UNESCO and other heritage preservation groups propose heritage as a natural and historic expression of local culture, but a more critical look asks us to reconsider naturalized accounts of heritage, and examine when and how a practice or object is transformed from “every day” to “heritage.” Making visible the process of heritage production also allows us to ask who are the players involved in designating, celebrating, promoting and preserving heritage, and what are the broader social and political contexts that inform those decisions? The Palestinian Authority in participation with UNESCO has devoted substantial attention and resources to “heritage preservation” as a part of its overall tourism development strategy, most notably in the successful 2011 campaign to acquire the designation of the Church of the Nativity as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While received with much fanfare by tourism producers and PA officials at the time, the move was met with some indifference and skepticism amongst many Palestinians, doubting if the designation would have any positive effect in their lives as individuals or as communities struggling under occupation. This reaction reflects a broader mistrust of the PA and a vocal critique of the statehood project, seen by many as a formalization of the occupation by conceding most of historic Palestine and refugee rights, and leaving the West Bank Palestinians in isolated bantustans. In my paper, I examine the politics of heritage preservation in the West Bank, particularly in the context of the PA statehood project. I argue that particular mobilizations of heritage by the PA reflect its efforts to normalize a conception of Palestine that is limited to its areas of influence in the West Bank, consistent with the limited territorial and demographic boundaries set by Israel and accepted in the PA statehood plan. By tracing the explicit and implicit narratives of history and national identity in PA tourism materials, I show how new meanings are being imposed on older Palestinian nationalist symbols, to adjust to the scope of the statehood project. Finally, I contrast these top-down notions of heritage with some examples of grassroots heritage projects that challenge the ahistorical and depoliticized narratives presented by the PA’s projects.

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.

The recent tragic death of a teenage girl in one of Bethlehem’s refugee camps prompted multiple NGO’s operating in the West Bank to organize a “March of Solidarity” in the camp in support of the girl’s family. As the details regarding the death revealed that she had been murdered by a close relative, the trauma experienced by this family was amplified. NGO’s that had participated in the march began to compete with one another as to what institution would provide psychosocial counseling and services to this family. In my interviews with members of this community, Palestinians often raised the question of whether this case demonstrated “tadamun” (Arabic for solidarity) or “tadakhul” (intervention). The theme of the tension between solidarity and intervention with regards to the “NGOization” (Islah Jad 2004) witnessed by Palestinians in the post-Oslo era was a salient dialectic that emerged during the 14 months of dissertation fieldwork I conducted in the West Bank on the politics of international aid provision. In this paper, I will draw upon my ethnographic findings to highlight the debates within Palestinian society on the role, effectiveness, and social consequences of the pervasive influence of international aid and NGO’s. While some Palestinians recognize the importance of aid in building a vibrant civil society, others are critical of the dependency that has emerged and the political whip of aid. This analysis is motivated by a methodological commitment to the study of the “social life of aid” (Erica James 2010) in addition to a theoretical approach that examines “social engineering” (Sharon Abramowitz 2009) in the context of international donor policies and psychosocial programming. While such an elucidation reveals the intimacy and far-reaching nature of such interventions, it is important to explore how Palestinian recipients of donor aid as well as Palestinian staff of local and international NGO’s understand the impact of foreign funding on Palestinian society. Such a study reveals the drawbacks of interventionism as well as alternative conceptions of interventionism that are aligned with forms of accepted and expected solidarity. While Palestinians do not reject any and all influence from international actors, there is widespread cognizance of when foreign aid is imposing in nature as opposed to when it helps preserve dignity and resilience.

Along with much of the rest of the world's waste after the 1970s, waste in the West Bank came to be managed within a new rubric: “environmental protection.” In the mid-1990s, the responsibility for managing Palestinian waste in the West Bank was “transferred” to the bureaucrats, experts and engineers of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Since then, they have been managing internationally funded, multimillion dollar sanitation projects to mitigate what is frequently called the “environmental catastrophe” they inherited from three decades of military occupation. In their work constructing landfills, sewage networks and treatment plants for the would-be state, these bureaucrats encountered new forms of involvement by international donor representatives, foreign consultants and Israelis of various professions—all professing concern about waste’s effects on a “shared environment.” As a result, the sense among PA waste managers that their work was subject to “international standards” was palpable daily. The experience was one of being overheard, overseen and evaluated for performance in two fields: “state readiness” and “environmental awareness”. It has been argued that technical standards are “important because they help to standardize the subjects of measurement—enabling engineers and technocrats to trust each other’s numbers not on the basis of any direct personal relationship, but simply owing to the existence of recognized standards laboratories and the discipline of well-defined measurement procedures” (Barry 1993: 464). However, in post-Oslo Palestine, where much—including the environment—is assumed held hostage to politics, technical trust is often subject to proof of the standards’ “sincerity.” That is, their non-political character. Thus, a distinction emerged between implementation of international standards in the form of a wastewater treatment plant, for example, and the sincere “environmental awareness” with which they were implemented. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the West Bank and Israel, this paper examines some of the forms of speech and comportment elicited by this experience of being “overheard.” It explores the possibility for comparison between the dynamics of proving sincere environmentalist thinking and those of proving sincere religious conversion in colonial mission encounters (e.g. Keane 2007).