Occupational Hazards: Palestine Ethnography

Abstract

One of the first days after I had moved to Nablus, in November 1984, I had an experience that has now become a daily routine for Israeli settlers in the West Bank. I was driving downtown, when suddenly, bam! the car shook under the impact of a heavy blow to its side. A Palestinian youth, whom I never saw, had darted out of an alley, hurled a large stone, and rapidly vanished. He only managed, luckily, to put a large dent above my gas cap and did not break the windshield, the usual goal of hurled stones. I guess he singled out my car as a target from all the others on that busy street because its yellow license plates and my appearance led him to believe I was an Israeli settler. (As the holder of a tourist visa, I had to register my car in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, so its yellow plates stood out amidst the distinctive blue-plated vehicles driven by West Bank Palestinians.) I was so shaken that I was ready to give up fieldwork and go straight home. My immediate thought was that I, of all people, should never have been stoned. After all, unlike those Westerners one saw in the West Bank-the settlers, tourists, and embassy officials-I was a foreigner, working in the best interests of the Palestinians. My response was typical of a mentality I shared with Westerners who worked as teachers, journalists, or researchers in the occupied territories and sympathized with the Palestinians. This was a frame of mind that I shared but also, in calmer moments, criticized. We good foreigners practiced constant rituals of self-purification, designed to guarantee that we-unlike the settlers, tourists, and diplomats-were part of the Palestinian community. We spoke Arabic, dressed modestly (no shorts, low-cut blouses or wild haircuts), avoided tourist haunts, rarely ventured into Israel proper and, whenever possible, purchased Palestinian rather than Israeli products. We were often more obsessive about these latter practices than our Palestinian friends. My point is not that these actions were incorrect, but that insomuch as they demonstrated our radical difference from other Westerners, they allowed us to disavow our real connections to the centers of power. My response to the stoning was emblematic of a reluctance to acknowledge my implication in the forces of domination in the West Bank. My Palestinian friends' reaction to the incident, which was much less sympathetic than I had ex-