Invited to Witness

Invited to Witness and Invited to Go Home “They called me a tourist, which I found insulting.” So began a reflection by a delegate I interviewed who had gone on solidarity tours to Palestine during the first intifada. She grappled with her discomfort in occupying this term: tourist. She outlined her rationale, explaining that the designation tourism, attached to what she did in Palestine, felt derisive of her work, as though it wasn’t serious and diminished the connections she made, connections seldom possible via tourism writ large. On a delegation during the summer of 2019, as we sat on the porch of the Tamimis’ house, in Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, I navigated a similar sentiment. Ahed Tamimi, eighteen years old at the time of our visit, was arrested in December 2017 for famously slapping an Israeli soldier, sentenced to eight months in an Israeli prison, and released in July 2018. The delegates had just heard a lecture by her father, Bassam Tamimi, which outlined what they, as a family and a people, needed. As Ahed rounded the circle of thirty delegates, perfunctorily shaking each one’s hand, Bassam told the delegates that what Palestinians needed was not tears (“We have enough tear gas,” he wryly joked) but solidarity. After a dinner hosted by the Tamimis, the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 INTRODUCTION 2 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 delegates circled around Ahed, taking incessant pictures and videos for their social media feeds and asking her a series of questions: What was prison like? What were the conditions? What did you do there? What was it like to finish high school in prison? Do you think you got a lighter or harsher sentence because of your notoriety? How has fame changed your life? One tourist tried to break up this line of questioning, posing a question an eighteen-year-old girl might rather answer: What do you do for fun and what kind of music do you like? The delegates ignored this derailing and returned to their questioning: Was the food in prison edible? What were other people in for? Another interlude: How do you feel about people coming here all the time asking you questions? And another return to the previous line of questioning: Can you drive around to places? Do you pass checkpoints when you go to school? Do you want to stay in Nabi Saleh? Really, for the rest of your life? Gathered around a set of hookahs after this interrogation of a different sort, some of the delegates began asking me about my research: “So what exactly is your book about?” one tourist, active with the Dream Defenders, asked. I answered, “It’s a study of solidarity tourism in Palestine. So, I go on tours like these and interview delegates, tourists, guides, and organizers about their experiences.” Another tourist, a lawyer and prison abolitionist, balked, “Don’t you think calling it tourism implies that there is a power dynamic going on?” “Yes, absolutely,” I answered. The first tourist responded, “But don’t you think it’s different, because they are tourists and we are delegates?” I paused, then said, “Well, you’re going to the same sites, meeting with the same people, hearing the same histories, and being asked to do the same things.” Silence followed, but as the week progressed, it became clear that my presence as a researcher, returning the gaze toward tourists and delegates who were used to doing the observing, was upsetting the dynamic but in generative ways that asked activists to think about the power dynamics of their own presence. This book takes as its subject what solidarity tourists are being invited to do in Palestine, despite their frequent disidentification with that category.1 I argue that solidarity tourism is a fraught anticolonial strategy in Palestine that follows a series of conventions. It is, first, an appeal to the commitment of solidarity tourists, acknowledging the work they have done in coming to Palestine to begin with. Second, it is a reminder that their presence is a responsibility, which guides communicate through an emphasis on international—particularly US—complicity in Israeli occupation. Third, as tourists and delegates alike are repeatedly reminded that their work is not in Palestine but at home, it is a Invitation as Keyword and Solidarity Tourism as Genre The invitation extended via solidarity tourism is a genre marked by the repetition of certain conventions. Key to understanding how solidarity tourism functions is thus studying it: being willing to understand how the invitation emerges, who the invitation is for, what it is meant to do, and how those who are otherwise understood as “toured” redefine the invitation to confront and resist settler-colonial contexts that are nowhere near “settled.” “Invitation” is not immediately understood as a cultural studies and comparative colonial studies keyword, nor is it a concept that is centrally theorized in the literature on tourism. But in Palestine, a site marked by occupation, displacement, and exile, and under the constraints of colonial military occupation, the politics of invitation, the genre of the direct address, and the disciplining of the tourist are interpellations that structure tourist and colonial encounters. The “contact zone” that animates solidarity tourism in Palestine, wherein tourists meet hosts, internationals meet Indigenous guides, and asymmetrical power relations collide, is one made possible not by the refusal to invite but by what constitutes the invitation itself.2 In sites structured by US imperial expansion and extraction, multiple forms of settler colonialism, and colonial desire(s) shaped by the coalescence of tourism and militarism (for example, in Hawai‘i), some Native scholar activists have asked tourists not to come.3 Other collaborations between Native and not-Native tour guides have reworked the tourist encounter to craft itineraries that resist commercial and gentrifying forms of tourism in the archipelago to envision Hawaiian self-determination.4 In Palestine, another site of military occupation and tourism, a site shaped by US imperial interests in the Middle East, Israeli settler colonialism, and Orientalist Introduction 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 reminder to tourists that while, yes, they have been invited to Palestine, they are now being invited to go home. This daily labor, on the part of Palestinian hosts, who control neither the narrative about Palestine nor the borders to Palestine, is a project of repeatedly inviting tourists to come to Palestine as tourists: to come for a truncated amount of time, listen, learn, and, ultimately, go home. It is there where guides hope that tourists will do their work, in solidarity with Palestinians and—for most tourists—from a place of complicity in their subjugation. I say most because the “solidarity tourist,” like the “solidarity tour guide,” is an incoherent category; delegations and solidarity tours are made up of multiple people who come to Palestine for many different reasons, among them Palestinians in exile who can only return to Palestine as tourists. 