A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERStheoretical but also political, since ‘‘life-enabling’’ or ‘‘economic’’ power—the power both
to provide concrete livelihoods and to cultivate ‘‘forms of life’’ supported by distinctive
symbolic orders—is not just claimed by Israelis to be used on behalf of others but is
ascribed to and recognized in others both as individuals and as communities, suggesting
that their ‘‘strangerness’’ to the Land does not make their roots in it any less vital or rich
in economic and symbolic value than those of Jewish Israelis. Importantly, it is almost
always Palestinian farmers, homeowners, or village committees who invite RHR members
and other activists to come to work with them. It is also Palestinians who invite RHR
members to celebrations intheirhomes and villages, that is, in places to which they are
tied not only by bonds of property or of economic need but also by bonds of symbolic
signification in ethno-national, familial, or religious terms. On these occasions, Palestin-
ians and Israelis are capable of life-enabling solidarity only by virtue of their different
access to certain ‘‘qualities’’ that make up the Levinasian ‘‘I can,’’ that is, a capacity for
economic and symbolically significant work that is partly, though not exclusively, rooted
in ethno-national membership.
For RHR members, neither human rights nor Zionist identity are set aside in the
work of solidarity, and yet each of these discourses is either exceeded or transgressed
while working literally ‘‘in the field.’’ Ultimately, there is no mimesis, no identification of
RHR members with their Palestinian ‘‘others,’’ either as abstract human beings or as a
national community. On the contrary, my participation in some RHR initiatives and my
reading of the group’s literature suggest that Israeli members retain a sense of primary
responsibility toward their national community, state, and religious tradition, as well as
to their own past and present traumas. Their Palestinian partners are often aware of this,
though they are not always willing to accept it, despite the expediency of contingent
cooperation. In fact, this sense of primary responsibility toward one’s people and one’s
own symbolic referents (e.g., Jewish values and understandings of terms likejustice)is
often reinforced by the ascriptive identity into which RHR people are interpellated by
their Palestinian partners. While accompanying an RHR member on a visit to a Bedouin
resettlement camp whose families he has helped for many years and with whom he main-
tains very warm relations, I once witnessed a group of children (who had run to meet the
rabbi with friendly enthusiasm during all his previous visits) ask him, ‘‘You are Jewish, so
tell me: why did your people kill Rantisi?’’^58 When the rabbi expressed his sadness for this
event and tried to challenge the children’s assumption that as a Jew he must respond for
all actions committed by the state of Israel, a child retorted: ‘‘Then [i.e., if you are indeed
sad] why did you Zionists come to take our land?’’ By asking that, the child seemed to
draw a line that could not be crossed by human rights discourse or by the strong personal
bond between his family and the rabbi, demanding not only friendship or practical soli-
darity but rather a clear assumption of responsibilityby an Israelifor what he saw as an
inextricable combination of the historical trajectory of Zionism and of specific acts of
violence authorized by the Israeli state today.
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