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“Your Work is Not Here:” Solidarity Tourism in Occupied Palestine
Abstract
As the Israeli government tightens restrictions on Palestinian movement, Palestinian organizers and activists increasingly invite internationals to “come and see” Palestine, to witness the effects of Israeli expansion in the West Bank, and to learn about the contours of life under occupation from Palestinians themselves. Drawing from several months of ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the ways in which solidarity tourism is imbedded in forms of international presence that have become commonplace in the West Bank in the post-Oslo period, such as working with Palestinian NGOs, volunteering, or participating in direct action in the occupied territories. I show, however, that the central thrust of solidarity tourism in Palestine is to tell tourists: “Your work is not here.” I trace the ways in which, rather than encouraging tourists to remain in Palestine, solidarity tour organizers direct tourists to return to their home countries to challenge their own governments’ role in sustaining the occupation. I ask what this shift in emphasis reveals about changing forms of Palestinian resistance, shifting definitions of both solidarity and tourism, and the politics of collective dissent against “investing” in Palestine while the occupation continues unabated (Bahour 2012). Positioning the emergence of professionalized solidarity tourism in the historical context of the Oslo Accords and the attendant establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its Ministry of Tourism, I show how solidarity tourism has come to expose and censure the Oslo process and its language of “negotiations,” “agreements,” and “economic integration” that supplanted the language of anti-colonialism and liberation that historically characterized Palestinian resistance (Said 2002; Massad 2010). Solidarity tourism critiques not only the “facts on the ground” since Oslo, including expanding settlements, proliferating checkpoints, the Separation Wall, sustained land-expropriation, and the consistent theft of natural resources, but also the language of Oslo, and, with it, the notion of investing in the Palestinian Authority at the expense of ending the occupation. I ask, what does it mean for this critique to take the form of tourism? What are the limitations of tourism as a vehicle for activism? How are organizers using tourism to delineate the failures of Oslo? How are guides and organizers attempting to restructure understandings of what Palestinians want and need from the international community? My paper thus takes tourism as its subject and asks what light an analysis of solidarity tourism can shed on questions of solidarity, neoliberal investments, settler-colonialism, military occupation, and anti-colonial dissent in Palestine.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Transnationalism