1In 2012, I travelled to Israel to conduct critical ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD dissertation, becoming, for lack of a better way of describing it, “researcher-as-tourist” (Scarles, 2010). The project was conceived as an exploration of the role of education in the Israel/Palestine conflict (Sheps, 2019). In it, I argued that public school systems tend to operate as a lens into public discourse, a way to determine how successive generations are moulded from students into citizens. History and civics curricula are sites of history making, where cultural and historical narratives, mythologies, and ideas are created, transmitted, and explored, often for the first time. My central thesis was that Israeli public-school curricula were designed to teach a single historical and cultural narrative to all students regardless of whether they identified as Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or any other ethnoreligious and cultural group that lives there. Like some approaches utilized in other settler-colonial education projects such as the Residential Schools in Canada (Gahman and Legault, 2019), education for Palestinian citizens of Israel suffers from unequal funding and resources and is a “decontextualized endeavor that excludes ideology and politics” (Agbaria, 2018: 20). The common thread linking these projects is the desire to erase the culture, history, and connection to land, using education as a tool to further this end. I argued that textbooks and curricular materials were intentionally designed to legitimize the discourse that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic, validate the occupation of Palestine and remove all other perspectives and histories from the conversation, especially any claims that might recognize Palestinian history or nationhood as legitimate (Sheps, 2014; Agbaria, 2018; Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2019).
- 1 Israel maintains separate secular public education streams for Jewish- and Arabic-speaking communit (...)
2Given my positionality as a Jewish researcher, albeit a Canadian citizen and not Israeli, my intention was to only review history, civics, and geography textbooks used in the secular Israeli-Jewish public education system and interview Jewish teachers to fit in with this more emic, insider-based approach.1 Indeed, my own experiences within Diasporic Jewish educational spaces and institutions led me to believe that being Jewish would be enough, perhaps unintentionally taking what Dimitri Ioannides and Mara Cohen Ioannides (2004: 107) refer to as a “modern day pilgrimage” to maintain a connection to the homeland, even though my intention was to disrupt this connection. Upon arrival, I learned that merely being Jewish was not enough to truly belong; I gradually learned that the conflict in Israel is far more consistent with settler colonialism than I ever imagined, especially after I interviewed Palestinian-Israeli teachers and educators and spent time with ethnic and religious minority communities who fall outside of the mainstream, Zionist gaze (Sheps, 2014). I also realized how much I ignored about the history of the region and of the conflict; my perceived insider status was as much the result of my own one-sided education as it was my ego and sense of entitlement. While it has been argued that an “awareness of the positionality of oneself as a researcher can invigorate empirical analysis” (Neumann and Neuman, 2016; cited from LaRocco et al., 2020), in my case the reverse can also be true. Through the process of travelling in a country divided by checkpoints and ethnoracial and religious hierarchies to complete my research, I unwittingly reproduced the very settler-colonial discourses I sought to challenge in my initial project—occasionally my privileged position as a Jewish scholar opened doors that allowed me the freedom of movement that some Israeli citizens and most Palestinians lack. At other times, my Canadian citizenship and my whiteness prevented me from building trust with the communities I wanted to help, reminding me that I did not belong. I lacked the reflexivity necessary to interrogate my own position as a colonizer—both as a Jewish person working in occupied East Jerusalem and as a Canadian with an unintentional saviour complex who desired to “fix a problem” (Regan, 2010), a type of settler’s move to innocence (Tuck and Yang, 2012).
3In my current role as a lecturer at a Canadian university within a Sociology Department committed to decolonizing our own curricula and program objectives, revisiting this work now provides an opportunity to put my teaching philosophy into practice. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) argue, decolonization needs to be more than a metaphor. Faculty members often struggle with this notion, trying to avoid falling into the trap of “immaterial liberal notions of decolonization” that have little transformative influence (Gahman and Legault, 2019). How can I come to decolonize my own process? Can this critical autoethnography contribute to any real effort to promote Indigenous sovereignty, land rights, or self-determination in either Canada or in occupied Palestine, or does this work reify the very metaphorical decolonization Tuck and Yang (2012) caution against?
4Though a decade old, revisiting this research provides an opportunity to discuss, critique, and reassess the purpose and scope of the project, and to call attention to past patterns and institutionalized research practices that ought to be reconsidered. I envision this piece not as a revisionist historical text but rather a site for meaning-making and Millsian social science craftsmanship (Mills, 1959: 195); to better understand the connection between research-as-tourism and settler colonialism with the benefit of time, distance, and new knowledge.
5I will first provide a literature review of autoethnography as both theory and method, demonstrating its role in the process of decolonization, drawing from the autoethnographic work of Tami Spry (2006; 2017), Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner (2000), and Amie L. Matthews (2012), among others. I then will revisit five entries from my unpublished travel diaries to interrogate my own actions, behaviours, and understanding of the material conditions that the communities I sought to study experienced in their daily lives. I will follow each entry with a self-reflexive “unlearning lesson” to help resolve some of the questions that I sought to better understand during the original fieldwork. Finally, I will discuss the tension that existed both during my fieldwork and now, ten years later, questioning what role I can play as a settler in decolonizing research and travel-based fieldwork. Matthews (ibid.: 57) writes:
6[I]f we agree that thinking critically about tourism means not just thinking about what others (specifically other tourists) do, but also about what we, as researchers, writers and educators (who frequently also happen to be tourists both in our personal lives and professions) do, then there is no reason why our own experiences should not be included in our accounts. Indeed . . . as critical researchers we have a responsibility to interrogate them. Not always as central components of our research, but at least as background to it. For how can we teach tourism, write tourism and if we are fortunate shape tourism, without thinking about how we ourselves do it?
