The Israeli Radical Left. Fiona Wright
on a Saturday morning in Jerusalem’s well-to-do Mishkenot Sha’ananim area, the streets are quiet. A group of Jewish Israeli activists called Ta’ayush, often accompanied by some international visitors, regularly meets here to set off for its weekly activities in the South Hebron Hills area of the occupied West Bank. On one of the days I join the group in April 2011, the organizers give a brief overview of the plans for the day and then split the activists into smaller groups to travel to different spots and join Palestinian farmers in various locations. I am sent with three Israelis and an American to travel in a car rather than the minivan the other group goes in, and our part of the convoy thus skips the stop-and-check by the Israeli army patrol that awaits the group, as it does every week, en route to its destination. Our aim, as in the activities of Ta’ayush more broadly, is to witness, record, and perhaps disrupt the practices of settlers and Israeli military authorities in the South Hebron Hills, where its Palestinian inhabitants face perpetual harassment, violence, and the threat of expulsion and house demolitions. We are to travel to a thoroughly colonial space to perform an anticolonial politics, alongside and on the land of the Palestinians who Ta’ayush activists call their “partners.” The less-articulated side of this activism, though, is the field of interactions it gives rise to among the Israeli activists, settlers, soldiers, and police officers, a scenario that exposes this activism’s complexities, contradictions, and even, as I will explore, shades of complicity.
We arrive at a roadside location a few kilometers southeast of Yatta, the southern West Bank’s main town, to which the Israeli state would like to see most of the South Hebron Hills’ Palestinian residents relocate. We are greeted by five Palestinian men who come carrying tools and olive trees that we are to plant together in their land, a short walk across fields overlooked by an Israeli outpost—one of the settlements in the region officially deemed illegal even by the Israeli authorities. Ilan, the most experienced of the activists and designated our group’s contact person by the organizers, explains that the settlers often come to disrupt the farmers whenever they try to work on the land and that we are there in the hope that our presence will let them get some more work done before disruption, and to witness and record any interaction with the settlers, army, or police officers. I am assigned the task of filming the activities and Ilan gives me the small video camera the organizers have brought for that purpose, together with instructions about making sure always to get a wide field of vision so that as much as possible will be captured on film.
Two soldiers are already standing a short distance away from the field when we arrive—it is not the first time Ta’ayush activists have been there, although it is not clear how the soldiers knew we would come today, or whether there is a constant army presence in that spot—but we are able to work undisturbed for about one hour. After that time, one of the settlers, an older man, comes down the hill from the outpost and starts to shout at us. He screams in Arabic at the Palestinians, and in Hebrew at us, accusing Ilan in particular of being a traitor, stating that he is a Hamas supporter. The two soldiers stand by for the time being but call their commander, who arrives after a few minutes. He starts to ask questions of the Palestinian farmers, checking the title deeds they have brought with them to ascertain whether the land does indeed belong to them, and asks why we are there with them. In the course of this discussion, more soldiers and police officers arrive, some of whom are able to speak in Arabic with the farmers. They demand that the Palestinians come to an army office to show a different document than the one they have brought, which is in Arabic and without any map and which the commander claims is not good enough as evidence of ownership. As this is going on, a police officer is taking photographs of each of us. I continue to film the whole interaction, though the Israeli activists, the American, and I remain silent, as we were instructed to do by Ilan at the beginning of the day. The commander then declares the area a closed military zone, the settler still stands nearby shouting at the group, and the Palestinians start to leave. We walk with them, and one of the soldiers asks me (in Hebrew) if I am a journalist, and I respond that I am not. He says that in that case I should stop filming and so I lower the camera, unsure of the repercussions of not doing so, although Ilan later informs me that we are entirely within our rights to film everything and that next time I should continue.1 The soldier says, in a sarcastic tone, “Shabbat shalom ve chag sameach” (the weekend “good day” greeting and happy holidays, as it was during the Passover festival), and we continue to walk away in silence.
Ilan is disappointed that we have left without the soldiers showing us a written order stating that the area was a closed military zone, which techically the army has to do before we are legally obliged to leave. Much of the aim of these Ta’ayush actions is to record occasions on which these written orders have been shown, in order to prove continued Palestinian presence on their land.2 He asks the Palestinians why they left without waiting for it, and they say they did not realize that the army has to show a written order. Ilan explains to them that next time they can wait until they see such an order, and one of the other Israeli activists, Efrat, asks Ilan why we left without it. Ilan replies, “I’m not going to tell the Palestinians what to do” and explains that because we had filmed the interactions those videos could still be used by Ta’ayush in any advocacy or legal discussions about settler and military harassment of Palestinian farmers. Thus Ilan says that he still considers the action semi-successful.
Figure 3. Ta’ayush activists interact with soldiers in the South Hebron Hills; a Palestinian man sits to the side. Photograph by Margaret Olin.
This kind of interaction was typical of Ta’ayush’s Saturday excursions during my fieldwork. Ta’ayush would travel to the rural South Hebron Hills area, a southern region of the West Bank designated as “Area C” under the Oslo agreements, and thus under full Israeli military and civil control, but because of the presence of the settlements also one of the easier parts of the West Bank for Jewish Israelis to enter and leave without breaking any laws or being conspicuously out of place.3 Many Palestinians living in this area are farmers, infrastructure and social services are poor, and the Israeli Civil Administration (an entity acting under the authority of the Ministry of Defense and officially responsible for planning and construction in Area C) carries out frequent house demolitions in the region, despite the “houses” in question often being tents or caves (B’Tselem 2013). Along with neglect by the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians here suffer much harassment and violence from Israeli settlers. In large part because of these conditions, Palestinians in the area are often more willing to work with Jewish Israeli activists than in other parts of the West Bank, where political reasons as well as fear of being considered collaborators (Kelly 2010) often prevent such cooperation. However, unlike other Israeli-Palestinian partnerships in areas such as East Jerusalem or in the villages of Bil’in, Ni’lin, and Nabi Saleh, for example, where mobilizations have taken quite a specific form following established traditions of nonviolence and civil disobedience (see Chapter 2), the form of action and Israeli-Palestinian interaction is rather more open and shifting in the South Hebron Hills region.
Thus several Jewish Israeli activist groups, as well as Ta’ayush, have been active in the South Hebron Hills over the past ten to fifteen years. Although these groups have different agendas and modes of action, all are active in the campaign against house demolitions and expulsions, which are currently among the biggest threats to Palestinian residents’ continued inhabitation of this part of the West Bank. While this activism depends on much behind-the-scenes work from activists’ homes in telephone calls, organizing transport, publicizing their actions to other Jewish Israelis, and working in Israeli NGOs, activists’ physical presence in the South Hebron Hills with Palestinians is its political and symbolic core. The focus of this chapter is, therefore, how groups such as Ta’ayush inhabit this thoroughly colonial space through their actions in order to perform an anticolonial politics and the contradictions that characterize such an engagement. Indeed, it seems necessary for these activists to expose the colonial practices in this region by physically being there themselves and providing some kind of counterpresence to the settlers, army, and police—the other Jewish Israelis in the region whose presence and actions there enforce its occupation. These practices are a fitting example through which to explore this problem, not because they are