You Prefer Your Enemies Simple and Well Defined : Reading Anton Shammas’ \u3cem\u3eArabesques\u3c/em\u3e as a Novel that Strategically Resists Interpellation

Anton Shammas’s 1986 novel Arabesques has been the subject of much literary criticism and on-going discussions in Hebrew literature circles. This article argues that existing interpretations of this work share a fundamental similarity to the extent that they assume Arabesques to be a novel whose primary aim is to depict a certain kind of subject, in accordance with the complicated emplacement of Shammas as a Palestinian writing in Hebrew. Against such interpretations, we suggest that Arabesques is better understood as a text that resists the process of subject formation as linked to Althusser’s notion of ideology. Instead, Shammas explores the possibilities inherent in fictionality itself. Fiction, in our reading, is an alternative practice that opens up new possibilities for identity formations and for political criticism which are tied neither to ideology nor to the Althusserian interpellated subject. While departing from previous readings of the novel, these claims nevertheless stand in a line of descent with their predecessors

Writing Rights, Writing Violence: The Bureaucracy of Palestinian Testimonies in Israeli Human Rights NGOs

This dissertation is an ethnography of Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs), that document the violations of Palestinians’ human rights (HR) perpetrated by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Israeli anti-occupation NGOs rely on a rigid bureaucratic logic in their processing of testimony – a written-down narration of a subjective experience of violence into a coherent narrative in document-form: violence is translated into a written text that can be used for legal-action purposes, research, media circulation, and is eventually archived. By anthropologically examining bureaucratic lugubriousness in NGOs, I theorize HR as a project of documentation and archiving that legitimates itself as a subversive bureaucracy. Simultaneously, this project’s own critical authority is undermined since it relies on colonial modes of knowledge production and representation. Based on 18 months of participant-observation in four NGOs, I trace the trajectory of Palestinians’ testimonies as NGOs’ main source of data and as HR’ dominant genre of representation. NGO practices are considered against the backdrop of growing disdain in Israel/Palestine towards HR, not only in the populist rhetoric and efforts of anti-liberal politicians, but also amongst activists, critical scholars, Palestinians living under the occupation, and within NGOs’ own staff. The main recurring critique is that HR fail to protect Palestinians or curb Israel’s settler-colonialism. Some detractors claim that NGOs are complicit with Israel’s violence. This study explores why Palestinians continue to testify for Israeli NGOs that, in turn, persist in documenting Palestinians’ testimonies. I suggest that HR are a genre of anti-colonial historiography that is itself based on colonial reason, mainly genealogies of surveying and bureaucratic writing: NGOs rely on what I term as “frames of in/validation” - phases of incessant verification and adaptation of Palestinian experiences of violence into simplified narrative structures, that conform to legal-moral discourses and definitions of HR. While the strictures of documentation and writing problematically limit the moral claims and political clout of NGOs, HR paradoxically remain relevant through the relational foundation affirmed by frames of in/validation, namely: between a violent past written as a bureaucratic document, and a distant future in which imagined publics make moral-political judgments based on NGOs’ archives.Ph.D.2021-03-21 00:00:0

Introduction

This introduction sets the scene for the special issue through an overview of extant anthropological approaches to witnessing and a discussion of the collection’s three main themes: truths, technologies and transformations. It lays the groundwork for a distinctly anthropological approach to witnessing in three ways. First, by drawing together disparate ethnographic takes on witnessing, it expands the anthropological analysis of witnessing beyond its conventional foci (e.g. legal or media settings). Second, it makes a case for attending not only to witnessing’s semantics and subjectivities but also to its structural, relational, performative and material dimensions. Finally, it puts ethnographic analyses of witnessing in dialogue with reflexive discussions of anthropological witnessing, asking what each can bring to the other. In a ‘post-truth’ moment, when our interlocutors are producing their own testimonies and representations, it is vital to rethink what it means for anthropologists to (bear) witness – and who/what we do it for. European Research Council Starting Grant 75849