Description
Situated within scholarship that has unraveled the paradoxical effects of waging solidarity struggles with the colonized from the ranks of the colonizer’s collective, this paper explores how this paradox unfolds in the case of Jewish-Israeli activists for Palestinian rights.
It does so by looking beyond the arena of solidarity action and at the micropolitics of the everyday: at how activists go about their lives as first-class citizens, move through space, and relate to each other, to Palestinian partners and to the other Others – often socio-economically marginalized Jewish-Israelis – that are not the target of their activism.
Through an in-depth ethnographic inquiry, the paper shows how, in each of these endeavours, acts of defiance of existing colonial relations and subjectivities coexist, and often intertwine in counter-intuitive ways, with the perduring projection and reification of structural privilege.
Yet, the paper’s conclusion departs from that of the “impossibility” of a decolonial endeavor of the colonizer (Memmi, 1957). If indeed an uncompromising and fully consistent decolonial stance is unavailable to Jewish-Israeli activists, the paper finds that it is precisely when they acknowledge the ambiguity of their contribution, and engage nonetheless in grounded, bodily, affective encounters with multiple others, that they can become more subtly aware of their intersecting colonial privileges and begin to erode them.
