Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine

Summary

Jennifer Lynn Kelly’s ethnographic study of solidarity tourism across all of Historic Palestine argues that Palestinian tour guides and organizers refashion conventional tourism into a fraught anticolonial strategy structured by a double invitation: tourists are invited to come to Palestine for a truncated time, listen and learn, and are then invited to go home, where their work in solidarity — and, for most, their complicity in Palestinian subjugation — actually lies (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.18-20). Part 1 (the Introduction and the opening of Chapter 1) sets out the book’s definition of solidarity tourism, its emergence from the Oslo Accords’ fragmentation of the West Bank and the post-1993 legalization of Palestinian tour guiding, its turn away from International Solidarity Movement-style protective presence and voluntourism toward deliberately truncated educational visits, and its feminist ethnographic and citational method, which cites Palestinians as theorists of their own conditions; Chapter 1 then traces, through Sherna Berger Gluck’s An American Feminist in Palestine (1994) and other first intifada report-backs, the “colonial calculus of veracity” in which Palestinian narrators are treated as unreliable and international witnessing is made to corroborate — and render human — what Palestinian literature had already documented (PDF p.38-55). Part 2 completes Chapter 1 (the costs delegations imposed on Palestinian hosts, hospital visits and blood donation, the Alternative Museum exhibition and Break the Silence murals, and the conclusion that Palestinians confront not a lack of evidence but epistemic violence), gives Chapter 2 in full (post-Oslo fragmentation of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C as an archipelago; the professionalization of solidarity tourism as both business and liberation work, in the voices of Michel Awad and Baha Hilo; Hantourism and the right to tourism as tourism; and asymmetrical itineraries through Checkpoint 300, Jerusalem and Hebron that use tourists’ mobility to expose Palestinian immobility), and opens Chapter 3 (olive planting and harvesting as recitation against erasure, tracing uprooting and afforestation back to 1908) (PDF p.56-105). Part 3 completes Chapter 3 (the JAI-ATG Olive Tree Campaign’s planting days in al-Khader, Beit Ummar and Jab’a; Zionist afforestation from the 1908 Herzl Forest through Dayr Yasin, the JNF’s green belt and post-1967 “security groves” to the theft and replanting of ancient olive trees and the al-Araqib “peace forest”; and organizers Baha Hilo and Bisan Kassis reframing the harvest as a culture of resistance whose work is BDS at home) and carries Chapter 4 through its West Jerusalem, Old City and East Jerusalem tours (Zochrot at Villa Harun ar-Rashid and Khalil Sakakini’s looted library; Ali Jiddah and Fayrouz Sharqawi on the Old City and “where the sidewalk ends”) (PDF p.106-152). Part 4 completes Chapter 4 (love and care under occupation, against the manufactured narratives that Palestinians were never there and cannot care for the city), gives Chapter 5 in full (Zochrot’s walking tours of depopulated villages and JNF forests, Bilal Dirbas at Ein Hod/‘Ayn Hawd, Yacoub Odeh at Lifta, Emwas under Canada Park, the Zochrot-BADIL “Practicalities of Return” blueprinting — Miska’s countermapping, flowers instead of fences — “mixed cities”, and the iNakba and Palestine VR apps), and opens Chapter 6 (Gaza’s politics of invitation under siege: the August 2017 virtual delegation with Raji Sourani, Laila El-Haddad and Mushon Zer-Aviv’s virtual tour You Are Not Here (2007-2009), and Anthony Bourdain’s 2013 Parts Unknown episode as a virtual tour for internationals and for diaspora Palestinians alike) (PDF p.153-208). Part 5 completes Chapter 6 (Bourdain on food under siege and on representing Palestinians beyond slingshots; Tanya Habjouqa’s Occupied Pleasures and the visual economy that forecloses Palestinian joy; Banksy’s February 2015 Welcome to Gaza mock tourist video and the Gaza Parkour Team’s After Banksy answer, which treats tourism seriously and claims the right to be tourists as well as guides; the Gaza University-Indiana University Gaza 2050 virtual museum, halted by Operation Protective Edge; and Hadeel Assali’s “Postcard from a Liberated Gaza”) and carries Chapter 7 through its central arguments (tourists’ formula of disbelief, translation and “what hits home”; Marietta Macy’s whiteness as legibility; the Jim Crow, apartheid South Africa and Turtle Island analogies and their erasures, refused by RL of the Dream Defenders; Noelle Farasha’s witnessing for her father and husband and the tour that drove through her family’s village without stopping; and “hanging out” — leisure, hospitality and the Flytilla — as guides’ refusal to perform subjection) (PDF p.209-259). Part 6 completes Chapter 7 (guides’ microrefusals, Sara Ahmed on evidence, and success measured by reaching one or five of twenty tourists), gives the Conclusion in full (Trump’s January 2020 “Deal of the Century” and its tourism “Breakout Venture” as tourism wedded to apartheid; solidarity tourism as a fraught, historically grounded anticolonial tactic anticipating its own obsolescence, animated by conditional futures and by hope recalibrated by “1 percent positive”), and reads the Notes in full — to the Introduction, Chapters 1-7 and the Conclusion — and the opening of the Bibliography (A, through Amiry) (PDF p.260-305).

What the file is

The 2023 Duke University Press edition (Durham and London), © 2023 Duke University Press (PDF p.5). ISBN 9781478019299 (paperback), 9781478016656 (hardcover), 9781478023920 (ebook); LCCN 2022026708 (print) / 2022026709 (ebook) (PDF p.5). 345 PDF pages, about 133,709 words; printed pagination runs to p.311 (Index) with front matter in roman numerals to p.xvi. Cover art is Tanya Habjouqa’s photograph from the series The Sacred Space Oddity (PDF p.5). The original PDF (29,268,593 bytes, SHA-256 1c683264716152e179376de0b61fd76a13b2abad492bff7e6c05ce7d795dcc72) was too large to deliver, so raw/ holds the supplied stub and the memex text copy, which is legible and carries === PDF p.N === markers for all 345 pages; access basis is open-license (OA via OAPEN; licence not stated in the scan), per the stub. Kelly is a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies), a non-Palestinian, non-Indigenous researcher who tells the story “as a settler in two places” (PDF p.16-17, 34).

Section by section

Front matter (PDF p.1-9)

Cover, half-title, title page, copyright and cataloguing, dedication to her mother, and Contents: Acknowledgments ix; Introduction printed p.1; Ch.1 The Colonial Calculus of Veracity p.21; Ch.2 Asymmetrical Itineraries p.59; Ch.3 Recitation against Erasure p.87; Ch.4 Itineraries under Duress p.112; Ch.5 Colonial Ruins and a Decolonized Future p.138; Ch.6 “Welcome to Gaza” p.179; Ch.7 Witnesses in Palestine p.211; Conclusion: On Futurity, Failure, and Precarious Hope p.245; Notes p.253; Bibliography p.287; Index p.311 (PDF p.4-8).

Acknowledgments (PDF p.10-17 / printed p.ix-xvi)

Kelly thanks first her interlocutors in Palestine — guides and organizers who let her sit in on tours, shop owners, farmers, community members and tourists — naming those whose words animate whole chapters: Sherna Gluck on first intifada delegations, Baha Hilo on Israeli state practice, Yazan Al-Zubaidy on witnessing, Bisan Kassis on organizing, Fayrouz Sharqawi on Jerusalem, Umar al-Ghubari on return, Bilal Dirbas on settler colonialism and Haifa, and Sarah Alzanoon, Maggie Goff, Yvonne Lory, Marietta Macy, Addis Green, Olga Negrón, RL and Noelle Farasha on touring Palestine (PDF p.10-11). Mentors named include Ella Shohat, Ann Stoler, Barbara Harlow, Naomi Paik, Amy Kaplan, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Gary Fields, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Nadine Naber and Rebecca Stein (PDF p.11-12). Funding is recorded in full: UT Austin and Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) dissertation support, UC President’s and UIUC Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellowships, and UC Santa Cruz fellowships including the 2019-2020 PARC Field-Based Research Fellowship; the Freedom Archives in San Francisco is thanked as making Chapter 1 possible (PDF p.15-16). The acknowledgments close with Marisol LeBrón and Isla, and the aim to “craft a world where all babies are free, from Puerto Rico to Palestine” (PDF p.17).

Introduction — “Invited to Witness and Invited to Go Home” (PDF p.18-21 / printed p.1-4)

The Introduction opens with a first intifada delegate’s reflection — “They called me a tourist, which I found insulting” — and with a summer 2019 delegation on the porch of the Tamimi house in Nabi Saleh: Ahed Tamimi, eighteen, arrested in December 2017 for slapping an Israeli soldier, sentenced to eight months and released in July 2018, was questioned incessantly by thirty delegates about prison while her father Bassam Tamimi told them Palestinians needed not tears (“We have enough tear gas,” he wryly joked) but solidarity (PDF p.18-19). Delegates resisted Kelly’s term “tourism” — “But don’t you think it’s different, because they are tourists and we are delegates?” — though, she notes, they go to the same sites, meet the same people and are asked to do the same things (PDF p.19). Her thesis: “I argue that solidarity tourism is a fraught anticolonial strategy in Palestine that follows a series of conventions” — an appeal to tourists’ commitment, a reminder that presence is a responsibility communicated through emphasis on international, particularly US, complicity, and a repeated reminder that their work is not in Palestine but at home; Palestinian hosts, who control neither the narrative about Palestine nor its borders, daily invite tourists to come for a truncated time, listen, learn and go home (PDF p.19-20). “Solidarity tourist” and “solidarity tour guide” are incoherent categories, since delegations include Palestinians in exile who can only return as tourists (PDF p.20). In the section “Invitation as Keyword and Solidarity Tourism as Genre”, the invitation is a genre of repeated conventions; Palestinian guides wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Said’s words, “the permission to narrate”, from Israeli control (PDF p.20-21). Kelly defines the term: “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). Organizers pursue three goals: 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 over Palestinian narratives (PDF p.21). She refuses an evaluative verdict on whether solidarity tourism “works”, asking instead what work it does and for whom, and calls the book a “history of the present” (PDF p.21-22).

Introduction — “Solidarity Tourism and Its Discontents” (PDF p.22-24 / printed p.5-7)

Contemporary solidarity tourism was made possible by the US-brokered Oslo Accords: Oslo II (1995) fractured the West Bank into discrete “areas”, institutionalized curfews, closures, roadblocks and checkpoints, and doubled the settlement population during the Oslo years, bypass roads turning the West Bank into an archipelago (PDF p.22). Oslo established the Palestinian Authority and its Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities; between 1967 and 1994 Palestinians were prohibited from becoming licensed tour guides in the West Bank or Gaza, Moshe Dayan allegedly quipping he would “be more willing to license a Palestinian fighter pilot than a Palestinian tour guide” (PDF p.23). Between 1994 and the start of the second intifada in 2000, total tourists in the West Bank doubled, exceeding 105,000 per month; hotel capacity rose from 2,500 to 6,000 rooms and occupancy to 60 percent; tourism employed about one thousand people and accounted for 7–10 percent of Palestine’s gross national product (PDF p.23). During the second intifada (2000-2005), 95 percent of those employed by the tourism industry became unemployed (PDF p.23). Against Debbie Lisle’s claim that “the tourist gaze requires a widely accepted cessation of military activity before the operations of tourism can be introduced”, Kelly notes there has been no real cessation in Palestine, and guides present colonial violence as an uninterrupted stream of dispossession, an “ongoing Nakba” (PDF p.23-24). By 2013 there were about 290 officially licensed Palestinian tour guides against Israel’s 5,400, and about 5 percent of the Palestinian tourism sector is alternative or solidarity tourism (PDF p.24).

Introduction — “Deliberately Truncated Visits and the Ambivalence of the Invitation” (PDF p.24-28 / printed p.7-11)

Recent solidarity tourism responds to the perceived failures of other international presence. Guides repeatedly tell tourists: “You do far more for our movement by writing your members of Congress than you do by getting shot by a rubber bullet at a demonstration” (PDF p.24). A Swedish gap-year volunteer countered, “You can’t leave Palestine without going to at least one demonstration”; demonstrations become a “must-see” show (PDF p.25). Kelly charts a deliberate shift away from the International Solidarity Movement’s protective presence and direct action toward educational itineraries that then ask internationals to leave — disrupting white savior narratives, advising tourists not to provoke settlers or talk back to soldiers, and reiterating that Palestinians pay the price (PDF p.25). Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s reading of ISM workers’ “prosthetic engagement” — identifying as “experiencing” occupation rather than acknowledging complicity as US citizens — is taken up as a critique now built into tour itineraries (PDF p.25-26). The shift is also a reaction to the 2003 murders of Rachel Corrie, crushed under an Israeli military bulldozer, and Tom Hurndall, shot in the head by an Israeli sniper (PDF p.26). Solidarity tourism likewise redirects Voluntourism and the desire to stay: presence is requested only for a structured, curtailed time and under conditions that do not replicate the Colonial Calculus of Veracity (PDF p.26-27). Community members’ exhaustion is voiced — “Why, when so many solidarity tourists come to Palestine, does nothing change?” and “How many people have to come here and see, for it to make a difference?” — alongside the 2014 Tumblr “Ajanebed Out: The Tragedy of Foreigners in Palestine” mocking career-building internationals (PDF p.27-28). The two structuring invitations are named: “Welcome to Palestine and Your work is not here”; solidarity tourism is simultaneously a pedagogical exercise, an anticolonial praxis, an income-generating industry, and a voyeuristic and exploitative enterprise (PDF p.28).

Introduction — method, citations and “A Narration in Seven Parts” (PDF p.28-37 / printed p.11-20)

The project is a multisited interdisciplinary ethnography grounded in transnational feminisms, drawing on Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Jacqui Alexander on required “Native friendliness”, and Teresia Teaiwa’s and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez’s feminist readings of Militourism — when “military or paramilitary forces ensure the smooth running of the tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the force behind it” (PDF p.28-29). Against the epistemic violence that renders Palestinians unreliable narrators of their well-documented dispossession, Kelly practices a feminist citational practice centering Palestinian authors, following Sara Ahmed’s contention that citation is a “successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies”, and Said on citation and Orientalist knowledge production: tourists’ desire to see instead of read lets witnessing stand in as an alibi for research, so Palestinian intellectual production is treated here as the theory on which the book hinges (PDF p.30-31). Her feminist ethnographic practice, following Audra Simpson on refusal, did not ask Palestinians to relive the trauma of displacement or perform subjection for the tourist gaze (PDF p.31-32). Over a decade she participated in one hundred different solidarity tours across Historic Palestine — “By Historic Palestine, I mean all of Palestine” — refusing to define Palestine by the borders of 1948, 1967 or 1993 and treating all of Palestine as occupied, albeit in radically different ways (PDF p.33). Her own mobility is indicted: questioned at Ben Gurion Airport but let through, able to follow tourists through checkpoints West Bank guides could not cross, she writes as a settler on Amah Mutsun Tribal Land at UC Santa Cruz and as a non-Palestinian researcher in Palestine (PDF p.34). Chapter previews follow: Ch.1 first intifada delegations and witnessing as alibi; Ch.2 Oslo and the Ministry of Tourism; Ch.3 olive-planting and Zionist afforestation; Ch.4 Jerusalem’s three occupations; Ch.5 tours inside the 1948 borders (Imwas/Canada Park, ‘Ayn Hawd/Ein Hod, “mixed cities”); Ch.6 Gaza under a siege “that has now lasted fifteen years”; Ch.7 US tourists and diaspora Palestinians who can only return as tourists — Palestine defined by its people, “including the six million in its diaspora”; the Conclusion on hope and futurity (PDF p.35-37).