7Drawing from Stephanie Masta’s (2018) contention that autoethnography is a means to decolonize Eurocentric research practices, these travel stories provide moments of disruption to my own perceived insider status. These disruptions invited the opportunity to (un)settle (Regan, 2010; Essa et al., 2021) and to (un)learn the colonial practices and politics that were unintentionally embedded into my research (Chen, 2021), a process that requires critical reflection, distance, and time.
8Each diary entry recounts a specific story from my travels—daily life journals, breaks from the research, the struggles with integrating into my temporary home and community. There are reflections about language and cultural barriers, physical barriers, and checkpoints; my response to being trapped under rocket fire in Be’er Sheva during a flare-up between Israel and Gaza; travel stories to different locations throughout Israel including a permaculture farm in the Negev Desert; a Druze village; and an encounter with a member of the Israeli Black Panthers during a guided tour of the former “seam zone”—the dividing line between West Jerusalem and the now occupied Old City. Parts of these entries were posted on my personal blog, whereas others were kept in a private archive that I have not revisited since completing the research. These stories are more than travelogues; they are a site for understanding my experience with travel and research in a country where citizenship, mobility, and movement cannot be taken for granted.
9Autoethnography exists on the edge of both theory and method, almost an embodiment of C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination (1959) taken to its logical end, bringing life experiences to the fore in their intellectual work (see also Dao, 2021). As a method, autoethnography provides the tools and the space to use personal experience to either examine or critique political and cultural experience (Holman Jones et al., 2013). In addition to making contributions to existing research, this nuanced critique of cultural experience is what separates autoethnography from autobiography and journaling.
10Mills believes that “you must learn to use your life experiences in your intellectual work: continually examine and interpret it” (1959: 196). By exploring our own stories, autoethnographers inherently recognize the connection between their private troubles and the larger public issues that ethnographers and critical social scientists tend to research. As for Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis (2013: 21), they assert:
11As our stories illustrate, autoethnography creates a space for a turn, a change, a reconsideration of how we think, how we do research and relationships, and how we live. These stories constitute a narrative of coming to an experience and a moment in time when excluding or obscuring the personal in research felt uncomfortable, even untenable.
12Autoethnographic subjects are intentionally vulnerable, opening ourselves up to what Carolyn Ellis (2004) describes as “criticism about how we’ve lived” (cited in Holman Jones et al., 2013: 24). By using this form of writing as its own method of inquiry, autoethnographers are also able to relieve themselves of one of the traditional issues with ethnography; they are no longer “speaking for the Other because they are the Other in their texts” (Richardson, 2000 [irregular capitalization in original]).
13The development of more critical movements within ethnographic and autoethnographic research was designed to empower non-white scholars, yet most ethnographic scholarship of the last twenty years is still produced by white (and white-presenting) researchers (Chawla and Atay, 2018), including me. In theory, critical autoethnography could be used as a method to tell “insider” stories as opposed to outsider interpretations of the same stories; a method to decolonize and to reconfigure generations of misinterpretation and understandings and to provide an emic rather than etic view of culture.
14Chawla and Rodriguez (2008) argue that autoethnography has situated and propels the “postcolonial” turn within ethnographic studies, although the “post” does not signify the “end” of its colonial legacy. I believe that autoethnography holds decolonizing potentialities . . . Therefore, autoethnography equips researchers to challenge power and cultural politics from within and through our everyday lives and our academic discourses (Toyosaki, 2018: 33).
15If autoethnography provides researchers with a set of tools to challenge colonial power relations and cultural politics from within, as Satoshi Toyosaki (2018) suggests, then does my own story have value?
16Chen Chen’s article “(Un)Making the International Student a Settler of Colour: A Decolonising Autoethnography” provides a framework for me to utilize—autoethnography for decolonization.
17As autoethnography can act as “a call to witness” (p. 98) and testify something that is otherwise unavailable (Sparkes 2002), decolonising autoethnography is tasked to reveal, unpack, and resist how colonial violence is deeply ingrained and (re)produced within academic institutions but also in everyday life (Dutta 2018). Here, I use my identity and experience as a “methodological source of knowledge” (Brigg and Bleiker, 2010), draw upon the struggles, uncertainties, and revelations in various stages of my “encounters” with settler colonialism (Chen, 2021: 6).
18Chen (ibid.: 2) presents stories of (un)learning from the perspective of an international student, “making sense of settler colonialism, particularly my own embeddedness therein.” I was also an international student, trying to learn about the role of education in an ongoing conflict between two communities who each claim nationhood and indigeneity in the region; however, being Jewish and Canadian, I was simultaneously the insider and outsider, possessing a measure of both colonial power and powerlessness in both my country of origin and my temporary residence.
- 2 Though beyond the scope of this paper, a brief history lesion is required to contextualize my asser (...)
19Growing up in a diasporic Jewish community and attending a Jewish day school, I was taught to believe that Israel is my home, a type of “diasporic fervour” that informed my personal narrative (Dao, 2021). Despite being raised knowing that I could claim the “right of return”2 and be granted immediate citizenship, this “right” was always something that I rejected for my own political reasons. Subconsciously, this knowledge empowered me to proceed with my project, naïvely believing that my Jewishness alone was enough to entitle me to the space, both intellectually and physically. As a “researcher-as-traveller,” I had the security of institutional affiliation in my capacity of visiting research fellow, freedom of movement and mobility to travel throughout the country to conduct interviews due to my Canadian passport, and the luxury of time to take breaks from the often difficult and emotionally draining process of “doing” ethnography; time that I took to travel and explore.
