Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the Israeli participants’ avoidance of throwing stones at Palestinian protests. We illustrate the complexity of their unique position and examine issues of privilege, risk, and latent nationalism.

Paper long abstract:

Ever since Israel has begun to construct the West Bank Separation Wall in 2002, weekly Palestinian demonstrations take place in various villages along its length. The demonstrations are organized by Palestinians, to whom a small group of Israeli activists, often referred to as "Anarchists Against the Wall", joins. These activists declare their participation under the Palestinian committees' rules and highlight their commitment and full solidarity with the Palestinians struggle. However, throwing stones at Israeli army soldiers remains solely a Palestinian practice and hence constitutes the place where Israeli solidarity becomes only partial. Based on ethnographic research in demonstrations between 2015 and 2017, this study seeks to examine the boundary work, the identity construction process, and the justifications used by Israeli demonstrators around stone-throwing practices during the demonstrations.

We show how the joining of Israeli Jews to demonstrations in Palestinian villages is often presented as crossing a border that places them against the Zionist oppressor. T the same time, stone-throwing during the demonstrations challenges this process, and framed as a taboo, a red line that stops the continuing process of crossing lines. The acquiescence to the Israeli activists' avoidance of stone-throwing is an active commission of doing a non-throwing, rather than a passive omission of not throwing stones (Scott 2018). It is part of the Israeli-Jewish activism, that illustrates the complexity of their unique position, and sheds light on the issues of privilege, risk, and latent nationalism.