Chapter 1 opening — delegations under erasure (PDF p.38-40 / printed p.21-23)

Chapter 1, “The Colonial Calculus of Veracity: Delegations under Erasure and the Desire for Evidentiary Weight”, begins where today’s tours started, with delegations during the First Intifada: informal, clandestine and typically unpaid, since only after Oslo were Palestinians formally “allowed” to be guides and hosts on their own land; people came to learn of nonviolent resistance such as the tax boycotts of Beit Sahour and the intifada gardens of Bethlehem, as comrades, teachers, students and tourists — and Kelly warns against romanticizing that moment, which lionizes unpaid Palestinian labor and the same asymmetrical desires tourists bring today (PDF p.38). The chapter’s trope is the delegate’s desire for evidentiary weight: tourists rely on their own witnessing as evidence despite volumes of Palestinian scholarship, and in the Report-Back genre witnessing functions as an alibi for research; a second trope describes the trip as putting a human face to what had been abstract, raising what it means for Palestinians to be rendered human only when a tourist witnesses their condition (PDF p.39). Palestinian-led tourism was criminalized and penalized during the first intifada and not legal in the Occupied Territories until 1993; on those delegations guides nonetheless intervened in knowledge production, refused to perform (only) subjection, and underscored tourist complicity (PDF p.39-40). The section “Witnessing and Its Alibis: On Context and Critique” introduces Sherna Berger Gluck’s An American Feminist in Palestine: The Intifada Years (1994), a memoir of four trips to Palestine between 1988 and 1991, read alongside a 2019 interview with its author (PDF p.40).

Chapter 1 — Gluck, shock and conversion (PDF p.41-50 / printed p.24-33)

Gluck’s book is read for what it reveals about tourists’ incapacity to believe until they see and about Palestinian narrators constructed as suspect unless filtered through a US non-Palestinian interlocutor — a construction Gluck acknowledged and lamented (PDF p.41). Its blurbs are recorded: Rabab Abdulhadi praised its refusal to impose “Western” feminism, and Barbara Harlow its questions raised by “a feminist, a Jew, a US academic and activist” on the eve of Oslo (PDF p.41). The book appeared amid Grewal and Kaplan’s Scattered Hegemonies (1994) and a cluster on women and Palestine, and alongside Salim Tamari’s scathing critique of the money available to people “‘doing Palestine’” and of funding shaping research into palatable frameworks (PDF p.42). Two tropes animate Gluck’s text: “I didn’t believe it until I saw it” and Palestine rendering human what was abstract; Kelly argues “the suturing of witnessing to evidence is a central problem of solidarity tourism. What Palestinians confront is not a question of evidence but a question of epistemology” (PDF p.43-44). In “Shock as Rhetorical Device and the Affect of Disbelief”, Gluck’s December 1988-January 1989 Salah Al-Din Street scene — tear gas, rescue by a Palestinian shopkeeper, “I am fleeing from Jews—Israelis—and being protected by Arabs—Palestinians. Everything was turned upside down” — is unpacked for its internalized Arab/Jew antithesis (PDF p.44-45). Her refrain “it was one thing to read… another to see” (Deheisheh and Jabalya camps, Lydda/Lod, Birzeit University) positions witnessing as more real than Palestinian literature; her 226-page book has no citations or bibliography and references only Israeli historian Benny Morris, without citation (PDF p.45-46). Human rights agencies are positioned as corroborators over Palestinian hosts, as at Jiftliq, and a UN officer’s corroboration footnotes the Gaza account of Fida al-Sharafi, the infant whose eye was destroyed by a rubber bullet (PDF p.46-47). In “Conversions and the Subtext of (In)humanity”, Gluck’s narration — “these had been abstractions. Seeing the real people, hearing their voices as they told me their own stories, drinking coffee and eating with them, made their pain more concrete” — is read as an affective hierarchy in which pain is made real only by in-person narration, attaching faces to statistics for Israelis and Palestinians alike (PDF p.48-50).

Chapter 1 — corroboration and the costs of delegations, opening (PDF p.51-55 / printed p.34-38)

Pamela Pennock’s history of the Arab American left — ADL infiltration of the Organization of Arab Students convention, Gerald Ford’s AIPAC speech attacking Arab students, the US Left’s “soft and somewhat perfunctory” commitment to Palestine — frames Gluck’s context; in her spring 2019 interview Gluck recalled her defense organizing for the Los Angeles 8, her Students and Faculty against Israeli Occupation group, and deciding, “I felt like it was important to travel as a Jew,” “so I could come back as a Jew and make my statements” (PDF p.51). She named the bargain directly: “It’s clear that we’re using [racialized privilege]. And it’s the only way to get heard” (PDF p.52). The report-back is thus an uneasy, reluctantly employed strategy that both deploys and relies on the racism it critiques (PDF p.52-53). In “Witnessing and/as Corroboration”, G. Roger Denson’s essay in Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the Intifada gives the delegation’s figures — between December 7, 1987 and April 1989, 681 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip killed, 34,000 wounded, 5,800 permanently disabled, 30,000 detained or imprisoned, 3,700 miscarriages reported as a result of the gas — and the US aid behind them, “3.1 billion American dollars—1.8 billion of which is apportioned strictly for military operations”, before narrating the same conversion from statistics to faces, in Deborah Willis’s words (PDF p.53-54). A February 1988 Physicians for Human Rights delegation report from Gaza — twelve Israelis, ten physicians and two psychologists — admits the delegates listened “with some suspicion and reservations” and heard “for the first time” a Palestinian prepared to recognize Israel, to which their hosts answered: “We’ve said this many times, in different ways, the PLO as well, it’s not possible that you haven’t heard. You didn’t want to hear!” (PDF p.54-55). The section “The Cost(s) of Delegations during the First Intifada” opens: the intifada years (December 9, 1987-September 13, 1993) saw Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza look to each other for anticolonial movement building, and Melani McAlister’s account of the 1967 War’s racialized, gendered place in US Jewish assimilation is introduced (PDF p.55). [Chapter 1 continues in part 2.]

Chapter 1 — the costs of delegations (PDF p.56-60 / printed p.39-43)

The section “The Cost(s) of Delegations during the First Intifada” continues: Palestinians put themselves in danger to lead delegations, since Israel criminalized Palestinian-led tourism before Oslo and forbade Palestinians from being legally sanctioned guides of their own territories; repercussions for hosting included lengthened curfews, retaliatory attacks on villages, imprisonment and even deaths of hosts, and report-backs narrate ducking past guards near refugee camps, hurrying through Gaza alleyways and sheltering from tear gas (PDF p.56). Gluck’s asymmetry of risk is quoted: on Dheisheh, “They probably would have done no more than expel us from the camp, but Jawdat might have been detained and even imprisoned again”; on Gaza in June 1989, detection would mean another curfew for the camp and escort out for her; and in Kufr Nameh in 1991 she admitted her concern for her hosts was subsidiary to the childhood voice warning her not to betray “my people” (PDF p.56-57). On March 27, 1988, after a tour of Birzeit University where academics including Zachary Lockman gave talks, Israeli soldiers shot and killed two Palestinian youth from Salfit; Al Fajr cited an army spokesperson’s claim that “clashes developed” after the army aided tourists who had mistakenly entered the town, while the scholars insisted the violence was unprovoked, instigated by an army surveilling them by helicopter, Lockman saying at the American Colony Hotel on March 28, “We were outraged by how our trip was used” (PDF p.57). The following Al Fajr issue detailed the Birzeit conference, much of it moved to the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem because of Birzeit’s three-month closure: Edward Said was denied entry to give the keynote, Gaza attorney Raji Sourani was placed on a six-month administrative detention order on the conference’s first day, and Dr. Haidar Abd al-Shafi, head of the Red Crescent, was prevented from leaving Gaza for Jerusalem, while participants received fresh news of Palestinians killed, injured, and under curfew and siege as they presented (PDF p.58). At Al-Am’ari Refugee Camp, Alternative Museum delegates suspected retribution after their visit: Denson writes that in the first house to host them they met Amel Habid, a sixteen-year-old active in the intifada “who would end up dead just four days after their visit”, and playwright Magda Dajani blamed the American “obvious entrance” — “We just marched in there, fifteen Westerners” (PDF p.58-59). In the section “Roadshows, Solidarity Tourism, and Spectacle during the First Intifada”, Deborah Willis records Gaza residents’ distrust and a Palestinian woman’s refusal on the beach: “What is this road show all about? This isn’t a picnic here. Why are you in our homeland?”, and the report that after a television crew filmed in Beach Camp soldiers entered and a child was killed, residents concluding they neither needed nor wanted the media there (PDF p.59). Kelly stresses there was no “Palestinian consensus”: some Palestinians invited tourists to witness clandestine businesses, alternative farming and daily resistances, and some resented a presence that brought retribution on its hosts; those who did invite did so, at risk to their lives, to underscore US complicity and ask where tourism fit a vision of reparation (PDF p.59-60).

Chapter 1 — hospitals, blood donation and Palestinian joy (PDF p.60-65 / printed p.43-48)

Hosts intervened in delegates’ expectations first by subverting spectacles of suffering into invitations to participate in potential acts of reparation and second by underscoring Palestinian joy, through one staple destination: Palestinian hospitals, characterized by voyeurism, subjection and subversion (PDF p.60). Gluck calls al-Ittihad hospital in Nablus “an obligatory stop on any tour of the Israeli-occupied West Bank”; Kelly notes none of the one hundred tours she joined for the book would bring tourists to a hospital — not because Palestinians are no longer maimed, but because itineraries today endeavour to disrupt that voyeurism (PDF p.61). Gluck herself records “the uncomfortable feeling of being a voyeur as the patients exposed their wounds and their amputated limbs”, a feeling she repeated in a 2019 interview, and her description of two boys shot by high-velocity bullets, the ten-year-old posing with the hospital cat, a newspaper folded to display Yasir Arafat’s photograph and a “V” sign (PDF p.61-62). Kelly reads the boy as performing pride and victory, narrating the terms of his representation, against report-backs’ habit of sorting Palestinians into innocent/welcoming and bitter/angry. Tourists were also frequently invited, or felt compelled, to donate blood: health committees trained thousands in first aid and blood-typed tens of thousands; the anonymous Link diary (1989) describes a Birzeit youth shot by an M-16 who “had already used twenty-five pints of blood from twelve donors”; Denson describes a twelve-year-old shot in the back while playing soccer, delegates watching from the ICU and artists volunteering blood, photographer Gary Nickard saying, “I had never before given blood” and “I had never before been faced with such tragedy” (PDF p.62-63). Denson explains West Bank blood was kept in mobile “floating blood banks” for fear military patrols would confiscate supplies found in hospitals; Kelly asks whether US citizens donating blood to Palestinians wounded by US weaponry can be understood as a meagre, fraught step toward reparation — a mobilizing rather than stultifying guilt, in which tourists also negotiate their “ugly feelings” (Sianne Ngai) around voyeurism (PDF p.63-64). Hosts likewise confronted tourists with Palestinian joy: at Al-Mughayer, northeast of Ramallah, a banner greeted visitors, “Welcome to the independent village of al-Mughayer”, children waved slingshots in greeting, flags and pictures of Arafat lined the main street, and the host invited the party “to look at the forest of flags marking the town center” — defiance of the ban on Palestinian flags that persisted from 1967 until after Oslo in 1993, with flags also painted and sewn into tatreez on thobes (PDF p.64-65). Kelly’s summary: everything about these tourists’ movement was illegal — guiding, hosting, blood donation between Palestinians, and the flag itself — and the politics of invitation belie any claim that solidarity tourism is merely voyeurism or inescapably futile; guides provided evidentiary weight not only of suffering but of Palestinians living, and not just surviving, in their homeland (PDF p.65).

Chapter 1 — transactions, the report-back genre and epistemology (PDF p.65-75 / printed p.48-58)

“First Intifada Transactions” opens with Said and Jean Mohr’s 1999 photo essay After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, an archive of Palestinians living and, in Rafeef Ziadah’s words, “teaching life” under occupation; Said: “Yet, for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms” (PDF p.65-66). Kelly argues solidarity tourism emerged not from a paucity of literature but from its excess — delegates needed to see despite having researched, because Palestinians speaking were not believed without corroboration, their imaginative geography a people “visible principally as fighters, terrorists, and lawless pariahs” (PDF p.66). Hosts demanded tourists grapple with complicity: a shopkeeper urged Gluck “to do something about the unquestioned American support of Israel”, and a displaced woman in Lod beseeched, “Don’t forget about the Palestinians inside Israel. Write about us in the newspaper” — work Gluck did over a lifetime of teaching, organizing and running Radio Intifada (PDF p.66-67). At Fida al-Sharafi’s house the parents overcame reluctance at “the urging of the other women of the household”; Kelly reads the hesitation through Audra Simpson’s ethnographic refusal and the repeated reminder that Gluck’s government supplied the tear gas and rubber bullets as a rhetorical strategy that would form the crux of tour narration, intervening in the twinned images of the “helpless, miserable-looking refugee” and the “man wearing a keffiyeh and mask and carrying a kalachnikov” (PDF p.67-68). “Invitation, Repetition, and the Genre of the Report-Back”: report-backs take the shape of lectures, articles, op-eds, performance pieces, song lyrics and art installations; the Alternative Museum delegation, led by Puerto Rican artist and curator Geno Rodriguez, brought Latino and African American delegates and first-generation Americans to cultivate solidarity between groups subject to racialized discrimination, and its exhibition Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the First Intifada (Alternative Museum, New York, summer 1990) is inventoried — Jay Murphy on Israel “eliminating exhibition spaces in the Occupied West Bank”, Terry Berkowitz’s Somebody’s Brother, Somebody’s Son (Homage to Hamad) (1990), Magda Dajani’s Mona Lisa Minus the Forbidden Colors of the Palestinian Flag (1990), Marylu Meibers’s Untitled (1990) (“As Americans, we support this outrage by our yearly donation of more than $3 billion to the government of Israel”), John Morita’s House Demolition II (1989) (“Only an informed public can prevent genocide”), and Deborah Willis’s quilted Mothers and the Shebab (1989) (PDF p.68-72). The exhibition ends with the Break the Silence Mural Project — four Jewish women artists from the Bay Area who lived with a Palestinian family in a Ramallah refugee camp, painted the first mural at the Popular Arts Center in Ramallah in 1989, were funded by the Middle East Children’s Alliance (founded 1988 after Barbara Lubin’s own solidarity delegation), and evolved after Oslo into Art Forces under Susan Greene (PDF p.72-73). The closing section, “The Evidence and Epistemology of Witnessing”, states the chapter’s verdict: solidarity tourism is a transactional process in which “evidence” is exchanged for a twinned reckoning with complicity and a commitment to intervene in knowledge produced about Palestine; guides subverted the tourist gaze by redirecting it to the tourists themselves; and “what Palestinian tour guides, organizers, and hosts confront is not a question of evidence. Evidence of the violence of Israeli settler colonial state practice is as accessible as it is abundant. What Palestinians confront is a question of epistemology” — epistemic violence, in women of color feminists’ term, that renders Palestinians unreliable narrators of their own histories and both structures and necessitates solidarity tourism (PDF p.73-74). Kelly closes against nostalgia for first intifada delegations, which eclipses their similarities to today’s tours, their voyeurism, the violence visited on hosts, and hosts’ unpaid labour, and against the question “What do Palestinians think about solidarity tourism?”, which assumes thirteen million people have reached consensus (PDF p.74-75). [Chapter 1 ends.]

