The Israeli Radical Left. Fiona Wright
at a kibbutz in the south to pick up two fellow passengers, Daniella and Dagan. For most weeks of the past decade they had been visiting Palestinians in their homes in the South Hebron Hills, as part of a small circle of mainly Jewish Israeli activists who engaged in a quite different form of activism to that of Ta’ayush, but who similarly aimed to create different and anticolonial relationships with Palestinians and to strengthen their struggle against the house demolitions and expulsions. We arrived at Daniella’s home to find her angry and despondent about the situation. “I won’t go to the shelter when the siren sounds,” she said, “I’m not moving.” Refusing to be part of what she considered the collective hysteria and persistent misinformation that served to justify the killings, Daniella had come to associate the sound of the sirens with injustice and complicity. We did not have to put her statement to the test, though, as we left the kibbutz to continue our journey, before the sirens again sounded across southern parts of Israel.
I wish to focus on Daniella’s remarks here, to further elaborate on an ethic of refusing complicity that is most succinctly captured in the often-used activist slogan “not in my name.” When even the sound of sirens warning of rocket attacks becomes an object of refusal because it is a mark of complicity with a hated regime, what is being resisted is not only injustice but also one’s (bodily) inclusion as a Jewish Israeli citizen and thus incorporation into the Israeli state. “Not in my name”—lo bishmi in Hebrew—circulates as a way of refusing such incorporation particularly in times of heightened violence, perhaps, because it is in such moments that the distinctions between Jewish Israelis and Others in Israel/Palestine become even more visible than usual and sensed in auditory and other embodied ways. In such a context, the push against the claiming of Jewish Israeli subjects by the state feels increasingly urgent and complicity an ever more anxious state that activists seek to address. Thus, having analyzed the performative elements of refusing complicity in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, as described above in the actions of Ta’ayush, here I elaborate on the acute sense of complicity that is an enduring feature of Jewish Israeli activist subjectivity and that permeates motivations, experiences, and relationships within this activist community. The phenomenology of activist presence in Palestinian areas—where this sense of being implicated in the perpetration of injustice is often most clearly confronted—tells of the difficulty of inhabiting an ethical space of resistance when one’s very person has been made to represent that which one resists.
Figure 4. “Not in my name” social media profile picture. This image was posted by many activists as their profile picture on social media accounts during attacks on Gaza and afterward. Image creator unknown.
Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where considerable numbers of Jewish Israeli activists regularly protested house evictions from 2009 to 2011, was a space in which these dynamics emerged quite strikingly. Although the protests had begun in August 2009, they grew to numbers above a few dozen people only after twenty-one activists were arrested on December 10th of that year (the day internationally marked as human rights day, no less). From this date, activists were no longer allowed to protest directly outside the homes of the Palestinians; rather, they were restricted to stand and shout from a park area at the top of the street in which those homes were located. Many of the Israeli activists and the Palestinian residents were unhappy about these restrictions and continued to try to lead the protests past the lines of border police, who had also started to arrive regularly and punctually on Friday afternoons in time for the demonstrations. Some of those who had started to come to take part in the demonstrations remained in the park, however, unwilling to go with the other activists to put themselves up for arrest or to enter into direct physical confrontation with state authorities. Resentments quickly developed among some of the more experienced activists who had been coming to Sheikh Jarrah for many months by now, and had perhaps been arrested on several occasions. Many felt that the demonstrations were becoming a modish, habitual affair and disconnected from the political imperatives and strategies from which they had developed in the first place.
On one Friday afternoon in May 2010, for example, the atmosphere leading up to the demonstration was particularly tense, given events earlier in the week around Jerusalem Day, an Israeli marked holiday celebrating the “reunification” of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. In recent years, the day had become one of provocative marches of Kahanist and other right-wing and ultra-nationalist Jewish groups through the old city and of the clearing of Palestinians from its streets as well as police violence toward Palestinian protesters.5 On the bus on the way from Tel Aviv to Sheikh Jarrah, one of the experienced activists explained to newer participants what might be expected that day, as was common during those journeys. As he explained that, although the organizers were not expecting arrests or violence, there was a chance this could happen but that there was no need to be anxious, one of the other activists prompted him to tone it down a bit, that he was probably scaring people. He laughed, and continued: “This is not to worry anyone, we’re not expecting anything to happen, but in case it does just stand back and nothing will happen to you. The important thing is just to be there and to be joyful, standing together with the Palestinians there, let’s not be sad. In any case, nobody ever died from being arrested at a demonstration. Well, no Israeli.” He paused, and then added, “Well, no Jewish Israeli,” checking himself once again. The contradictions in what he had said—to stand back and not to worry, on the one hand, but to stand together with the Palestinians, on the other—were underscored by his stumbling over his words about what danger is or is not imminent, and for which kinds of subjects, in the demonstration.
Over the course of the demonstration, the political positioning of the Israeli protesters (who were the majority of participants, with only a few Palestinians and internationals taking part) further developed as an issue of tension. All the protesters remained on one side of the road in the park for some time at the beginning of the demonstration, holding their banners and chanting slogans against the evictions and against the occupation more generally. But after about half an hour a few people crossed over and started taking photographs and approaching the line of police blocking the entrance toward the houses in question. A quarrel between two of the officers and one of the activists began and soon more activists crossed the road to join the confrontation, before the organizers urged everybody to approach the police and to bring the demonstration closer to the contested area. Many of the protesters did so, mostly those more experienced or affiliated with other groups, such as Ta’ayush and Anarchists Against the Wall—the kind of activists who were interested in challenging the injustice written into Israeli law and who saw the Sheikh Jarrah evictions as a stark demonstration of that injustice. Others, however, held back and looked nervous about the unfolding confrontation, particularly as police managed to push the advancing demonstration back and were quite aggressive in the way in which they did so. One organizer stayed in the park and reassured those protesters that it was fine if they did not want to cross the road and encouraged them to chant loudly in support of those who had. At other moments, however, activists were gesturing for more people to come and join the push against the police and, at one point, one of the activists who had been arrested several times in Sheikh Jarrah and elsewhere cried out in frustration at those who stayed in the park, “OK, I see more or less the demographics here.” His remark spoke to discussions that had been going on within the organizing group and among other radical activists who were unsure about the large number of more liberal and Zionist participants in the demonstration: they were concerned that for some of those who had arrived at Sheikh Jarrah only after the outcry about the arrest of Jewish Israelis in protests there, the issue had been framed as one of a threat to Israeli democracy rather than the ongoing oppression of Palestinians.
Though these tensions often appeared around debates about ideology—Zionist versus anti-Zionist approaches to activism, for example—another way to consider them is as a struggle among the different Jewish protesters as to how far their participation in these demonstrations involved their refusal to be complicit with Israeli state violence. It recalls the effort invested also by more liberal, Zionist Israeli leftists to differentiate themselves from the settlers in the Gaza Strip, which Joyce Dalsheim describes on the peripheries of her ethnography of the latter (2011). For the left radical activists in Sheikh Jarrah who felt that civil disobedience toward the police was necessary during those