The Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity by Fiona Wright (review)

In the epilogue to this ruminative ethnography of radical leftist activists in Israel, Fiona Wright alludes to the well-known practice of non-radical Israeli doves and leftists: "shooting and crying," i.e., agonizing about the sins they commit and the moral costs they pay for carrying out orders necessary for the defense of their state. In Hebrew the phrase is yorim ve-bokhim. What engages Wright's interest is that Israeli radicals cannot avoid awareness of being implicated in the oppression they struggle against or, in her sense of the word, of doing "violence" to those they seek to honor and assist. As she depicts them, the practices and emotions of these activists can aptly be described as mohim ve-bokhim—"protesting and crying."

Although she does not cite him, Wright's project is directly in line with the analysis of Albert Memmi. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi—a Tunisian Jew with French citizenship—himself a described the predicament of the "colonizer who refuses."¹ For the Tel Aviv activists Wright lives with and studies, Israeli society has become a hostile, politically alien, and morally contaminating place; and yet it is where they live. This was just the predicament of those European settler-colonists who opposed the oppression of others that resulted from the policies and indeed the very nature of the society and polity of which they were members.

Wright's book considers the array of emotional, cultural, and psychological afflictions suffered by these activists, many of them employees of humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. She provides brief participant-observer accounts of their strenuous and often courageous work: protecting Palestinians in the West Bank's South Hebron Hills threatened with the destruction of their homes; making solidarity visits to Palestinian families mourning relatives who have been killed; caring for African and other immigrants forbidden to work and in desperate need of health care; and mobilizing in support of a Jewish-Arab political alliance that, for a while, competed in Tel Aviv municipal elections. The thematic focus of her analysis is on the unintended and unavoidable "complicity" of the radical activists. She is conscious of the strength and even cruelty of this term, but, tracing her usage to Emmanuel Levinas and others, is at pains to justify it.

Substituting the "ethics of complicity" for accusations of conscious betrayal, Wright emphasizes how these activists cannot avoid invoking or mobilizing privilege in circumstances of systematic oppression by a dominant group to which they belong. They argue that in Israel, as it has become, no action can be morally pure, even with the best intentions and the most exquisite awareness of the equal humanity of "the Other." Drawing extensively on postcolonial and psychoanalysis-inflected social anthropology and cultural studies, Wright discusses how Israeli radical activists experience the frustrations of a situation that seems wholly intractable to their best efforts and how they "process," as it were, the damage they do to others as well as to themselves.

The book is offered as an ethnography, and it does illuminate the experiences and the angst of the radical left activists Wright lived among and studied. However, readers expecting detailed accounts of protests, solidarity activities, grassroots organizing, or the quotidian elements of service provision to needy populations in Israel will be disappointed. Indeed, in the last substantive chapter in the book, about activists who emigrate and either return or do not, Wright acknowledges that she cannot use standard ethnographic techniques since she is writing about Israelis living in Berlin and elsewhere, while she remains in Tel Aviv. Wright also devotes what, to many readers, will seem an inordinate amount of attention to parallels, resonances, and echoes between the work of dozens of cultural studies and postcolonial scholars and her treatment of the somewhat precious psychological struggles in which, she says, Israeli radical activists are engaged.

In Wright's turn toward the emigration question she emphasizes, as she does in each chapter, that her subjects...