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Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights

Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel

Zed Books Ltd

Understanding and researching the social movement

Defining an object of study is always somewhat arbitrary. There are no clear boundaries in real life between movement networking and having a drink with a friend, between tactically speaking out 'as a Jew' and getting into an argument. Nevertheless, it is immensely valuable to look at diaspora Jewish criticism of Israel in terms of being a social movement, centrally affected by the dynamics of movement contention. Rather than thinking of a social movement as a neutral container of opinions, or an inert thing within which critics of Israel gather, I examine it as a process, a productive force whose dynamics shape the ideology and outcomes of diaspora Jewish opposition to Israel.

In this chapter I explain what I mean by a social movement and the questions I ask of this particular movement, seeing it as both an identity and a distant issue movement. I also explain how I research this movement – both the practical methodological issues and the theoretical approach I take. To help conceptualise this distant issue/local movement I use Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, adapting his ideas and introducing the concept of social movement actors as translators from one field to another.

I treat this diverse movement as a historical actor engaged in cognitive reimagining of Israel/Palestine and Jewish identity. These words need some unpacking. The term 'historical' is derived from Alain Touraine; central to Touraine's concept of social movement is this idea of a historical actor, by which he means an actor guided by a plan or call to historicity – the conscious production of society by social actors. Touraine sees social movements as engaging in 'the social control of historicity in a concrete community' (1981: 77). Complementary to this idea, Eyerman and Jamison (1991) speak of social movements' practice of 're-cognising reality' in order to change it. Their focus is on the knowledge production of social movements or what they call the movement's cognitive praxis. Certainly this particular movement is about much more than fighting for political change in Israel/Palestine. Centrally, it seeks to re-cognise or theoretically reconstitute what it means to be a diaspora Jew in direct contestation with dominant Zionist praxis.

This movement's praxis involves actors engaging in identity and political contestation. However, the contestation isn't necessarily in the form of overt conflict. Cox defines social movements as

the organisation of multiple forms of materially grounded and locally generated skilled activity around a rationality expressed and organised by (would-be) hegemonic actors, and against the hegemonic projects articulated by other such actors. (Cox 1999: 99)

In this definition, Cox draws out the directionality and purpose of movements, and centres the field of contention where they contest other actors' hegemonic projects. Social movements should be seen less as oriented around conflict (though this plays a major part in their activities) than around alternative rationalities which direct their counter-hegemonic contestation.

While 'cognitive reimagining' and 'counter-hegemonic contestation' are one way of viewing movements, it is also important not to overlook the nuts and bolts of social movement organising – the networks and organisations involved. The following well-known definition of social movements by Diani centres their structuring mechanisms:

A social movement is a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organisations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity. (Diani 1992: 13)

This sees movements as networks; they are not to be confused with the constituent groups within the movement, nor are they just the containers of a common ideology. Diani offers two points of unity, which allows one to place the label 'movement' on these networked interactions – a shared conflict and a shared identity. Do such conditions exist for the people and groups I'm studying? Certainly they are connected to each other through a network of linkages and alliances, around which a collective identity has been built. They are also involved in a shared conflict, or rather two shared conflicts, which is unique to this movement – namely, around the distant issue of Israel/Palestine and around local identity contestation with Zionists.

Seeing the movement as involved in local contestation, on the one hand, and as global historical actors, on the other, helps solve the question as to whether instances of diaspora opposition to Israel in different countries and continents are part of the same movement. At first blush it seems self-evident that we are talking of a single movement. Otherwise we would have to believe in a remarkable series of coincidences whereby Israel-critical Jewish groups in different countries, often carrying similar names and with similar programmes, somehow happened to spring into existence around the same time. Yet the transnational linkages are weaker than first appears, peripheral to all the groups under discussion. We can solve this disjuncture by speaking of cognitive reimagining and one level of political contestation over Israel/Palestine happening on a global scale, while the practical networks and fields of contestation occur more on the national and local communal scales. We can go further and examine similar dynamics in this local contention that recur from country to country, and speak of Jewish critics of Israel occupying a similar space within their own countries, throughout the diaspora.

So there is something that connects these groups, which Diani would call 'shared collective identity'. While accepting the importance of identity construction in movements, I draw upon the idea of movements as directive agencies and propose that what they share is 'purpose', not simply identity. To decipher this movement's purpose, I explore what differentiates it from others – its existence both as a movement centred on Israel/Palestine and as one involved in local identity contestation.

