"It won’t stop until we talk”

A slogan circulated by The Parents’ Circle Families Forum⁶ (PCFF), a joint Israeli-Palestinian grassroots organization made up of families who have lost loved ones as a result of the ongoing conflict, reads “It Won’t Stop Until We Talk” [ze lo igamer ad shelo nedaber]. This slogan appears prominently on the group’s website (in Arabic, Hebrew, and English), and has been widely distributed in the form of stickers that bear the organization’s logo. The unspecified “it” in this slogan, which can be read as vocatively using the power of the pronoun to index absence and loss, implicitly refers to the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is this ongoing and ever-escalating violence of military and terrorist actions to which members of this organization respond - and which they seek to prevent. Talking in this context is thus both a vehicle and an emblem of the renunciation of violence. It signals forum members’ commitment to work toward national reconciliation and peace and bears the mark of hope for both Israeli and Palestinian societies. Since 1998, members of the Forum (that numbers over 600 families) have initiated and sustained a wide range of encounters and dialogue meetings in which Israeli and Palestinian participants mobilize their shared sense of personal loss in generating a dialogue that defies entrenched divisions and hostilities. Since 2006, they have also co-organized an Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony on Israel’s official Memorial Day for the Fallen under the heading of “Sharing sorrow, bringing hope.” In this ceremony - a newly invented joint Israeli-Palestinian tradition (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983) -members of bereaved families on both sides, who belong to PCFF, are annually joined by thousands of supporters who choose to mark that day in a way that defies the us/them binary of military logic and acknowledges the enormous price paid by both Israelis and Palestinians in the course of their national struggles. The counter-hegemonic position presented by PCFF, which follows the Israeli commemorative calendar yet equally acknowledges the human loss on both sides of the conflict, has triggered considerable outrage in both mainstream Israeli and Palestinian societies, and its members’ personal sacrifice has not shielded them from being marginalized and, at times, even criminalized as traitors. Nevertheless, the joint trilingual (Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles) memorial event has steadily grown, attracting 9,000 on-site attendees in 2019, who were joined by numerous others from around the world, including the Palestinian territories, through live streaming. Opposition to the memorial in Israel has also grown, led by right-wing groups as well as by other bereaved parent groups, who object to the symmetry implied by this ceremony and particularly to its scheduling as part of the national commemorative calendar. The ceremony has also been condemned by leading political figures year after year. In 2018, Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman tried to completely block the participation of Palestinians in the ceremony held in Tel Aviv by denying them entry permits into Israel, a decision that was overturned by a High Court of Justice ruling. Despite this legal precedent, in 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu, himself a member of a bereaved family, again tried to prevent Palestinians from participating in the ceremony in his role as Minister of Defense; his decision was again overturned by the High Court of Justice, whose ruling allowed for 100 West Bank Palestinians to participate in the ceremony in person. The overall escalation of hostilities toward grassroots peace initiatives in Israel over the past few years was keenly felt during the 2019 memorial ceremony, which was held in a large open-air park that was heavily guarded by the police. On that occasion, as in the year preceding it, members of bereaved families and their sympathizers were attacked by dozens of extreme right-wingers, who hurled insults, invectives, and even spit at participants who were making their way into and out of the site. However, quite tellingly, the media’s coverage of the 2019 event largely focused on the view expressed by Prime Minister Netanyahu and other officials that this ceremony is an illegitimate provocation, and on their questioning of the High Court of Justice’s decision to allow the participation of Palestinians. Very little media coverage was given to the ceremony itself, which is an attempt to prefigure a future of conciliation and peace, and thereby promote a message of hope. This message was reinforced by the interweaving of Arabic and Hebrew throughout the event as well as in the lyrics of its closing song, which is performed annually by an Israeli-Palestinian chorus. This song, originally performed by the popular singer Chava Alberstein, is a well-known contemporary take on the traditional Passover holiday song, Had Gadya, that speaks of unending rounds of violence. Performed in this ceremony, with Arabic and Hebrew verses seamlessly interlaced, it dramatizes the call to stop these senseless rounds. This song also closed the 2020 ceremony, which was conducted only online due to the Coronavirus pandemic, bringing into full view the power of digital media to reach wide audiences and to overcome the pressures of offline constraints and on-the-ground hostilities. Sponsored by a variety of left-wing organizations, it was attended by an audience of about 200,000 viewers around the world, and was followed by a new participatory initiative in the form of coordinated zoom meetings with members of the PCFF organization in their Israeli and Palestinian home-settings, which were conducted in either Arabic, Hebrew, or English, as the case may be.

The “It won’t stop until we talk” slogan gives voice to the organization’s trust in the potential of the defiant deployment of discourse as a path to social change. It also attests to its members’ conviction that it is only through grassroots people-to-people dialogue-centered encounters that challenge both the Israeli and Palestinian consensus that intergroup hostility can be curbed. In other words, within the context of this group’s peace activism, engaging in talk prefigures and models the possibility of a currently unacceptable but desirable state of mutual acceptance and collaboration between members of national groups separated by what seem to be impenetrable physical and mental borders. Such people-to-people initiatives hold the potential to breed unusual friendships that fly in the face of the mutual demonizing that dominates public discourses in both Israel and Palestine. The exhortation to opt for speech that defies accepted limitations and borders is fueled by the fear of violence and the realization that the use of violence can only breed more violence, whether in the form of state-sponsored wars or of the terrorism of non-state actors. In the spirit of the twentieth-century legacy of nonviolence (Ackerman & Duvall, 2000), which has inspired a myriad of grassroots peace initiatives in Israel/Palestine over the past century (e.g., Katz, 2016), this slogan constructs border-crossing defiant discourses among officially designated enemies as the only path out of the grip of violence in the current state of protracted conflict. This path, it is hoped, will be created by promoting a new kind of respectful dialogue based on common ground and mutual recognition, one held in defiance of official divisions and separations, as prefigured in the joint Israeli and Palestinian memorial ceremony I have briefly described.