20I also had moments of crippling self-doubt, a feeling exacerbated during what I thought was to be my second interview; my participant decided to not only end the interview before it began, but told me, “Go home, this isn’t your story. You don’t belong here.” It was in these breaks in the research and the moments of self-doubt that the process of unlearning really began—the more time I spent away from the research, the more (un)settled I felt and the more acutely aware of my privileged position I became. I started to better understand that my relationship to Israel was the point in which my (cultural) history and (personal) biography intersect (Mills, 1959; Dao 2021), providing context, depth, and meaning to this process of (un)learning myself and my culture.
- 3 The irony is twofold; the spectre of the holocaust is something that most Jews of Eastern European (...)
21I arrived in Israel early in the morning in January 2012, connecting via Warsaw, Poland. There is a historical irony in this statement.3 I was able to find my way from the airport outside Tel Aviv to my new temporary home in occupied East Jerusalem, although it took a while to coordinate where I would live. As a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University, I was not affiliated with any faculty or program; I had no timeline, limited resources, and was directed to the housing office to negotiate where I was going to stay for an unknown period.
22In broken Hebrew, a language I can read and understand but had not spoken regularly since childhood, I explained that I had no idea how long I was going to be living on campus and asked for the cheapest option—ideally something month-to-month. The person on the other side of the window encouraged me to sign up for a six-month stay in the brand-new dormitories, what she called the “כפר סטודנטים” (student village), a place where hundreds of other North American exchange students stay every semester. I could neither afford this residence nor did I want to spend any time with undergraduate exchange students who were looking to party, and politely asked if there was another option. I was told that there was, but I would not want to live there, that I would be uncomfortable there. I asked why and was told “they” live there. I knew who “they” were, but I wanted to hear it, so I pressed. Eventually, after some rather rude badgering in broken Hebrew, I received the answer I was looking for—the woman behind the window relented, acknowledging that this residence, called “Reznick,” was for “הערבים”—the Arab students. I signed up.
23Diary entry 1 (January 20th, 2012)
24My new Druze friend, a medical student, has been great. He helped me get Internet access, found a way to top up my Israeli mobile phone and is letting me use his kitchen supplies. He calls me “Abu jār,” neighbour in Lebanese-Arabic, and it seems to be a genuine term of endearment. The others on my floor have been nice enough as well, but few have been as kind as he has. Last night I wandered into my new friend’s dorm room. He had a couple buddies over, they were playing FIFA 2012 on the PS3, drinking some beers and smoking Argileh (hookah). We talked for a little while. He asked me why I would come all this way to do research and I told him I study the education system and how it pertains to conflict. He laughed and said something like “Which one? Here everyone is in conflict. Jews and Arabs, Arabs and Arabs, Arabs, and the Arabs not in Israel, Jews and Christians, Arabs, and Christians. Sometimes everything works, but everywhere is conflict.” I found it odd that he never once used the word Palestinian in his explanation of his world but didn’t want to press. He laughed again as he offered me a pull of the rich, fruit flavoured tobacco and said, “at least I know you’ll be a good neighbour.”
25Guns are everywhere, as are soldiers; that is the normal here. The other normal is checkpoints. In the course of my work, I have learned quite a bit on the hyper-securitization of the Israeli state, the near panoptic, biopolitical wet dream for those in power (Foucault, 2008), who use the technology and infrastructure at their disposal to surveil those who have been made Other in this society (Said, 1978). What I wasn’t expecting was the extent to which those inside the state have also been made a part of this architecture. To leave my dorm, I go through a gate with an armed guard. To get onto main campus, I go through a gate, a metal detector, and a bag search, every time. Even if it’s the same guard who saw me earlier in the day, I go through the process all over again. Headphones out, iPhone turned off, bag passed to armed guard, walk through metal detector, just to get to class in the morning. It’s the same to catch a bus to go to Tel Aviv.
26This is not to belittle the experience of the Palestinians, whose daily experience is much more than the minor inconvenience of having my bag searched. I am not actually being made subject to it in the same ways that a Palestinian would. My Jewishness, Canadianness, and Hebrew University Student ID shield me from many of the daily humiliations of the checkpoints, though not necessarily the daily grind. There is clearly a difference between the institutional security checks and the actual military checkpoints that are in place throughout the country. I spoke to my mom about this, and she said something like “what do you expect? you know the reasons behind it,” but that doesn’t mean I am going to agree. I find it is unsettling and obviously take a position that is critical of such an architecture of biopolitical control.
27One of the more interesting parts of this process was determining when I was an insider and when I was an outsider. This a key distinction when conducting any sort of fieldwork, but one that is muddied in this case by the “right of return” bestowed upon any Jewish person who decides to live in Israel. While I did not emigrate, this perception of belonging to a place and a people was part of the educational and cultural tradition I grew up in. As John Urry (2000) suggests, “the spatial ‘boundaries’ of citizenship are inherent within the very constitution of what it is to be a citizen and are not historically invariant. Those boundaries are not necessarily those of the nation-state” (Pierson 1996: 128-130; cited in Urry, 2000: 167 [emphasis added]). This perception was put to the test after my first interview, which took place at a teacher’s college. The participant graciously brought me to the library upon completion of the interview to explore their textbook archive and learn which books I needed to review for my content analysis.