Chapter 2 — Bousac’s archipelago and fragmented tourism (PDF p.76-81 / printed p.59-64)

Chapter 2, “Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and Fragmentation under Occupation”, opens with French artist Julien Bousac’s 2009 map L’archipel de Palestine orientale, built entirely on B’Tselem data, which turns West Bank cities into islands in shades of green for levels of Palestinian autonomy, everything in Israeli hands into sea, Israeli military roads into dotted shipping lines and permanent checkpoints into tiny blue warships (zone sous surveillance) (PDF p.76-77). Kelly uses the map to chart post-Oslo fragmentation — Oslo as “in actuality a formalized Israeli land grab” — and to ask how guides use tourism to expose the fragmented terrain and stay anchored to land they still have, drawing on interviews with guides organizing since the first intifada (PDF p.77-79). “Fragmented Tourism in the Post-Oslo West Bank”: Oslo splintered the West Bank into Area A (nominal Palestinian control), Area B (PA administration, Israeli security control) and Area C (complete Israeli rule); Israel has worked to prohibit Palestinian development and construction in 40 percent of the West Bank and 70 percent of Area C; Area C is 60 percent of the West Bank, of which 63 percent is under settlement local and regional councils and off-limits to Palestinians, 2.5 percent is “state land” reserved for settlements, military and infrastructure, and 20 percent is now classified “survey lands”; Area C contains 165 “islands” of Area A and B land (PDF p.79-80). The expropriation was written into the plan: Noura Erakat calls Oslo a regime that “engendered yet another specialized regime that has enabled Israel to continue its settler-colonial expansion, this time under the veneer of peacemaking”, and Ilan Pappe calls that veneer a solution to the paradox of “how to have the land without its native people in a world that no longer accepted more colonialism and ethnic cleansing” (PDF p.80). Oslo also introduced closures, curfews, roadblocks and checkpoints, and the settlement population doubled; Raja Shehadeh describes hilltop settlements and their roads forming “a noose around Ramallah” (PDF p.80). The “continuity of the settlement enterprise” (Rashid Khalidi) continued through the “Road Map to Peace”, the Wall’s construction, Trump’s presidency and Biden’s May 2021 authorization of a $735 million weapons sale to Israel during its bombardment of Gaza; Yara Hawari: “Palestinians are consistently told that the two-state solution is the only possible outcome and that they must therefore concede on certain rights, including the right of return”; the “process” itself, in Said’s 1995 words, has functioned as a “distortion of hopes and rightful aspirations” (PDF p.80-81).

Chapter 2 — “Israel, Israel, Israel”: branding, narration and the noose (PDF p.81-87 / printed p.64-70)

Once Israel lifted the prohibition on Palestinian licensed guides, Palestinians professionalized solidarity tourism: the Ministry of Tourism focused almost exclusively on heritage sites like the Mount of Temptation and the Church of the Nativity, while alternative tourism organizations focused on the occupation, merging the language of business (branding, marketing) with the language of liberation (PDF p.81). Michel Awad of the Siraj Center, preferring “responsible tourism” to “alternative tourism” (“because alternative to what?”), states its aims — “Our first aim is to create rural development, the other is to change the perception about Palestine” — and laments, against Israel’s “Brand Israel” strategy: “We don’t have a Palestinian brand. What we promote is pilgrimage; that’s what Israel promotes” (PDF p.81-83). Baha Hilo, fieldworker for the Joint Advocacy Initiative and the Alternative Tourism Group’s Olive Tree Campaign at the time of Kelly’s initial research, reframes rebranding as intervention in discrediting: “From the very beginning of the Palestinian issue, there has been so much effort put into discrediting the Palestinian realities and making sure Palestinian voices always have no credibility”; the one supported narrative says “Israel is one of the best achievements of the twentieth century, that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East”, ending “Israel, Israel, Israel”; against “Israel made the desert bloom”, “We all know that the land that was made to bloom already bloomed because there is a Palestinian population [living] here”; and the best way found was “having people here, expose them to the reality, and let them decide [for] themselves”, correcting a story in which “the Palestinian is not part of the story. The Palestinian is the problem in the story. The Palestinian is scary in the story” (PDF p.83-84). In “A Noose around Ramallah”, Awad explains that “before Oslo, people had more accessibility” — guides could move between Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Ramallah and meet groups at the airport — and that after Oslo, with Palestinians “looking to have an independent state” that should “rely on your own resources”, solidarity tourism became somewhat permissible to Israel only because it became containable (PDF p.85). Tourism was also written out of Oslo by the Palestinian side: Israeli negotiators brought a tour guide, Palestinian negotiators did not — “They never thought tourism was important to know about” — and at Sebastia Israel put the city in Area A and the heritage sites in Area B or C, so “if you are at the entrance to Sebastia, at the site, it’s Area A. If you move two meters, it’s Area C. Two meters!” (PDF p.86-87). Guides and organizers who created the “Code of Conduct for Tourism in the Holy Land: A Palestinian Initiative” hold that responsible tourism should be the Ministry of Tourism’s work, not civil society’s unpaid labour; Kelly concludes Oslo not only divided communities and denied land and resources but distributed tourist sites directly into Israeli control with the PA’s cooperation (PDF p.87).

Chapter 2 — the right to tourism, shame, and asymmetrical itineraries (PDF p.88-95 / printed p.71-78)

Even tourism showcasing inequality will traffic in asymmetries privileging the tourist, but guides’ work is to upend tourists’ assumptions — the United States as “honest broker”, what they are in Palestine to do, what they have learned (PDF p.87-88). In “A Nice Evening in Bethlehem”, on the right to tourism as tourism, Hantourism, a community-based tourism platform named after the hantour (horse-drawn carriage) that began with a Jericho guesthouse, argues travellers need to experience Palestine as tourists, not only politically: Palestinians must not “keep living in this ecosystem of ours that’s basically in the shadow of the occupation”, must track how “hummus is being sold as an Israeli experience, how shakshuka …” on the other side of the wall, and have the right to tourism even under occupation; Hantourism works as a revenue-sharing network of local partners across Jericho, Nablus, Nazareth, Ramallah and Jerusalem rather than an umbrella controlling guides and sites, and wants to recuperate “a nice evening in Bethlehem” against NGO-parroting guidebooks (PDF p.88-90). In “Walking Tours of Occupied Land and the Spectacle of Immobility”, Kelly takes up Paul Gilroy’s distinction between paralyzing guilt and productive shame: tourists described guilt and shame as turning points that catalyzed outrage at settler colonialism and at their own mobility against their guides’ restricted mobility (PDF p.90-91). Tours negotiate fragmentation through handoffs at checkpoints, separations in Hebron and arbitrary searches, making tourists aware of difference, not sameness, and disrupting “prosthetic engagement”; “Your work is not here” is the refrain, and the truncated invitation is a project of rearranging tourist desire — critiquing reliance on US-led negotiations, leading tourists through fragmentation, and redirecting their aspirations home (PDF p.91). The narration tourists receive differs substantively from pilgrimage narration at the same sites: at the Church of the Nativity they hear that Bethlehem is 87 percent Area C, of the lives lost in the forty-nine-day siege in 2002, and of US and European silence on settlements; at Beit Jala they hear bypass roads begun in 1993 connect settlements in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49, and that displacement in 1948, 1967, 1993, 2010 and now is an ongoing Nakba (PDF p.92-93). Guides give the Wall’s figures — 725 kilometers, extending 20 kilometers into the West Bank, only 10 percent an actual wall — and the analogy “I can get to Copenhagen easier than I can get to Jerusalem”; at Checkpoint 300 tourists wave international passports at bulletproof glass while Palestinians beside them show permits and place fingers in the biometric scanner, under Israeli tourism posters that in 2012 read “Every Day Is a Vacation” (PDF p.93-94). In Jerusalem a new guide takes over for the Old City and Abu Dis; within the West Bank a guide may try to blend in with internationals at checkpoints, and one guide crossing Qalandia with a yellow licence plate asks, “Will they think I’m a Shlomo or an Ahmed?” — entrance contingent on “not looking Arab” (PDF p.94-95). In Hebron tourists walk alone down Shuhada Street, once a thriving market, now closed to Palestinians, whose residents enter their homes from the back, cage their patios against settler violence, and hang signs reading “You are witnessing apartheid” (PDF p.95).

Chapter 2 — “I’ve seen more of Palestine”, tear gas, and what tourism does in Palestine (PDF p.96-103 / printed p.79-86)

Shuhada Street’s figures: Hebron’s main road is closed to the 177,000 Palestinians who live in the city, with access only to tourists, the 500-800 settlers and the 1,500-2,000 soldiers protecting them; guides intend tourists to witness some of the more than 400 stores closed under military orders, almost 2,000 others closed because of closures and checkpoints, and more than 1,000 emptied Palestinian homes (PDF p.96). In “I’ve Seen More of Palestine Than Many Palestinians”, Maggie Goff names the two things that stood out on her ten-day 2012 tour — “the overwhelming amount of militarism” and “the idea that I’ve seen more of Palestine than a large portion of the Palestinian population”; Yvonne Lory describes getting “a smile and get passed right on by because of my passport” at Checkpoint 300 while Palestinians were interrogated, and guilt that her tax dollars were “going to make life a living hell” for Palestinians (PDF p.96-97). Sarah Alzanoon, a Palestinian American on the same tour and the first in her family — scattered since 1948 across Jordan, Kuwait, Canada and the United States — to see Palestine, was detained at the airport for “somewhere between five and seven hours” in a room populated solely by “brown people like me”; at a Bethlehem-Jerusalem checkpoint, ordered off the bus with the Palestinians, a Palestinian woman signalled her to stay: “because I was a foreigner — even though I’m just as Palestinian as them — but I have my American passport, I get more rights than the people that have lived there, and their ancestors who have lived here for hundreds of years” (PDF p.97-98). Kelly: tourists rehearsing the segregation in the itinerary is a strategic choice, forcing the question of what they are already doing that makes their mobility possible, not “What can we do?” (PDF p.99). In “Exported Tear Gas and Reminders of Complicity”, USAID donated almost $400,000inDecember2013toChristmascelebrationsonMangerSquareinBethlehemundersignsreading"USAID—AgiftfromtheAmericanpeople";activistsaffixedspentteargascanistersandstungrenadesfiredatyouthin[[aida-camp|AidaCamp]],lessthanamileaway,toasmallChristmastree,andinAidateenagerssellartmadefromcanistersstampedCTS,CombinedTacticalSystems,388KinsmanRoad,Jamestown,PA16134,"MadeintheUSA"(figure2.2)(PDFp.99-101).Coordinator[[mustafa-al-arraj|Mustafaal-Arraj]]wasarrestedbyPalestinianpolicethatdayfordisruptingtheChristmasscene;policespokesmanLoayZreiqatfearedthegrenadeswould"scaretourists";al-Arrajanswered:"Theygiveus$1 for some project and then give Israel $1 million to hit us with tear gas and shoot us” (PDF p.100). Post-tour action is hard to quantify — demonstrations, report-backs, conversations, letters and joining BDS campaigns — but guides also emphasize what tourism does in Palestine: Yazan al-Zubaidy, then a fieldworker and guide on olive planting and harvesting initiatives, witnessed a Hebron family keep their house and shop through tourist income — “If they had no income, they would just leave and sell their house to the Israelis”; “Before, where there was only their shop, now there are four shops around them”; “This is resistance”, he concludes. “Just to stay where you are. And to live” — and describes his daily narration of occupation as an inoculation against complacency: “Israel wants us to forget” (PDF p.102). The chapter closes: tours are deliberately asymmetrical and deliberately tourism — voyeuristic, reductive and incomplete — crafted, like the grenade-decorated tree, to transform the detritus of war into ornamental reminders of complicity and to help Palestinians stay on land that has become a set of islands (PDF p.102-103). [Chapter 2 ends.]

Chapter 3 opening — recitation against erasure (PDF p.104-105 / printed p.87-88)

Chapter 3, “Recitation against Erasure: Planting, Harvesting, and Narrating the Continuities of Displacement”, opens by framing solidarity tours as ritual: olive tree planting (winter) and harvesting (fall) initiatives repeat annually as rehearsal, repetition and recitation, with Said’s 1978 account of Orientalism’s repetition of colonial logics pressed into anticolonial service, and the land framed as a palimpsest in which past, present and alternative futures of a decolonized Palestine are laid bare (PDF p.104). Trees — olive, almond and fig — are central, the olive tree the narrative nucleus: the history of uprooting Palestinian olive, fig and almond trees predates the establishment of the State of Israel and stretches back as far as 1908, early Zionist claims taking the form of uprooting native trees and planting forests commemorating Zionist leaders like first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who sought to fashion Israel after Europe as a “Switzerland of the Middle East” (PDF p.105). Planting and harvesting tours anchor contemporary theft and destruction of olive groves in the history of Israeli afforestation, frame contemporary settler violence and settlement expansion as part of a long ongoing history of displacement, keep farmers on land under constant threat of annexation, and intervene in the repetition of “making the desert bloom” by revealing it as an invocation gaining legitimacy through its narrative form — repetition — rather than facts on the ground (PDF p.105). The section “We Inherit the Loss”, on generational grieving and planting as pedagogy, opens by naming organizations supporting Palestinian farmers economically and politically — including Canaan Fair Trade, the Joint Advocacy Initiative, the Alternative Tourism Group, the Freedom Bus, and To Be There (PDF p.105-106).