4 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 tourist desires, there are some who have asked tourists not to come, some who invite tourists to come and intervene in sustained and more long-term ways, and many more who invite solidarity tourists to Palestine—and then invite them to go home.5 Palestinian tour guides, in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, thus wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Said’s words, “the permission to narrate,” from Israeli control.6 Even more, they redefine the terms of the invitation, letting tourists know that despite their unease with the category, they are being asked to be tourists of a particular kind and also to shoulder the responsibility that accompanies that invitation. This book takes this daily labor of Palestinian tour guides as its central subject to explore what happens when tourism understands itself as solidarity and when solidarity functions through modalities of tourism. Specifically, I ask what kinds of anticolonial imaginings are made both available and impossible through solidarity tourism. I use the term solidarity tourism to refer to forms of travel that are animated by the tour guide’s desire to cultivate solidarity with their cause and tourists’ desires to establish a deeper connection to or understanding of a particular social movement. I argue that, through solidarity tour initiatives, Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism to the region to advance three specific political goals. First, by staging tourist encounters with everyday Palestinian life, organizers seek to challenge Israeli statesanctioned narratives and popularize Palestinian accounts of Israeli occupation. Second, organizers employ tourism to keep Palestinian shop owners and farmers on land that is under threat of expropriation. Finally, organizers confront the racialized asymmetries in their profession that privilege tourists’ accounts of what they witness over Palestinian narratives of their own displacement. Taking as my subject a phenomenon that is too often relegated to one side of a “good tourism/bad tourism” binary, I instead analyze the complex ways in which solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as a viable organizing strategy—and a commercial industry—that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement.7 I resist advancing an evaluative analysis of whether or not solidarity tourism “works.” Such an assessment, I argue, hollows out the everyday labor of tour guides and empties solidarity tourism of its nuance, contradictions, and import. Instead, I consider what work solidarity tourism does and for whom. The book details what tourists do in Palestine and after, taking into account their reflections on the ethics of their presence in Palestine and charting the extent to which tourism catalyzes their activism. However, rather than focus Solidarity Tourism and Its Discontents The emergence of contemporary solidarity tourism in Palestine was made possible by the US-brokered Oslo Accords and their afterlife. The Oslo Accords both fragmented the West Bank and simultaneously enabled unforeseen possibilities for commercial tourism in Palestine. The Oslo Accords, and specifically Oslo II in 1995, initiated the fracturing of the West Bank into discrete “areas,” with varying Israeli and Palestinian administrative and security control, though everywhere is subject to Israeli raids, Israeli control, and Israeli state violence. These taxonomies, and the subsequent land expropriation by the State of Israel, both animated the Oslo Accords and introduced and institutionalized a collection of curfews, closures, roadblocks, and checkpoints that led to increased Palestinian immobility in the Occupied Territories.9 Along with the proliferation of Israeli settlements—the population of which doubled during the Oslo years—came bypass roads connecting settlements, turning the West Bank into an archipelago with expanding Israeli settlements connected by Israeli-only roads and islands of Palestinian cities and villages disconnected from one another or connected by roads that can be entirely shut down by the presence of one soldier.10 Alongside this fragmentation of Palestinian land, the Occupied Territories saw dramatic changes to the possibilities of tourism in Palestine/Israel with the Introduction 5 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 solely on the tourist encounter or whether tourists become activists, I focus on what change solidarity tourism effects in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, inside Israel’s 1948 borders, and in Gaza. In this way, I show how the story of solidarity tourism in Palestine not only traces emergent and sedimented forms of international movement building but also reveals how Palestinian organizers are strategically using tourism to transform the “facts on the ground” in Palestine. In the chapters that follow, I chart the conditions that led Palestinians to make their case to the international community through solidarity tourism in the first place. I also detail the ambivalences, asymmetries, and affective ties that take shape in solidarity tourism’s orbit. In this way, the book is a “history of the present” that asks why Palestinian organizers have turned to tourism as both an organizing strategy and an income-generating business. It asks why they have done so despite the fraught asymmetries of tourism as a strategy. And it shows how, through this fraught strategy, tour guides and tourists have worked, albeit unevenly, to craft an anticolonial movement outside of a strictly witness/witnessed relationship and despite the epistemic violence and settler logics that structure their encounters.8 6 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 Oslo Accords’ establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Between 1967 and 1994, Palestinians were prohibited from becoming licensed tour guides in the West Bank or Gaza. Indeed, Israeli military leader and politician Moshe Dayan allegedly quipped that he would “be more willing to license a Palestinian fighter pilot than a Palestinian tour guide,” demonstrating the profound political importance of the ideological narrative Israel was advancing through tourism.11 Because of these prohibitions against Palestinian tour guiding, solidarity tours before Oslo were mostly composed of small groups of international activists seeking to show solidarity in the form of informal delegations—delegates, like the one who bristled at being called a tourist, sought to distance themselves from the moniker tourism even while the archives show both celebrations and critiques of their presence in