BETTINA PRATOreality participation in these activities entails a relative blurring of nationally marked
subject positions with respect to power and vulnerability. Israeli rabbis and volunteers
accept vulnerability to violence, at least for the duration of the activities, but they also do
all they can to avoid that violence, most importantly, by refusing to give up their superior
power to ‘‘represent’’ that violence by ‘‘speaking the same language’’ as soldiers and set-
tlers (i.e., not only Hebrew but also the language of Zionism and of the laws of the state).
At a demonstration against the Barrier in the village of Biddu, for instance, Rabbi
Ascherman approached Israeli border police to stop them from beating a young Palestin-
ian boy, only to be arrested himself and then tied to the front of a police jeep as a human
shield ‘‘protecting’’ the front window from stones thrown by demonstrators. On other
occasions, RHR members and supporters have been harassed, beaten, and arrested while
demonstrating with Palestinians or working in the fields. Generally both they and their
partners understand that the privileges attached to an Israeli ID card (or even to a skull-
cap) may be temporarily forfeited in these situations. In sum, the space where joint ac-
tions take place is one in which identity lines are often partly and temporarily suspended,
but the effectiveness of these actions also depends on the preservation of the privileges of
Israeli identity, without which the presence of group members would not render Palestin-
ians safer or their situation more available to potentially empowering instruments for
representation (e.g., Israeli courts).
Despite the temporary suspension of these privileges, the specific prerogatives of an
Israeli national or rabbi in a situation of joint work with Palestinians are thus part of
what makes RHR’s acts of solidarity possible and effective. This is contrary to Levinas’s
view of ethical responsibility (though not his notion of political justice), which requires
that people confront the other’s suffering and his practical (including economic) misery
while shorn of all qualities of their own, including the capacity for doing, or what he calls
‘‘I can.’’ Besides relying precisely on this capacity, RHR’s work constitutes a verypolitical
sort of responsibility in the sense that it engages Israelis with an ‘‘other’’ whose ‘‘suffering’’
is not unrelated to their own history or to their power, both in the sense that these have
contributed to it and in the sense that they are necessary in order to enable its witnessing
and its alleviation under the Occupation.
On a second level of ‘‘excess’’ beyond its symbolic referents, much RHR practice goes
beyond the principle of ‘‘nonoppression’’ of the stranger (which is affirmed by the sym-
bolic order of prophetic Judaism) by actively cultivating Palestinian presence in the land-
scape of biblical Israel. By rebuilding homes, replanting orchards, and assisting with
harvesting, RHR members seem to signal a desire to nurture the ‘‘economic’’ fabric of
Palestinian life as a nontransient factor in this land, whether in the West Bank (including
East Jerusalem) or in Israel proper. In this respect, there is an important difference be-
tween the call not to oppress ‘‘strangers,’’ which the group upholds in theory, and the act
of buildingwith them(as opposed tofor them) the capacity to provide for themselves, in
the process strengthening their roots in the Promised Land.^57 This difference is not only
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