Chapter 3 — “We Inherit the Loss”: the Olive Tree Campaign (PDF p.106-111 / printed p.89-94)

Kelly turns in detail to the Joint Advocacy Initiative (JAI) and Alternative Tourism Group (ATG)‘s Olive Tree Campaign, whose itinerary pairs guided walking tours, hillside lectures and research-office presentations with planting every other day. On the first planting day of the 2012 program the group planted four hundred olive trees in al-Khader, on land bisected by a bypass road and under threat of annexation by the settlement of Navi Daniel; farmer Nabhan Mousa carried his papers, worn through from producing them for soldiers since 1997, and explained he had refused Israeli money for the annexed part of his field: “Once you accept their money,” he said, “it’s all over” (PDF p.106). Baha Hilo describes the campaign’s work in al-Walaja: “The Israelis destroyed one hundred trees. We came back with three hundred” (PDF p.107). BADIL and ARIJ lectures supply the recited statistics — 738 checkpoints, seventy-eight of them in Hebron; sixty-eight million cubic meters of water isolated within the western segregation zone of Jerusalem; the partition allotment of 56 percent to Jews and 43 percent to Palestinians with Jerusalem the 1 percent corpus separatum, and Israel’s claim of 78 percent after 1948; only 105 permits out of 1,900 applications granted between 2000 and 2007, and 408 demolitions in 2012 alone (PDF p.107). A lecturer interrupts his scripted recitation with his own story — “In Jerusalem, my great-grandfather’s initials are still carved on the building he owned” — and explains how cypress and fir were planted only to hold land until the paperwork to take it was complete, as at Har Homa, classified a green area until 1997 and then cut down and rezoned for settlement (PDF p.108). ATG guide Ayman Abu Zulof points to Beit Ummar’s terraces: “These terraces are very old. This proves that there was always a people here taking care of the land” (PDF p.108). In Aida Refugee Camp, Hilo corrects a fellow guide who argues camp Palestinians should accept they will likely never return: “My grandfather was in a refugee camp. Just because they can’t go home doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be here. Fighting back”; refusing to “move on”, he explains, “We inherit the loss” (PDF p.109). On the fifth day of the 2012 program the group planted their seven hundredth olive tree in Beit Ummar under circling military vehicles, in a disagreement between a UK-trained arborist tourist — “We don’t need to rush — we have all day” — and farmers’ sons planting against time before the IDF intervened; the farmers “had exactly one afternoon” (PDF p.110-111). On the ninth day the group planted four hundred more trees in Jab’a, on a field shared by four farmers isolated from one another by a highway they may not drive on, beside a blue-and-white water pump Palestinians may not use but are held responsible for if it leaks (PDF p.111).

Chapter 3 — “If You Plant a Tree, That’s Your Land”: planting as a technology of erasure (PDF p.112-117 / printed p.95-100)

Trees serve as both a technology of erasure and evidence of presence. Zionist planting of cypress, fir and pine has long been part of the state project to “make the desert bloom”, “a call that, following colonial logics, erased as it named” (PDF p.112). Susan Slyomovics’s study of Ein Houd, the Palestinian village that became the Israeli Dada artists’ colony Ein Hod in 1953, records resident Isaiah Hillel’s assessment — “The only trees that were here were wild fig trees and the wild kind of oak, and that’s all. Nothing. Not a single tree” — and the artists’ studied unwillingness to read olive, fig, almond and wild oak as trees: every artist defined “trees” as pine or cypress and never mentioned the local olive orchards clearly visible in pre-1953 photographs (PDF p.112-113). With this formulation Zionist settlers sought to, in Joseph Massad’s words, “transform … a ‘desolate’ and ‘neglected’ Asiatic desert into a blooming, green European terrain full of forests and trees” (PDF p.113); Ella Shohat emphasizes Herzl’s call for a Western-style state and Ben-Gurion’s vision of Israel as a “Switzerland of the Middle East”, to be marked by fast-growing pine and cypress, not the fig, oak or olive groves considered “nothing” (PDF p.113). Zionism was also predicated on “a land without a people for a people without a land” and an image of a “perceptually depopulated” Palestine (Lawrence Davidson) structured against the “Diaspora Jew” (PDF p.113). Simon Schama describes diaspora Jews putting coins in Jewish National Fund boxes: “The trees were our proxy immigrants, the forests our implantation”; “The diaspora was sand. So what should Israel be, if not a forest, fixed and tall?” (PDF p.114). The Jewish National Fund afforestation project has seen over 240 million trees planted across Palestine/Israel; it began in 1908 with a donor-funded olive grove to be named the Herzl Forest, first planted by hired Palestinian workers — members of the Jewish community who advocated exclusively “Hebrew labor” arrived, uprooted the saplings, and planted their own with pine and cypress to show the site was “more than just a commercial olive grove” (PDF p.114-115). Israeli afforestation did not begin in earnest until after the massacre at Dayr Yasin in 1948, carried out by the Stern Gang and the Irgun and sanctioned by the Haganah’s Operation Nachshon; in Walid Khalidi’s words, “the best-known and perhaps bloodiest atrocity of the war”, it took 245 lives, half of them women and children, after parading them through Jerusalem in a “victory convoy”, notwithstanding Dayr Yasin’s nonaggression pact with the Haganah (PDF p.115). The depopulated village, renamed Givat Shaul, was employed in afforestation; its forest burned down entirely four years later, and in 1956 the JNF expanded its plans (PDF p.115-116). Today Yad Vashem routes visitors to a final viewpoint that, unbeknownst to most, includes the former village lands and massacre site of Dayr Yasin (PDF p.116). Under Joseph Weitz the JNF planted 130,000 seedlings in its first planting season alone (1956-1957) in a “green belt” around Jerusalem; periods of intense afforestation followed 1948, the 1956 Suez War and the 1967 occupation, trees acting as “security groves” to conceal soldiers (PDF p.116). By 1968 the JNF had planted ninety million trees, over seventy million of them fast-growing evergreens, adding to the roughly forty-two million planted in the ten years following the Dayr Yasin massacre; post-1967, unregistered West Bank land was named “Abandoned Property” and considered Israeli state land, and the JNF planted pine, cypress and eucalyptus as security groves, boundary markers and foreclosures of Palestinian use — the JNF described its trees as “the best guards of the land”: “walls and fences can be cut down. A tree says, ‘we are here.’ If you plant a tree, that’s your land” (PDF p.116). Journalist David Bloom narrates Jayyous, which lost 20 percent of its lands in 1948, and the villager who crossed the Green Line at night to his family’s apricot orchards, calling himself and his donkey “the Apricot Liberation Front”; geographer Shaul Cohen narrates Katannah, whose olive grove was expropriated and sold to a nearby kibbutz, whose villagers resumed harvesting “generally under the cover of darkness” after 1967, and where the Israel Land Administration in retaliation uprooted three thousand trees (PDF p.117). After 1967 Palestinian olive planting in the West Bank became illegal via civil and military orders — the 1982 Military Order 1015 and the 1989 Civil Administration permit requirement — punished by destruction of the trees, one year’s imprisonment and/or an escalating fine (PDF p.117).

Chapter 3 — planting and harvesting as evidence of presence (PDF p.118-123 / printed p.101-106)

In Emile Habibi’s 1974 novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, Saeed reflects on Tawfiq Zayyad’s poem “The Olive Tree” — “I shall carve the name of every stolen pot / And where my village boundaries lay; / What homes exploded, / What trees were uprooted, what tiny wild flowers crushed” — and asks, “And are there any olives left in courtyards still?”; the uprooted olive tree mirrors the uprooting of Palestinian people, while its durability signals sumud (PDF p.118). A longtime harvesting and planting organizer describes a family near Bethlehem whose access receded year by year — accessible in 2006, a gate in 2007, a wall and fence the local staff could not cross the following year, then completely inaccessible except via Jerusalem: “Every year there is a new challenge imposed on you that you will have to deal with”; “What happened in 1948 continues to happen today, but instead of happening in Israel, it’s happening in the Occupied West Bank” (PDF p.118-119). Since 1967, Israeli authorities have uprooted 800,000 Palestinian olive trees, and 80,000 Palestinian families who rely economically on the olive harvest have lost a total of US$12.3million;over80percentofolivefarmersownorchardsofapproximately250trees,andoliveproductionresultsinthreemillionseasonalworkdaysperyear;theoliveoilsectorcontributes$100 million to families in Palestine, and trees between one hundred and one thousand years old are stolen and sold in Israel, 50 percent without legal permits, for tens of thousands of dollars (PDF p.119-120). Uprooted trees are sold in settlements: a giant ancient olive tree “welcoming” settlers into Ma’ale Adummim, and Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions explaining on ICAHD tours that “it’s becoming very fashionable among the nouveau riche in northern Tel Aviv to have an olive tree” (PDF p.120). Tens of thousands of trees have been uprooted for the Wall; Oxfam noted in 2011 that “once the Wall is completed, some one million trees will be caught in the Seam Zone” — in Qafeen 12,600 trees were uprooted for the Wall and 100,000 more remained inaccessible in Seam Zones, and Jayyous saw 70 percent of its remaining farmland and all its irrigated land caught in the Seam Zone (PDF p.120). Raja Shehadeh noted in 2012: “More than 40 percent of the West Bank is now effectively off limits to Palestinians or very difficult for them to access because of settlements and other outposts, military bases, bypass roads and areas that Israel has declared as nature reserves” (PDF p.121). There are seventy-three barriers preventing Palestinians from accessing their olive groves, fifty-two closed the entire year except limited harvest hours; in 2011 alone Israel rejected 42 percent of Palestinian applications to access their fields (PDF p.121). Since July 2010 Israel has tried to expel the Bedouin villagers of Al-Araqib 186 times to make way for a JNF “peace forest” funded by GOD TV, an evangelical Christian Zionist TV station; the most recent attempted expulsion at the time of writing occurred on March 11, 2021 (PDF p.121). During the 2013 olive harvest alone B’Tselem field researchers documented twenty-seven incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and their property; farmer Ibrahim Salah of Far’ata, allowed to plow only one month per year and limited to two harvest days, testified, “We got less than one full sack of olives. Before the vandalism began, when I could go to my land and work all year round, we used to get forty to fifty sacks of olives a year”, describing what anthropologist Irus Braverman calls the “regulatory regime” of Israeli military control over Palestinian agriculture; Salah Radwan of ‘Azzun found about sixty trees chopped down with a saw on October 13, 2013 (PDF p.122). Of ninety-seven cases documenting olive tree destruction between 2005 and 2012, not one resulted in an indictment; the 800,000 olive trees uprooted since 1967, “with a loss of $55 million to the Palestinian economy per year”, are attacks against Palestinian viability sanctioned by the state (PDF p.123).

Chapter 3 — permission to narrate, refusal to leave, and the chapter’s close (PDF p.124-128 / printed p.107-111)

The section “Permission to Narrate, Refusal to Leave” gathers the campaign’s purpose: “We know,” Hilo emphasized, “the situation gets worse by the year in order to force Palestinians to leave” — not an inevitable process but a systematic, deliberate process of land theft meant to provide Israel with, in Ilan Pappe’s corrective rephrasing, “the land without its native people” (PDF p.124). Bisan Kassis, advocacy officer at the Joint Advocacy Initiative at the time of Kelly’s research, describes being sustained by the incremental 1 percent positive — the University of Johannesburg breaking ties with Ben-Gurion University, a farmer winning a lawsuit against a settler in 2011 after fighting for ten years — and reframes the harvest: “You understand that these people are doing resistance every day. Just by going to their field they are resisting. You going with them during their hottest season for them, which is the season with the most percentage of attacks, you understand that you are partaking in the culture of resistance” (PDF p.124-125). Another organizer restructures the charity expectation: farmers “could also harvest the trees themselves, but they actually — in their hospitality — allow you to take part in this cultural yearly event”; “The Palestinians can deal with themselves. You have to go back home and put your efforts into changing your community, your church, your leaders” (PDF p.125). Kassis wants tourists to feel not pity but “sympathy mixed with anger” — “We are witnessing a new kind of apartheid and not doing anything about it” — and tells them ritually: “The B is going brilliantly, the D is going brilliantly, and we need you for the S” (PDF p.126). The closing section, ‘What Trees Were Uprooted, What Tiny Wildflowers Crushed’: Stolen Olives and the Continuity of Rupture, holds that the displacement these tours narrate cannot be contained to a single year (1948 or 1967), act (the Nakba or the Naksa) or process (afforestation): the continuity between olive trees razed in 2013, the “tiny wildflowers crushed” in 1948, and the saplings uprooted in 1908 demonstrates “the need for an end to an endless Nakba”, and guides mobilize recitation against erasure against “the colonial refrains that they were never there to begin with” (PDF p.127-128). [Chapter 3 ends.]

Chapter 4 opening — Dheisheh, trash, and three occupations of one city (PDF p.129-133 / printed p.112-116)

Chapter 4, “Itineraries under Duress: Tours across Three Occupations of One City”, opens in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in summer 2019, where a white delegate from California, after five days of learning about Palestinian exile and denied municipal services, picked up trash for nearly an hour and explained the trash in a Palestinian man’s yard as “Just no connection to the earth”; a Jerusalem guide makes the counter-narration her labor: “The Palestinians who live here in East Jerusalem who pay taxes and work for the city have to wake up every morning and go clean neighborhoods in the western part of Jerusalem” (PDF p.129-130). The chapter asks how Palestinian tour guides organize across the different forms of occupation that animate their lives and work in Jerusalem, where all of Jerusalem is occupied: West Jerusalem’s sprawling mansions of Palestinians exiled in 1948, now occupied by affluent Israelis, “settlers by another name”; the Old City’s floor-by-floor settler takeover and archaeological excavations beneath Palestinian homes; and the eastern part’s Wall, expanding settlements treated as “suburbs”, and forced evictions in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah in May 2021 to make way for the biblically inspired King David Park tourist site (PDF p.130-131). Jerusalem attracts four million tourists per year, carefully routed to Israeli businesses (PDF p.131). In the section “Jerusalem as a City Multiply Occupied”, Kelly itemizes what Israeli tourist agencies do not want tourists to know — the policing at Damascus Gate, the tunnel excavations shaking homes’ foundations, residency revocation for failure to prove a “center of life” in Jerusalem, house demolitions, and the nomenclature of “permanent residents”, “meant to signal a permanence that is not inherited and can be revoked” (PDF p.132). Only 10 percent of Jerusalem’s city budget is earmarked for Palestinian neighborhoods, although these neighborhoods are home to 37 percent of the Palestinian population of Jerusalem, as printed (PDF p.132). Between 2004 and 2019, 978 housing units were demolished, leaving 3,177 homeless, in the grassroots collective Visualizing Palestine’s words “privileg[ing] Jewish settlers over the indigenous Palestinian population”; ten thousand Palestinian children in Jerusalem have no legal status because their parents hold different types of ID cards (PDF p.132). Love Under Apartheid, founded by Tanya Keilani, documents the separation of Palestinian families (PDF p.132-133). Between 1967 and 1995 Palestinians could lose residency if they left the city for seven years or received residency or citizenship elsewhere; after 1995 the criterion expanded to moving their “center of life” outside East Jerusalem, and since 1995 Israel has revoked the Jerusalem residency of 11,500 Jerusalemite Palestinians; in 2006 the Ministry of the Interior began punitively revoking residency for “breach of allegiance” — a practice called by many a “silent transfer”, a forcible transfer and breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention (PDF p.133). Some 200,000 Israelis live in Jerusalem settlements with unfettered access to state resources (PDF p.133).