the West Bank and Gaza.12 After Oslo, however, when the establishment of the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Tourism made it possible for Palestinians to be trained as tour guides, these same delegate leaders alongside newly licensed guides began to launch feasibility studies to explore the possibilities of using tourism, in all its fraught inconsistencies, as an anticolonial strategy. They sought to design and develop tourist initiatives that foregrounded military occupation instead of solely highlighting the depoliticized sites the Palestinian Authority deemed national heritage sites. Organizers began to bring delegations to Palestine, particularly from the United States, with the expressed goal of teaching them about the contours of Israeli colonial violence. This alternative tourism subsector grew in a context where general tourism to Palestine was also increasing as a result of the newly established possibilities for Palestine to host tourists.13 Between 1994 and the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, the number of total tourists in the West Bank doubled, exceeding 105,000 per month.14 Hotel capacity rose from 2,500 to 6,000 rooms, and occupancy rose to 60 percent.15 Tourism employed approximately one thousand people and came to account for 7–10 percent of Palestine’s gross national product.16 During the second intifada, between 2000 and 2005, the alternative tourism sector experienced substantial setbacks, as checkpoints barred tourists from entering Palestinian areas, and 95 percent of those who had been employed by the tourism industry became unemployed.17 This constellation of statistics partly reiterates Debbie Lisle’s argument that “the tourist gaze requires a widely accepted cessation of military activity before the operations of tourism can be introduced.”18 Yet in Palestine there has been no real cessation of military activity. Palestinian guides and organizers, both Deliberately Truncated Visits and the Ambivalence of the Invitation While early forms of commercialized solidarity tourism emerged in response to post-Oslo possibilities for Palestinian-led tourism in the West Bank, more recent forms of commercialized solidarity tourism have emerged in response to the perceived failures of other kinds of international presence in the West Bank and Gaza. As Palestinian guides and organizers repeatedly articulate to tourists, “You do far more for our movement by writing your members of Congress than you do by getting shot by a rubber bullet at a demonstration.” This sentiment is a clear pushback against the desire on the part of internationals to “get shot by a rubber bullet,” or what would otherwise be a feature of both disaster tourism and adventure tourism—tourism defined, respectively, by visiting sites of destruction and the desire to be part of the action.23 As one Introduction 7 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 during the first and second intifadas and now, do not structure their tours as a remembrance of violence that is relegated to the past; rather, their tours position the colonial violence of Israeli occupation as an uninterrupted stream of dispossession, an “ongoing Nakba.”19 During the second intifada, some solidarity tourists still visited Palestine, and guides worked to create alternative itineraries during curfews and closures, always having, as one guide put it, a backup plan.20 By 2013, there were about 290 officially licensed Palestinian tour guides, a minuscule number compared with Israel’s 5,400 tour guides.21 Of the Palestinian tourism sector, about 5 percent constitutes alternative or solidarity tourism, which speaks to the development of solidarity tourism as part of the larger economic sector and, on a smaller scale, an organizing strategy.22 These statistics reveal not only the monopoly Israel holds over the Palestinian tourism sector and Israel’s control over Palestinian borders, airspace, and entry and exit from Palestine/Israel but also how the Palestinian tourism sector, in some ways competing with Israel’s, responds to market logics that necessarily privilege Christian pilgrimage sites over the exposure of Israel’s militarized occupation. Nonetheless, the Palestinian tourism sector makes space for a solidarity tourism subsector that is comparatively small in scope but still results in rotating scores of curious international tourists and year-round employment for Palestinian tour guides and organizers. Thus, while the Oslo Accords enabled the possibility and professionalization of Palestinian-led tourism, the business of solidarity tourism in the West Bank emerged as both a product and a critique of the Oslo Accords. 8 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 of several examples during my research, I heard a Swedish youth—who was volunteering on his gap year with one of the solidarity tour campaigns—tell a tourist, “You can’t leave Palestine without going to at least one demonstration.” Here, in some ways like the circling of Ahed and interrogation about her prison experience, demonstrations become a “must-see” show internationals have to catch (and document) before leaving the West Bank. This critique of international desire to participate in protests, or engage in a politics of confrontation with Israeli soldiers, indexes a substantive shift from the days when the International Solidarity Movement (ism) began asking internationals to come to the West Bank and Gaza to serve as a protective presence for Palestinians under siege. The guides and organizers I spoke to positioned solidarity tourism in Palestine as a move away from direct action and protective presence and deliberately toward tourist itineraries meant to educate internationals—and then ask them to leave. Through this reframing of the role of internationals in Palestine, guides and organizers articulate a disciplined attempt to disrupt white savior narratives, wherein (mostly) white US and other international tourists come to Palestine to protect Palestinians. Even when they schedule moments of protective presence into their tours, solidarity tour guides and organizers resist positioning protective presence as the central feature of any of their tours. They repeatedly advise internationals not to provoke settlers or talk back to soldiers at checkpoints, and they rarely schedule Friday demonstrations into their itineraries. It is clear, from the fatigue of their narration, that this is something they have to reiterate often, repeatedly reminding tourists that it is Palestinians who pay the price for these forms of activism. In her analysis of the digital archives of the ism, anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins analyzes how ism workers relate to Palestine and narrate their relationship with Palestinians. She reads ism workers’ identification with Palestinians as a “prosthetic engagement” in which ism workers see their