I, a Collaborator

[JPN Commentary: In addition to activism in the New Profile movement focused on achieving change within Jewish Israeli society, Dorothy Naor dedicates huge amounts of time to a variety of protest and humanitarian actions in the West Bank — from the camp at Masha in protest of the separation wall through olive harvesting through securing permits for Palestinians in need of medical treatment in Israel, whom she then drives to the hospital herself or provides with carpools. Dorothy, a retired teacher with a PhD in English Literature, is in her seventies, a grandmother of eight. As part of her work with New Profile she acts as the main contributor to an alternative information service, an email list forwarding or providing information from a variety of alternative as well as mainstream sources on events in the Occupied Territories, anti-militarist analyses and anti-occupation activities.

Dorothy’s essay below reflects on the paradoxical double bind often encountered in anti-occupation activism. While attempting to resist and alleviate oppression, activists are forced to negotiate the very rules and authorities that implement this oppression. The very act of resisting the system is co-opted, in effect extending its reach. For many activists this is a very real, very painful issue, further compounding the constantly lurking sense of being trapped, powerless. About a decade ago, doing human rights work in Gaza, I wrote: “we are Jewish Israelis, answerable only to the laws that hold only for the rulers here. These we don’t break. We stretch them a little when we try to offer a couple of their protective measures to people for whom they were never meant, and probably won’t serve. But the freedom we feel ourselves exercising in fact consists of deciding to obey and apply these laws and rules. … my liberty or strength come of crossing. Back and forth. As if I were subject to neither community while I am actually subject to both.”

This recognition of our own complicity as activists is both depressing and enraging. However, an awareness that each of us, personally, is a player within the power structure is, in my view, vital to effective resistance. Human rights and anti-oppression activism can provide activists with a seductive sense of heroism and generate patronizing attitudes. An awareness of the complex positioning of such activism can temper these tendencies and nurture more careful, context-sensitive and egalitarian practices. Therefore, as sad as they may be, Dorothy Naor’s insights make a crucial contribution to continued resistance. RM]

I, a Collaborator

By Dorothy Naor

The realization has recently begun to weigh heavily on me that in almost all my acts regarding the occupation of the Palestinian Territories I collaborate with the powers to be. Of course my collaboration is wholly involuntary. But it nonetheless is. Almost all of our humanitarian and political intentions and acts depend on abiding by the rules, which is another way to say that we kow-tow to the IOF. This applies alike to situations that are planned in advance (e.g., the intention to help with the olive harvest in the OPTs) and to emergency situations (e.g., as when Palestinians stuck at a check point request help to get them through).

We have no option but to request help from the IOF, and by requesting we unwillingly cooperate with its and the government’s rules of the game. We thereby involuntarily assist the government and the military to perform the occupation and to perpetuate it, and in this sense I very much realize that–like it or not–I collaborate.

It’s a catch 22 situation. If we don’t play by IOF rules we are prevented by the IOF from helping the Palestinians and of expressing solidarity with them. Of course there are also means of civil disobedience, and the possibilities of appealing to the high court. These acts are not collaboration. But the ways in which we activists daily involuntarily collaborate are many, too many.

How do I collaborate?

Let me count the ways.

I. The Olive harvest

When I harvest olives for a family that has received insufficient permits to allow them to harvest their trees by themselves, I, by making up for those who were not given permits, collaborate with the military and perpetuate Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

When I agree to to harvesting olives in certain areas only, because of military restrictions on where the Palestinians may harvest, I collaborate with the military and help perpetuate the occupation.

When I agree to harvest olives on the days that the military has designated for a given village, I collaborate with the military and perpetuate the occupation.

II. SOS calls

When I phone the so-called Civil Administration to request help to release someone being held hours at a checkpoint, or when I phone them to request finding and releasing a 12 year-old Palestinian boy whom soldiers have detained, or when I phone to request letting an ambulance through post haste, I collaborate with the military and perpetuate the occupation.

When I request the Civil Administration to issue a permit for a desperately ill person to go to an Israeli hospital for care that she/he cannot receive in the OPTs, I collaborate with the military and perpetuate the occupation.

When I request a permit to a hospital in east Jerusalem for a father whose 2 year-old daughter is to undergo kidney surgery, and am denied because the Central Security Service has declared the father “barred,” and then, even after various attempts to get the permit, nevertheless fail to produce it, I collaborate with the military and perpetuate the occupation by letting it keep him from his child’s hospital bed.

When I phone the Civil Administration at 1:00 AM to report that the army has entered a village, ordered all the inhabitants (old, young, ill, well) out of their homes in pouring rain, and is throwing their belongings outside into the rain, and after reporting this am told by the woman’s voice at the other end of the phone, “What do you want? This is normal” and I quietly declare rather than yell at her, that it’s not in the least normal, I collaborate with the military and perpetuate the occupation.

When, after an hour of arguing with soldiers barring my way into a Palestinian village, I give up trying to get to my destination, and return home instead, I collaborate with the army and perpetuate the occupation.

III. Road blocks and check points

When I accept the reality of road blocks and check points, I collaborate with the army and perpetuate the occupation.

IV. The Apartheid Wall

When I go to a Palestinian village to protest the theft of land, the uprooting of dunams of trees, the destruction of land for the sake of building a wall that will not only rob the villagers of their trees and land but will also enclose them in a ghetto, and then run from the bulldozers and soldiers when they begin shooting tear gas at us, and at the end of the day go home, I collaborate with the military and perpetuate the occupation, because construction of the wall goes on.

Dorothy