Chapter 4 — “The Family Never Lived Here”: Zochrot in West Jerusalem (PDF p.134-138 / printed p.117-121)

In late September 2012 Kelly joined a West Jerusalem tour organized by the Israeli NGO Zochrot, coinciding with the publication of its guidebook Omrim Yeshna Eretz (Once Upon a Land: A Tour Guide) in Arabic and Hebrew. Guide Tamar Avraham began, “There used to be vineyards here”, gestured toward the construction site atop the Mamilla Cemetery, where the Simon Wiesenthal Institute was attempting to paper over Muslim graves to build a Museum of Tolerance, and pointed toward Gaza Street, Jaffa Gate and al-Khalil (Hebron) Gate — roads that once led to their named designations (PDF p.134). Avraham asked, “How can we tell this was a Palestinian neighborhood?”, detailed the Absentee Property Law, under which anyone not living in their home, even temporarily, in 1948 lost it permanently, and described Jewish philosopher Martin Buber preserving the Palestinian furniture in his new home in case the family came back, and the Jalat family leaving in 1948 after the Haganah sent a messenger who announced, in Arabic, that residents should leave for their own security (PDF p.134-135). Umar al-Ghubari, translating Avraham into Arabic, corrected her description of one family as taken out by force, pointing to the history of the neighborhood: whether exiled at gunpoint or warned by a messenger, it constituted “force”, and settlers then took over the homes in their “absence” via the Absentee Property Law (PDF p.135). In Talbiya the tour stopped at the first house a Jew came to rent in 1943, then arrived at Villa Harun ar-Rashid, the home of Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, leased to the British as headquarters of the British Air Force and acquired by the Haganah; it became the home of Zionist stateswoman and later prime minister Golda Meir (PDF p.135). The guides turned to the narrative of Bisharat’s grandson, law professor George Bisharat, in his 2003 essay “Rite of Return to a Palestinian Home”: the villa, built by his grandfather in 1926 and named for the Muslim Abbasid Caliph, was “picked by Zionist armed groups for the commanding view it offered from its roof”; “No blood was shed in taking it, as the British officers simply handed over the keys to the Haganah” (PDF p.135-136). Meir — in Bisharat’s words, author of the famous quip that “the Palestinian people did not exist” — ordered the sandblasting of the tiles bearing the villa’s name anticipating a visit from UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, “to obliterate the ‘Villa Harun ar-Rashid’ and thereby conceal the fact that she was living in an Arab home” — but on his 1977 visit Bisharat “could just make out the name in the tile: Villa Harun ar-Rashid. I guess Golda’s sandblasters had been a little rushed” (PDF p.136). The Eastern European woman who opened the door in 1977 responded, “Your family never lived here”; her husband was Zvi Berenson, a retired justice of the Israeli Supreme Court who had “upheld laws facilitating Israel’s acquisition of Palestinian lands through what amounted to legalized theft”, and some ten thousand Arab homes in West Jerusalem were looted and seized in the months before 1948 (PDF p.137). On Bisharat’s return in 2000, an American from New York insisted, “a half dozen times”, “The family never lived here” (PDF p.137). In 2019 tourists on a walking tour of Armenian ceramicist David Ohanessian’s tile work slipped into the villa’s compound: the side entrance still states “Villa Harun ar-Rashid (1926)”, a giant Israeli flag is planted atop its roof, and an Israeli settler yelled at two women in hijab to get off “his” property (PDF p.138). Echoing Hilo, Bisharat adds that his children are “heirs of the truth about Villa Harun ar-Rashid” (PDF p.138).

Chapter 4 — “Live in Peace, My Library”: Khalil Sakakini, theft and return (PDF p.139-145 / printed p.122-128)

The tour traveled past a Greek Orthodox church and the Greek consulate, past the street Zochrot was trying to get renamed Nakba Street, to the home of Palestinian author, poet and scholar Khalil Sakakini in Qatamon, a neighborhood — translated from Greek as “under the monastery” — that became a site of constant gunfire in 1948 before Sakakini fled to Cairo (PDF p.139-140). Sakakini saw his house, built in the years before 1936, as a personal project and a national project: “Our house was a world in itself”, the guide read from his daughter Hala’s edited volume of his journals and her own memoirs (PDF p.140). After the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution to partition Palestine in 1947, although the resolution named Jerusalem a separate international zone, Zionist militias began to target Qatamon; on January 5, 1948, the Haganah blew up the Semiramis hotel, claiming mistaken intelligence that it was the headquarters of the Qatamon guard — eighteen people died and dozens were wounded (PDF p.140-141). Khalil Sakakini wrote sarcastically, “We have turned our neighborhood, which is encircled by a road and is a kind of island, into an entrenched fortress, compared to which the fortresses of Sebastopol, Verdun, Gibraltar and Malta are as nothing”; Hala Sakakini wrote, “If strong security measures are not taken immediately, our turn of leaving our home will come soon” (PDF p.141). After the San Simon battle, when the Zionists conquered the San Simon Greek Orthodox Monastery, the family finally fled — the last Palestinian family in Qatamon, on April 30, 1948 (PDF p.141-142). Kelly sets this urban dispossession against Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains (1992), which focused deliberately on villages; Khalidi wrote that urban centers’ “immovable assets — commercial centers, residential quarters, schools, banks, hospitals, clinics, mosques, churches, and other public buildings, parks and utilities, all passed en bloc into the possession of the citizens of the nascent state of Israel”, and “also appropriated intact by Israelis” were “the moveable assets: furniture, silver, pictures, carpets, libraries, and heirlooms — all accruements of middle-class life of the erstwhile Palestinian residents”, as printed (PDF p.142). Taking up libraries, Zochrot read Sakakini’s lament for his stolen books at the site: “Farewell, my library! Farewell, the house of wisdom, the abode of philosophers, a house and witness for literature!” and “goodbye, my books! I know not what has become of you after we left: Were you looted? Burnt? Have you been ceremonially transferred to a private or public library? Did you end up on the shelves of grocery stores with your pages used to wrap onions?” (PDF p.142). After 1967 Hala and her sister Domiya returned fleetingly to their childhood home, then heard rumors their father’s books were housed at the Hebrew University National Library; a senior librarian told them, “You have no right to claim anything because each volume, individually, and all of them together, are abandoned property”, declined to let them touch the books, and brought one whose title they remembered — “We selected The Beggars, by Al-Jahdh, a ninth century encyclopedist”, as printed — letting them page through it “as if we were dangerous culture robbers” (PDF p.143-144). Kelly cautions that Zochrot’s wealthy-neighborhood itinerary can flatten class differences, depicting “people” as those who have the trappings of modernity and privileging a narrative of loss that pivots on mansions; Palestinians in 1948 were heterogeneous, and the fellahin, as Rana Barakat notes, were central to the political, economic and social life of Mandate-era Jerusalem (PDF p.144). Sophia Azeb writes: “Who have we become, as Palestinians, in the wake of the enduring catastrophe? I am a fellaha, the daughter and granddaughter of Palestinian farmers” — and that “Where is your family from” is a question frequently asked by Palestinians of other Palestinians, a demonstration of mutual understanding that “also reveals our wariness of one another” (PDF p.144-145).

Chapter 4 — the colonial present in the Old City (PDF p.145-148 / printed p.128-131)

The section “The Colonial Present in the Old City” opens with the June 5, 1967 occupation: Israel demolished the Moroccan Quarter (Al-Magharbeh) of the Old City, which, as Grassroots Al-Quds writes in its guidebook Wujood, “had been a Muslim Waqf since 1193 and was home to one thousand Palestinian residents, who were then displaced to Shufat Refugee Camp and elsewhere in Jerusalem” (PDF p.145). Tourists in the Jewish Quarter tour a space where four thousand Palestinians were evicted; at the end of the 1967 War 66,000 Palestinians remained in Jerusalem, and as of 2018 there are 330,000 within the municipal boundaries (PDF p.146). Over three hundred Palestinian shops in the Old City have shuttered because of the suffocation of the Palestinian tourism industry; in Silwan, Israeli authorities have granted Elad, a settler organization, authority to manage an archaeological park that dispossesses and evicts Palestinian homeowners and hosts 300,000 tourists per year, a use of archaeology now mapped onto Silwan, Ras al-Amud, Wadi Joz, Al-Suwana, Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Tur, and the King David Park / City of David National Park supplied the justificatory logic for the police violence and expulsions in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah during the spring 2021 uprisings (PDF p.146). Grassroots Al-Quds writes of Damascus Gate, the Old City’s historical main entrance: “The Old City’s historical main entrance — Damascus Gate — lies neglected”; “Today, Damascus Gate looks more like an imposing military outpost with its three watchpoints”, intimidating tourists away from the Palestinian markets behind it, “which have seen a sharp decline of visitors in recent years”, while tourists to Israel ask soldiers for “selfies with the IDF” (PDF p.147). Tourists meet Ali Jiddah, an elder Afro-Palestinian activist and freelance alternative tour guide who began giving tours shortly after his release from an Israeli prison in a 1985 prisoner exchange; passing the apartment Ariel Sharon took over in 1987, with its menorah and giant Israeli flag, he asks, “Why is Ariel Sharon still in a coma?” — “Because even hell doesn’t want him” (PDF p.147-148). At the end of his tours Jiddah delivers the three-part appeal: “Your presence here is very important for my people. It shows them someone is listening. But your work is not here” — validating presence, emphasizing international complicity, and inviting tourists to go home to write letters and join movements to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel’s occupation (PDF p.148). Tourists also meet Armenian Palestinians, made refugees twice over — once from the Armenian genocide and again from Israeli displacement practices (PDF p.148).

Chapter 4 — “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (PDF p.149-152 / printed p.132-135)

On an ICAHD solidarity tour in summer 2012, a guide at the perimeter of an East Jerusalem settlement showed tourists where municipal services ended — manicured settlement grounds, trash pickup and a working bus line giving way to a dirt path — half joking in a nod to Shel Silverstein: “This is where the sidewalk ends” (PDF p.149). Fayrouz Sharqawi of Grassroots Al-Quds takes tourists to the same settlement and narrates sarcastically: “The sidewalk is gone. Because Palestinians don’t need sidewalks” — laying bare the tautological colonial logic that positions the trappings of modernity as a barometer for deservingness of freedom (PDF p.149-150). At the Wall severing the two-thousand-year-old Jericho Road, Sharqawi points to a roundabout built only because settlement construction up the hill required it — “Now that the settlements and their visitors need a traffic circle”, she explained, “we can have infrastructure” — and to the lookout ratio of cranes: always zero in the eastern part and ten to twenty on the western part (PDF p.150). She connects the colonial present to tourism: a planned cable car from the German Colony to Silwan’s settler-run City of David park, the settlements along the Mount of Olives and the settlement inside Ar-Tur — “They will not see the occupation and they will not spend money in our shops”, she explained. “Now Israel wins twice over” (PDF p.151). Wujood writes: “The Israeli tourism industry and propaganda outfits use the Jewish history in Palestine to justify the Zionization of Jerusalem”, referring to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism’s licensing courses emphasizing only Jewish ties to the land, the routing of tourists to religious sites and back west to eat, drink and shop, and the nearly seventy million dollar Silwan cable-car project, defined in 2017 as a “national priority” (PDF p.151). Discussion of tourism on these tours ends with the BDS movement call, issued by Palestinian civil society in 2005, whose demands remain in place until Israel dismantles the Wall and ends the occupation, grants equal rights to Palestinian citizens in Israel, and allows Palestinian refugees to return (PDF p.151-152). Sharqawi begins her tours as Avraham does — “How do you know these are Palestinian homes?” — pointing to arched windows, and on a July 2019 tour said of the Israeli flags peppering the neighborhood: “Imagine how painful it is for me to see flags on those windows and those doors” (PDF p.152). Kelly closes the part against equating solidarity tourism with slum tourism: Sharqawi, a community organizer who is the granddaughter of two refugees, refuses that voyeurism by anchoring witnessing to “the necessity of reparation and return” (PDF p.152). [Chapter 4 continues in part 4.]

Chapter 4 closing — love and care under occupation (PDF p.153-154 / printed p.136-137)

The closing section, “An Invitation to Consider Love and Care under Occupation”, states the chapter “has been about love” — of things, books, land, olives, “the love of that which is stolen, the remembrance of—and struggle for—a beloved heterogeneous city” — and about invitation: guides invite tourists to rethink Jerusalem and reject the narrative they have been sold. Traversing neighborhoods the international community understands as occupied and neighborhoods it holds as uncomplicatedly Israeli, the guides together refuse the fragmentation Israel has sought to sediment, weaving histories of displacement that began well before 1948 and cannot be circumscribed to 1967, and exposing tourism and law as the strategic means by which Israel has divided Jerusalem, minoritized its multiple Palestinian populations — Afro-Palestinians and Armenian Palestinians, wealthy and impoverished — and expelled the people who shaped the city (PDF p.153). Trash, on these tours, means not Palestinian disinvestment but Israeli state disinvestment in Palestinian communities; the tours evidence colonization through infrastructure, legalized theft, beautification of once-Palestinian neighborhoods for only Israelis, and the labor of East Jerusalem Palestinians who clean West Jerusalem, often the part stolen from their own families, interrupting both refrains — “no connection to the earth” and “the family never lived here” — as manufactured narratives of the Zionist state-building project (PDF p.153). The guides gesture toward a Jerusalem where everyone moves freely to Jaffa, Gaza, Hebron or Jericho and can care for and receive care from the city equally: “a Jerusalem only possible in the wake of decolonization” (PDF p.154). [Chapter 4 ends.]

Chapter 5 opening — witnessing and return in Historic Palestine (PDF p.155-156 / printed p.138-139)

Chapter 5, “Colonial Ruins and a Decolonized Future: Witnessing and Return in Historic Palestine”, turns to walking tours of spaces too often understood as uncomplicatedly and unequivocally Israeli — landscapes of rubble amid donor-funded JNF forests of cypress and fir, cityscapes of segregation inside Israel’s borders, and appropriated villages as Israeli spaces of culture and recreation. “By Historic Palestine, I mean the lands across all of Palestine” — the lands Palestinians were expelled from before, during, and after 1948, not limited to just Palestinian “territories”: the West Bank and Gaza. During the spring 2021 uprisings — amid the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions, attacks on Al-Aqsa, mob violence in cities inside Israel and bombing campaigns on Gaza — Palestinians in Lydda, Haifa, Akka and Nazareth raised Palestinian flags in protest, and Palestinians across social media declared: “Historic Palestine is no longer historic” (PDF p.155). The chapter follows tours from Lifta (depopulated 1948) to Emwas (depopulated 1967) to Ayn Hawd (depopulated 1948), and through Haifa, Jaffa and Nazareth, where guides disrupt the notion of happily “mixed cities”; in a Palestinian citizen in Israel’s words introducing such a tour, “Here you will not see checkpoints, but if you know the layers, you will see occupation.” The itineraries expose the strategies of erasure and either gesture toward or practically design a future of reparation and redress accommodating return, refusing a nostalgic rendering of pre-1948 Palestine; guides ask what role tourism can play in archiving displacement and imagining return (PDF p.156). Palestinian villages are no longer a neglected site of scholarship as when Walid Khalidi turned to them in Before Their Diaspora (1984) and All That Remains (1992), the latter including the image of an ostensibly benign eucalyptus park that is also the ruins of a Palestinian cemetery (figure 5.1, the cemetery of Salama (Jaffa), now a park, May 1987, photo by Rafi Safieh) (PDF p.156-157).

