is resonates with what Colla has called spaces of “permitted protest” in the context

of Egyptian mass mobilizations (2002, 14–15).

28. According to its website, BostonoPalestine has “helped send more than forty local activ-

ists to the West Bank since 2002 for solidarity delegations and to join in nonviolent

resistance to occupation” (2008). Th ere are hundreds of such local organizations across

the United States and Canada alone (Palestine Freedom Project, database of organiza-

tions, 2006–2007). See, for example, Colorado Progressive Jewish News (CCMEP 2007),

CUPE British Columbia (2005), Florida Palestine Solidarity Network (2008), Northern

California International Solidarity Movement (2008).


29. Tacking back and forth between Palestine and Latin America, the parallels between

the performative aspects of both activisms are remarkable. Koopman describes how

in protest against the School of the Americas, “We draw lines that put us beside those

who have been killed and tortured by graduates of the school. We mourn, and as Butler

(2004) argues, this puts us beside ourselves with anger, grief. We are beside ourselves,

with one another. Our connections cut through the fence. Our counter-topographies

cross the line, to close the school” (2008a, 5).

30. Whereas before 2000 internationals could most often be found in Ramallah, Bethlehem,

and Jerusalem, beginning in 2000 there was a surge in the number of internationals

doing solidarity work across the West Bank and Gaza (A. Bornstein 2007, 1).

31. See Bishara (2007) on Palestinian versus “international” graffiti on Israel’s “separation

barrier.” In her 2002 article “Palestinians Debate ‘Polite’ Resistance to Occupation,”

Lori Allen provides a local framework for where some of this ambivalence has come

from: “[Non-violence] has been a strategy mostly promoted by intellectuals, expatriates

and internationals working in solidarity with the Palestinians. Th is may be in part a

result of these groups’ wider awareness of, and heightened concern with, international

public opinion. Attitudes towards non-violence are largely related to how important

one considers international pressure to be. While most people recognize that global

solidarity is a good thing, and recall its importance during the first intifada, not every-

one believes it is still so relevant” (42). Th is leads to the question of the extent to which

the movement is Palestinian-led. On the ground, ambiguities of this sort have resulted

in unintended consequences from joint international-Palestinian actions: In the early

months of the second intifada, for instance, “several Israeli visits and demonstrations

coordinated by Israeli leftist groups . . . resulted in a heavy-handed military response

against [the Palestinian village of] al-Khadir, which was already feeling the strain of

encirclement. Al-Khadir had some serious questions for the ISM: what would be the

aftermath of long-term presence?” (Seitz 2003, 55–56). Th e ISM’s intervention in the

siege of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity is most famously what earned the movement

“considerable criticism.” Another important though seldom-discussed fact is that on

occasion internationals, too, have come away from solidarity trips to Palestine with

disappointments. Author, journalist, and cofounder of Israel’s Alternative Information

Center (AIC) Michael (Mikado) Warschawski suggests that “many internationals have

visited Palestine and come away feeling that the relationship is not reciprocal, that the

Palestinian struggle looks only to itself, and that the activists in the Palestinian national

movement do not understand the importance of the huge global anti-war movement

for their own cause” (2004, 143).

32. It will become important in the next section on American Jewish solidarity that guilt,

unlike responsibility, has not been a feature shared discursively by all activists, rather

that seems to be held in monopoly by Jewish Americans (A. Bornstein 2007, 6–7).

33. A group of Israeli Jews descended from families ousted from al-Khalil/Hebron during

the 1929 massacre there provides an interesting parallel to the “not in my name” mode

of appeal. Over the past decade or so, these descendants “have launched a publicity

campaign contesting the right of the 450 current settlers [in Hebron] to speak in the


name of the former Jewish community. Th ey are demanding instead that the enclave

be plucked from the heart of Hebron, a city of 120,000 Palestinians” (Sipress 1997). In an

even more ironic reversal, the settlers in Hebron against whom Hebron’s descendants

are campaigning are, to a large extent, citizens of the United States and Canada.

34. Take, for example, Kvisa Shchora (Black Laundry). Th ey are a “direct action group of

lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders and others against the occupation and for social

justice. Kvisa Shchora tries to stress the connection between diff erent forms of oppres-

sion—our own oppression as lesbians, gays and transpeople enhances our solidarity

with members of other oppressed groups” (Kvisa Shchora 2008).

35. For one of the more recent discussions of the implications of this phenomenon in the

Middle East, see Joseph Massad’s new monograph titled Desiring Arabs (2007).

