Rupture in heritage: strategies of dispossession, elimination and co-resistance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Diaspora and Israel Jews are increasingly engaging their historical narratives of liberation within new forms of co-resistance to the Israeli Occupation, a history that controversially has been weaponized by the settler colonial power to manifest its dispossessive policies. ‘Occupation is not our Judaism’ has become a political slogan to mobilise Jews against land confiscation, house demolitions, trees uprooting, interrogations, and the Annexation Wall. Activists are concerned about the enactment of violence in the name of Judaism, and seek to contest the establishment of a Jewish nation-state as a solution to antisemitism. Their Jewish identities are articulated on the basis of Israel-centrism, and through intersectional struggles for universal liberation. This article explores the ways in which Jewish historical narratives inform the settler colonial policies in Palestine and the counter activism in which Jews play a potential role. It focuses on the patterns of ‘co-resistance’ which emerged after the collapse of the Oslo Accords of 1993. While co-existence was propagated during the 1990s to reveal the occupier and occupied as two equal sides, co-resistance emerged as a counter narrative in which Jewish and Palestinian activists stand in solidarity against the occupation. Interviews and on-site observations in the Old Town of Hebron showed how heritage and history have been weaponized by settlers to construct Jewish-only enclaves and to destroy the social and spatial realities that signify the collective identity of the Natives. Despite the failure of co-resistance to reverse the settlement project, the interviewed activists saw it as a viable form of resistance to this project. This article explored its potential in dismissing any claim that casts the settler colonial project in Hebron as a natural return of Hebron’s Jews to their history, and to link Nakba to tikkun olam, challenging its exclusion from the moral universe of the Jewish legacies of liberation.