Chapter 5 — Zochrot: remembering as a place for the future (PDF p.157-162 / printed p.140-145)

Zochrot began in 2002 with Jewish Israelis certain that to talk about the future of Palestine they would have to go to the sources of the conflict in 1948 and 1967; its audience has always been Jewish Israelis, and its work is grounded in remembering — and forcing other Israeli Jews to remember — the Nakba and the Naksa, urgent where the Israeli education system fails to teach “what happened in 1948” (PDF p.158). Umar al-Ghubari, Zochrot’s tours coordinator, interviewed in Tel Aviv in September 2012, described the work as a mobile pedagogical narrative intervention: “Zochrot tries to tell the story through walking, on the ground, visiting the places, seeing the ruins, taking testimonies from the refugees of the villages, establishing the booklets and material about the village, and inviting people to see the place and hear the story from the former residents of the village.” Zochrot tours are (typically) free, designed for Israeli Jews, and based on refugee testimony and archival research, in contrast to West Bank solidarity tours; for West Bank refugees Zochrot gets permission to enter Israel to see their former village — “a fleeting and incomplete return” (PDF p.158). Participation is entirely contingent on the refugee’s desire, with no expectation of repeated narration or performance of refugee status; al-Ghubari’s trailing off — “You can imagine if you have fifty or seventy people, most of them Israelis, just watching and listening to the refugee telling the story of what happened to himself and his village in 1948 …” — asks recognition of the contact zone’s asymmetry. The work is not about the past but about looking at each place “as a place for the future”: refugees are asked how they envision their village’s future and what return should look like (PDF p.159). Israeli scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan is quoted on Israeli textbooks: one aim of the Israeli-Zionist narrative “is to create a homogenous identity to all the Jewish ethnicities in Israel … while attempting to erase—both physically and spiritually—traces of a continuous Palestinian life on the land, so that both Israeli and Palestinian memory of it would die” (PDF p.158). In mid-September 2019 Kelly joined Zochrot’s Jewish National Fund (JNF) Erasure of Palestine Tour, led by al-Ghubari from Levinksy Garden [as printed] in Tel Aviv through Ben Shemen Forest, Rabin Park, Britannia Park, Begin Park and USA Independence Park; al-Ghubari began, “I am not a tour guide. I am a history teller.” Ben Shemen Forest is thirty thousand dunams (a little over 7,400 acres) of JNF trees covering the ruins of Jimzu, Dayr Abu Salama, Khirbat Zakariyya, Haditha and Khirbat al-Duhayriyya; Zochrot’s 2014 replacement sign recorded: “Haditha had 880 inhabitants when it was captured. Ben-Gurion ordered it demolished; moshav Hadid was established on its land. Jimzu had 1,750 inhabitants” and was likewise demolished on Ben-Gurion’s order (Gamzu established on its land); Dayr Abu Salama had seventy inhabitants, Khirbat al-Duhayriyya 116, Khirbat Zakariyya’s number unknown; “These villages were captured in July, 1948” (PDF p.160-161). The tour emphasized that 80 percent of the signs marking such recreational sites ignore the village histories, and that the JNF in fact purchased 70 percent of the land before 1948, as printed, a strategy to hold land for Jewish and not Palestinian use. Guides point to cacti as signs of Indigenous Palestinian presence and village boundary markers (PDF p.161-162). At Haditha a tourist watching the rubble said, “If only there was Facebook Live when this shit happened” — a reflection Kelly reads as disappearing the demolitions that continue daily fifty kilometers away in Jerusalem, across the West Bank and in every bombing campaign on Gaza, broadcast on Facebook Live as they happen (PDF p.162).

Chapter 5 — archives, shame, and a reckoning that ends in return (PDF p.162-165 / printed p.145-148)

The 2018 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East forum “Palestine: Doing Things with Archives” is taken up through Lila Abu-Lughod’s introduction — what archives are or should be for “a dispersed people with no state archive, no less a state, a majority of whom live in exile or under occupation and have had their ‘proper’ archive destroyed, seized, or sealed in inaccessible colonial archives” — and Sherene Seikaly’s reflection on her great-grandfather Naim Coltran, dispossessed of orchards and bank accounts through the Absentee Property Law, petitioning until his death: her “epistemology of shame” “determines what stories we erase”, and “At the base of this epistemology of shame”, she continues, “is the directive that Palestinians must repeatedly evidence their worthiness” (PDF p.162-163). Tours, even in committed anticolonialism, can flatten this nuance. In the donor-funded forests groups huddle around pre-1948 aerial photos, learn village names and depopulation histories, which structures were razed and which remain, and which refugee camps villagers were sent to; at Britannia Park (British-donor funded, after the paving over of Dayr al-Dubban, Kudna and ‘Aijur) an elderly Israeli man recalled entering a Palestinian house as an eleven-year-old in 1949: “Everything was exactly the same as the family had left it” — plates on the table, a child’s spinning toy stopped in the middle — “I wanted to take it, but I left it there in case they came back” (PDF p.163). The tours are a reckoning, not a land acknowledgment: Zochrot tours end with a demand for the Right of Return, described as “just, necessary, and possible”, and with calls for a multicultural society in Palestine/Israel that sees itself as part of the Orient, an end to segregated space and segregated education, where no one is expelled, Israelis included (PDF p.165).

Chapter 5 — Ein Hod and the new ‘Ayn Hawd: recreation at the expense of return (PDF p.165-170 / printed p.148-153)

Section “Walking Tours of Repurposed Villages: Recreation at the Expense of Return”. Near Haifa, Ein Hod sits inside a JNF forest planted with US donor funds. On an August 2019 Eyewitness Palestine delegation, Bilal Dirbas of Bil’aaks Alternative Tours guided delegates through both the Israeli artist colony Ein Hod and the nearby new village of the internally displaced of Ayn Hawd, opening: “Today, we’ll be talking about settler colonialism, the same history as you have back home with Native Americans.” ‘Ayn Hawd’s villagers numbered 650 in 1945 and 800 in 1948; they held the village through two Zionist attacks but were forced out by the Israeli army and navy on July 15, 1948; those not exiled to camps in Jenin and Irbid created a new village nearby, unrecognized until 1994 and not beginning grid connection or municipal services until recognition in 2005, with recognition not fully realized until 2006 and some three hundred villagers living there on precarious deeds (PDF p.166, 169-170). Dirbas: “The village mosque is now used as a bar and restaurant. The minaret is gone”; of the colony, established in 1953: “They are the bohemian, radical left Israelis, but they are Zionists and their mindset is settler colonial”; Marcel Janco, Dada cofounder who emigrated in 1941, “brought tourism to this village and gave legitimacy to the new project of Zionism” (PDF p.166). The JNF forest at the village’s base was US-donor funded after the 2010 Mount Carmel fires — fires that thrived, as in California, because Indigenous fire-prevention knowledge is ignored and nonnative trees planted to foreclose return make the soil acidic and the forests susceptible to uncontainable fires (PDF p.166). The Ein Hod Artists Village website’s invitation is quoted as itself carrying out discursive erasure: its “earlier occupants” are “the Christian Crusades” and “the Turkish Empire”, never Palestinians, and its “natural Mediterranean gardens of olive, pomegranate, almond, and carob trees” suture biblical flora to the present; its promotional literature describes the village as “abandoned and left in ruin” after the “War of Independence” and resurrected by artists’ perseverance, foreclosing even imagining that ‘Ayn Hawd’s villagers two kilometers away produce archives, village maps and memory books and long for return (PDF p.167-169). Tourists thus understand settlements are not only in the West Bank, and the root of the “conflict” is the Nakba’s displacement of 750,000 Palestinians — to neighboring countries, to the West Bank and Gaza, from the region, or internally displaced inside Israel (PDF p.170).

Chapter 5 — Lifta: preservation against restoration (PDF p.170-174 / printed p.153-157)

Section “Jerusalem, Revisited: Ruins and Return” turns to Lifta and Emwas. Lifta, occupied in 1948, functioned as a “suburb of the city of Jerusalem” — “which is, not coincidentally, how Israel refers to settlements off Jerusalem in the West Bank now”; it had 2,550 Palestinian residents in the mid-1940s, a mosque, shops, elementary schools, two coffeehouses, a social club and a thriving agricultural presence. After a Stern Gang attack on one coffeehouse left five patrons dead and more wounded, with repeated Haganah and Stern Gang raids and home demolitions, villagers were forced to leave; Ben-Gurion celebrated: “From your entry into Jerusalem through Lifta—Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, King George Street and Mea Sharim—there are no strangers. One hundred percent Jews” (PDF p.170). In July 2019 Yacoub Odeh, an elder forced out as a child, gave an international student group a tour not, he explained, “as a tour guide but as a villager”: his narration paused in sorrow over burned terraces, graffiti, settler damage and Israeli youth partying in still-standing stone structures — “I’m so sorry” — “Everything has changed” — and over the village well and spring appropriated for Israeli swimming: “They say they need more water than us”, “Why? Because they are cleaner than us? They drink more than us? They need flowers more than us? It is a racist mentality”. At his family home — “This is my mother’s tabun [clay oven]” — he refused the group leaders rushing him (“Occupation Bootcamp” is one Palestinian American artist and activist’s name for the pace of solidarity tours): “We tell this story so we don’t forget.” He continued: “I was small. I didn’t forget. This is our village. We should return. We will never forget. I have a right to go back to my home. We can build a democratic state together” (PDF p.171-172). He ended by asking the group to write to UNESCO to register Lifta as a World Heritage Site against Construction Plan 6036, the Jerusalem Municipality and Israel Land Authority plan to demolish Lifta for an elite villa neighborhood; UNESCO’s own description, submitted by Israel’s Permanent Delegation, calls Lifta “abandoned” three times (PDF p.172-173). Rana Barakat, in “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History”, cautions against preservation without restoration and return: “Preservation … is incommensurate with restoration (or deruination). If preservation serves settlers’ interests, then restoration serves Indigenous interests”; restoration means repatriation “as a lived space, not as a symbolic museum space of a former past” (PDF p.173). Odeh’s appeal, fraught and contingent on settler desires to preserve, still ends restructured: preservation from destruction together with restoration as a site of life and return for his family (PDF p.173-174).

Chapter 5 — Emwas under Canada Park, and the demand for return (PDF p.174-176 / printed p.157-159)

That same summer, Eyewitness Palestine delegates bused from Jerusalem to Canada Park, “ostensibly inside Israel”, where al-Ghubari introduced himself again as a historian, not a tour guide: they were in fact on occupied West Bank land, learning about three villages — Yalo, Beit Nuba and Emwas — occupied in 1967 “because it couldn’t occupy them in 1948”: “This is the West Bank”, “We are outside the Green Line”. The park is planted by the JNF and funded by Canadian donors, in the Latrun salient. “This area was full of houses only fifty years ago”; asked “How many people were killed here?”, al-Ghubari answered: “Not many”, al-Ghubari answered. “The ethnic cleansing was planned in advance. Six people were killed in their homes”; there was no war — ten to twenty Egyptian and Jordanian soldiers left after ten minutes of clashes; “Two thousand people lived here until 1967”, the expelled becoming refugees in Ramallah and Jordan; “Bulldozers razed the village over the following weeks”, “People were killed inside their houses”. A diaspora Palestinian participant later detailed the pain of listening while tourists leaned against and sat on the tombstones of the partially destroyed cemetery (PDF p.174). “Refugees from Emwas, Yalo, and Beit Nuba are waiting for their right to return”, and “That is the whole mission of these tours: to not only know the history but to support the Right of Return” (PDF p.174-175). Days later in Ramallah, delegates met Dima Abu Ghoush, director of Emwas: Restoring Memories (premiered at the 2019 Boston Palestine Film Festival), who was forced to leave at two and decided in 2009 to rebuild the village as a model from elders’ memories; a village elder asked if he remembered anything, though he was thirteen when forced to walk away under threat of being shot, answered: “I remember every road and every stone”. Abu Ghoush: “We made a model village as a plan for return.” The refugees’ booklet demands are printed in full, including that what happened in “Emwas and Yalu and Beit Nuba” (Yalu as printed in the demands, against Yalo elsewhere) “is a crime of war”, the residents’ right to return and rebuild “regardless of any political solution”, refusal of compensation not linked to return and of resettlement anywhere except their hometowns (PDF p.175). Postcards at the entrance turn the tourism staple on its head — bulldozers razing houses, village ruins, before-and-after shots of the 1967 demolition (figures 5.8-5.10) (PDF p.175-176).