36. See also Mireille Mendes France (2004).

37. Witnessing is a pillar in other American solidarity movements as well, as Sara Koopman

has shown from within the movement to close down the U.S. School of the Americas:

“We are transformed by witnessing, by mourning,” she explains in a forthcoming article

on the movement (2008a, 16).

38. At least two volumes of writings of activists who have gone to Palestine have also been

compiled by Sandercock et al. (2004) and Stohlman and Aladin (2003).

39. On April 11, 2003, 22-year-old British citizen and ISM volunteer Tom Hurndall was shot

in the head by an IDF soldier in Rafah as he helped accompany Palestinian children out

of harm’s way. Tom died on Janurary 13, 2004, after remaining in a coma for eight months

as a result of his wounds (Arrindell 2004).

40. Part of what makes activists’ willingness to sacrifice their lives in Palestine significant

is that in the end it does not fit into the model of what a “rooted cosmopolitan” should

be, according to sociologist of social movements Sydney Tarrow (2005). I am suggesting

that to sacrifice one’s life for someone else’s cause, having traveled to someone else’s

land, undermines the idea of “rootedness” altogether. Th rough solidarity travel, should

these activists be classified as “prosthetic” nationalists instead? Here we encounter

another problem of definition. For theorist of the nation Benedict Anderson, there is an

absolute and very basic diff erence between the cosmopolitan and the nationalist: the

nationalist is willing to sacrifice her life, whereas her cosmopolitan counterpart is not

(Anderson 1991, 141). Anderson’s definition of the nationalist, then, does not allow for a

cosmopolitan, transnational nationalism.

41. Avram Bornstein writes that, as “Katz (1988) points out in the context of criminal activ-

ity, taking risks in the face of danger gives one street credibility, a kind of power over

those who do not risk. Th is idea can be seen in Hegel’s discussion of lordship and bond-

age in which the master is master because he is willing to risk death, while the slave

clings to material safety. In this case, there are at least two relational others for whom

activists may demonstrate their willingness to risk danger (whether they enjoy it or not)

and, thus, become masters: for Israelis who maintain and support the Occupation, and

for audiences of comrades and potential supporters, many of whom are at home” (A.

Bornstein 2007, 6).


42. Th e latter, writes Robinson, occurs “when the two principal means of regulating cor-

porate power in twentieth-century labor markets—states and unions—are less able, or

less willing, to perform that function eff ectively” (2007, 202). It is possible that the most

recent burst of anti-occupation organizing emerged (in 2000) just as there was a sense

among people in the United States and elsewhere that the Palestinians, as compared

with the first intifada, were less able to perform the function of resisting eff ectively. Th at,

in any case, is how some Palestinians interpret their international “friends” arrival on

their shores (Seitz 2003, 61).

43. Activist Nahla Chahal explains, “Over the years we have . . . developed the concept of

the ‘triangle,’ in which the internationals are one element. We are not trying to invent

a role for internationals, but to provide an answer to a real need. In this conflict there

is too much passion, too much sensitivity, too many temptations to hide and too many

‘tactics’: the internationals can help minimize these aspects” (in Warschawski 2004,

144).

44. Th is brings us to the question of the extent to which reparations can be deployed as

a kind of historical “sealant.” I am reminded of McKee’s discussion of Foucault: “Th e

challenge posed by Foucault was thus how to mobilize civic passions against practices

deemed ‘intolerable’ without assuming a horizon of satisfaction” (2007, 328). Should

we see reparations as productive—just as they break out of an older imaginative

paradigm—of a new troubling “horizon of satisfaction” around injustice?

45. For an extensive discussion of the drawbacks of North American activist guilt, see also

Koopman (2008b, 21).

46. Of course, these contradictions, this ambiguity is not unique to this particular move-

ment nor to the Middle East. See also Koopman (2008a, 2008b).

47. Although much of the content of initial online reports and journal entries finds its

way into “live” report-backs, the vastly diff erent forms these two phenomena represent

necessarily mean they are met with diff erent “results,” have diff erent symbolic logics

as media events, or nonevents, and are productive of diff erent facets of the politics of

this movement. As this essay is more interested in the discursive regime to which the

written, textual narrative online practices give rise, there is still much ground to be

covered to understand the various characteristics of the movement.