Identity and distant issue movements

Identity production is particularly salient for this movement, since one of its aims is the creation of an alternative Jewish identity to still dominant Zionism. The process of identity production involves both creating a specific movement identity and deploying and contesting an ascribed ethnic/religious identity.

Della Porta and Diani (2006) offer a useful summary of the importance of identity production for movements. First, 'collective action cannot occur in the absence of a "we" characterised by common traits and specific solidarity' (Della Porta and Diani 2006: 94). Second, 'the presence of feelings of identity and of collective solidarity makes it easier to face the risks and uncertainties related to collective action' (94). The assumption of a common identity enables relations of trust and reciprocity to be established among those within its boundaries, creating an esprit de corps for the movement. Third, a sense of collective identity gives the social movement continuity over time and space, sustaining movements through 'latent' periods and moments of downturn (Whittier 1997; Melucci 1989). For the individual, breaking with past identities and affiliations is much easier if there are new identities available, ones which stress the continuities and the naturalness of the movement. Movements need to present themselves as normative continuations of previous identities, to some degree, in order to gain adherents.

This leads to a chicken-and-egg-type question about identity and movements. Namely: 'To what extent are collective identities constructed in and through protest rather than preceding it?' (Polletta and Jasper 2001: 285). The answer is a bit of both. People may participate in this Israel-critical movement because they believe they are the sort of people to get involved in this sort of activity. Nevertheless, this initial identification is weak and diffuse. It is the social movement itself that gives form and purpose to this project, even in this movement where the assumption that actors are directed by their prior identities has previously been unchallenged, both by critics and supporters (Atzmon 2005; Julius 2008; Polner and Merken 2007; Kushner and Solomon 2003).

I focus on the process of goal and identity construction within the movement, as this process 'frames' the situation for participants and produces participants fit for activism. An example of identity formation before and during movement involvement can be seen in the study trips Palestinian solidarity groups organise to Israel/Palestine. Initial identity constructs and ties are just about enough to get people to go on a trip to Palestine, but the real project of building a collective identity happens on the trip, and in fact a central purpose of these tours is to produce subjects fit for Palestinian advocacy.

If we treat collective identity as a process and series of claims by social movements, rather than a quality or thing already possessed either by actors or by movements, we can highlight its active strategic dimension, and we can see social movements as 'systems of action' which become unified empirical actors through the operation of this process of identity. As Melucci says,

Collective identity is thus a process in which actors produce the common cognitive frameworks that enable them to assess their environment and to calculate the costs and benefits of their action. (1989: 35)

By treating identity as part of a directed 'system of action' we can revisit Diani's definition of a social movement. This definition works rather well if one replaces 'collective identity' with 'collective purposes'. Rather than differentiate identity and strategy, I treat them both as social movement processes and projects which inhabit each other and offer principles for continuity as well as explanations for ideological choice (Polletta and Jasper 2001). This is especially so in a movement such as this, which has as one of its political aims as well as one of its strategies the reconstitution of an identity.

This formulation explicitly rejects differentiating between so-called political and identity movements – the former being 'instrumental, the latter 'expressive (Duyvendak and Giugni 1995). So-called 'identity movements', such as lesbian and gay movements, entail an instrumental deployment of identity categories to challenge power structures (Bernstein 2005; Gamson 1995). Equally, movements working for political change, such as the civil rights movement, also have 'expressive' goals such as the altering of participant identities as a prime aim (McAdam 1988). While differentiating between identity and political movements is not particularly convincing, it becomes downright confusing when referring to Jewish Israel-critical groups in which expressive and instrumental goals are intertwined.

Identity contestation is a means both of enabling change and of restricting it. A major theme in this study is the constraints and traps, as well as the opportunities that identity contestation offers. Identity categories based in notions of 'the Jewish community' are often retrograde, and work to muffle Israel-critical action and silence the subjectivities of Palestinians. As Joshua Gamson (1995) points out, fixed identity categories may be the basis for political power, but they are also the basis for oppression. Gamson is acutely aware of the problem of deploying identity, even strategically, and advances the logic of trying to queer, or to disrupt, the categories of identity. Nevertheless the dangers of any type of contestation in the field of identity is that actors focus their efforts on this field to the detriment of activism elsewhere – effort spent on discussing Jewishness is effort not spent trying to affect the situation in Israel/Palestine. In addition there is the problem of actors fighting 'the Jewish civil war' becoming institutionalised within the Jewish community and having their goals changed. These are issues of which many movement participants are acutely aware.