28In his own research unpacking the politics of identity and returning, Michael Dao (2021) writes: “How does one reconcile the political nature of their research when the very act of research is rooted in their own historical and biographical privilege?” This seemingly benign interaction with the librarian provided insight into the privileges that insiders receive, and the hostility directed towards outsiders. At first, the librarian was very resistant to my presence. I heard her whispering to my contact about not wanting to let outsiders read the textbooks, afraid that I was some western interloper, probably an anti-Semite. Without hesitation, I used my privilege like a weapon to get what I wanted, politely telling the librarian, “אני יהודי ואני מביו עברית” (I’m Jewish and I understand Hebrew). The librarian’s tone changed immediately; she switched to English, apologized for the misunderstanding, and immediately took me to get what I needed.
29Unlike “mobility citizenship” concerned with rights and responsibilities to other cultures that Zygmunt Bauman (1993; cf. Urry, 2000) describes, in Israel, citizenship is contingent on ethnonational and religious affiliation. As Nurit Peled-Elhanan writes, “[Israel] takes the ethnic nation, not the citizenry as the cornerstone of the state, creating a democracy in the diminished form” (2009: 93-94). That ethnic citizenship rather than naturalized, territorial citizenship is the most important facet of defining who is included and who is excluded, only reinforces the idea that Israeli democracy is a diminished democracy, one that is deeply embedded in the practice of settler colonialism (Sheps, 2014). I came to realize from these experiences that privilege was an important distinction, one that would allow me the freedom to move through spaces that could be denied even to certain citizens, depending on where they exist in Israel’s complex ethnonational and religious hierarchy (Peled-Elhanan, 2009; Sheps, 2014). My religious identity afforded me certain rights that would not necessarily be granted to all, demonstrating the increasingly contested nature of citizenship within a given nation-state (Yuval-Davis, 1997; cf. Urry, 2000). This not quite insider but not quite outsider status afforded me the luxury of colonial privilege. I took the freedom of movement between space and place for granted, not realizing how easily I was navigating the place and my project as a result.
30In my original study, I learned that geography textbooks often reproduced the existing power relations and ethnoracial hierarchies in the state, both in terms of how borders between Israel and the West Bank are (or are not) included in maps as well as the ways in which place names are used in both Hebrew and Arabic textbooks (Sheps, 2014). Towns and cities in Arab-dominant areas have different names than in Hebrew, but in textbooks, the Hebrew names are transliterated into Arabic and maps do not indicate the presence of two separately named spaces. Not only are the borders structured in such a way as to remove the very possibility that the West Bank and Gaza have anything resembling sovereignty, but the use of Hebrew names reinforces that lack of agency or control, even within the supposedly sovereign Palestinian territories (Bar-Gal, 1993; cf. Peled-Elhanan, 2004: 9). Beyond maps and topography, what about physical space? How does access to land shape its development? How might this development provide opportunities for some and limits for others in the same space?
- 4 See unlearning lesson 4 for more information on Birthright.
31One of the first breaks in my research was a trip to the Negev desert to visit a permaculture farm. It provided a moment of both respite and considerable awe. The existence of such a space made me rethink what was possible in a seemingly lifeless, uninhabited region. My only previous experience in the Negev was staying in a traditional Bedouin camp many years prior as part of an organized tourist trip called Birthright,4 so I was tacitly aware that this region was home to the Bedouin people. The farm operated as a self-sustaining community, an education centre, and was a popular tourist destination. At no point did I consider what this farm might have meant to the people who no longer live there. I could not see below the surface (Pelias, 2003).
32Diary entry 2 (February 15th, 2012)
33There are some amazing things happening in this country that tend to be overshadowed by all the death and violence and fences and bomb threats, things that would have been unimaginable even 10 or 15 years ago in the West. I had the good fortune of experiencing one of these amazing things—a permaculture farm in the middle of the Negev Desert. Yes, a permaculture farm in the desert. This place has been in action for 20 years and self-sufficient for 12. The notion of sustainable and ethical agriculture and energy has really only been inside the mainstream for a few years back in Canada, at least as far as I know; perhaps it’s not even really permeating mainstream consciousness yet and I am projecting, perhaps it’s been going on for a while and despite my position in the Academic world and surrounded for years by hippies, lefties, radicals, and the occasional dude who might want to blow up a dam to make a point, I still wasn’t aware of it.
34They had an extensive greenhouse, planter boxes that doubled as composters to make the most of limited space and designed to leave as little of a footprint as possible, and the best part of all is that with all this organic material being contained in one space, it smelled a lot better than I was expecting! It was a truly incredible use of space and place to provide for both the land and the people living on it, a sign that better ways of looking at consumption patterns and environmental impact are possible. There is something to be said for knowing that you can eat everything around you, that weeds have a purpose often forgotten in the west, and that other plant-life in the same families can be located and planted, knowing that the growing conditions will work.
35The farm was a living and breathing example of what can be done to an environment without impacting that environment. Everything grown there can be eaten, and everything that’s eaten goes right back into the earth, compost toilets, worm colonies, and no pesticides anywhere. Adding to it is the giant row of solar panels collecting the powerful desert rays which are used to power not just this little farm, but also the neighbouring Moshav. Instead of going off grid, which I assumed was the plan, the grid was reversed—one of the ways the farm can support itself, especially during the hot summer months when this surprisingly lush green space turns into a dust-bowl and there are no crops to be sold. In about three months, the only viable plant life will be the cacti in the distance. The weeds, flowers, shrubs, and crops will all come back again in the winter, but this really is a farm in the desert. I look forward to a return visit when there is nothing but sand and dust. After the shock of spending a month living with checkpoints and guns in a land that seemed harsh, unforgiving, and insular, this was a welcome respite.
