The Israeli Radical Left. Fiona Wright
friends and family, and in the banal forms of action and communication that constitute the often invisible backdrop to what we generally recognize as activism. It is an analysis of ethics—of how these activists respond to their circumstances with care and attention—as much as it is of politics—of how structures of power and inequality shape one’s capacities for response in the first place. As begins to emerge in the scene that I described at the beginning of this chapter, taking ethical and political responsibility in contemporary Israel/Palestine entails a confrontation with the violence faced by many of its inhabitants, a confrontation that brings with it immense amounts of deliberation and anxiety, urgency and caution. These experiences seep into intersubjective relationships and into activists’ routines and ways of living, as well as find expression in moments of public protest and dissent.
While the ethical and political commitments of Jewish Israeli left radical activists are both heartfelt and in many ways all-consuming, then, they are also characterized by profound tensions and ambiguities. As Jewish citizens of the state of Israel, they occupy a position of power, both legally enshrined and socially embedded, relative to Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel/Palestine. They are also mostly highly educated, secular, and Ashkenazi (of European Jewish origin). They thus inhabit particular ethnic and class positions relative to other Israeli Jews, such as Mizrahi (in Hebrew literally “Oriental,” used to refer to Jews from non-European and often Muslim-majority countries) and Ethiopian Jews, and have historically been, and continue to be, privileged by the Israeli settler-colonial project.1 Jewish Israeli left radical activists act, therefore, in response to the oppression of others but as members of the dominating and colonizing group. They routinely find themselves politically pitted against loved ones and coworkers, as well as having to challenge the ways in which this position of power has been ingrained in their own patterns of thinking, acting, and relating to people around them. There is no simple way to continually try to remember, and to make other Israelis aware of, the systematic violence exercised toward Palestinians, when one also lives a life made “normal”—made livable—by a system of governance based on this violence. Practicing solidarity and embodying dissent are therefore neither straightforward nor self-evident but rather involve compromise, disappointment, and even, as I will explore, complicity.
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The gray zones and ambiguities foregrounded in my analysis reflect and emerge from how I carried out ethnographic research with Israeli left radical activists, the empirical starting points of that research, and the ideological assumptions it both carries and unsettles. Having planned a research project on human rights and medical ethics in Israel/Palestine, I began my fieldwork by volunteering at Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), the NGO introduced in the above opening scene. PHRI was one of the handful of Israeli organizations that cooperated with the United Nations Fact Finding Mission led by Judge Richard Goldstone in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 attacks on Gaza in “Operation Cast Lead,” providing his team with information and testimony about the effects of the Israeli army’s actions on Palestinians’ access to health care during the conflict. The organization is part of the community of critical Israeli human rights groups that in the last two to three decades has persistently campaigned against the Israeli state’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as within the “green line” (the 1949 armistice lines and internationally recognized borders of Israeli territory). As such, it has been caught up in the general attack on the Israeli radical left by right-wing and nationalist Jewish and Israeli groups who police, in various ways, the legitimate bounds of public criticism of Zionism and of the state. While best known for its work on human rights violations against Palestinians, though, PHRI also campaigns on the rights of others in Israel/Palestine, primarily for non-Jewish and non-Palestinian migrant workers and refugees. A major part of this work is the open health clinic that PHRI runs from its offices in Jaffa, which mainly catered, at the time of my fieldwork, to refugees from Eritrea and Sudan. It was in relation to this work that I, as a researcher-volunteer with no medical training, was initially able to get involved with the organization.
Unlike the desk work of doing research, writing reports, speaking to patients in Gaza on the phone, or negotiating with army bureaucrats on behalf of those patients, which the staff in the shtachim (territories) department carried out, just down the corridor PHRI’s other busiest department was caught up in a daily struggle to provide refugees with the most basic care and support.2 Each afternoon, up to one hundred refugees arrived for basic medical attention in the Open Clinic, often queuing up for hours before it opened to make sure they would see a doctor. Volunteer receptionists, nurses, and physicians provided the basis of this under-resourced and struggling facility, and I was able to start right away behind the reception desk, helping to sort files and receive patients a couple of times each week. There I started to learn not only about the behind-the-scenes activities that produced the official reports and press releases on human rights violations but also about the community of refugees and migrant workers and the odd Palestinian living without a permit in Israel, who relied on the rudimentary services provided by organizations like PHRI and the network of activists that coalesced around them. I started going with these activists to other sites of protest and organization outside the office, while at the same time helping with research for a report about food insecurity in Gaza that the shtachim department wanted to produce. I quickly came to understand that the small collection of human rights NGOs in Israel went hand in hand with its equally marginal radical leftist activist groups. Staff and volunteers were also activists, and I was likely to encounter many of the same faces whether in PHRI’s offices or at a demonstration against the occupation. Although some in PHRI were not active in this radical scene, and talked of a more humanitarian motivation as well as more mainstream liberal political convictions, this kind of human rights work was, for the most part, tightly intertwined with a stringent activist critique of state violence and militarism.
My fieldwork thus emerged from these mixed beginnings—with ideologies and motivations of human rights, humanitarianism, anarchism, socialism, feminism, and even liberal Zionism, all implicated in the leftist community I came to consider as my “field.” It is for this reason that I use the term “radical left” to refer to the activism described in this ethnography. While most studies focus on groups clearly defining themselves as anti-Zionist (Elian Weizman 2017), “joint” or Arab-Jewish (U. Gordon 2010; Hallward 2009a; Koensler 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2009; Svirsky 2012), antioccupation (Lamarche 2010; Ziv 2010), or as focusing on human rights (Dudai 2009; Hajjar 1997, 2001) or peace (Hallward 2009b; Helman 1999; Hermann 2009; Norell 2002), I worked with a variety of people and groups who sometimes disagreed with each other on these identifications but often found themselves cooperating nevertheless. A sense of emergency about the need to act, as well as increasing attacks on these groups by right-wing groups in Israel, meant that there was as much pragmatic cooperation as there was debate and division over political differences. I therefore use the loose definition “left radical activism” to delimit the field of my research, which refers here to those who actively challenge the colonial and militarist violence of the Israeli state, even as the ways they do so may differ significantly. It is an ethnographic term, from the Hebrew haSmol haRadikali (the radical left) that was most often used by activists to describe themselves (although others in Israel mostly refer to it as haSmol haKitsoni [the extreme left]). While there are some mobilizations in Israel toward “leftist” politics in the socioeconomic sense—recently most notably in the social justice protests that took place in the summer of 2011—“the Left” in Israel has generally referred to the Palestinian question and an antioccupation or pro-peace position, as opposed to a more clearly exclusionary and colonial vision of the Israeli right. Although this “emic” definition of the Left traditionally includes the Israeli Labor Party, or groups such as Peace Now, these are generally excluded from my ethnography as they are seen by the activists I worked with as part of the nationalist, uncritically Zionist mainstream. Indeed, a suitable diagnostic for whether a particular group might appear within this loose definition of “left radical” activism is its stance on the attacks on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead and the later assaults of November 2012 and July–August 2014. Those who supported the government’s narrative that these assaults were both necessary and justified found themselves on clearly opposing sides of the political fence from the activists I came to know, for whom these acts constituted the pinnacle of nationalist and colonial violence (cf. Callan 2016).