The Activist Tour as a Political Tool

One sunny Saturday morning in spring 2008, I joined a group of thirty people who waited for a tour bus outside the train station in Tel Aviv. The majority of us were middle-class Jewish Israelis roughly between twenty-five and sixty-five years old. There were also a few internationals and a foreign filming crew working on a documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We all had preregistered for this free tour through the organizer, an Israeli NGO called Zochrot, whose name means "we remember" in female plural form in Hebrew. We knew we were going to visit the ruins of a pre-1948 Palestinian village. From chatting in the train station I found out that for many, this was the first time they would be participating in one of Zochrot's tours. All of us were casually dressed, in hats and sport shoes or hiking sandals, carrying light food and water we had packed in advance. We looked like the thousands of other Israelis who go hiking in national parks and reservations every weekend. And indeed, after an hour or so, the bus dropped us off at the parking lot of a national park that was full with cars and hikers. Shortly after leaving the bus and stretching our legs we, joined by thirty to forty other tour participants who arrived by car, gathered around the tour guide, Amin. One of Zochrot's two Palestinian staff members, Amin explained in perfect Hebrew with a slight Arabic accent where we were going, what stops we would make on the way, and what we were about to see at these stops. For a Jewish Israeli like myself, everything felt quite familiar so far, resembling the popular script of the tour by foot as it has been practiced in Israeli schools, youth movements, scouting clubs, and family weekend trips around the country. There were only two indications that this was not a regular weekend tour. First, an elderly Palestinian in traditional attire, accompanied by his son, the son's wife, and three of his grandchildren, arrived in a private car and was greeted by the tour guide and Zochrot's staff members. Second, as the group started walking, we wandered off to an unmarked path in an otherwise well-marked and mapped park. Unlike the marked paths, lined by trees planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), Israel's land and forests agency, and seeded with archeological structures, along our path there were no signs, only wildly growing fruit trees, scattered stones, and cacti. There were no other travelers on this path, which together with the wildly growing flora suggested that it is not considered a destination for the ordinary weekend hiker. Our diversion from the marked path received curious and inquisitive looks from other hikers, who we soon left behind.

Zochrot's tour of Palestinian ruins continued to follow the tour format familiar to Jewish Israelis: following a tour guide on a path through nature, making stops along the way to hear the guide commenting on the landscape, explaining what had been there before. Yet some differences did arise: not only that the tour guide spoke first in Arabic and only later in Hebrew; the elder Palestinian also spoke alongside the guide; the man is a Palestinian refugee and a former resident of the site before its destruction in 1948. His mental map of the place, communicated through testimony, in combination with documents and photos, critical historiographies, and testimonies of other former residents, provided the foundational body of knowledge for this tour. Moreover, at central stops during the tour, signs prepared by Zochrot that carry the Palestinian place name in Arabic and Hebrew (sometimes also in English) were posted by the refugee's family, some of Zochrot's staff and volunteers, and willing participants. These signs resembled the JNF signs that are posted throughout this national park but had brighter colors.

The guide and refugee gave short oral presentations at every stop along the way. They had visited the site together at least once before to prepare for this one-time public tour of this particular site organized primary for Israeli Jews. In fact, the refugee's testimony was transcribed and translated to appear in a booklet handed out to tour participants at the beginning of the tour. The same knowledge on the site is distributed through two mediums: the written booklet and the spoken and embodied performance of live testimony during the tour. This suggests that Zochrot does not expect the written information to function independently from the refugee's presence and performance. Giving testimony is indeed a position that, in addition to providing firsthand knowledge, carries unique moral authority, especially when performed in situ (J. Feldman 2008, 69). It is a position and practice that Israelis are highly familiar with when the witness is a Jewish Israeli Holocaust survivor for example. But will they give the same legitimacy and authority to a non-Jewish witness, moreover, to a Palestinian who testifies about Jewish and Israeli violence, displacement, and dispossession? And how will the Palestinian refugee communicate a long-silenced memory to those whose parents and grandparent may have taken part in the war that caused his displacement and loss?

These and other questions suggest that this activist tour, which mimics the form of the tour previously used for Zionist national education, to portray not Jewish Israeli, but Palestinian ties to the land, is far from being simple and straightforward. The activist utilization of the tour carries dilemmas, tensions, contradictions, and ironies, some which are inherent to the hegemonic use of the tour in Israel, and others that stem from its activist employment in the political context of the 2000s.

Here we begin our close reading of how memory activists have been appropriating and redeploying locally familiar memory practices to pursue the postconflict paradigm of truth and reconciliation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This close reading, which continues in the two following chapters, is of the activist appropriation of the tour and testimony by different groups of Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian activists since 2001; these are commemorative forms and practices that are locally rooted within Israel's dominant memory culture. The examination not only includes cultural forms that have been dominant among Jewish Israelis but also considers similar, separate yet related, practices developed by Palestinian citizens. The analysis begins with the appropriation of cultural practices primarily by and for Jewish Israelis by the largest of the memory-activism groups I studied in Israel, Zochrot. Drawing on a history of touring in the Zionist movement and among Palestinian citizens of Israel, the intended and unintended consequences of a meeting between a Palestinian refugee and an audience of primarily Jewish...