“But we don’t just talk, we also do things”

In the autumn of 2016,1 went on a tour of Palestinian villages adversely affected by Israel’s unilateral construction of the Separation Barrier (or Wall, as it is more often called). The Wall, whose declared goal was to block the entrance of Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank into the State of Israel, following the suicide bombings that terrorized Israeli streets and buses during the Second Intifada of the early 2000s, combines stretches of a massively built fence with towering concrete structures. However, its winding route makes deep incursions into Palestinian-owned areas that are under Israeli military occupation, greatly complicating villagers’ access to their agricultural lands, children’s access to their schools, and relatives’ access to each other. For Palestinians, the Wall stands as an emblem of Israel’s policy of occupation and displacement, and has been a major site of contention and protest, including occasionally successful legal struggles. Given Israel’s general policy of separation between Israelis and Palestinians, most Israelis encounter the Wall only vicariously through media coverage and from a safe psychological distance. This psychological distance protects them from recognizing the daily hardships of the Palestinians, whose lives have become ever-more dependent on an elaborate permit system and on military measures that compromise their freedom of movement.³ Hence, the tours. This particular tour was organized by Combatants for Peace,⁴ an NGO founded in 2005 by former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters, who chose to renounce the use of violence, and to join hands in seeking nonviolent, people-to-people paths toward national reconciliation by defiantly forming an organization that promotes grassroots border-crossing engagements. The goal of this tour was to expose members of the Israeli public to the particular plight of Palestinian farmers created by the building of the Wall due to its problematic route. An additional goal was to familiarize tour participants with the vision and model of joint Israeli-Palestinian activism enacted by this particular NGO, whose politics of hope rests on the promise of personal change that lies in the participation in defiant border-crossing projects that take both Israelis and Palestinians beyond their accustomed comfort zones.

At some point in the tour, as we were walking from the bus into the yard surrounding the house of one of our Palestinian hosts, I overheard a conversation between one of the tour guides and a woman participant as they were discussing the border-crossing agenda of Combatants for Peace. The guide spoke at some length about the organization’s dialogue-building activities and the sense of possibility they helped to nurture. Somewhat to my surprise, he concluded the exchange by saying: “But we don’t just talk, we also do things” [aval anaxnu lo rak medabrim, gam osim dvarim]. Having just described the group’s agenda in discourse-centered terms, stressing the defiant potential of the dialogic encounters they organized, he nevertheless put a coda to his account by contrasting (mere) speech with (real) action. His interlocutor did not question this final statement, thus confirming the dualism implicit in the deeds vs words binary and the implied view of speech as less consequential than action. Literally minutes later, the group of some forty participants convened in a general open discussion in the same yard. The exchange was moderated by the second Combatants for Peace activist who acted as a guide on this tour. At one point, an older participant, obviously exasperated by what he had seen and heard that day about the villagers’ hardships in that area, asked: “So what can we [regular citizens] do?” The moderator’s prompt response was: “To speak, to persuade” [ledaber, leshaxne’a]. The response was received with a generally affirmative nod by the audience and went unchallenged. In this case, a question about the possibility of action triggered an exhortation to engage in speech, implying that verbal engagements can be considered a form of resistive action. For this speaker (and apparently his audience), speaking and persuading are potentially effective modes of activist engagement in challenging deeply entrenched public perceptions and attitudes in an attempt to open the door for the possibility of change through the performance of defiant speech.