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 demonstrations, it was not only a question of political tactics or strategy but also an ethical refusal to grant legitimacy to and thus be complicit with the actions of the state. It was this that those protesters who were reluctant to put their bodies on the line, to be arrested, to confront the state in this embodied way, seemed to be doing. It was an anxiety about complicity, I suggest, as much as a disagreement about political strategy or principle, that brought out these tensions at this and other demonstrations and political events. Hence the sense of embarrassment or cowardice that those remaining in the park at Sheikh Jarrah reported feeling, and the urgency with which other protesters were keen to enter into confrontation with the police, even though there was confusion and disagreement within the movement as to whether this was an intentional, or wise, strategy. This aspect of the activism was underscored for me when one activist, Guy, who had been heavily involved in the Sheikh Jarrah protests told me: “Today [as opposed to earlier experiences of activism] there are people for whom to get arrested, from their point of view, it’s respectable—for all of us. It’s not pleasant. But in a moral, political sense, we’re happy to be arrested, because it gives us the chance to show that we’re not part of the story.” The desire to demonstrate a disconnection from or a rejection of the “story” of Israeli state violence and domination was what was expressed in many of the more dramatic moments of antioccupation activism, but it also appeared in other spaces and settings in which the confrontation with the state was more subtle and perhaps therefore even more pressing. During the 2012 and 2014 attacks on Gaza, when Qassam rockets were fired toward cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, sentiments like Daniella’s about refusing to heed the siren’s warning to take shelter were common among activists. A disavowal of one’s implication as an Israeli citizen in the army’s assault manifested in these refusals as well as in the bravado of those who deliberately went onto rooftops in Tel Aviv to watch the “Iron Dome” missile defense system shoot down the incoming rockets. In more mundane ways, it manifested as activists’ careful and pointed use of language—talking about “Palestinian citizens of Israel,” rather than “Israeli Arabs” or just “Arabs,” for example, or rejecting the increasingly common Israeli use of “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the occupied West Bank—or in seeking out alternative cultural spaces and forms of schooling for their children, as well as many more often small and everyday attempts to extricate themselves from unwilled support for, or compliance with, Israeli state power. Often this took the form of a kind of resentment that other Jewish Israelis did not feel the same discomfort. One activist told me, for example, “I want Israel to be humiliated. I’m not a big fan of punishment, in general, but Israel should be punished. I want Israelis to feel uncomfortable when they go abroad and have to admit to having done army service.” In this sense, “not in my name” was a myriad of more and less dramatic practices and forms of expression that mediated an affective relation to activists’ Israeli citizenship and what this meant in terms of ethical responsibility. The moments of solidarity activism that I consider in this chapter are among the most visible and theatrical ways that activists routinely attempt to address the ways in which their lives have been made complicit in violence and oppression.
Figure 5. Activist drummers at a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. The drummers are dressed in pink masks, mocking and mimicking the black masks worn by armed police in previous weeks. Photograph by author.
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