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ABSTRACT
The proliferation of voluntary and grassroots relief initiatives during the recent ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe brought renewed attention to the feelings, desires, and motivations that prompt aid workers and volunteers to engage in humanitarian actions. The article expands on this interest in ‘the need to help’ and in the care of the self that humanitarian engagements involve by looking at another layer of humanitarian affectivity – the need to hope – that bears on the helpers and on their aid activities in an intimate and yet impersonal way. I demonstrate how the helpers’ experience of living in an impasse and their tentative coping with political stuckness and paralysis find expression in their humanitarian subjectivities and relief programs, and how their humanitarian encounters and the affects they trigger are entangled with the crisis of the future that their own political communities face. The analysis focuses on two refugee relief projects that were carried out by civil society organizations from Israel in Europe since 2015, in which the resonance between the refugees’ predicament and the crisis of hope that the Jewish helpers from Israel confronted was mobilized as an affective and an operational resource. I show that the normalization of the Israeli occupation and its view as an intractable condition had contrasting effects upon the helpers’ political and humanitarian expectations, fostering both a minor humanitarianism that reaffirmed resilience as a prime political virtue, and a visionary humanitarianism that sought to leverage the humanitarian exception as a platform for practical utopianism.
Acknowledgments
I thank Adriana Kemp for the conversations that preceded the writing of the article and my research assistants, Renen Yezersky and Yasmin Kremer, for their help in conducting the interviews for this research. I extend my gratitude to the staff members and volunteers of Natan and the International School of Peace for sharing their stories and thoughts with us.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The interviews pointed to significant variations in the ways in which Arab-Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli volunteers and staff members who were involved in relief activities in Europe sought to make sense of the humanitarian encounter and the affective politics it triggered. For a detailed discussion of the narratives of volunteering of the Arab-Palestinians from Israel see Givoni Citation2020a.
2 Two recent examples may briefly illustrate this point: The first is the public protests against Netanyahu that spread across Israel in the summer of 2020, which were adamant about the need to restore hope by having Netanyahu leave his office, but did not advance any clear political agenda beyond that and mostly ignored the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second is the Abraham Peace Accords that Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020, followed by normalization agreements with Morocco and Sudan, all of which have similarly bracketed the Palestinian issue.
3 https://oknesset.org/meetings/2/0/2002922.html (in Hebrew), last accessed on 13 July, 2021.
4 The terms ‘volunteers' and ‘refugees' are used here for the sake of convenience. The Jewish-Israeli teams, as one of the school founders remarked, were reluctant to use the term ‘refugees' and preferred to refer to the people and groups that found shelter in Lesvos by the term ‘the communities.' Additionally, the teachers at the school were called ‘volunteers' although they received a monthly payment for their work. Finally, although the Jewish-Israeli teams did refer to themselves as ‘volunteers,' this label does not fully capture their practice of activism as a way of life. The members of the HHLM usually live in communes on a modest allowance they receive from the movement, and dedicate their time to social and educational ‘missions’ (mesimot in Hebrew).
5 A similar position was expressed in an interview with a Palestinian team member. ‘It was very important for us,' he said, ‘to prove to the young generation how much we are able to live together. And our activity as an Arab-Jewish group was the biggest challenge and the biggest example of how much we come from an internal struggle, Arab, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, we come from occupation struggles, land and home struggles and all the rest, but nonetheless we have emerged from the heart of the struggle with something that is very beautiful. We wanted to prove it there.’