own experience in Palestine as an extension or microcosm of Palestinians’ experience.24 In the way that ism workers frame their work, she argues, they identify with Palestinians as “experiencing” occupation rather than acknowledging an identification with Israelis based on complicity in the occupation as US citizens whose tax dollars and government support Israeli state practice. ism workers’ identification as “occupied,” even temporarily, StamatopoulouRobbins shows, allows them to deny their own privilege in their capacity to leave Palestine. Such critiques of international presence in Palestine that resembles ism have made their way into the itineraries of solidarity tours. While Introduction 9 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 there are some endeavors to show internationals “what it’s like,” there is a palpable turn away from allowing internationals to believe that they are “experiencing occupation” and toward an attempt to make them aware, at every turn, of their own privilege in Palestine.25 The shift away from direct action is also a reaction to the 2003 murders of Rachel Corrie, crushed under an Israeli military bulldozer, and Tom Hurndall, shot in the head by an Israeli sniper, which made Israeli impunity against internationals clear and necessitated a different approach to antioccupation strategizing.26 Israel’s willingness to murder international activists, like Corrie, who attempted to obstruct the occupying forces’ destruction of Palestinian homes and Palestinian lives, called, in some ways, for a reassessment of the role of internationals in Palestinian resistance movements. In today’s post–second intifada political climate, it is clear that solidarity tour organizers route internationals toward tourism and away from direct action and prolonged presence in Palestine. They repeatedly invite internationals to come—and then invite them to go home. In this way, solidarity tourism has also emerged as a response to the proliferation of sustained volunteer work and voluntourism in the West Bank, wherein tourists, mostly on gap years or breaks from school, come to Palestine to work in schools or with organizations for a limited amount of time (usually a year, pieced together by three-month shifts to accommodate the tourist visa Israel allows internationals). The act of inviting tourists to Palestine, and then inviting them to go home, is thus a formulation that redirects tourists’ desire to “see action” in the West Bank or stay for demonstrations and rallies. It is also a formulation that redirects tourists’ desires to become fixtures in Palestine, to remain and volunteer either their time or their labor. There is an appreciation for internationals who help rebuild demolished Palestinian homes, who volunteer in Palestinian preschools, and who walk Palestinian children to school in places like At-Tuwani and Hebron to protect them from settlers, especially since these acts of protective presence are constantly being prohibited and policed by the Israeli state. Palestinian solidarity tour organizers’ work is often made possible by a handful of volunteers, and their labor itself is rendered necessary because tourists have to see it to believe it because Palestinians are too often not treated as reliable narrators of their own condition. Fully aware of the contradictions of their labor, Palestinian tour guides extend invitations to tourists yet simultaneously redefine the parameters of that invitation, inviting internationals to Palestine but refusing their missionary relationship to the place and rejecting either narratives that position internationals in the benevolent 10 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 role of helping Palestinians pick up the pieces of their lives or narratives that position seasoned activists as more capable of articulating the Palestinian condition than Palestinians themselves. International presence in Palestine is requested, but only for a structured and curtailed amount of time and only under conditions that don’t replicate the colonial calculus of veracity that positions only tourists and delegates as truth-telling subjects, only tourists and delegates as witnesses to colonial violence in Palestine.27 This limiting of the time internationals spend in Palestine also emerges in a context wherein Palestine is flooded by internationals working in Ramallah ngos, interns in Bethlehem, scholars studying conflict zones, and budding professionals learning to develop their skills. For instance, on a sardonic Tumblr popularized in 2014 titled “Ajanebed Out: The Tragedy of Foreigners in Palestine,” the creators underscore the relationships between white privilege, international mobility, and career building in Palestine through gifs, memes, and conversation fragments that expose the hypocrisy of “wanting to make a difference in Palestine” and using Palestine as a space for one’s own personal fulfillment or career aspirations. One 1950s-esque advertisement, titled “Palestine: For all your professional and academic career needs!” mocks internationals’ travels to Palestine to intern, build their cv, get into a PhD program, work in an ngo, and earn a salary doing so.28 Another simply asks, “Need a purpose in life?” and answers “Visit Palestine!”29 pointing to the many ways in which foreigners use Palestine to give their own lives a sense of purpose. While this was a short-lived project, it pointed to an exhaustion with foreigners’ treatment of Palestine as a place for their personal and professional growth. This exhaustion with internationals in Palestine also extends to those who overestimate the importance of their presence in Palestine for Palestinians. Much of this criticism is directed at those who believe that their presence alone is doing something to better the situation in Palestine. My discussions with community members affected by solidarity tourism in Palestine repeatedly reflected the paradox of escalated international presence in Palestine yet continued overwhelming silence on the part of the international community. They would ask, “Why, when so many solidarity tourists come to Palestine, does nothing change?” and “How many people have to come here and see, for it to make a difference?” This book probes fault lines of this sort. It asks what the movement-building limitations and possibilities of this kind of international presence are. It shows how solidarity tourism in Palestine is formulated in contradistinction to other forms of international presence at the same time that it rehearses and recapitulates them. And it demonstrates how solidarity A Subjectless Critique of Solidarity Tourism: Feminist Readings of Literature, Methods, Citations, and Ethnography This project is a multisited interdisciplinary ethnographic study grounded in transnational feminisms. Postcolonial and anticolonial feminist engagements with race, space, and (im)mobility