A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERSers. Nonviolent resistance is also used in demonstrations in which the group participates
at the invitation of village committees in West Bank areas affected by the construction of
the Israeli Separation Barrier.
While explicitly motivated by desire to uphold the human rights of Palestinians, the
presence of RHR rabbis and volunteers is often perceived by observers (both Israeli and
Palestinian) as having political meaning in transgressing the Israeli consensus. This is true
on a variety of levels, starting with that of spatial transgression, though RHR members
usually refrain from breaking laws regulating Israeli presence in areas populated primarily
by Palestinians (those labeled under Oslo regulations as areas A). By crossing ‘‘borders’’
into areas B or C to stand by Palestinians who try to secure a livelihood by tending to
their farmland, RHR members challenge the state politically in the sense that they ask its
institutions (notably the army, police, and courts) to show their power to protect these
people’s rights according to commitments the state has openly made. As Rabbi Ascher-
man has often stated, what RHR wants is often just to see that police and soldiers ‘‘do
their job’’ in preventing settlers from encroaching upon Palestinian farmland or attacking
farmers. In practice, the presence of RHR alongside Palestinian harvesters sometimes
encourages security forces to restrain settlers, aids communication when farmers are not
fluent speakers of Hebrew, and ensures that someone is present at the site of possible
rights violations who can report to Israeli authorities and, if necessary, appeal to the Israeli
judicial apparatus (something that Palestinians are unlikely to be able to do). Needless to
say, however, soldiers (not to mention settlers) often also experience this presence as a
provocation, and at times settlers react by doubling their efforts to damage Palestinian
fields when RHR members return to their homes. Furthermore, though there is no official
RHR position on settlements as such, the presence of group members during confronta-
tions between settlers and Palestinian farmers pushes them to take contingent stances
that, though framed in terms of human rights or of Israeli law, take on clearly political
significance in the context of debates around settlements in Israel. As for house demoli-
tions, the political import of the group’s stance came out, for instance, in Ascherman’s
speech at the final hearing of his trial in the spring of 2005, when he stated that there is a
gap between law and justice in Israel that obliges its citizens to practice civil disobedience
until legal institutions can once more acquire legitimacy from a religious point of view.^56
How, exactly, do these various acts of solidarity exceed the discursive references of
RHR, whether in terms of human rights discourse or in terms of an ethics of Jewish
strangerness combined with sovereign power in the Promised Land? The answer may vary
depending on the kind of activity at issue, as well as on its context. To the extent that any
degree of generalization is possible, one might say that a first level of ‘‘excess’’ can be
found in the way in which subject positions and power relations are shaped by the very
fact of Palestinians and Israelis working together in a given situation. Although the pres-
ence of RHR rabbis supposedly brings an element of security to joint demonstrations,
planting, or harvesting thanks to their religious standing and to their being Israelis, in
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