orders…. Be ashamed. I have grandchildren your age.” Ravid then takes over and continues: “When you hear about Israeli democracy, you should reflect on that. Democracy includes something called equality, and here it seems like there’s one law for settlers, one law for Palestinians, and one law for leftists!” She then beings to sing “Hero of the Defence Army” (gibor tzva hahagana) by the Israeli punk band Pollyanna Frank, which mocks the macho young soldier whose sexual conquests are cast in the light of the state’s military conquests. By this point, some settlers have arrived at the scene and the risk of arrest is accompanied by that of physical violence by the settlers against the activists, so all those who have not yet been detained start to leave and walk back toward the Palestinian village, after some negotiation with the army commander present about what path we are allowed to take.
Let us pause here to consider what is being enacted in these encounters in the South Hebron Hills. Although the name Ta’ayush means “living together” in Arabic, and activists would often explain this meaning as they talked about the group and its cooperative modes of action, what was striking to any observer of this Saturday action and others like it was the lack of emphasis on Palestinians’ experiences or Palestinian-Jewish cooperation. Rather, this activism’s orientation toward and against other Jewish Israelis—settlers and state authorities—performed a political breach of cultural intimacy as a way both to expose and to disturb how Jewish Israeli citizenship is tied up in uncomfortable ways with state violence. Both the physical movements of the activists and the ways in which they drew on culturally resonant symbolic tropes in their verbal interactions can be read here as an intimate form of communication with those deemed to be “like us” by the activists—other Jewish Israeli citizens. This emphasis on common Israeli citizenship, and highlighting of the ways in which it privileges Jewish subjects specifically, is what was enacted by activists’ approach to the soldiers blocking the entrance to the settlement: unlike Palestinians, who would be much more likely to be shot were they to approach the soldiers in this manner, the physical approach of a Jewish Israeli body toward the state apparatus is an invitation for that body to be restrained and disciplined but with the knowledge that it will be unlikely to suffer the kind of grievous physical harm faced by other kinds of subjects. The action sets in motion a chain of legal procedures that will result, in all likelihood, in the activists’ release by a judge after up to twenty-four hours in a police cell, with the possibility of a criminal charge to be tried and punished at a later date. In thus eliciting and exposing state power, the Ta’ayush activists also reveal its uneven terrain: that they, as Jewish citizens are differently subject to its workings than are the Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills as in other areas in Israel/Palestine.
This physical method of exposing the injustice of Israeli rule was then echoed in the activists’ cries over the megaphone. Addressing the soldiers in Hebrew, and thus evoking again their common status as Israeli Jews, the older female activist first alludes to the Holocaust, a common trope in all kinds of Israeli political discussions, with her statement “Don’t say you are just following orders” of course recalling Adolf Eichmann’s “Nuremberg defence” (Arendt 2006). She then draws on her age to suggest a maternal authority (cf. Handelman 2004: 111, cited in Paz 2016: 26), which, together with the common experience of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, is intended to shame the soldiers as having betrayed a shared Jewish Israeli ethos on two different levels. In Ravid’s subsequent return to the discourse of citizenship and democracy, she links the breach of morality to the discourse of inequality and injustice, finally turning to expose and mock the soldiers’ bodily incorporation into the state regime with the Pollyanna Frank song. Although Ravid had recently experienced a more sober and nuanced encounter with a colleague with whom she felt able to discuss the situation in the South Hebron Hills and individual soldiers’ roles in perpetuating injustice, in general activists’ denunciations of other Jewish Israelis’ actions and their consequent responsibility to act differently were performed in these more dramatic and confrontational ways in places like the South Hebron Hills. This theatrical mode of communication contrasted with other spaces and encounters in everyday life, where activists would more often try to “keep their head down” and to avoid difficult discussions about politics both from their fear of consequences and from a desire not to live their lives in a constant mode of argument and aggression.
On my way back to Tel Aviv after the action, I receive a phone call from a friend, Yifat. She calls to check with me that I am okay, having heard through social media about the arrests in the South Hebron Hills, as she knows I had planned to go that day with Ta’ayush. I assure her that I am fine and that I had been able to make the choice not to get arrested—“the others intended to get arrested, you know, they had planned it that way,” I explain to her. She replies, “Of course they did!” I did not need to explain the tactics to her; she is involved in this activism and knows how Ta’ayush and similar groups work. She understood that when such activists got arrested in this way, it was likely to have been intentional. At the time, I did not reflect on the way in which she had taken for granted the intentionality of the arrests: activists tended to narrate reports of these arrests as the shocking enactment of a heavy-handed and authoritarian state in the face of nonviolent political action when recounting these occasions in the press and on social media. Anybody involved in this kind of activism, however, knew that these actions were more often than not intended to provoke a certain reaction and that the army and police could be relied on to use physical violence and/or to detain activists. The gap, though, between the intentionality of these actions and the performance of surprise at their unfolding deserves further consideration. Jewish Israeli activists invite and meet the force of the state in the form of military and police violence and arrests and yet profess shock when they indeed receive such reactions. In the same moment, they partially shift the focus of both their and their audience’s attention from what the Palestinians face to ethical and political relations among different Jewish Israelis.
* * *
Here I want to examine more closely the idea of complicity and its relation to this activism’s elements of performance and staging. Anthropologists and others considering the dynamics of social movements, including those deploying similar tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience, have considered the theatrical elements of protest in various ways. These analyses question any approach to activism that would narrowly consider its efficacy in positivist terms or propose a functionalist analysis of social movements, focusing instead on the symbolic resonances and phenomenological experiences of activist displays within specific cultural and political contexts. A significant thread of such interpretations emphasizes the creativity of these protests, which often use music, art, or humor to expose or symbolically invert dominant power relations (Haugerud 2013; Reed 2005; Spellman-Poots et al. 2014), and often create alternative or “liminoid” spaces which imagine or “prefigure” (Juris 2014) different cultural and political forms. Here confrontations with state authorities are understood as political performances that enable not only the envisioning of these utopian political futures (Juris 2008) but also the development, or “self-cultivation” (Flynn and Tinius 2015) of subjectivities that bring energy and motivation to these movements. The Jewish Israeli activism I consider here certainly shares the element of staging or performance with these other examples and, on some occasions, also the affective qualities of joyfulness and play that contribute to the sense of a creative horizon of different potential worlds, as well as feelings of solidarity and connectedness within the group that enable the members of the group to continue with their often challenging practices. Central to this activism, however, is not so much a creation of different worlds to the one in which they live, I contend, but rather an exposure of the violence and injustice of activists’ own reality as well as the crucial centering and challenging of their entanglement within this political domain. Contrary to those accounts of activist performances that emphasize the creation of alternative realities through performance and storytelling, I propose the notion of a “theatrics of complicity” as a key feature of this particular case of nonviolent activism and civil disobedience.
A “theatrics of complicity” describes the way in which this activism operates by staging a certain confrontation with state authorities. This confrontation allows activists to exploit the cultural intimacy between themselves and the police officers