have both shaped how I theorize the disparities in power and privilege between tourists and their hosts and enabled me to detail how tourism often facilitates and conceals past and present colonial violence.30 These works are woven throughout my readings of asymmetrical mobility in Palestine, Palestinian tour guides’ theorization of their own labor, tourist expectations and negotiations of the ethics of their presence in Palestine, and the colonial logics that structure tourist encounters. Jamaica Kincaid’s direct address to the tourist in A Small Place informs how I write about tourist mobility: Palestinian tour guides’ acts of reminding tourists of their stark mobility in contrast to Palestinian immobility echo how Kincaid challenges the tourist to consider their parasitic role in the global economy, as someone who “moves through customs quickly,” whose whiteness shields them from being searched and interrogated at customs, whose mobility is enabled by the colonial present.31 Jacqui Alexander’s critique of the “Native friendliness” required of tour guides and hosts in colonial contexts structures how I write about Palestinian hospitality.32 Teresia Teaiwa’s and Vernadette Introduction 11 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 tourism is rendered necessary by colonial logics that position “witnesses in Palestine” as the only ones capable of furnishing Palestinian accounts of Israeli occupation and settlement with evidentiary weight. Through repetition to the extent that it forms a genre, solidarity tourists in Palestine/Israel are repeatedly told that their work is not in Palestine but back in their home countries. In this context, my book reads the ambivalence written into the two invitations that structure the solidarity tourist encounter: Welcome to Palestine and Your work is not here. Solidarity tourism is an invitation to visit Palestine followed by an invitation to leave. It is, simultaneously, a pedagogical exercise, an anticolonial praxis, an income-generating industry, and a voyeuristic and exploitative enterprise. I position solidarity tourism in Palestine as not reducible to only one of these categories; instead, I explore the contradictions that inhere within solidarity tourism to think through the work of tourism, and tour guiding, when it coexists unevenly with the work of resisting military occupation, staying on land under the threat of exile, and negotiating the circumvented mobility and fragmented geographies of settler states. 12 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 Vicuña Gonzalez’s respective feminist readings of militourism—or, in Teiawa’s words, when “military or paramilitary forces ensure the smooth running of the tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the force behind it”— have shaped how I understand how tourism functions in contexts of colonial military occupation.33 These analyses of the routinization and coalescence of militarism and tourism, while in different colonial contexts ranging from Antigua to Trinidad and Tobago to Guam to Hawai‘i to the Philippines, not only have shaped how I read my ethnographic data but also point to the larger stakes of this project: namely, that the study of solidarity tourism in Palestine does not only matter to Palestine. Solidarity tourism is a transnational phenomenon that asks us to consider how people under the strictures of colonial military occupation strategically use tourist forms and tropes to critique the colonial asymmetries of the tourist encounter, stay anchored to land receding from their grip, and envision decolonized futures. This project exists at the interstices of feminist studies and tourism studies, American studies, Asian American studies, critical ethnic studies, and Palestinian studies. I chart questions of privilege and leisure on solidarity tours, the distance(s) between solidarity tourists and their hosts, the pitfalls of voluntourism, and the ethics of “sightseeing” itself.34 I labor to put solidarity tourism in Palestine in conversation with research on domestic tourism’s role in race making in the United States, militourism, and the intersections of tourism and US empire.35 Indeed, this project emerged in American studies and has remained invested in studying the structuring forces of US empire, militarism, and war making, naming and writing against the unconditional support of the United States for Israel and charting the movement—and potential movement building—of US tourists. Further, careful ethnographic, archival, and interdisciplinary studies of forced migration, diaspora, war, occupation, and exile guide my understanding of not only how solidarity tourism functions in Palestine in a context of past and present displacement but also how the displaced are asked and expected to narrate their stories.36 At the same time, I follow those scholars who have recently asked if tourism can advance an anticolonial and antiracist praxis.37 I explore the contradictions, exploitations, and voyeurism that inhere in solidarity tourism, alongside the strategic uses of mobility in a context of restricted movement and the moments when tourism functions, if only aspirationally, as a site of anticolonial praxis. Palestine has long been a historic site for tourism and the study of tourism, from colonial land surveys to the many forms of fiction that justified colonial pursuits in Palestine in advance of colonial acts—across multiple historical Introduction 13 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 periods and under different colonial powers.38 There have also been those who researched regional tourism in the aftermath of World War I, when British and French mandates partitioned the Ottoman Levant, some of whom focused on Zionist tourism to Palestine and some of whom focused not on tourism to Palestine but on Palestinian tourism to neighboring countries in the region.39 In describing the role of tourism in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land—a history of the colonial present that this book centers—there is a great deal of scholarship and reporting that details how, since the establishment of the state, Israel has deliberately and strategically monopolized the tourism sector at the same time that it has expropriated land, homes, and businesses from Palestinians.40 Scholars have also analyzed the tourist industry’s role in the “business of peace,” the “consumer coexistence” that shaped the Oslo period, and the role of domestic tourism in shaping Israeli national identity.41 There is also an emerging body of literature on “alternative” tourism in Palestine/Israel, which I refer to here as solidarity tourism.42 Some of this work tends to excoriate solidarity tours for clashing with the goals of locals, or celebrate alternative tourism’s role in the Palestinian economy, or other wise assess whether solidarity tourism “works” in its capacity to change hearts