The Joys and Dangers of Solidarity in Palestine: Prosthetic Engagement in an Age of Reparations

When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide that I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

—Rachel Corrie, International Solidarity Movement activist(in Stohlman and Aladin 2003, 174)¹

From the perpetrator’s perspective, restitution and apologies are part of the growing cultural trend of performative guilt. The cost of admitting guilt (especially on the home front) and the difficulty of conceding that one’s own identity is mired in crimes of injustice may be somewhat eased by the international trend to validate the ritual of public confession and legitimized by recognition of the egalitarianism of imperfection. Nonetheless, the global admission of guilt remains significant. This international validation of apologies transforms the ideological norm from nationalist righteousness—“my history right or wrong”—to an attitude of reconciliation. This compromise aims at gaining the recognition of others while paying for such recognition of its victimization and the restitution of its history.

—Elazar Barkin (2000, 323)

I. Introduction

In a recent conversation with a Lebanese friend, I raised the question of bringing a handful of PhD students from my department to a conference in Ramallah. Her nose crinkled. She didn’t know if it was ethical—there was the question of the boycott campaign, of non-normalization. So maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. “Unless you make sure to make it really uncomfortable for them,” she mused after a moment. “At least make them take the [Allenby] bridge through Jordan. That way at least they can feel what it’s actually like for the Palestinians.” The conversation got me thinking. What of Americans and Europeans who do seek that discomfort—who go to Palestine precisely to see what life is actually like? Once they have seen, and have something to say about it, where do we go from there?

On April 23, 2006, a woman named Mary began her International Solidarity Movement (ISM) journal entry from Palestine, titled “Mary’s Journal: Daily Life in Tel Rumaida,” as follows:

Everyday but Friday, we are out on the street watching as children go to school, which starts at 7.45 am. It’s usually quiet, though today about 15 visiting settlers attacked Anna and BJ and 3 EAPPI (Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel) people. They are not badly hurt (one was kicked and another hit on the foot by a stone) and are now still at the police station making a complaint.

Informed by Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of “vicarious responsibility” (Alexander 2004, 262),² this paper seeks to theorize the increasing trend, over the past two decades, whereby individuals from North America and Europe have been traveling to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to stand alongside Palestinians nonviolently resisting the Israeli occupation. Looking first at how the politics of “being there” and “witnessing” shape the political forms this solidarity has taken, I then do a reading of the electronic archives of the ISM—one of the most important organizations enabling this phenomenon, founded in 2001—to examine the discursive regime to which this movement has given rise and the conceptual and political work that regime does. Specifically, I am interested in the way activists’ subject positions are discursively formulated vis-à-vis the Palestinians with whom they express a “solidarity.” For this, I look at both the bodily practices of travel to and “direct action” in Palestine, and at the discourse that helps constitute and is constituted by them. Finally, I conclude by briefly exploring what it means for dissident American Jews, in particular, to participate in this form of prosthetic political engagement.

At stake in understanding the conceptual work done...