Fields and Facebook: Ta’ayush’s Grassroots Activism and Archiving the Peace that Will Have Come in Israel/Palestine

Jon Simons

doi:10.17645/mac.v4i1.390

Abstract

Israeli peace activism has increasingly taken place on new media, as in the case of the grassroots anti-Occupation group, Ta’ayush. What is the significance of Ta’ayush’s work on the ground and online for peace? This article considers the former in the light of social movement scholarship on peacebuilding, and the latter in light of new media scholarship on social movements. Each of those approaches suggest that Ta’ayush has very limited success in achieving its strategic goals or generating outrage about the Occupation in the virtual/public sphere. Yet, Ta’ayush’s apparent “failure” according to standard criteria of success misses the significance of Ta’ayush’s work. Its combination of grassroots activism and online documentation of its work in confronting the Occupation in partnership with Palestinians has assembled an impressive archive. Through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, Ta’ayush can be seen to enact a “future perfect” peace that will have come.

Highlights

A Small Incident in the South Hebron HillsOn the YouTube channel of guybo111 there is a 47 second video
The clip shows a melee of Israeli soldiers, activists and locals
A separate video lasting 42 seconds, shows in slow motion a woman activist being attacked by a settler who grabs her camera and smashes it, amid much shouting. This video was posted on November 23rd 2013 to the Facebook page of Guy Butavia, who is an activist in Ta’ayush, a grassroots group of “Israelis & Palestinians striving together to end the Israeli occupation and to achieve full civil equality through daily non-violent direct-action” (Ta’ayush, 2015a)

Summary

A Small Incident in the South Hebron Hills

On the YouTube channel of guybo111 there is a 47 second video (guybo111, 2013a). The clip shows a melee of Israeli soldiers, activists and locals. A separate video (guybo111, 2013b) lasting 42 seconds, shows in slow motion a woman activist being attacked by a settler who grabs her camera and smashes it, amid much shouting This video was posted on November 23rd 2013 to the Facebook page of Guy Butavia, who is an activist in Ta’ayush, a grassroots group of “Israelis & Palestinians striving together to end the Israeli occupation and to achieve full civil equality through daily non-violent direct-action” (Ta’ayush, 2015a). The branch of it that intersects with new (or social) media studies, offers some instructive answers to those questions, which are outlined in what follows Those answers miss the full significance of Ta’ayush’s online presence, especially its website, which, through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, appears as an archive of both the Occupation and of its activities in the “future perfect”, prefiguring a time in which the work of the activists will have become recuperated by the practice of peace as partnership. “A future of equality, justice and peace begins today, between us, through concrete, daily actions of solidarity to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories” (Ta’ayush, 2015a)

Ta’ayush and Anti-Occupation Activism

Ta’ayush as Media Activism

An Archive of Occupation

Findings

An Archive of the Peace That Will Have Come