Chapter 5 — “Blueprinting Return”: Zochrot and BADIL (PDF p.176-183 / printed p.159-166)

Section “Blueprinting Return”. Al-Ghubari described the impasse with Israeli audiences: “Most of the Israelis still have the ability to listen, maybe also to remember, if they saw, and even to express how they understand the pain of the refugees”, but “they don’t want to talk about return or see the place with Palestinians again. Many of them politically see that as a destruction of the Jewish state and they want, they insist, to see the state with a Jewish majority and that’s it” — a stance of the majority of Jewish Israelis, not of right or left alone; tourists fear refugees killing them, destruction of society’s fabric, or another Holocaust, fears grounded in racism; the impasse is a “border” “between the past and the future”, and “We want the tour”, he continued, “to put the question there”. Refugees routinely answer: “I’m not kicking you out. I want us to build the village. I want to be your neighbor” (PDF p.177-179). Zochrot’s most sustained collaboration is with BADIL (BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights): by the 2012 interview they had collaborated for three years on “The Practicalities of Return”, beginning in 2009 with a workshop on Miska, in the Tulkarem subdistrict, approximately twenty-seven kilometers north of Tel Aviv and the site of Zochrot’s first tour on Land Day in 2002 (PDF p.179-180). Since BADIL organizers in the West Bank cannot enter Israel, the partners traveled together to South Africa and the former Yugoslavia for field tours and Istanbul for workshops, jointly producing documents of “accumulated knowledge” — in Cape Town in January-February 2012, ten people from each organization studied truth and reconciliation, restitution, compensation and post-apartheid housing, learning among other lessons to begin from 1913’s land confiscations, and in Serbia that return’s viability does not mean return, as many refugees sold returned property rather than live alongside the enemy: “This is why”, al-Ghubari explained, “we would not call for refugees to come back to the Israeli regime”; “The regime, or the political system, would need to be changed in order for the refugees to feel like they are coming to their homeland and to their state” — not piecemeal symbolic return but a “fundamental change in the regime” (PDF p.180). The twenty-five-page report-back “Study Visit to Cape Town”, introduced by Hazim Jamjum, holds that conceptions of “return” have remained superficial on both sides — settlers seeing return “as a calamity to be avoided at any cost”, the indigenous community equating it to “a reversal of six decades of settler-colonialism; the return to a paradise lost” (PDF p.181). The workshops’ fraught questions are class questions: “Some of the refugees, when the Nakba started in 1948, they lost thousands of dunams of land. But some of the refugees didn’t have anything except their small house. So what does the return mean for this family and the return for this family?”; Jamjum: “How, for instance, is return to materialize to a village whose inhabitants numbered less than two thousand before the Nakba, and who now number in the tens of thousands?” The shared principle: “the purpose of return and reparations is not to return the descendants of landlords and peasants to the socioeconomic positions of poverty that they were in before the Nakba” (PDF p.181-182). Their work must be continuous “not only before the return itself, but also during and after the return process”, to avoid South Africa’s post-1994 loss of civil-society orientation; and Palestine is not exceptionalized — cases run “from East Timor, the former Yugoslavia and Cyprus, to Rwanda, Zimbabwe and South Africa” — toward practical redistribution, restorative rather than retributive justice, and flexible mapping (PDF p.182-183). Disparities structure the work itself: a BADIL participant asked, “How am I to imagine a postliberation future when I am still under occupation?”, and al-Ghubari on refugees in the West Bank and Jordan: “this question is very far away from them. They are in difficult situations, and they are just running after the daily difficulties”; “It’s amazing what this Wall is doing”, and “It’s not only a Wall blocking their movement. It’s also blocking their ideas, their imagination. They can’t see beyond the Wall” (PDF p.183-184). By 2019, against 2012’s rarity, many West Bank tours included a day inside Israel, a sea change from organizers refusing the circumscription of “Palestine” (PDF p.184).

Chapter 5 — flowers instead of fences: countermapping Miska (PDF p.184-189 / printed p.167-172)

Section “Flowers Instead of Fences”. Al-Ghubari produced the planning workshops’ maps of Miska — a draft overlaid atop aerial photos from 1948 and today, referred to in the running text as figure 5.10 and captioned as figure 5.12, “Countermapping Miska” — from a workshop of village refugees and Israelis living nearby, close to Kfar Saba: “So this is the valley and this is the college and this is the swimming pool and this is the neighboring kibbutz from Ramat HaKovesh, and instead of fences they want to open the fence and plant some flowers”; “You know, people can fantasize things”; “This is the center of the village; they want to make that a public cultural center and the neighborhoods should be here. So they ask the questions of really how to plan, how to live, is it possible to live there and, if so, how” (PDF p.185-186). Palestinian architects displaced from Miska ask, “what is my mandate to plan the village when I didn’t talk with the other refugees on the outside?”; the workshops therefore propose not the only perfect solution but ideas to react to, improve and augment — different ways of return, the center as cultural place, or for the old people and still-living refugees — “but all the ideas are based on the acceptance of the right of return” (PDF p.186-187). In Sedek: A Journal on the Ongoing Nakba, Ahmad Barclay documents four stages of “re-emergence” for Miska developed from the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Beit Sahour, whose work proposes a “subversion, reuse, profanation, and recycling of the existing infrastructure of colonial occupation”: symbolic interventions (“laying markers to reappropriate the site of the village”), a token return by Palestinians living in Israel (“planting catalysts”), actual return by a handful of families who “densify” the original grain of the village, and solidification as remaining families return, leaving some “colonial debris” evident and the “voids of absence” as “public spaces with an architecture composed of a dialogue between the layers of memory, erasure, and presence” (PDF p.187-188). The history behind the plan is al-Ghubari’s 2009 account: in 2005, on the fifty-seventh Nakba anniversary, internally displaced Palestinians from Miska established the Committee of Miska’s Uprooted and visited the village with Zochrot, planting olive and fig saplings that authorities uprooted days later, barring the village school’s door; after the school hosted Salman Natour’s play Memory and an event with Iraqi-Jewish writer Sami Michael, authorities surrounded it with barbed wire and tore down protest artworks; after actor Luft Nuweser presented Uncle Matta, a story of the Nakba for children, authorities bulldozed the school and planted orange trees to hide the ruins — “In May, 2007, we held the first commemoration of the Nakba without the school building. But we nevertheless planned a special children’s activity—drawing a huge wall mural. This time, after the regime finally understood that the destruction failed to stop us, it didn’t respond” (PDF p.187-188). A 2014 DAAR exhibit abstract, co-authored by al-Ghubari among others, asserts: “The right of return is the right to the urban, to a condition of heterogeneity and multiplicity that may already distinguish the sites of origin” (PDF p.188-189).

Chapter 5 — “mixed cities”, the General Strike, iNakba and Palestine VR (PDF p.190-195 / printed p.173-178)

The multiculturalism of Zochrot’s September 2013 conference “From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of the Palestinian Refugees” — videos of postreturn sites with animated students, Muslims, Christians and Jews in bustling social spaces — is not, after Hazel Carby (1992), an alibi or “convenient substitute” for structural change: it is contingent on reparation, restitution, desegregation and return, a heterogeneous future “perhaps even one that replaces barbed-wire fences and bulldozers with flower beds and open universities” (PDF p.189-190). Tours of Haifa, Jaffa and Nazareth likewise document displacement and lay claim to the city against the “mixed city” label: Jaffa tours show high-end stores like Ahava selling stolen Dead Sea products from settlements in formerly Palestinian businesses, and rampant gentrification; Haifa tours a city militarily occupied in 1948, where Jewish Israelis have long fought to quiet the adhan and Palestinian citizens do not learn their own histories in school; Nazareth tours end at Liwan Café, a Palestinian cultural space, bookstore and community center reviving the Old City. The General Strike on Tuesday, May 19, 2021, as printed — in response to the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, attacks on Al-Aqsa worshippers, the bombing of Gaza and police-protected mob attacks in the mixed cities — was the first uniting Palestinians across Historic Palestine since 1936; Jonathon Cook wrote that the “coexistence model in the ‘mixed cities’ was always an illusion … It was built on the continuing Judaization of these historic Palestinian communities to erase their Palestinian heritage and drive out their Palestinian populations” (PDF p.190-191). Section “Digital Signposting, Demanding Return”: in 2014 Zochrot created the free, trilingual (Arabic, Hebrew, English) app iNakba, whose iTunes description positions return as the “imperative redress of the Nakba”; for each locality it gives district, population before occupation, occupation date, occupying unit, and settlements before and after, with archival images, videos, maps and user-added family archives drawn largely from Khalidi’s research (PDF p.191-193). Zochrot media director Raneen Jeries told journalist Ian Black (May 2014): “There is an app for everything these days, and this one will show all the places that have been wiped off the map. It means that Palestinians in Ein Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, say, can follow what happened to the village in Galilee that their family came from—and they will get a notification every time there’s an update” (PDF p.193). Palestine VR, a virtual reality app from the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), was released after Israel’s August 2019 denial of entry to US Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, requested by Donald Trump, to show highlights of the trip they were not allowed to take — the Dome of the Rock, settler expulsions in the Old City, the wall around Aida Camp, Hebron’s ghost-town business center, and the Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar; PIPD executive director Salem Barahmeh: it “aims to give viewers a glimpse of life in Palestine despite Israel’s routine entry denial and attempts to cut Palestinians off from the rest of the world” (PDF p.194-195). The chapter closes: Palestine is Palestinian citizens in Haifa with family exiled in Jenin, Jerusalem residents collecting “center of life” evidence, guides touring Canada Park’s trees, filmmakers in Ramallah fighting for return to Emwas, villagers in exile uploading photos to iNakba, and diaspora Palestinians touring Hebron on Palestine VR; the tours demand a wholesale end to occupation across Historic Palestine, possible only via freedom of movement and the Right of Return, envisioning a Palestine an exile does not have to visit as a tourist, or virtually: “a Palestine marked by futurity and vitality that they can return to if they so choose” (PDF p.195). [Chapter 5 ends.]

Chapter 6 opening — a virtual delegation to Gaza, and the politics of invitation (PDF p.196-198 / printed p.179-181)

Chapter 6, “Welcome to Gaza”: On the Politics of Invitation and the Right to Tourism, opens in August 2017, when the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Interfaith Peace Builders (now Eyewitness Palestine) hosted a virtual delegation to Gaza. Organizers introducing Raji Sourani — from “Palestinians for Human Rights in Gaza”, as printed — warned of technical difficulties; of sixty scheduled minutes it took twenty-seven for Sourani to connect. He described how Israel has strategically separated Gaza from the rest of Palestine, the siege’s contours — three hours of electricity a day, no fresh water, inability to treat sewage and so to swim in the ocean — and closed reiterating that Israel delimits Palestinian life in Gaza so Palestinians will leave; the organizers closed: “Raji, from the bottom of hearts, thank you” (as printed), “and we will keep working until Palestine is liberated and we will take our lead from you, from Palestinians on the ground in Palestine” (PDF p.196-197). With the siege in its fifteenth year at the time of writing, Palestinians in Gaza have navigated their cleavage from the rest of Palestine through virtual collaborative projects that rehearse, satirize and reimagine tourism, combating both the siege and representations of themselves as under siege and nothing more. The chapter moves chronologically through virtual tourism crafted during and between “Operation Cast Lead” (2008-2009), “Operation Pillar of Defense” (2012) and “Operation Protective Edge” (2014): Laila el-Haddad and Mushon Zer-Aviv’s “You Are Not Here” (2007-2009), Anthony Bourdain’s 2013 trip, Tanya Habjouqa’s 2013 images of joy under siege, Palestinian responses to Banksy’s 2015 Gaza installations, and a 2014-2015 Gaza University student project imagining a thriving Gaza 2050 (PDF p.197). Unlike elsewhere, Gaza’s politics of invitation are not performative in producing the physical presence of tourists — except in rare cases invitations do not result in it — but are performances underscoring the right to freedom of movement, the right to tourism, and the right to invitation (PDF p.197-198).

Chapter 6 — “You Are Not Here”: a Gaza-Tel Aviv virtual tour (PDF p.198-202 / printed p.181-185)

In 2007 designer Mushon Zer-Aviv and Laila El-Haddad, proprietor of the blog Gaza Mom and coauthor of Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, launched the Gaza-Tel Aviv virtual tourism platform You Are Not Here (YANH), originating in Zer-Aviv’s New York-Baghdad version. A tourist in Tel Aviv downloads a double-sided map (Gaza on one side, Tel Aviv on the other, figure 6.1), and at each stop, marked with a “You Are Not Here” symbol parodying “You Are Here”, calls the Tourist Hotline (03-915-0880) to hear El-Haddad’s recorded tour — an orchestrated reversal of Israel’s mapping of Israeli names onto Palestinian spaces, mapping Gaza’s streets onto Tel Aviv ephemerally, without destruction. Launched in 2007, YANH ceased in 2009, as Operation Cast Lead made it impossible to sustain; its maps and recordings survive as an archived “urban tourism mash-up” (PDF p.198-199). The stops run from Arts and Crafts Village, Islamic University, UNRWA, Rashad Shawa Cultural Center, Palestinian Parliament, Park of the Unknown Soldier, Palestine Stadium, Kazem’s Ice-Cream Parlor, Akeela’s Restaurant, Shifa Taxi Station, Qattan Center for the Child, Hammam al-Samara, Souk al-Zawya and Al-Qissariya Market to Qassr Al-Basha (Napoleon’s Castle), the Great Omari Mosque and Beach Camp — where the Alternative Museum’s first intifada delegation met the woman who exclaimed, “What is this roadshow all about? This isn’t a picnic here” (PDF p.200). The tour is animated by impossibility and shifting temporality; at Barcelona Peace Park, donated in 1998 in a triple sister-cities declaration between Barcelona, Tel Aviv and Gaza City, El-Haddad remembers her son frolicking near youth playing football and attempting the monkey bars, then: “But all of that was destroyed by Israeli tanks in January 2009. Now more than anything hopeful, the park’s ruins represent the shattered dreams of peace and prosperity and the malicious nature of occupation” (PDF p.200-201). Her narration includes attacks on UNRWA — Trump withholding $350 million in annual aid in 2018, Biden restoring less than half in 2021 — Palestinian demands for return, and Saraya Prison: established by the British in 1929, then used by Egyptians, Israelis, the Palestinian Authority/Fatah (jailing and torturing Hamas members) and most recently Hamas (jailing Fatah opponents); Hamas Prime Minister “Ismail Hanieyh”, as printed, had planned to turn it into a shopping mall before Israeli forces destroyed it in January 2009. Its rubble holds not only Gilad Shalit but the “nearly nine thousand Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli prisons, nearly a third of them being detained without a jail sentence, denied family visits, and some of them only twelve years old when they are jailed” (PDF p.201-202). Against expected subjection, El-Haddad dwells on pleasure — Roots restaurant (“I hope you’re hungry and ready to empty your pockets!”), a temporary refuge from poverty and sorrow for those who can afford it, and Kazem’s Ice-Cream Parlor (“Check your shyness at the door”, she advises, “and jostle your way through the throngs of thirsty customers”) — evidencing a Gaza multifaceted in class and perspective (PDF p.202).

