Abstract
On January 2, 2020, for the first time in 15 years, Palestinian activist Kifah Adara drew water from the Ein Albeida spring near her West Bank village of Al-Tuwani. The natural water source had been used by Palestinian communities for generations. But a decade and a half ago, Jewish Israeli settlers living nearby started swimming in the spring and using it as a mikveh, a ritual bath, which dirtied the water and made it unsuitable for drinking. Since that time, because of settler violence and intimidation tactics, Palestinians couldn’t access the spring at all. But that was about to change. In a massive nonviolent direct action involving over 150 Palestinian, Jewish Israeli, and diaspora Jewish activists, Adara had decided to reclaim and rehabilitate Ein Albeida. Alongside supporters and allies, she walked from her village to the spring to fill up water buckets for the first time since her youth. The coalition of activists who participated in this co-resistance action with Adara joined her to show their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against occupation and to assert their commitment to justice in the region.
This paper examines this and other co-resistance activities in Palestine as an ongoing method of civil disobedience performed collectively by Palestinians and Jews to oppose Israeli policies of military occupation and state violence. Co-resistance means that Palestinians, Israelis, Jews from the diaspora, and international activists resist policies and structures of occupation in collaboration with one another. In the co-resistance model, Palestinians set the conditions for action and invite partners to join them based on the shared commitments to bring a just and equitable end to the Israeli occupation. Based on ethnographic research in Palestine and interviews with nearly two dozen activists, this paper looks at the history and development of co-resistance activism and argues that the nature of this organizing model builds a vibrant, intersectional, and powerful movement that provides evidence on the ground for what a different future might look like for Palestinians and Jews in Palestine/Israel. Although there are many methods and tactics used to resist the occupation, this paper suggests that the co-resistance model is one of the most impactful in showing tangible results to improve the lives of Palestinians while also shifting Jewish relationships to Israeli state violence.
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