36My own knowledge gaps about non-Jewish access to land were painfully clear after visiting the farm. I was unaware that the Israeli state annexed 93% of the Negev using the controversial Land Acquisition Law in 1953, with thousands of Israeli Bedouin forcibly moved to an area known as the Siyag over the next several years (Hamdan, 2005). The primary reason for this relocation was to ensure that the Negev would be suitable for Israeli development, with the goal of making the region into a hub for Jewish immigration and settlement. Drawing from Michel Foucault, John Urry claims that governmentality involves not just territories with fixed populations but also “mobile populations moving in, across and beyond territory” (2007: 49). Mobile populations like the Bedouin are difficult to monitor and even more difficult to control.
37The sustainability ethos of the farm is admirable and is a model that ought to be implemented in more places, but who lived and worked at this farm when it was active? Were the Bedouin groups indigenous to the region welcome to access the space or the power grid? Chen (2021) suggests that “relationships with one place can be produced at the expense of that with others.” To an extent, the farm presents more like an environmental offset used to greenwash dispossession. I am reminded of the work of Nicolien van Luijk, Audrey Giles, Rob Millington, and Lydsay Hayhurst (2020), among others, who examine the role of environmental and cultural offset programs sponsored by the extractives industry in Indigenous communities in Canada. Unlike the Canadian examples, the impact on the land is overwhelmingly positive rather than destructive, but the result is the same: Indigenous people losing access to their lands, leading to the loss of a traditional way of life for someone else’s benefit. Settler claims are “continuously reinscribed across occupied territories” (Chen, 2021). Development, progress, and colonialism are deeply enmeshed concepts, with colonizers often utilizing actual agricultural development to enforce claims to land and space (George, 1979). Projects like the permaculture farm I visited inadvertently reinforce some of these issues, though I was unable to see past the farm’s incredible accomplishments at the time to understand the complexity of the situation: for the farm’s workers; for the people the farm may have displaced; and for the tourists succumbing to the settler-greenwashing narrative of “Making the Desert Bloom” (ibid.: 88).
38Early on Friday March 9th, 2012, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) launched a targeted drone strike on a Gazan resistance member, blowing him and an associate up. There were rumours and no definitive proof that these two men were involved in planning a major assault, and civilians will never know if these intelligence reports were valid or true. Figure 1 shows the range of often homemade Grad rockets and mortar shells that are sometimes launched by Gazan resistance fighters from the Gaza strip into the Negev region in response to these targeted missile strikes into their ostensibly sovereign space. See on the map the city called Be’er Sheva, a rather famous biblical city and currently the largest metropolitan area in the Negev. It was also the home of a very good friend of mine and his young family.
Figure
“Rocket Range from Gaza”
Retrieved from: <https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/General/range-of-fire-from-gaza>, accessed May 24, 2023.
39Diary entry 3: (March 17th, 2012)
40March 9th, 6PM:
41At dinner, we heard on the news that something happened in Gaza in the afternoon, a couple of militants were targeted and killed. I was told to brace myself for potential retaliation. OK, sure. It seemed unlikely to me that anything would happen. Wrong.
42March 9th, 10:30 PM:
- 5 Under Jewish law, it is illegal to work on the Sabbath, which runs from sundown Friday to sundown S (...)
43We are sitting around having a perfectly normal conversation when the siren goes off. I hadn’t heard it before, but I knew exactly what it was. Stunned, I look towards my friend and without even a trace of irony say, “so this is actually happening?” as we are running down the stairs towards the bomb shelter in the basement. A few minutes later we heard the new “Iron Dome” missile defence system engage and do its thing. All is quiet, then suddenly a large rumbling “boom!” off in the distance and the whole building shakes a little. Then 3 more. On the outside I was trying to look and feel as calm as possible. On the inside I was screaming and cursing and trying not to lose my dinner. We return to the apartment; I grab the scotch and down 2 shots in succession without blinking or batting an eye. I ask if it’s over. I’m told hopefully, but probably not. And because its Shabbat, the buses aren’t running so I can’t even flee in the night back to Jerusalem where it’s safe.5 It was a long night to say the least, 1AM, 3:30AM, 7AM and then again, the next evening around 5:30. That’s when it ended for me. It continued well into the next week for the residents of the south, not to mention the residents of Gaza who also endured precision tactical strikes until a ceasefire brokered by Egypt came into effect several days later. A real Israeli experience. Just what I always wanted.
44March 17th
45While I was inside of it, clearly scared and wondering what was going to happen next, my friend asked me if this changed my perspective, altered my political position at all. I assured him it hadn’t, but at the same time there was a part of me that was feeling a kind of anger I had never felt before. I wasn’t angry at the Gazans or the Israelis per se; I was angry that such an existence had become normal. I was angry that my friends had to live like that. I know they choose to live in the south, but they don’t choose to live under threat of violence. I know the Gazans don’t choose to live under threat of drone attacks and precision tactical strikes either. The craziest part of it all was knowing that while the rockets were being blasted out of the sky and the mortar shells were falling, there were 1000 Israelis at the biggest club in town, partying well into the next morning. Normal life, right? Yeah, welcome to the new normal.