The foregoing vignettes offer a glimpse of the entanglement of speech and action in activist contexts, which are underwritten by an ethos of doing that involves taking personal responsibility through participation in organized opposition and alternative meaning-making practices. They suggest an underlying tension between a trust in speech as the ultimate social and political tool as in “It won’t stop until we talk” and a suspicion of the potency of words as in “We don’t just talk.” While much of this book explores the potential of discourse-centered activism, of the things activists choose to do with words, this mostly unarticulated tension, I argue, has become a familiar feature of activist engagements. Occasionally, it becomes foregrounded in public debates that address the question of what dissenting individuals need to do, or can do, in particular times and places. In such contexts, critiques of activist projects often include the accusation that they do not go beyond “mere words.” Within the Israeli anti-occupation movement, such critique has been consistently and persistently voiced by Ilana Hammerman, a highly regarded author, editor, translator, and columnist, whose activism combines words and deeds to an unusual degree. Her critique addresses what she considers anti-occupation activists’ overreliance on verbal interventions and their underrepresentation in on-the-ground, risk-taking engagements. Participating in human-shield actions organized by the Palestinian-Israeli grassroots organization Ta’ayush,⁷ which has been active since 2000, Hammerman has been witness to the plight of the Palestinians in actual sites of conflict in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, and has experienced clashes with soldiers and border-police, about which she has reported in her journalistic writings and books (e.g., Hammerman, 2016). She has also initiated a creative form of resistance involving civil disobedience, such as taking Palestinian women and children from the West Bank for recreational trips to the Tel Aviv beach or to the Jerusalem zoo in defiance of entry regulations into Israel. Some of the opinion pieces she has published in Ha’aretz, Israel’s elite daily, express not only her outrage against the occupation regime but also her deep disappointment at the inefficacy and lack of commitment of anti-occupation activists. She attributes the failure of the struggle against the occupation to activists’ reluctance to go beyond symbolic gestures of dissent and to take real risks by launching acts of civil disobedience that can significantly disrupt and thereby inhibit the carrying out of oppressive and injurious practices. Such direct action, she believes, has the potential of undermining governmental policies of dispossession and displacement, or at least of putting the occupation more squarely on the public agenda.

Thus, for example, in a scathing critique of a petition published by academics on the eve of the Jewish New Year in September 2018, in which they expressed their outrage at the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories in sharp condemnatory tones, and reaffirmed their commitment to humanistic values, she pointed out that their declarative statement was no more than an attempt at conscience-cleansing. It failed to propose any concrete resistance measures, such that would go beyond words and require them to put their bodies on the line and make real sacrifices. Therefore, in her view, such public statements carry no weight. She proposed that the signatories join the small groups of anti-occupation activists who regularly go to the South Hebron Hills or to the Jordan Valley, where blatant oppression and displacement take place, believing that only grounded activist interventions can attenuate settler violence against the Palestinians, encourage protective military involvement, and express solidarity in a credible way. Thus, drawing a clear line between words and deeds, Hammerman repeatedly claims that high-worded petitions, when not backed up by acts of civil disobedience that actually involve “being there,” amount to de facto complicity with governmental policies of dispossession. To her, as to others among activists I have encountered, discourse-centered activism undertaken from the comfort of one’s home, whether in the form of petitions, the penning of op-eds, or archive-building projects, does not convey the resoluteness and commitment to the cause required to make a difference. In a society that views itself as democratic and seeks to maintain this image vis-à-vis the global community, speaking out, unwelcome as it may be, does not entail real risk-taking in the sense of endangering life and limb (as is the case in totalitarian regimes). Therefore, speech does not entail the corporeal sanctions that grounded action may risk, is less of a sacrifice, and carries less weight. As she put it, “so far any (Jewish) citizen in Israel may cause an uproar with his home computer without anything happening to him” (Hammerman, 2018).

In an op-ed Hammerman published in Ha’aretz about a year later, she reiterates and generalizes this position to all forms of activism that fall short of her expectations for embodied presence, claiming that slogans against the occupation are no more than a meaningless form of ventilation, whether they appear in journalistic articles or are chanted in street demonstrations. She calls for embodied civil resistance to stop what she describes in graphic detail as the ethnic cleansing that is currently underway in the Jordan Valley, arguing that the failure to undertake such action throws into question the sincerity of the anti-occupation proclamations appearing in petitions, slogans, and newspaper articles. Responding to the implicit charge that writing articles in Haaretz is preaching to the believers, her call for grounded and sustained acts of civil disobedience targets, in particular, organized grassroots groups such as Breaking the Silence, Combatants for Peace and Machsom Watch* [Checkpoint Watch], part of whose action repertoires involve organizing guided tours in the occupied territories through which visitors are exposed to the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli military control. She claims that these forays into the landscape of the occupation have not proven sufficient to generate the outrage that could actually move audiences out of their zone of comfort. She calls on her readers to “finally get out to the field, support us [activists], and help us make our presence more meaningful” (Hammerman, 2019), believing that a sharp increase in the intensity of grounded action at the site of conflict and a significant increase in the number of participants in it can make a real difference. This call for real action that involves the taking of risks invokes a heroic ethos and a sacrificial cultural economy, which resonate with the ethos of military sacrifice that dominates Israeli mainstream culture. Exhorting those who oppose the occupation to take real action in the form of civil disobedience, Hammerman frames her activist version of the Israeli sacrificial ethos in terms of a speech vs action binary, using words to persuade others to join her in going beyond discourse.