A View From Within the Fortress

By: Sarai Aharoni and Amalia Sa’ar

This blog was previously published on August 5th 2016 and is republished with the following new introduction:

The world has changed in so many ways since we published our thoughts about BDS and feminist solidarity in 2016. The Israeli fortress, built according to the military logic of protection from human infiltrators, armed groups and rocket attacks, became ineffective in the face of a global pandemic. In 2020, Israel has become an isolated country with soaring numbers of Covid-19 patients. A deep political crisis emerged after three rounds of indecisive elections and accusations of growing political corruption. While an American brokered peace agreement (the “Abraham Accords”) was signed between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain in September 2020, the reality of military occupation and stalemate in Israel-Palestine has remained intact. In this context, our call to rethink BDS as a viable strategy seems even more relevant. Given that the so-called Abraham Accords were, once again, secretly negotiated between multilateral all-male delegations, it seems that feminist insistence on anti-normalization politics is detached, foolish or even dangerous for local women and minorities. As such, we still call for a cooperative approach, which considers the asymmetries, power relations and historical injustices that were caused during decades of armed conflict and occupation. This nuanced position has been the common perspective of Israeli feminists and peace activists, who have been working for decades to create alternative paths for dialogue and shared action. We believe that now, more than four years ago, as the world is shaken by a devastating health crisis, women and feminists must reconsider these historical legacies and discuss creative ways to work together across identities, borders and historical enmities.

Editor’s Note (2016): Given the ongoing conversation around BDS,  we invited several individuals to respond to the the Conversations piece by Simona Sharoni, Rabab Abdulhadi, Nadje Al-Ali, Felicia Eaves, Ronit Lentin, and Dina Siddiqi in the 17(4) issue of IFjP.  This is the first response of two. 

Similar to our previous piece on feminism and BDS, this short intervention is written from a particular standpoint, the standpoint of local, Jewish-Israeli pro-peace feminists. Our perspective is somewhat different from diasporic accounts or other narratives about ‘doing something’ to end the Israeli occupation and the violent separation systems it sustains. Although we do not intend to summarize the multiple voices and positions among Israeli feminists concerning the question of BDS as a solidarity movement, we find it crucial to highlight the importance of this positionality and the possibilities of engaging with it more seriously. In certain ways, this response is written from within a fortress. The metaphor of a fortress captures the current mental and geopolitical reality inside Israel that is becoming more and more fortified amidst a turbulent Middle East. By using this metaphor, we acknowledge how we are both protected by and enclosed within the walls that define and confine our communities. By using this metaphor we also imply that in this juncture there is a clear convergence between the belligerent-cum-isolationist policies of the current Israeli government and the call for BDS. While we sympathize and to some degree even identify with the sentiment that Israel deserves shaming and the Palestinians deserve global solidarity, and while we entirely agree that this conflict is gendered in manifold ways, we would like to question whether isolation and boycott are good for ‘women’, for our communities and future generations.

Photo Credit: Sarai Aharoni, Women in Black, weekly vigil, Haifa 2012. The signs say: "Stop the Occupation" [Arabic] and "There is no military solution for Gaza" [Hebrew]. The photo captures the ongoing presence of Israeli women as peace activists, in the public sphere.

Our response is not meant to continue a ‘dialogue of the death’ concerning the pros and cons of BDS. Like many other scholars and activists in Israel, we are faced with daily manifestations of silence about the occupation and experience various forms of censorship of dissent, criticism or resistance. Like many BDS supporters we too agree that the situation on ground is so dire that we need to adopt radical, innovative and non-violent means to constantly confront the ongoing militarization, occupation and fundamentalism. But, while BDS is configured as a form of negative politics of resistance (refraining and prohibiting normalized contacts with Israeli institutions), we would like to suggest the possibility of endorsing positive forms of peacebuilding that are based on the acknowledgment that we, those who live here, must work hard to build a joint future. This is particularly relevant to feminist scholars who have been highlighting for years the invisible work done by women to sustain life, empathy and tolerance.

This may be seen as a naïve or privileged point of view, but it has grown out of long and constant thinking about the place we live in. Outside and inside our writing, teaching and research we are constantly faced with moral dilemmas and societal sanctions that are born from occupation. Working and living inside the complex and sophisticated double regime system which actively and skillfully separates Israelis from Palestinians has brought us to ask questions that remain invisible in external debates about this conflict, its roots and possible solutions. This position has brought us, in our current research project, to reexamine feminist perspectives on moral agency and asymmetrical warfare. Doing so, we assume that within this fortress there are various communities (and individuals) that are trying to make sense of the past and present by producing local ethical trajectories that define ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Moral agency is important since we, as local feminists, cannot blindly endorse gendered fantasies of protection and external salvation. We do not believe in the power of the international community to save us from ourselves. Our explorations are meant to highlight local agency and creativity and insist that these are relevant and important.

Studying the lessons of other intractable bloody conflicts underscores the importance of adopting a perspective of conflict transformation. While the strategy of boycott, divestment, and sanctions aims to force Israel to retreat, and while unlike military confrontation it is distinctly non-violent, it is still strikingly similar to the latter in its focus on defeating the enemy, without much thought about the day after. Arguably, successive Israeli governments have justified this attitude, having repeatedly truncated previous rounds of negotiation by rejecting any terms that would allow a sustainable Palestinian state and by consistently refusing to acknowledge the Palestinian right of return. However, as Israeli feminists, we see our agency not in joining the game of trying to subdue power – a pointless endeavor to begin with – but in trying to undo it by working in its interstices and invisible spaces; and by inculcating care as a moral politics of conflict transformation. We therefore see global feminist solidarity as supporting the Palestinian quest for historical justice while actively working towards de-militarization of all parties to this conflict; and as not giving up on collaborative actions for peace, which the BDS movement unwittingly disparages. Otherwise, we would be denying our own history of cross-border feminist peace activism and forfeiting our legacy of talking in a different voice.

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Each blog post gives the views of the individual author(s) based on their published IFJP article. All posts published on ifjpglobal.org remain the intellectual property and copyright of the author or authors.

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Dr. Sarai Aharoni is a lecturer in Gender studies at Ben-Gurion University. She received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from Bar-Ilan University, writing her dissertation on gender perspectives and the participation of Israeli women in formal Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. She has published articles on gender, peace and conflict in Israel and co-edited the book Where Are All the Women? U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325: Gender Perspectives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2004). Dr. Aharoni is one of the founding members of the IWC (International Women’s Commission) and has been active in promoting women’s rights in Israel as a member of Isha l’Isha-Haifa Feminist Center.

Dr. Amalia Sa'ar is a cultural anthropologist, a feminist, and a peace activist. In my academic capacity I’m an assistant professor and chair of the anthropology dept. at the University of Haifa. Sa’ar’s fields of interest include the politics of gender in the Palestinian society inside Israel, women work and citizenship, feminist security and feminist theory more generally, generational relations in Israeli feminism, , urban anthropology, and participatory action research. Sa’ar’s book Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment (Berghahn Books 2016) documents the social economy field in Israel and explores the paradoxes that inhere in neoliberal empowerment projects. Sa’ar is a long-time member of the Haifa Feminist Center Isha l-Isha (woman to woman).