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The Role of Ideological Conversion in the Palestine Solidarity Movement
Abstract
There are two underlying assumptions driving both scholars’ and activists’ approaches to Palestinians’ engagement with international audiences. The first is that travelers who are sympathetic to Zionism can be convinced to support Palestine through witnessing the occupation. The second is that growing Jewish criticism of Israel stands to radically undermine Israeli oppression. This paper looks at both of these presumptions from the perspectives of Palestinian tour guides and activists who work to educate predominately Jewish visitors to Palestine. My data include six months of participant observation and 25 interviews with Palestinian guides about their work to transform travelers’ opinions and generate activism abroad. COVID-19 and subsequent drops in tourism to Palestine have raised questions surrounding tourism’s viability as a tactic for social change. In light of these concerns, my research takes on the question of how awareness-raising initiatives advance (or detract from) wider strategies of resistance in Palestine. Past studies of Jewish support for Palestinians tend to center Jewish individuals’ experiences and identities over how this group’s attitudinal shifts tangibly contribute to ending Israeli settler colonialism. My paper shifts the focus away from internal processes of change within the Jewish community, and instead interrogates the political utility of Jewish opposition to the occupation, and more broadly - ideological conversion, in liberating Palestine. My preliminary findings suggest that initiatives to generate solidarity from tourists often perpetuate racialized conceptions of power and violence due to institutional constraints on funding, marketing, and capacity-building. I argue that the political narratives presented on these tours must be made palatable to the “clients” that sustain them, which inevitably reproduces colonial paradigms of thinking. Palestinian tour guides are incentivized to assert the legitimacy of Zionism, affirm Jewish suffering, and emphasize nonviolence. By encouraging the softening of Palestinians’ anger and obfuscating violent anti-colonial resistance, Palestinians’ humanity becomes conditional upon their adherence to nonviolence, which in turn, reinforces the power of the colonial state. While these tours challenge tourists’ unequivocal support for Israel and deepen their sense of empathy with the Palestinian people, they can also function to legitimize the Israeli state and propagate the assimilative forces of settler colonialism. Given these outcomes, my paper explores how Palestinian guides navigate the contradictory processes of movement building and allyship in alternative tourism. Specifically, I detail the ways Palestinian activists are working to unravel Jewish support for Israel while simultaneously resisting the settler colonialism embedded within Israeli tourism to Palestine.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Israel
Palestine
West Bank
Sub Area
None