I fly to Palestine/Israel in just a few days. As I’ve been packing my suitcase and making my final preparations, I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of solidarity. Drawing on inspiration from many of my teachers, including Palestinians, Jews, and others, I want to assemble a provisional analysis of the concept that can guide me during my time in the Land.
Start with the obvious. An elementary principle of solidarity must be to ask, “If I pursue this particular tactic, what will the effect be on the people that I’m trying to serve?” The renowned linguistic and political dissident Noam Chomsky put it thus: “You don’t pursue a tactic because it makes you feel good. You pursue it because… you estimate that it’ll help the victims.”1
While the logic here feels second nature to most people involved in social struggles, solidarity activists violate this first principle all too often. A prime example is the Weathermen—self-styled radicals, predominately white, who were active in the 1960s and 70s and believed in creating acts of symbolic political violence, such as setting off bombs at the U.S. Capitol. They claimed to act in service to various oppressed groups, like the Vietnamese and Black Americans, but in reality they put marginalized folks in greater danger. Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, denounced the group. “It’s leaders take people into situations where the people can be massacred, and they call that ‘revolution,’” he said in an October 1969 interview. “It’s nothing but child’s play. It’s folly.”2
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When I was in Palestine/Israel in 2018, I volunteered a couple days a week with the celebrated human rights defender Rabbi Arik Ascherman to accompany Palestinian shepherds in the West Bank. By walking with the shepherds and documenting the day’s events, Israeli Jews and internationals deter attacks from settlers and the Israeli army, providing some measure of protection. It would be bad PR for “the most moral army in the world” to be caught on camera attacking an American or European, a fact that we leveraged to create space for the shepherds to continue earning their livelihood.3
A couple of friends and I would wake up around 4 or 5am at our apartment in West Jerusalem, make our Nescafe, and then meet the rabbi and his SUV down by Gan HaPamon (Bell Park). In the car ride, exploiting the moments in which Arik wasn’t dodging bad cell service to coordinate with the shepherds, I asked questions about the day’s tactical plan as well as the deeper logics underlying our work.
Arik explained that his organization, Torat Tzedek, and its volunteers must defer to the Palestinians on all tactical and strategic decisions. We are not there to lead, but to follow. Arik insists further that we need to be careful about even inadvertently influencing decisions, because—and Arik says this repeatedly—we aren’t the ones who have to directly live with the consequences. After the day’s work is over, we go home to our apartments in Jerusalem; after a few months, internationals return to North America, Europe, South America, etc. The shepherds, the farmers, and their families—they stay. So they lead.
This activist approach flips the racist logic of the occupation on its head: Counter to the norm of Jewish supremacy, in which Jewish Israelis impose their will on Palestinians via various means (e.g., juridically, politically, violently), Jews here submit to the authority of Palestinians. It is not a complete inverse for many reasons, including the fact that Jewish solidarity activists choose to listen to their Palestinian partners, whereas Palestinians obviously don’t choose to live under occupation and apartheid.
I have to acknowledge: In the fields outside al-Uja or in the rolling South Hebron Hills, I am a temporary presence. In this land, I am more or less a visitor. It is not really my house, even if the place sometimes feels like home when I receive such a warm welcome from Jewish and Palestinian friends alike. I’m not a primary stakeholder.
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The last time I went out with Arik, in January 2020, we documented a standoff between dozens of Israeli soldiers and the villagers from al-Uja, north of Jericho, when a cry rang out. We ran down the dirt road to see that the Israeli army had demolished a shack with an elderly Palestinian man still inside.. A crowd formed around the man, who lay injured on the ground, and then people started yelling at the soldiers, pelting them insults. One of the Israeli commanders pulled Arik aside, and whispered that he ought to be careful.
“These people could rip you apart,” he said to him in Hebrew. Arik laughed. The commander did not understand. “These people” had called Arik to be there.
A virtue of Arik’s solidarity stems from the strength of his personal bonds with Palestinian communities. He is a friend. He shows up for his Palestinian friends nearly everyday, except on Shabbat. Arik serves them by putting his body on the line, and Palestinians serve him tea, hummus, and the occasional glass of goat’s milk. It’s not meant to be an equal exchange, but it is an exchange, a kind of reciprocity, nonetheless.
While people of relative privilege can and do serve the cause of people from an oppressed group, no one can entirely abolish their own inherent self-interest. Even while I’m making personal sacrifices to do this human rights defense project, I’m also benefiting from the experience: honing my skills as a political organizer, learning Arabic, and starting this newsletter. This project likely improves my social standing as a movement leader and could even help with job prospects. That’s not why I’m doing this work, but I do recognize these rewards—another outgrowth of my personal privilege in a world structured by classism and racism.
Activists sometimes try to resolve the bind between our commitment to serving others on the one hand and the necessity of speaking and acting as one’s self on the other hand by “centering” the oppressed group. By positioning the oppressed group at the center of the conversation while rhetorically marginalizing ourselves as solidarity activists, we seek to counteract the oppressor’s cultural hegemony, whereby one side speaks and the other sits in an imposed silence.
This corrective rhetorical move has had outstanding success in recent years, both in the conversations surrounding Black liberation in America and Palestinian liberation in Palestine/Israel. I support it. However, reflecting on Arik’s career, I wonder if there isn’t a better way to theorize solidarity that does not require any marginalization whatsoever. Can we envision our solidarity as an interweaving of stories, interests, and identities? To have sustained solidarity you have to break down barriers with the Other. I wonder whether a hard distinction between “centering yourself” versus “centering the Other” actually, in the long term, reinforces the separation that we seek to destroy.
Going into this project as a foreigner and as a Jewish American, I need to rigorously prioritize the interest of my Palestinian hosts who invited me to fight the occupation with them. I can’t let go of my elementary principles. I should accept Rabbi Arik’s teachings; but I’m honest enough with myself to understand that I can’t completely abolish my own self-interest, my own voice, or my own identity. Hopefully, with enough practice subordinating my will to the will of Palestinian leaders, we can become partners, and then friends. The solidarity of struggle sows the seeds of even deeper trust, commitment, and friendship across divisions. Jews and Palestinians can then learn and grow together, intertwining our daily lives, and thereby creating a crisis for the apartheid regime.
“Noam Chomsky on BDS and How The Israeli Occupation is ‘Much Worse Than Apartheid,’” https://chomsky.info/20140811/
“Fred Hampton Interview” (10/9/69):
A recent profile on Ascherman: “How a U.S.-born Rabbi Became the Nemesis of Radical West Bank Settlers” by Judy Maltz (Haaretz), 4/26/21: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-how-a-u-s-born-rabbi-became-the-nemesis-of-radical-west-bank-settlers-1.9748086
You ask many good and important questions. Time will give you (and me) the answers. I wonderin this situation if it’s possible to have solidarity with the Palestinian and Israelis both. ? Since there are more who want peace with their neighbors than don’t. I stand with all who want human rights of all to come before hate and fear and domination. (like you)I pray for leadership on all sides who value equality to rise above domination and persecution and restore civility. i love you zak. you are brave and i’m proud of you.