Witnessing as activism: Watching the other at the Israeli checkpoints

ABSTRACT

The practice of external witnessing—bearing witness to someone else's suffering—is often criticized as further destroying the victim's subjectivity. As a result, this approach limits the use of the practice to extreme cases in which victims lack the ability to speak for themselves. This article argues against limiting the use of the practice by tracing its potential to promote identification with the Other, thus undermining cases of dehumanization. This claim is developed through an analysis of the Checkpoint Watch movement in Israel, which reveals the way the movement challenges the dehumanization of the Palestinians. The activists address the delegitimation of the voice of the Palestinians through witnessing as representation and the unwillingness of the Israeli public to understand their experiences as suffering by witnessing as transformation. As such, this account calls for conceptualizing external witnessing as a prominent form of social and political activism.

Notes

1. According to Oliver (2001), the difference between testimony and witnessing is that “testimony is usually a spoken or written account of something seen or experienced, [while] witnessing refers to the structure of subjectivity itself, the very structure that makes testimony possible” (81). The choice to use the term witnessing — even if sometimes together with testimony — reflects the emphasis of this article on analyzing the concept of subjectivity.

2. This distinction, while valuable for understanding the relations between witnessing and truth, often fails to grasp the complex relations between the two. For example, in cases of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, the aim of testimonies is to tell the stories of the victims and to reveal the ways in which survivors experience atrocity. In addition to providing catharsis in a way that written documents cannot, the testimonies are also meant to uncover the truth and, thus, to replace judicial processes (Winter 2009).

3. Israel's claim of reducing the number of obstacles has been successfully directed at the American government, resulting, for example, in the US government congratulating Israel on the removal of 50 checkpoints (see numerous reports from the meeting with Condoleezza Rice [Cooper 2008]). OCHA's reports, however, do not identify a tendency to reduce the number of checkpoints, stating an increase between 2010 and 2011 from 503 to 522 and again in 2012 to 542 checkpoints. Checkpoint Watch activists report similar patterns of random disappearance and reappearance of checkpoints, such as in the reappearance of the Atta-Birzeit checkpoint during the month of July 2009, which was officially declared by Israeli authorities as a canceled checkpoint.

4. The activists' knowledge of the regulations is often more detailed than that possessed by soldiers and their superiors, who may only serve at the checkpoints for a short period of time.

5. All the quotes of the activists were translated from Hebrew by the author. All activists quoted here are identified only by the first letter of their name to maintain their anonymity.

6. This part appears only in the English version of the report in the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Hebrew version, however, contains an additional section that discusses cases of abuse of the humanitarian permits for other reasons besides medical emergencies. Among these cases, the report mentions a woman who bought a medical permit from Gaza to the West Bank in order to visit her children, and a father who asked for a permit to visit his son with cancer but admitted also wanting to work in Israel. The dehumanization of the Palestinians in Israel is probably the reason why these cases were mentioned only in the report in Hebrew and were excluded from the report in English. A foreign audience would probably be surprised by the case of a mother who lied in order to visit her child in a report about terrorism (Israel Security Agency 2008).

7. For example, see the ruling of the Supreme Court #5429/07 from April 2008, in which the judges ruled against the petitioners, including the Israeli organization Physicians for Human Rights. The ruling was in favor of continuing to examine ambulances at the checkpoints and granting permits only to some of them. It was justified as balancing between security and humanitarian needs and embraced the claim of the Security Services that these processes are necessary for preventing terrorist groups from “abusing the humanitarian relief for terrorist actions” (Physicians for Human Rights v. Defense Minister 2007).

8. Land Day was first organized on March 30, 1976, by Palestinian citizens of Israel, who enjoy a different legal status than the Palestinians living in the OPT (who have no Israeli citizenship) in response to the government's intention to confiscate Arab land in Galilee for Jewish settlements. Since then, Land Day has become a day of demonstrations against the unfair treatment of the Palestinian and Bedouin minorities in Israel.

9. Legally, the military closure of an area requires a written order signed by a high-ranking officer.

10. Examples can be found in reports summarizing shifts at A-Ram and Qalandiya checkpoints from August and September of 2002, in which the activists mention they had left the checkpoints early because of the soldiers' claims they are a “Closed Military Area.”

11. An alternative argument, which is also used by the Israeli public, government, and military to dismiss the experience of the Palestinians as suffering, defines the checkpoints “just like a border” and the experience of crossing as “just like any other border-crossing.” This argument is supported by architectural, administrative, and legal changes, which equate the space of the checkpoints with regular border-crossing points between two countries (Maoz 2008; Mansbach 2009). This argument, however, neither corresponds with the political situation — mainly the fact that it is a border between a state and an occupied territory — nor reflects the experience of living under occupation and the reasons why people travel outside of their hometowns.

12. While this article does not examine the response of the Palestinians to the practice of witnessing, Checkpoint Watch activists report hearing during their shifts statements like “You are good for nothing, but thank you for coming” (Personal interview with L., November 8, 2008). This statement, I argue, reflects the understanding that the presence of the activists does more than merely change the actual conditions at the checkpoints.

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Daniela Mansbach

Daniela Mansbach is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Superior where she researches gendered forms of resistance, activism, and modern use of power. Her peer-reviewed articles have been published in Feminist Theory, The Journal of Power, and Theory and Criticism.