Summary
In Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, the practice at the center of solidarity tourism’s politics: tourists’ firsthand seeing is treated as evidence of occupation’s realities, while Palestinian narration of the same realities is treated as insufficient — so witnessing corroborates, and is made to complete, the Palestinian archive (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.39, 50).
Details
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Tourists rely on their own experience of witnessing as evidence despite the volumes of Palestinian scholarship that have narrated colonial displacement; in the Report-Back genre, witnessing functions as an alibi for research — visitors need not engage Palestinian writers, artists and cultural producers, only describe what they saw (PDF p.39).
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Tourists articulate a desire to see instead of read, letting witnessing stand in as an alibi for research; Kelly’s counter-practice is a citational practice citing Palestinians as theorists (PDF p.31).
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The conversion formula attached to witnessing: Palestinians are rendered “abstract” — statistics in the news — until a tourist witnesses their condition in person, at which point their pain is made “concrete” and they are rendered human (PDF p.47-50).
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Solidarity tourism is rendered necessary by the colonial logics behind this hierarchy: “witnesses in Palestine” are positioned as the only ones capable of furnishing Palestinian accounts of Israeli occupation and settlement with evidentiary weight (PDF p.28).
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Chapter 1’s close (part 2): tourists demanded to see for themselves in a context where evidence abounds, refusing to corroborate Palestinian narratives until they witnessed violence with their own eyes; Kelly concludes Palestinians confront not a question of evidence but a question of epistemology — epistemic violence renders them unreliable narrators of their own histories (PDF p.73-74).
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Chapter 2 adds a reversed witnessing: guides witness small victories against colonization, as when tourist income lets a Hebron family stay in its house and four shops open around theirs (PDF p.102).
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Kelly’s Chapter 7 distinguishes witnessing to human rights violations, the kind most solidarity tourists mean, from Noelle Farasha’s witnessing for — being in Palestine for her father and her partner, who cannot or will not return: “Witnessing my homeland for other people” (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.250).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Colonial Calculus of Veracity, Report-Back, Solidarity Tourism