46When one’s supposed sovereignty is breached, one has the right to defend it. This is a concept that applies on both sides of the separation wall that surrounds Gaza. The IDF felt the pre-emptive assault would protect Israeli sovereignty and security; the Gazans felt their security had been breached. I recall describing it as like Newtonian physics—“for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”; the difference here of course is that equal and opposite does not apply when one has drones and an advanced military, and the other has smuggled, crude, sometimes home-made mortar shells and rockets as their only means of self-defence.
47I had to try and wrap my head around the fear, the anger, and not let it consume me. One of my supervisors told me I was “getting (un)settled and that could be part of decolonization.” He was right, but only superficially. As my fear and anger faded, I came to accept the experience as a part of me, a new normal. Innocence was lost in a way I never expected. It took many years to come to terms with the experience, knowing that I had lived through what was later named Operation Returning Echo by the IDF.
48However, this experience brought about another unintended consequence—not exactly survivor’s guilt, but more like tourist’s trauma. Bauman (1993) refers to tourists as persons “[who pay] for their freedom; the right to disregard native concerns and feelings, the right to spin their own web of meanings. Tourists move through other people’s spaces . . .” (cited in Urry, 2007: 39). This experience was normal for my friend and his family, for the residents of Be’er Sheva, for the residents of the Gaza Strip, whose lives are frequently turned upside down when Israeli air strikes occur, whose cities are levelled, hospitals, schools, and other key sites destroyed. But I went home, first to Jerusalem, which was at the time outside the range of Gazan mortar shells; and then later back to Canada, a place in which I am in no danger, a place where my position as a settler academic at a major university is never under threat.
49A childhood friend used to run an alternative tour company in Jerusalem, where he would take curious tourists of a particular ideological persuasion to various parts of the city to uncover the settler-colonial realities of the space. One of his tours was to the City of David archeological site, which was used to reinforce Israeli claims of indigeneity at the expense of similar Palestinian claims. In their own ways, these counter-historical tours were designed as a sort of settler-decolonial praxis; my friend used the freedom of movement provided by his citizenship to unmask the truths that the state would rather keep hidden. It was a form of “destituent power” (Agamben and Wakefield, 2014) that attempts to resist the sort of ideological state apparatuses like state-funded archeology “by grasping the potentialities of the forms-of-life that these apparatuses try to marginalize, exclude, and erase” (Joronen, 2016: 91). I participated in a tour along the “Seam Zone,” the former border between Israel and Jordan prior to the annexation of Jerusalem and the West Bank following the Six-Day War in 1967.
50Diary entry 4 (March 24th, 2012)
51My recent experience with rocket fire led me to try and take advantage of the other sorts of travel opportunities available to me, ultimately leading me to the neighbourhood of Musrara yesterday. It’s right on the seam of the 1949 armistice line, down the hill from the newly developing and predominantly Ashkenazi and middle-class Jewish West Jerusalem and directly under fire from the (then) Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem. This neighbourhood was a former Palestinian community that was eventually settled by North African and Arab Jews who have more in common with their neighbours to the east than they did with their fellow Jews up the hill. At least that’s the narrative according to one of the neighbourhood’s long-time residents and few surviving members (due to age, not violence) of the Israeli Black Panthers.
52They borrowed their name and were directly inspired by the Black Panther movement of the United States, recognizing the importance of the intersection of race and class in the struggle. Mizrahi Jews were brought into Israel from their former homes in the Middle East and North Africa and were settled in the interior . . . They were almost always placed in areas closest to the borders in cities along the various armistice lines between 49-67. Musrara was no exception, and since there were many abandoned homes, it was a place for cheap housing for the unemployed and under-educated non-white Israeli Jews in Jerusalem.
53The Panthers wanted change for their social conditions; access to schools, health care, and infrastructure that had been denied to them. They wanted a voice in Israeli society and were sick of being pushed to the margins, labelled as backwards, primitive, and incapable of integration. The 1973 war ended a bit of their momentum, but their early work created quite a storm in Israeli society and paved the way for the protest movements of future generations. Without the use of social media, the Panthers managed to mobilize more than 8000 disenfranchised and disaffected protesters in the early 1970s, the strongest and most organized protest movement in Israeli history until the housing protests of last July.
54Reuven, the last surviving Panther, made an argument that I found particularly compelling. He claims that the peace process won’t really happen until the Mizrahi Jews are given an equal role in the power structure of the nation. He believes that due to the shared ethnic backgrounds, marginalized class position, linguistic and cultural affinities, that it will be the coming together of the Mizrahi Jews and the Palestinians (regardless of religious affiliation) that could create a lasting peace. Call me crazy, but I think he just might be right.
55As a part of defining itself through racial configurations, Israel has become presumptively white and European; Israelis are brothers-in-arms with the [Christian] Americans, and in keeping with the way that Americans operate under a cloak of racial invisibility, its racism and whiteness is rendered equally invisible to observers on the outside. As a result, this constructed whiteness of Israel not only makes the Palestinians the antithesis of Israeli-ness (neither Jewish nor White), but it also makes for an unsettling situation for Mizrahi (Arab) Jews as well (Sheps, 2014).
- 6 Military or civil service is mandatory for all Israeli citizens between the ages of 18 and 20/21, d (...)