and minds. I learn from and engage with these extant studies, but rather than advance an evaluative claim, I analyze why Palestinian organizers are choosing tourism as a vehicle for activism and how organizers are negotiating, and even utilizing, the asymmetries that inhere within their profession. Undergirding my reading of solidarity tourism across each of these fields is also the feminist critique of epistemic violence, or violence at the site of knowledge production. I show how violence at the site of knowledge production shapes solidarity tour itineraries. On solidarity tours, Palestinians are expected to provide evidence of their own, extremely well-documented dispossession against a constellation of US and Israeli state-sanctioned narratives that have rendered them unreliable narrators. For this reason, pivotal to the feminist analytics that shape this work is a feminist citational practice that not only centers women of color but specifically centers Palestinian authors. Following Sara Ahmed’s contention that citation is a “successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies,” this book is built on a citational practice that honors the intellectual labor of women of color and structured by a commitment to citing Palestinians—both scholars and interviewees—as theorists of their own conditions.43 In addition to describing the restricted mobilities and fragmented narrations of tour guides, I also describe the movement and listening practices of US tourists. I write about how 14 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 Indigenous guides and organizers structure their itineraries and how tourists move on land that is not their own; my work here is thus shaped by women of color feminist analyses of race and mobility, feminist and queer scholarship on US racism within its borders and within its imperial reach, Indigenous studies research on the shared logics and practices of settler-colonial states, and feminist analyses of the death-dealing violence that feminism without intersectionality and devoid of critiques of militarism can enact. Further, coupled with Edward Said’s contention that citational practice is central to the circulation and repetition of Orientalist knowledge production, this book is structured by a citational practice that cites Palestinians.44 In writing about solidarity tourism in Palestine, I am writing about a phenomenon that has too often been shaped by tourists’ refusal to read or cite Palestinian scholarship on their own displacement. Tourists articulate a desire to see instead of read, to allow witnessing to stand in as an alibi for research. For this reason, central to my political and intellectual project is a commitment to citing Palestinian authors, theorists, scholars, journalists, artists, novelists, tour guides, farmers, and shopkeepers. Palestinian intellectual production animates this work; Palestinian descriptions of settler colonialism—when it does and does not travel by that name—shape how I read the landscape and those who traverse it. In this way, Palestinian literature on their own displacement, and Palestinian tour guides’ descriptions of their own labor, is the theory on which this book hinges. For this reason, in my research, I also crafted a feminist ethnographic practice not only in the subjects I chose to interview but also in how I chose to interview them. In my interviews, I did not ask Palestinians to relive their trauma of displacement in their retelling. I did not ask them to share their wounds with me for my (and my readers’) consumption. I did not ask them to share with me the “authentic” inner workings of Palestinian life or Palestinian thought. I did not ask them to reflect on what Palestinians—as some homogeneous singular entity—“think” about solidarity tourism. Instead, following Audra Simpson’s theorization of what her interlocutors refuse to say and what she as an ethnographer refuses to write, I do not tell a story here that recovers a singular Palestinian “stance” on solidarity tourism; nor do I tell a story that asked my interlocutors to rehearse their own trauma of exile. In fact, I show how tour guides also refuse to participate in the performance of reliving their trauma for tourists. Though solidarity tours are, in many ways, predicated on the performance of subjection, I document moments when tour guides reject performing subjection for the tourist gaze. Introduction 15 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 My ethnographic practice centered on asking tour guides to tell me about their jobs, their daily labor, their thoughts and theorizing on the tourist industry in Palestine, their relationships with tourists, the impetus behind the pedagogical work they do, and the changes they witness in their own landscape. I asked tourists to reflect on the ethics of their presence in Palestine, the asymmetries that shaped their itineraries, what brought them to Palestine, what they brought with them, and what they did when they returned home. In this way, my project is a feminist one not because it centers women, though I interviewed tour guides and tourists who identified as women, men, trans*, genderqueer, and nonbinary. My project is a feminist one because, borrowing from women of color and queer of color writings that underscore the importance of subjectless critique, which endeavors to decenter “women” as the sole subjects of feminist studies, it takes up a feminist analysis that is grounded in the transnational study of race, gender, and settler colonialism and foregrounds a feminist ethnographic and citational practice in its study of the fraught anticolonial project of crafting lives and livelihoods in contexts of state and settler violence. To demonstrate how and why Palestinian organizers are treating tourism as a viable anticolonial tactic despite the problems that tourism poses as an organizing strategy, I drew from interviews with guides, community members, tourists, and activists and from participant observation of solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel. I interviewed tour guides, rather than directors of programs, to get a sense of what the quotidian labor of guiding solidarity tours looks like, to understand how tour guides differently envision their work, and to explore the tourist expectations solidarity tour guides negotiate on a daily basis. I interviewed Palestinian organizers in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and inside Israel to learn more about how they set up their tours and why. I interviewed Ashkenazi Jewish Israeli organizers and tour guides doing work in East Jerusalem and inside Israel to understand how they construct their itineraries and how they see the politics and ethics of their solidarity work. I also interviewed Palestinian citizens in Israel who lead tours to villages that were depopulated in 1948 to gain an understanding of how they see