This may be because this movement relates to identity politics in a particular way. Most studies of the strategic element of identity contestation deals with how it affects the people deploying the identity category. For instance, gay groups are usually seen as political in that they contest the way gays are treated, and so on. However, diaspora Jewish Israel-critical groups don't only or even primarily work on issues concerning diaspora Jews; they also strive to achieve political goals in distant fields. This movement's embodiment as both a distant issue and a local identity movement appears to present a problem for social movement theory. This is because distant issue movements are usually characterised as being different to other movements, in that their primary concern is seen as the interest of others rather than self-interest (Giugni and Passy 2001; Olesen 2005; Rucht 2000). Altruistic actions, which distant issue movements are supposed to pursue, have been defined as disinterested actions that only benefit others and not the self, and are performed voluntarily for that purpose (Bar-Tal 1985; Passy 2001: 7).

The immediate problem of such a definition is obvious, since there is never action without interest. More importantly, insisting that political solidarity is altruism ignores the extent to which it is not seen as 'altruism' by movement participants. Few, if any, of my interviewees thought they were working exclusively 'for' the Palestinians. This is partly because some participants think they're protecting the Jewish collectivity from anti-Semitism by promoting peace in the Middle East. But such parochial concerns were at most supplementary reasons for activism. More often participants felt the need to be part of this movement because of their political beliefs. This is not altruism, nor is it usefully theorised as selfishness – it is a specific outcome and instance of their global political consciousness and needs to be examined as such.

Nathan Teske criticises the altruism/self-interest dichotomy, whether evinced in transnational activism or otherwise. In discussing activist motivations, he mentions how he was struck by

the fusion of self-regarding and moral-regarding concerns in activists' self-understandings. Without seeming to feel any contradiction or tension, activists speak a language rich in references to moral concerns, and, at the same time, a language rich in references to self interest. (Teske 1997: 75; emphasis in original)

I was struck by exactly the same thing in my interviews. Reasons for activism, such as 'being able to model a way of being in the world for one's children' (Teske 1997: 76), which one of my respondents also cited as a prime motivation, are both selfish and altruistic. Such responses need an approach that 'recognises a complex weave of moral motive and self in politics' (Teske 1997: 74). It is a recipe for frustration to maintain an either/or dichotomy between altruism and self-interest.

There appears to be a depoliticisation process at the heart of this altruism/self-interest distinction – a refusal to grant activists the right to political analysis. For instance, in the edited collection Political Altruism there is an arbitrariness as to what defines a selfish good; for instance, environmental activism is held to be for one's own good, whilst political mobilisation – whether fighting fascism in Spain or, the example most commonly used, white Northerners helping the struggle for civil rights in the American South – is altruism (Giugni and Passy 2001). Yet all are attempts to fashion one's own world as better to live in and, in the case of fighting fascism, as safer. In doing so the participants are motivated by political beliefs, but these beliefs are neither phantasmagoric nor altruistic.

It was noticeable that while none of my interviewees described themselves as 'altruistic', some thought that Palestine solidarity activists were, and criticised them for this orientation. Altruism, it seems, is for others and about others. One of Teske's interviewees made the point very powerfully:

David explicitly disavows 'altruism' as a motivator for his activism, noting that the word is etymologically traceable to a Latin root meaning 'other' or 'alien', and likening it to a kind of alienation. An altruistic or 'charity consciousness' attitude separates the activist from the poor, and, hence, altruism creates a lack of integration or connectedness in antipoverty activism. (Teske 1997: 79)

This linking of altruism with others' motives accords with Bourdieu's comment about how the field

defines itself by defining specific stakes and interests, which are irreducible to the stakes and interests specific to other fields ... every category of interests implies indifference to other interests, other investments, which are therefore bound to be perceived as absurd, irrational, or sublime and disinterested. (Bourdieu 1993: 72)

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Excerpted from Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights by David Landy. Copyright © 2011 David Landy. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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