48. For off ering clarity in a moment of haziness around this question, I want to thank David

Scott. In the spirit of taking responsibility, I should note that where I have not finally

managed to make solidarity do the conceptual work I ask of it is, however, entirely my

own responsibility.

49. Rothchild observes that she has “witnessed a virtual explosion of US Jewish organiza-

tions working for a just peace in Israel and Palestine, in Boston and across the US . . .

our Jewish dissent stems from an intensive desire for justice and for a democratic future

for Israeli and Palestinian people” (2007, 15).

50. Widespread recruiting for the Birthright Israel program across North American Univer-

sity campuses is but one example. See www.birthrightisrael.com.


51. Th is relates, of course, to assumptions about what can and will bring about change—my

assumption, informed by the reparations debates, being that the perpetrator-victim

binary can actually be useful to pushing forward a truly reconciliatory, just politics.

52. It is worth listening to Novick: “Th ere are two separate balance sheets. One has to do

with the consequences for American Jewry of putting the Holocaust at the center of its

self-understanding and self-representation; the other with the consequences of height-

ened awareness of the Holocaust for American society at large” (1999, 6).

53. In a 2005 review of two recent books on Jewish resistances to Zionism, Neve Gordon

discusses why reference to the Holocaust is so necessary in this kind of interaction:

“Th e Holocaust, which has been used by some as an ideological tool to justify Israel’s

egregious violations of human rights, at the same time has informed the moral judg-

ment of many of Israel’s sharpest critics” (2005, 103).

54. Th is identification of national/ethnic identity with historical consciousness of the Holo-

caust is reminiscent of the discussion of Habermas’s argument about German national

identity that we find in McCarthy’s work: Habermas argued that “German national

identity was inseparable from its historical consciousness and that any major shifts in

German public memory would leave their mark upon German self-understanding, with

practical-political consequences. If those shifts were in the direction of denying and

repressing the past instead of confronting and dealing with it, they would likely lead to

forms of ‘acting out’ rather than ‘working through,’ symptoms of which could already be

discerned in German public life, most notably in various expressions of mounting xeno-

phobia. For what was at issue here was not a temporary aberration but a catastrophe

with deep roots in German history and culture” (McCarthy 2002, 626–27).

55. Th e twentieth century off ers several examples of how this Jewish humanism played

out in American Jewish political engagement. It is worth noting that Jews were among

the largest groups represented as both American volunteers in Spain’s International

Brigades (Jews were nearly one third) in the 1930s and in the journey down south of

northern whites during Freedom Summer’s 1964 Civil Rights voting campaign in Mis-

sissippi (Jews were nearly one fourth) (Hoar 1970, 118).

56. Telling her story of “coming around” to become critical of Israel, Rothchild writes, “Per-

haps these discussions will help all of us begin the long walk to a future that is filled

with fewer demons and more possibilities for mutual acceptance and respect between

the descendants of two sons of Abraham” (2007, ix). Again, this is not unique to Jewish

activists: many others, upon returning from a delegation, remark on the “memories

of kindness and the humanity [they] witnessed among the Palestinian civilians living

under this most brutal form of occupation” (Davis 2004; emphasis mine).

57. I may run the risk here of naturalizing historical injustice for the Palestinians as Jef-

frey Alexander accuses Cathy Caruth of doing: “In keeping with the psychoanalytic

tradition . . . Caruth roots her analysis in the power and objectivity of the originating

traumatic event, explaining that ‘Freud’s intuition of, and his passionate fascination

with, traumatic experiences’ related traumatic reactions to ‘the unwitting reenactment

of an event that one cannot simply leave behind’ (Caruth 1995, 2)” (Alexander et al. 2004,

6–7). Peter Novick makes a similar point about American memory of the Holocaust:


“Characteristically, it is assumed that the Holocaust must have been traumatic. And if

it wasn’t talked about, this must have been repression” (1999, 3).

58. Alice Rothchild is one of those dissident Jews trying to complicate Israel’s apparent mo-

nopoly on suff ering: “I worry that if we as Jews do not tolerate criticism of Israeli policy,

then all Jews will be seen as culpable for whatever catastrophes lie ahead. Surely history

will teach us that Israel cannot claim a moral dispensation because of past suff ering,

and then behave immorally, that the US government will not always be there off ering

large amounts of economic and military aid, that misusing the term anti-Semitism to

characterize criticism of Israeli behavior ultimately renders the concept meaningless”

(2007, 237).

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The Joys and Dangers of Solidarity in Palestine: Prosthetic Engagement in an Age of Reparations

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