The Israeli Radical Left. Fiona Wright
army’s actions in Gaza as with the state’s actions toward the Palestinians more broadly, the Israeli radical left has increasingly found itself under attack—in both figurative and literal terms—from a largely hostile Jewish public. Actions in public spaces are regularly met with verbal abuse, spitting, or egg throwing, as well as physical assaults by other Jewish Israelis; mainstream Israeli politicians and media outlets depict non-Zionist leftists as “extremists” and “traitors,” and their protests as violent, although they predominantly are not; and NGOs that expose state violence or advocate for Palestinians’ rights have been subject to public campaigns against their work as well as proposed legislation that would cut their funding from abroad and criminalize some of their activities. Most activists I knew would readily use the word fascist to describe the nature of these mobilizations and many consciously enacted forms of self-censorship in what they publicly said or did, out of fear of potential repercussions. Whether avoiding showing the antioccupation T-shirt they were wearing on a bus on the way to a demonstration or attempting to conceal their activism or politics in the workplace, these silencings reflected the tacit or explicit consent of a broader Israeli public to the forms of violence and domination habitually exercised by military and state authorities.
Given such a polarized context, the theme of this book, an ethics of complicity, may appear out of place. The word complicity seems to signal alignment with the state regime, silence, or participation in its violence, rather than the conscientious and active struggle to challenge it with which my activist interlocutors resolutely persist. Indeed, as one (non-Israeli, non-Palestinian) attendee suggested at a talk about my research I delivered in Jerusalem, it could even be considered as “blasphemy” to use it in relation to this small and beleaguered activist community. Although I understand these misgivings, these critiques also reflect and reproduce the bifurcated imaginaries of Israeli politics sketched here that have culminated in an oppressively narrow field of possible thought and action. They tend to hold up Jewish Israeli left radical activists as heroes in a David-and-Goliath-esque scenario, or, as in another ancient metaphor, bnei haOr ubnei haChoshech (sons of the light and sons of the darkness).3 While I am sympathetic to their aims and admire their dedication, I wish to consider how this activism is subversive and challenging but also, and simultaneously, how it marks ethical and political gray zones. Without such a perspective, we risk concealing the complexity and ambivalence of this activism. As scholars and activists, we fail to grasp the contradictions and challenges entailed in mobilizing against militarist and colonial power when one is embedded in a position of relative privilege within the dominant group. I think of this activism instead as a difficult and troubled negotiation with complicity, and wish to consider the ethnographic richness of what it means to take responsibility—to live responsibility—as a challenging set of practices and not only as an abstract ethical concept.
Complicity, here, signals the fraught nature of activists’ endeavors to act differently and to affect the actions of others in Israel/Palestine.4 It refers to the ways in which activism can be constantly pulled back into violent ways of thinking, feeling, and being in relation to others, even as it attempts to depart from that violence. Following Mark Sanders, who writes of “complicities” in relation to intellectuals in apartheid South Africa (2002), I use the idea of complicity to explore the impurity of ethical and political relations and the often uncomfortable ways this makes itself felt in Jewish Israeli left radical activism. For Sanders, advocacy on behalf of racialized Others under a political system imposing such separations can be considered “responsibility-in-complicity” (11). In Sanders’ reading, complicity takes on two meanings, the distinction between which makes it possible to address one’s implication in injustice: the first meaning is a broader, existential one that harks back to Levinasian ethics, in its sketching of a generalized condition of relatedness (“folded-together-ness” [5]) among human beings that makes possible the notion of responsibility; the second is narrower and connotes particular acts (or failures to act) within historically specific situations that result in complicity with injustice, as in the more common understanding of the term (11). It is only by rejecting the possibility of separation—apartheid’s premise—and thus recognizing the more generalized notion of complicity, Sanders argues, that one can also begin to struggle against its practices of domination by way of addressing one’s own particular acts of complicity with them. The fantasy of separateness that characterized South African apartheid politics parallels, of course, a similar denial of the intimacies of violence and unequal cohabitation of Israeli Jews and Palestinians over the last century, and it is activists’ confrontations with the impossibility of separateness—between Israeli Jews and Palestinians and between Israeli Jewish citizens and Israeli state violence—that is the focus of this book. As in Sanders’ work, the idea of complicity complicates a reading of Jewish Israeli left radical activism as simply a heroic resistance purified of its implication in the forms of power and violence it aims to subvert.
Activists’ hopes and desires, their attachments to ideas of a different and more equitable life in Israel/Palestine, emerge as an integral part of their activism in this analytic of complicity. Their enduring discomfort with their own position as Jewish Israeli citizens and their attempts to refuse attachments to the Israeli state and polity even as they simultaneously underscore those very attachments mark a conflicted and an affective dimension of activist subjectivity. These aspects of activist ethics and politics cannot be explained either by a quasi-functionalist analysis of their actions (regarding whether this activism succeeds in its intended political effects) or through a discursive approach that takes activist rhetoric at its own word. Here, anthropological approaches to politics that highlight the violent and “strange intimacy between the state and the people” (Aretxaga 2003: 403), often informed by psychoanalytic theory, help to situate the political subjectivities of activists and others in more ambivalent terms. In this scholarship even when the state is revealed as a “fictional reality” (401), it maintains its sovereign, psychic hold through the anxiety produced over its secret and magical qualities (Taussig 1992, 1997) and even as people cynically critique its power (Navaro-Yashin 2002). Thus in Shattering Silence, Begoña Aretxaga’s ethnography of Catholic women in Northern Ireland and their contributions to the nationalist movements against British rule in the 1980s and 1990s, the “liberating effect of political action” (1997: 116) is not the negation of power but rather the psychological and emotional relief that comes from the troubled engagement with its very structures that emerged in women’s activism. In this way, sovereignty, whether of the state or other oppressive forces, is seen not as separate from the desires, ideals, or acts of resistance by those who challenge it but as an integral part of the very constitution of those phenomena.
Experiences of ambivalence and fractures of consciousness involved in activism and protest are thus central for political anthropologists who wish to study the nuances of how power reproduces itself in the face of constant struggle. In this vein, recent studies have considered the interstices of affect, emotion, and language in political activism in different ethnographic contexts. Deborah Gould, in her work on the American ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) movement against the AIDS crisis, writes about the affects of sadness and grief as central elements through which “the boundaries of ‘the political’ are continually made, unmade, and remade” (2009: 4). She argues that the mobilization of emotion can be a central factor in the intensification of political struggle and a key site through which to study activism (29). Pushing this perspective somewhat, Athena Athanasiou (2005), Naisargi Dave (2012), and Eirini Avramopoulou (2012) have all argued that affect marks the limits, as well as the potential, for political contestation in ways that invite us to attend to power’s enduring psychic grasp in the moments when these are named or exposed by those challenging sovereign subjugation. When considered in this way, and with the “cruel” quality of ongoing attachments to and desires for damaging forms of power in mind (Berlant 2011a), Jewish Israeli activists’ uncomfortable relation with their own complicity can be considered as sovereignty’s affective mark. The frequent moments in which they express the meaning of their deeds as a totalizing rejection of any implication in Israel’s violent politics, I suggest, are precisely those when we sense most strongly its effects on their subjectivities. Activists’ failures to be at one with ethical conflicts and psychic ambivalences emerge as disavowals of complicity that intimate “responsibility-in-complicity” (Sanders 2002: 201). But equally, as Judith Butler suggests, they may be the basis