Summary
In Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, forms of travel animated by the tour guide’s desire to cultivate solidarity with their cause and tourists’ desires to establish a deeper connection to or understanding of a particular social movement — in Palestine, a fraught anticolonial strategy structured by a double invitation, to come for a truncated time and then to go home and do the work there (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.19-21).
Details
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Definition as given: “I use the term solidarity tourism to refer to forms of travel that are animated by the tour guide’s desire to cultivate solidarity with their cause and tourists’ desires to establish a deeper connection to or understanding of a particular social movement” (PDF p.21).
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Its conventions: an appeal to tourists’ commitment; a reminder that presence is a responsibility, communicated through emphasis on international, particularly US, complicity in Israeli occupation; and a repeated reminder that tourists’ work is not in Palestine but at home — they have been invited to Palestine and are now “being invited to go home” (PDF p.19-20).
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Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism to three ends: staging encounters with everyday Palestinian life against Israeli state-sanctioned narratives; keeping shop owners and farmers on land under threat of expropriation; and confronting the racialized asymmetry privileging tourists’ accounts of what they witness over Palestinian narratives of their own displacement (PDF p.21).
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It emerged as a legalized, professionalized practice from the Oslo Accords — Palestinian tour guiding was prohibited between 1967 and 1994, and by 2013 there were about 290 officially licensed Palestinian tour guides against Israel’s 5,400; about 5 percent of the Palestinian tourism sector is alternative or solidarity tourism (PDF p.23-24).
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It is formulated in contradistinction to other international presence: a turn away from the International Solidarity Movement’s protective presence and direct action, and a redirection of Voluntourism, requesting international presence only for a structured and curtailed amount of time (PDF p.25-27).
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Kelly refuses to reduce it to any one of its simultaneous characters: “a pedagogical exercise, an anticolonial praxis, an income-generating industry, and a voyeuristic and exploitative enterprise” (PDF p.28).
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Its categories are incoherent: delegations include Palestinians in exile who can only return to Palestine as tourists, and guides who are themselves positioned differently across Historic Palestine (PDF p.20, 32-33).
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Chapter 2 (part 2): after Oslo it was professionalized into an income-generating business merging the language of branding and marketing with the language of liberation; Siraj Center’s Michel Awad frames it as rural development and changing perceptions of Palestine, Baha Hilo as disruption of the discrediting of Palestinian narration, and Hantourism claims a Palestinian right to tourism as tourism, not only political tours (PDF p.81-90).
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Its itineraries are deliberately asymmetrical: guides guide tourists through spaces they themselves often cannot enter (Checkpoint 300 handoffs, Shuhada Street in Hebron), using tourist mobility to highlight Palestinian immobility, and frame displacement in 1948, 1967, 1993, 2010 and now as an ongoing Nakba of which Oslo is part (PDF p.79, 91-96).
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Guides also measure it by what it does in Palestine: Yazan al-Zubaidy’s Hebron family kept house and shop through tourist income — “Just to stay where you are. And to live” (PDF p.102).
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Chapter 3 (part 3): the Olive Tree Campaign uses tourists’ unrestricted mobility and protective presence to plant and harvest on land Palestinians can no longer access, and recites the history of Zionist afforestation as recitation against erasure; Bisan Kassis reframes the harvest as a gift Palestinians give tourists and assigns tourists BDS work at home (PDF p.106-128).
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Chapter 4 (part 3): Jerusalem guides organize differentiated itineraries across the city’s three occupations — West Jerusalem mansions, Old City settlement expansion, and a plundered East Jerusalem — routing tourists to Palestinian businesses and narrating infrastructure itself (“where the sidewalk ends”) against the colonial logic that blames Palestinians for the conditions imposed on them (PDF p.129-152).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Witnessing, Colonial Calculus of Veracity, Report-Back, Militourism, Voluntourism, International Solidarity Movement, Olive Tree Campaign, Bisan Kassis, Fayrouz Sharqawi, Ali Jiddah