their labor and how they articulate the effects of the work they do. Finally, I interviewed US solidarity tourists across multiple different demographics—white Presbyterian youth ministers, queer Black solidarity activists, tourists who identify as mixed race, diaspora Palestinians returning to Palestine for the first time, for instance— to demonstrate the multiple and varied reasons tourists come to Palestine. The interviews that form the basis of this book thus detail the phenomenon of 16 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 solidarity tourism at the same time that they disrupt the coherence of “solidarity tour guide” and “solidarity tourist” as its central categories. Over the past decade, I have participated in one hundred different solidarity tours—day trips to Hebron, thematic solidarity tours of West Bank cities and villages, weeklong advocacy workshops straddling the West Bank and East Jerusalem, bus tours through East Jerusalem, walking tours in villages and city centers inside Israel, and virtual tours to sites in Gaza and elsewhere across Historic Palestine. By Historic Palestine, I mean all of Palestine. In studying solidarity tourism across all of Palestine, I am referring to Historic Palestine, a shorthand for the Palestinian lands of what constitutes today’s State of Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the (also occupied) city of Jerusalem. In doing so, I am also refusing to define Palestine solely through shifting definitions and newly policed borders that emerged in 1948, with the Nakba; or in 1967, with further entrenched occupation; or in 1993, with the categorizations of the Oslo Accords. I also treat all of Palestine as occupied, albeit in radically different ways. Tourists, too, learn this on solidarity tours, from Hebron to Haifa, where occupation takes different forms but also works toward the incremental and sustained expulsion of Palestinians from city centers, towns, and villages across Palestine. This research method allowed me to follow the itineraries of organizers in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and inside Israel as they worked to reject the borders and checkpoints crafted to divide them. It also allowed me to detail how guides and organizers collectively attempt to use tourism to both expose the continuity of past and present Israeli settler colonialism and imagine a future without colonial occupation in Palestine/Israel. My research drew from participant observation; interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists; Palestinian cultural and literary production on displacement and return; and archival material activists have compiled in the wake of solidarity delegations to Palestine since the first intifada. In this way, this book is not a straightforward ethnography;45 it is, instead, deeply interdisciplinary and committed to the ethos that the research questions we ask should determine the methods we use and not the inverse. This interdisciplinary ethnographic approach enabled me to contextualize the emergence of solidarity tourism as both an industry and an organizing strategy and to explore the promise and pitfalls of solidarity tourism as an anticolonial praxis across Palestine/Israel. As a researcher in Palestine, I traveled with the mobility of a tourist. Unlike my Palestinian colleagues who have been denied entry to Palestine, I was let through after bored and distracted Israeli agents at Ben Gurion Airport A Narration in Seven Parts Again, in a refusal to tell the story of solidarity tourism in Palestine via a time line punctuated only by 1948 and 1967, I construct a historical chronology in the book that traces the material of contemporary solidarity tours to Zionist land expropriation that began as early as 1908, positioning displacement in Palestine as ongoing and sustained. The book draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and inside Israel’s 1948 borders, alongside secondary research on Gaza, yet resists dividing these spaces from one another by chapter and thus mirroring the fragmentation of Palestine itself in book form. Instead, the manuscript begins the story of solidarity tourism in Palestine with delegations during the first intifada but also travels from 1901 to 2021, and crosses borders, checkpoints, and green lines, to narrate the continuities in displacement, sustained exile, and the shifting strategies in organizing against expulsion that have animated solidarity tourism, first as a strategy and then as an industry, in Occupied Palestine. In this sense, my project not only Introduction 17 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 engaged in multiple lines of questioning and much confusion as to why I, a young non-Jewish and non-Arab woman, ostensibly straight (a misreading) and unaccompanied, was traveling alone to Israel without a return ticket. Unlike Palestine solidarity activists with less common names and more visible profiles, I was not placed in detention or denied entry. Nor did I receive the stamp, doled out to both international activists and Palestinians in the diaspora, that denies entry to Israel for five to ten years. Unlike the West Bank Palestinian tour guides with whom I worked, I followed the tourists wherever they went and traversed checkpoints, green lines, and arbitrary borders. With barely a glance at my documents, I was (mostly) allowed to pass. My ability to pass through this racialized surveillance and border policing—to be read as solely a tourist—enabled research that would other wise have been foreclosed. These racialized injustices deny Palestinians the ability to move and live in their homeland and to visit and explore other parts of their own inherited geographies; they also deny many Palestinian researchers in the diaspora the right to do place-based research on their own histories. I thus tell this story as a settler in two places, a non-Indigenous faculty member working on Amah Mutsun Tribal Land at my institutional home of University of California, Santa Cruz, and a non-Palestinian researcher in Palestine who was able to move freely on land that is not my own. My research, in this way, documents, archives, and indicts the shared settler-colonial practices that have enabled it. 18 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 reveals the fragmented terrain to which Palestinian guides invite tourists but also seeks its own alternative structure, beyond fracture and fragmentation and beyond a straightforward chronology, to tell this history. The first chapter draws from pamphlets, report-backs, speeches, and artist statements from solidarity tours to Palestine during the first intifada (1987– 1993) to chart how this phenomenon emerged as a political strategy in Palestine. I show how these archival materials are characterized by a studied—and curious—unwillingness to cite Palestinian literature as well as tourists’ need