56Tourism, particularly Jewish tourism from the Ashkenazi/Western Jewish diaspora, is one of the largest industries in Israel. Every university has programs for visiting students; there are the twice-yearly free “Birthright” trips, where large groups of university-age Jewish people from around the world travel by bus from region to region, visiting significant historical and religious sites, dine with a friendly Druze family, sleep in a traditional Bedouin tent in the desert, all with a small group of off-duty IDF soldiers of a similar age as a method of cultural exchange.6 These trips alone contributed more than 2 billion NIS to the Israeli economy between 2000 and 2012 (Shemer, 2012). Palestinian territories are not included in these trips other than the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. This program has been criticized by many on the Jewish left, including Jewish Voice for Peace, claiming “it is unjust that we get a free birthright trip while Palestinian refugees can’t return to their homes” (JVP, 2018). These tours only show the ideal version of Israel as the Jewish state, reinforcing the “right of return” mentality at the expense of any other ideological positions, erasing Palestinian voices and faces from the conversation. Given the dominance of tours like Birthright, the importance of the counter-hegemonic tours my friend organized cannot be overstated. These stories were neither a part of the diasporic Jewish educational experience of my past nor are they given priority in Israeli education in the present (Bar Shalom, 2006). I knew nothing about Mizrahi Jewish experience prior to my fieldwork, or any social movements that ran counter to the primary narrative. This tour showed me more about the complex ethnic stratification within Israeli society (ibid.), perhaps more than my actual fieldwork ever could.
57As my time in the field was winding down, I began to spend more time with my neighbours in the dorm in our off-hours. I developed a newfound passion for one of their favourite things, LaLiga (Spanish Soccer). The two top clubs at the time were Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona, and the rivalry between them appeared to transcend national and cultural boundaries. I was invited to join one of my friends in his village to watch the upcoming match, known as “El Clásico.” It was an opportunity that as a researcher and a tourist I could only dream of; the idea of being invited into an Arab space as a guest seemed impossible at the time, but the friendship that we had cultivated appeared to go beyond any cultural or religious barriers. I jumped at the chance. For most of my life I was socialized to have at least an implicit fear of the Other, particularly Arabic speakers. It was part of the system I grew up with, and yet not for a second did I feel unsafe in a place that is 100% Arab, mixed almost evenly between Muslims, Druze, and Christians.
58Diary entry 5 (April 29th, 2012)
59Last weekend I was treated to an experience that few outsiders ever will; my friend took me to his village, Abu S’nan, and I was privy to a sort of cultural exchange I never thought I would find myself having, exposure to life in a typical Arab village in the north. I was welcomed with open arms by my friend’s parents, brother, and very old friends. There was a real sense of community, of historical bonds that comes from growing up in one place and maintaining friendships over long periods of time. I know that feeling well, but it was a bit strange to walk into a circle of people who had known each other for 25 years. I saw some analogues to my own friendships and sensed a sort of brotherhood, of shared experience that I always feel when I go back to Edmonton for a visit. Our Friday night was spent outside around a bonfire, an Argileh, and several dozen beers. It felt like home . . . One person asked me how I felt about hearing conversations in Arabic—if it made me uncomfortable. I can honestly say not for a second. It was a typical Friday night, just in another country. The amazing part about language and culture is that if you spend enough time interacting with people in a language you don’t understand, you can pick up on the non-verbal cues and still follow along—a well-told joke can still make you laugh, even if you don’t understand the punchline.
60This is a complicated part of the country where identity and culture are constantly tested and the lines between who is what are very blurry. One person told me that he wants to leave the village permanently, not to mention the country because of the racism and discrimination he feels. The fact that he’s Druze puts him in an uncomfortable position, knowing his privileged status within Israeli society, while other Arabs in his village and others like it don’t have the same sorts of opportunities. He resented serving in the Army, and it was there that he felt the most racism. His family is of Syrian origin, but due to the complications with Syria, he will never meet his cousins who still live there. Yet others from the same community feel very attached to Israel, find serving to be an honour and can’t imagine not doing it. It’s complicated to be an ethnic minority within a very divided and hierarchical place where one’s ethnicity is tantamount to status and access to power within the state. To most Druze though, the arrangement with Israel is a positive one as they can keep their historical land and property rights, which to them is the most important part, and having spent some time on their land, I can see why.
61I spent my Saturday evening indulging in two local traditions: the family meal and “El Clásico.” The family meal consisted of perhaps the most delicious food I have ever eaten in my life. Kibbeh, kebabs, grilled lamb, tabbouleh, olives from the family’s own olive trees. And of course, everything that required oil was made using hand pressed olive oil from these same trees. Words cannot describe the amazement . . . “El Clásico” was the soccer match the village and most of the rest of the country were waiting for, the match between F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid. And yet the clubs themselves are completely detached from the material realities of life in the village, the region, and the country. How a tiny village in the north of Israel is so evenly split between two clubs from Spain is beyond me . . . There were about 70 Druze men, equally divided in terms of team allegiances, hanging out in the local pub, a hookah for every 3 people, and the match up on the big screen. The intensity of the match, the passion of the fans, and the energy in the room were incredible. I was able to put my limited knowledge of Arabic to good use, screaming with joy when things went well, cursing and shouting when things went badly, all in the local dialect. As the only English speaker for miles, the people who didn’t know me all seemed very pleased to see that I was embracing the local culture and the passion. In the aftermath everyone spilled into the streets to celebrate the victory, driving around honking their car horns, shouting, and jumping with unbridled energy, while the people who lost walked or drove home in disgust.
62I can’t say for certain how typical the snapshot of life I experienced was. I don’t know what it’s really like to live in these northern villages. I do know however that there are major problems with employment, schools are underfunded, infrastructure is lacking and, in some cases, the villages themselves are unable to grow despite the population and demographic situation begging for expansion at the same rate as Israeli communities. The funding isn’t there even though the tax base is. What I do know, however, is that I was treated like family by total strangers, given a glimpse into a community I wouldn’t ever have been exposed to had it not been for a little bit of luck, and had the best time of my entire trip. And yet, growing up, I was taught that these are the people I am supposed to fear.