to “see for themselves.” I argue that this phenomenon, wherein tourist witnessing functions as an alibi for research, became institutionalized in solidarity tourism before it became a legalized profession in Palestine and persists in contemporary solidarity tour itineraries. In chapter 2, I chart the emergence of solidarity tourism as both a product and a critique of the 1993 US-brokered Oslo Accords and the attendant establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its Ministry of Tourism. In this chapter, I show how solidarity tourism emerged as a viable practice—and industry—for garnering international support for Palestinian freedom from occupation. This leads into chapter 3’s analysis of post-Oslo West Bank solidarity tours and the displacement across Historic Palestine that the tours trace, where I focus specifically on Palestinian olive-planting programs that connect contemporary settler destruction of olive trees in the West Bank to the long history of Zionist afforestation in what is now Israel. Chapter 4 analyzes solidarity tours of Jerusalem as a multiply occupied city. Some of these tours cover the eastern part of Occupied Jerusalem, with settlements extracting land and resources from Palestinian neighborhoods that are not granted municipal ser vices. Others focus on the Old City of Jerusalem, with settlements taking over the top floors of Palestinian apartment buildings and Israeli archaeological and tourist projects excavating the tunnels beneath Palestinian homes. Still others take tourists to West Jerusalem neighborhoods, with Israelis occupying mansions that belonged to affluent Palestinians before their exile in 1948. Together, they reveal three differently occupied sites across the same city, resulting in the combined isolation, fragmentation, and expulsion of the Palestinians who live there. Chapter 5 takes Palestinian solidarity tours inside Israel’s 1948 (and 1967) borders as its subject and describes what the return of Palestinian refugees could look like in this space. Studying tours that span the Palestinian village Imwas, razed in 1967 and now named Canada Park; the Palestinian village ’Ayn Hawd, now Dada artist colony and tourist site named Ein Hod; and segrega- Introduction 19 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 tion in “mixed cities” like Haifa, Jaffa, and Nazareth; this chapter refuses to use “solidarity tourism in Palestine” as a shorthand for “solidarity tourism in the West Bank” and instead looks at how these tours take shape, and what work they do, across Historic Palestine. Chapter 6 turns to forms of virtual tourism, celebrity tourism, and guerrilla art installations in Gaza, and the response to each by Palestinians elsewhere in Palestine and Palestinians in the diaspora. Charting these initiatives that resemble tourism, forged under the Israeli siege on Gaza that has now lasted fifteen years, this chapter intervenes in narratives that circumscribe Palestine to the geographic borders of the West Bank at the same time that it shows how Palestinians and internationals alike have sought to circumvent the borders erected to sever Gaza not only from the rest of Palestine but also from the rest of the world. The seventh and final chapter returns to interviews with US tourists about how they interpret the ethics of their fleeting moments in Palestine as tourists and their role as witnesses back home. In this chapter, I focus on the many different “tourists” who participate in solidarity tours, including displaced Palestinians in exile who can only return to Palestine as tourists. I detail not only the logistic difficulties of diaspora tourism in Palestine, where Palestinians in exile are criminalized and racially profiled at the airport, detained, deported, or other wise intimidated into not trying to enter at all but also the joy and trauma diaspora Palestinians experience when they are able to enter Palestine via a tour and the many ways in which the tours struggle to make space for this multiplicity. In this way, Palestine, in the story I tell, is not circumscribed by the geographic borders of the Israeli nation state and its Occupied Territories or by Historic Palestine. Palestine is, instead, defined by its people, including the six million in its diaspora. Building from literature in queer and affect studies that has outlined the contradictory project of hope in the face of despair and work on Palestine that has outlined the generative potential of Palestinian cynicism, I conclude the book by exploring the paired questions of hope and futurity as they are articulated through solidarity tourism in Palestine. I call these questions not as a rhetorical device to index themes but as real questions: articulations of a futurity that is consistently under threat of erasure and descriptions of a hope that is precarious but unyielding. I detail not only how tour guides think about their labor in a context in which the “future” of solidarity tourism would render it obsolete but also how they see their work as a potential, if uncertain, safeguard for the future of their presence in Palestine. In this way, the book concludes 20 Introduction Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1673707/9781478023920-001.pdf by guest on 08 December 2022 by demonstrating how Palestinian guides and organizers position hope, like solidarity, as an incomplete and sometimes impossible endeavor, yet one that is altogether necessary. In total, Invited to Witness explores the varied uses of tourism, the strategic uses of mobility in a context of restricted movement, and the shifting strategies of anticolonial labor that converge in solidarity tourism in Palestine. It also explores the contradictions, exploitations, and voyeurism that inhere in solidarity tourism. I look at how solidarity tourism both effects change and traffics in promises of change that it cannot deliver and contains all the trappings of tourism at the same time that it critiques them. Accepting the invitation to study solidarity tourism, my work resists easy definitions, and evaluative assessments, of what solidarity tourism is and does. I ask what happens when tourists are simultaneously invited to Palestine and invited to leave, when they are asked to be witnesses yet also asked to interrogate their voyeurism, when tourists and tour guides alike commodify Palestinian culture while resisting its erasure, and when solidarity tourism is predicated on the performance of subjection but tour guides refuse to reenact it for tourists. Refusing the desire, and invocation, for me to position solidarity tourism as either wholly redemptive or wholly exploitative, I instead show how solidarity tourism troubles how we understand both “solidarity” and “tourism,” looking not only at the limitations of each, nor only at their radical potential, but at the asymmetrical ways they take shape in settler-colonial contexts.