63My relationship to Israel is complex; I cannot separate my personal politics from my research process. I cannot detach my history and identity as a member of the Jewish diaspora any more than I could detach myself from what I learned and experienced in the field. Mills (1959: 196) writes: “[y]ou are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work. To say that you can have experience, means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience.” I cannot remove myself from the research and ensure a sort of detached objectivity when sharing these experiences. I must own my process—the successes, and the failures.
64Ethnographic research, particularly fieldwork in communities or nations that are not your own, can be ethically troubling projects, where the line between tourism, colonialism, and “legitimate” research is blurred at best and non-existent at worst. Doug T. Pham and June E. Gothberg (2020: 4097) suggest that problems with ethnography include: “the violations of the ethics of doing research . . . and the failure to fully account for the experiences of the researched—the minority, oppressed, marginalized, and underrepresented groups such as Indigenous people.”
65Similar to tourists whose experiences are rarely more than superficial, even if the experiences are still transformative, Ronald J. Pelias (2003: 369) argues that, like tourists, researchers: “[o]nly manage to get to the surface of any area of inquiry they pursue, in part because of the nature of what constitutes full understanding and in part because of the habits of academic life.” Social scientists often engage in these types of projects with good intentions—a desire to help, to give voice to the voiceless and to use the privilege bestowed upon them by their institutions and granting bodies to do some good in the world despite “the growing recognition among academics about the dominance of Eurocentric thoughts and approaches in social research” (Pham and Gothberg, 2020: 4097). Upon closer reflection, this collection of travel stories implies that I did have good intentions, but are good intentions enough? Avery Gordon claims that research is a political site where “power vectors of the institutional, social [and] personal intersect to render and valorize a particular desire to know” (1990; cited in Toyosaki, 2018: 34), but this desire is mediated by our research persona. We are often blinded by our own implicit habits, biases, and participation in dominant knowledge systems that we take with us everywhere we happen to go.
66Mills (1959) proposes that people try to know where they fit in the world to better understand where they may travel to in the future, trying to grasp the complex relationship between biography and history within society. Dao (2021) takes this Millsian formulation a step further, writing that autoethnographers seek to understand “tensions entrenched in historical, political, and sociocultural foundations . . . by sharing my stories and my experience, others may be inspired to engage in their own historical, political, and socio-cultural tensions.” I have come to realize that this project is not a symbolic departure from colonizing research. Furthermore, according to Toyosaki (2018: 35), a complete departure can never occur.
[B]ecoming a postcolonial autoethnographer is not a ceremonial moment that signifies the complete departure from colonizing research; rather, it marks the beginning of and a pledge for our continuous labor of self-reflexive interrogation to trace and mark the colonial ways through which we become autoethnographers, how we do autoethnography, and how autoethnography works in global knowledge production systems and movements. That is, autoethnography does not signify a departure from the “what” it critiques; it is always departing, yet never completely.
67Using Toyosaki’s approach as a guide, I would like to say that I learned a profound lesson from revisiting these stories. I want to conclude with a hopeful insight or a grand statement where I can call out my privilege for what it is while still maintaining that I was right to take on such a project. I want to feel as though it was ethical for me to spend six months in a place and call it an ethnography without really belonging or diving below the surface; without developing trust and ties to the communities I worked in. I want to believe that I was not just a tourist masquerading as a researcher, accidentally colonizing both a research space and a physical space, all while using my self-perceived insider status to my advantage. I want to say I was a good guest, a good ally, and a good critical scholar, but as Tuck and Yang (2012: 19) would likely assert, these self-criticisms are not enough: “[t]he front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change.”
68Settlers engaging in field research must be willing to take risks to unsettle themselves in both literal meanings: “this is deeply disturbing, I don’t like this,” as well as “we are living or working on occupied land, what am I personally going to do about this?” especially when one acknowledges the colonial baggage and troubling denotations of “otherness” that come with the idea of “the field” in the first place (LaRocco et al., 2020).
69Revisiting this research makes me uncomfortable, but the discomfort is the point. It is a critical first step towards a more viable path, not just decolonizing myself symbolically but actively working to change my approach to research and how I relate to space, place, and the production of knowledge. I learned that I must be more careful in determining what sort of projects I should take on and what spaces may or may not welcome my presence. I cannot simply assume the position of an insider, even if everything I learned tells me that I am. However, I also do not want to take a Pollyannaish stance, believing that any and every project I may take on in the future will be fine. I struggle with knowing when I am an insider and if I have either the right or the ability to help communities share their stories. There is also an obligation for researchers, practitioners, and educators to question not just their objects of study or their methods, but also the overarching institutional structures that enable and encourage this kind of research in the first place, a structural issue Levi Gahman and Gabrielle Legault (2019: 51-52) assert is particularly common and troubling in Canadian universities.
70I hope that anyone who reads this story might reflect on and re-evaluate their own practices and consider what it means to take on the incredible responsibility of working in the field; the privilege that comes with travel for research and the obligations of being a guest in spaces that are not their own. Revisiting this research through my travel stories allowed me to retrace my steps, to better understand what I experienced, to grasp my sociological imagination, and to reconcile myself to the fact that decolonizing my research process is not just something that happens immediately. There is much more work to do.
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