Chapter 6 — the PLO Flag Shop, “not a normalization initiative”, and Bourdain’s virtual tour (PDF p.203-208 / printed p.186-191)

The YANH tour’s final stop is the PLO Flag Shop: “It’s tourism shopping time! As you can see by the sign on the door, we’ve now reached the self-proclaimed first tourist shop in Palestine: the PLO Flag Shop. If you’d like to grab some cheap souvenirs for your family back in Tel Aviv, this is the place to do it.” Its owner Abu Daya, as El-Haddad cites him: “I want to run a tourist shop and I want to sell souvenirs, not politics” — echoing West Bank guides who wished for the obsolescence of their own profession. In a November 17, 2009 Gaza Mom post El-Haddad stressed “this is not a normalization initiative” — not dialogue to smooth out a “conflict”, but a project about a colonial military occupation requiring decolonization and reparation; its logo, by Dan Phiffer, is a broken beach umbrella and a crossed-out “You Are Here”. El-Haddad herself lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and has been repeatedly denied reentry to Gaza; rerecording the tour was “a very strange, very emotional experience”: “It’s been a while since I’ve been able to return to Gaza, and so much has changed that I feel like a stranger—one that is nevertheless intimately familiar—with this city, this place I call home”; the tour was pieced together from her knowledge, her parents, Wikimapia and research — “nostalgia for the future”, in Brooklyn-based Palestinian filmmaker Nadia Awad’s phrase (PDF p.203-205). Section “My Boy Anthony Brought Gaza to Me”: on September 15, 2013, CNN aired Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — in a context of Israeli-controlled entry and exit, a virtual solidarity trip. In Jerusalem, chef Yotam Ottolenghi conceded of falafel that “it’s been done for generations here” rather than presenting it as Israeli; in Ramallah, Speed Sisters racer Betty Saadeh said in her second sentence, “When I drive, I speed. I feel free”; Palestinian writers praised the episode’s portrayal of Palestinians leading full lives. Maysoon Zayid wrote in the Daily Beast that Saadeh, “sporting a fantastic hot pink Bebe tank top, burst[ed] negative Arab female stereotypes, and showing everyone that there is more to Palestine than slingshots”, and that “Palestinians are trapped like rats in a cage with little open space to race or even breathe”; Bourdain, traveling along the Wall, called Aida Refugee Camp from inside “a prison” — an analogy Kelly faults for eliding literal prisoners and the difference between a nine-by-five-foot cell and an occupied homeland, while crediting its reminder of Israeli control over every aspect of Palestinian life (PDF p.205-207). Amer Zahr wrote: “Something amazing happened on CNN last night. Palestinians were portrayed as human beings”; “Part of being Palestinian in America is getting really excited whenever someone tells the truth about us on American TV. Kind of depressing, right?” (PDF p.207). Bourdain foregrounded Gaza’s closure: “Getting in and out of Gaza from Israel is truly one of the most surreal travel experiences you could have on Earth”; “Over 1.5 million people live in Gaza, most of them considered refugees … Israel decides who comes and goes, what gets in and what stays out.” Zayid, a Palestinian in the diaspora with cerebral palsy who has been denied permission to cross Erez to visit the A. M. Qattan Foundation’s Centre for the Child in Gaza City and cannot handle the treacherous Rafah route, concluded: “My boy Anthony brought Gaza to me” (PDF p.207-208). The episode is thus a virtual tour also for Palestinians denied entry — contingent on surveillance of activism, research and online profile — and a painful reminder of Bourdain’s expansive mobility as a famous, international, Jewish, non-Palestinian traveler. In Gaza, El-Haddad acts as Bourdain’s guide, reminding him over meals, as journalist Alex Kane retells it, of cooking under siege: fishermen “can’t go beyond three to six nautical miles”; the Israeli Navy will “shoot at the fishermen, they’ll spray cold water at them, they’ll destroy their boats, they’ll cut their fishing nets, they’ll detain them” (PDF p.208).

Chapter 6 — food under siege, and Bourdain on representation (PDF p.209-210 / printed p.192-193)

El-Haddad’s guiding continues on fishing: the catches are not as big because fishermen cannot go beyond three to six nautical miles — “Nine nautical miles, that’s where that deep sea channel is where you’re going to get the really good catches” — the Israeli Navy shooting at fishermen, spraying cold water, destroying boats, cutting nets and detaining them (PDF p.209). Kelly: El-Haddad underscores how Israel limits not only movement but what Palestinians can eat, without mentioning Israel’s “calorie count” limiting Gaza food during the blockade between 2007 and 2010. Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun (2019) interviewee Essa Ghrayeb, at the Zahra hotel in eastern Occupied Jerusalem: “you can’t discuss Palestinian food without talking about the Occupation. About the water restrictions, about the inability to move freely, about the checkpoints, about the house demolitions. This isn’t me being political, this is me explaining that the Occupation affects how we eat. You can’t escape it” (PDF p.209). Bourdain sought to show both the joys of Palestinian cooking and how occupation affects eating; in Alex Kane’s words the episode, while not without problems, gave American viewers “a window into how ordinary Palestinians live—and eat”. Bourdain recalled Palestinians excited simply to be portrayed living daily lives — “so used to camera crews coming in to just get the usual shots of rock throwing kids and crying women” — and elaborated: “For some, unfortunately, depicting Palestinians as anything other than terrorists is proof positive that you have an agenda”, and “depicting Palestinians as anything other than terrorists is proof positive that you have an agenda” (PDF p.209-210). Kelly credits Bourdain with a twofold task many visitors do not attempt: refusing to center Palestinians’ subjection, and bringing Gaza to the outside world and the outside world to Gaza while Gaza is sequestered from the rest of Palestine and the world.

Chapter 6 — the visual economy and Habjouqa’s Occupied Pleasures (PDF p.210-216 / printed p.193-199)

The section What, You Don’t Have Babies in Your Country?: On the Visual Economy of Palestine and the Foreclosure of Palestinian Joy argues Palestinian life beyond subjection is rarely the subject of report-backs; social life is eclipsed by representations of Palestinians subjected to Israel’s punitive whims, and hanging out does not incite the outrage that descriptions of the Wall and Hebron settlers do. Photographer Tanya Habjouqa’s Occupied Pleasures (2015) works against the “visual narrative of Palestinians” circumscribed to “stone-throwing teenagers confronting Israeli soldiers, refugee camps, mothers mourning children killed in conflicts, and long lines at border crossing points”; James Estrin in the New York Times: “Particularly dramatic variations on these visual tropes make the front pages and win awards” (PDF p.210). One guide described artists coming to Palestine to make their work more meaningful by photographing stone-throwing youth; another wanted to ask tourists snapping nonconsensual photographs of poor Palestinian children in refugee camps, “What, you don’t have babies in your country?” (PDF p.211). Habjouqa’s images: women practicing yoga on nature walks to spots Jewish settlers try to intimidate Palestinians from accessing (figure 6.3); Al Quds University students in javelin practice near the Wall (figure 6.4); Ramallah teenagers preparing for a school dance (figure 6.5) (PDF p.211-212). In Gaza, where the visual economy is structured by international photographers with press passes producing almost exclusively images of a suffering, war-torn population, she shows a parkour troupe propelling off buildings damaged by Israeli incursions (figure 6.6), a toy store van driving along Gaza’s beach highway (figure 6.7), a woman cuddling lion cubs born in the Rafah Zoo — Gaza once had six zoos, two closed; keepers famously painted a donkey as a zebra, smuggled animals through tunnels and stuffed them once dead (figure 6.8) — and a woman without a travel permit marching through an underground tunnel to a party in Egypt clutching flowers, the tunnels an essential lifeline for the 1.7m population of the coastal enclave (figures 6.8-6.9, PDF p.213-216). Kelly, with Rafeef Ziadah’s “We teach life, Sir”: Habjouqa shows Palestinians teaching life, resisting both a Palestine defined solely by occupation and a narrative equating life with joy alone, and her images ask viewers what narratives they assimilated to need reminding Palestinians are human (PDF p.216).

Chapter 6 — Banksy’s mock invitation and the Gaza Parkour Team’s answer (PDF p.216-222 / printed p.199-205)

The section So Meet Your Tour Guides: On the Palestinian Right to Tourism turns to Banksy’s February 2015 Gaza work: three pieces indicting Israel’s most recent assault and a satirical promotional video, just under two minutes, opening “Make this the year you discover a new destination” and “Welcome to Gaza” (figure 6.10), with captions “Well away from the tourist track”, “(Access is via a network of illegal tunnels)”, “The locals like it so much they never leave”, “(Because they’re not allowed to)”, “Nestled in an exclusive setting”, “(Surrounded by a Wall on three sides and a line of gunboats on the other)”, “Watched over by friendly neighbours”, “(In 2014, Operation Protective Edge destroyed 18,000 homes)”, “Development opportunities are everywhere”, “(No cement has been allowed into Gaza since the bombing)” and “Plenty of scope for refurbishment” (PDF p.216-217). A shot of Qalandia checkpoint in Ramallah appears, unexplained, in the Gaza montage. The camera pans Banksy’s pieces — Niobe weeping on a demolished building’s standing wall, a surveillance tower turned into an amusement park swing, a cat playing with coiled debris — and a Palestinian man comments: “The cat found something to play with. But what about our children?” Banksy explained the cat as commentary on internet audiences who only look at pictures of kittens; the final shot is wall writing in red capitals: “If we wash our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless we side with the powerful—we don’t remain neutral” (PDF p.217-219). The Gaza Parkour Team answered immediately with After Banksy: The Parkour Guide to Gaza: over Banksy’s kitten, “Banksy says make Gaza your destination”; Shadia Mansour’s music; a youth backflipping as Israeli bombs explode in the background; “so meet your tour guides” (figures 6.14-6.15). Abdallah AlQassab: “Nearly 50 percent of us are unemployed and we are very available to show you” (PDF p.219-220). The team scales walls and Banksy’s own pieces, transforming the detritus of incursion into a training course, and extends invitations to a hypothetical tourist: though Israel refuses construction materials and twelve thousand people are homeless, they could host a guest; though Israel limits electricity and shut down Gaza’s single power plant, they could offer meals; though Gaza’s water is undrinkable, they would share expensive bottled water. At the sea: “We want to go out, we want to see the parkour teams, we want to see everything. We want to do a lot of things and we dream a lot”; “Seeing the world will remain a dream until the borders open”; and the closing plea: “But with all of this happening in Gaza, we are here, and alive, and our spirit is very strong. So come, and discover us, and make Gaza your destination” (PDF p.220-221). Kelly: the team’s critique is not that Banksy’s work is by and for internationals — their video, too, is in English for his audience — but that his narrative is incomplete, pivoting solely on devastation, evacuating hope and positioning tourism as a joke instead of a potentiality under different conditions; their critique theorizes their isolation, expressing a desire to be tourists as well as to host them, recalling a guide in Beit Sahour: “they have a right to tourism” (PDF p.221-222).

Chapter 6 — Gaza 2050: the virtual museum halted by Protective Edge (PDF p.222-225 / printed p.205-208)

In “The Gaza Strip 2050”, during the 2014-2015 academic year, Gaza University students, in collaboration with Indiana University in Indianapolis under Ian McIntosh and Jamil Alfaleet, charted a vision for Gaza in 2050 through research, interviews, field trips, video calls and meetings with archivists and archaeologists, identifying tourism as the “key to a renewed and thriving economy” and, with Indianapolis students, a virtual museum of 252 sites of touristic potential alongside an imagined overland pilgrimage route connecting Gaza City and Jerusalem; Gaza would return to its status as the “jewel of the Mediterranean”, not in its pre-1948 version but in a contemporary, thriving iteration (PDF p.222). The work halted with Operation Protective Edge, launched July 7, 2014 and lasting fifty days: between July 7 and August 26, 2,131 Palestinians were murdered and 18,000 housing units destroyed, rendering 108,000 Palestinians homeless; Israel bombed Gaza’s only power plant on July 29, shutting down water treatment plants, and destroyed Gaza’s largest sewage treatment plant; students saw twenty-two of their schools destroyed and six of their teachers killed; 419 businesses were damaged and 128 destroyed; 42,000 acres of cropland were destroyed and access to the sea prohibited (PDF p.222-223). The students chose 2050 for distance from blockade, unemployment, poverty and the water and sewage crisis; their scene had vibrant seaports and airports, high-tech high-rises, sports centers, transportation networks, green spaces and water parks, thriving fishing and strawberry and citrus production; they dedicated the spring semester solely to tourism, visiting and identifying over 250 sites — churches, mosques, bazaars, Silk Route ruins, sites associated with Cleopatra’s Egypt, fortresses, Cypriot, Mycenaean and Minoan artifacts — and envisioning return of artifacts stolen from Gaza to museums in Israel and elsewhere (PDF p.223-224). Their logistics question: “If three million tourists or pilgrims were to pass through the Gaza Strip and on to Haram al-Sharif, how would the people of Gaza feed them? Where would they be housed? What forms of entertainment would be available to them, like museums, parks, and cultural activities?” Through “back casting” they built a Virtual Museum of Gaza; one entry charted fisherman Jawdat Abu Ghurab’s 2013 discovery of a statue of Apollo — 2,100 years old, 450 kilograms, 1.75 meters, estimated value US$340 million (PDF p.224). McIntosh and Alfaleet’s article describes holding the course together as bombs rained down, Alfaleet using his car battery to power Skype calls and becoming “a tour guide of the macabre”; Alfaleet was “tired of words”; at the year’s end it was unknown how many of the 252 sites still existed, and the museum has not (yet) come to fruition beyond their writing (PDF p.225). Kelly argues the students positioned tourism as both an anticolonial project and one possible in the wake of decolonization, and that “key” also invokes the key of return held by Palestinians displaced in 1948.

Chapter 6 closing — Assali’s postcard from a liberated Gaza (PDF p.225-227 / printed p.208-210)

For +972 Magazine’s New Futures project in 2020, anthropologist and filmmaker Hadeel Assali crafted “Postcard from a Liberated Gaza” (December 25, 2020), dated July 20, 2024 and addressed to “E”: every day she meets friends on the beach “just like we do in Luquillo” — another beach under colonial rule, in Puerto Rico; elders, “like stand-up comedians”, regale her with tales of throwing off the occupiers; “people have been coming to Gaza from all over”; “say it is just like the old days when everyone from the surrounding regions would descend on Gaza, in part for the beaches and the fresh seafood—grilled grouper, clay pot shrimp, and fried sardines are the favorites. But people especially come for the shopping. You should see the markets!” The tunnels are metamorphosed into educational tourist sites; she analogizes the resistance guides to how “E” speaks of the Macheteros in Puerto Rico — “I see your eyes when you tell me about the Macheteros in Puerto Rico” — and ends: “What do you say? Come to Gaza. I will wait for you here” (PDF p.225-226). The chapter closes: in the fifteen years since the most recent siege began, and in spite of and because of UN declarations that Gaza would be unlivable by 2020, Palestinians in Gaza — activists, professors, students, chefs, shop owners, performers, anthropologists, filmmakers, science fiction writers — have labored through collaborative, creative, transnational and virtual tourism projects to exercise their right to host and to be tourists, intervening in Israel’s severing of Gaza from Palestine and the world and in images of Gaza as solely destruction, demanding a Gaza beyond subjection — comedy clubs, tunnel tours, museums, beach cafés, mobility, vitality — and attempting, between Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, Protective Edge and the eleven-day assault of May 2021, to “teach life” through tourism (PDF p.227). [Chapter 6 ends.]

Chapter 7 opening — evidence, spray paint and a moved school (PDF p.228-234 / printed p.211-217)

Chapter 7, “Witnesses in Palestine: Imperfect Analogies, Acts of Translation, and Refusals to Perform”, opens in Nablus in 2012: a US tourist, stopping at a blackened section of wall beside a shop door coming off its hinges and followed eagerly by the other tourists in search of evidence, asks “What happened here?”; the guide shrugs: “Someone was just spray-painting their bedframe against the wall.” The tourist, visibly disenchanted, mumbles, “Oh … I thought it was from, like, a bomb or something.” In Aida Refugee Camp in 2019 a returning tourist asks about the UN school next to the Wall in Bethlehem, riddled with bullet holes, recently shuttered and moved; the guide is glad it moved farther from the Wall, less a monument to Israeli assaults; the tourist, palpably disappointed: “But it would have been so good to show tourists!” “Why?” “For evidence!” “Look around you”, the guide says, gesturing to the camp’s narrow streets, the Wall, the murals. “There is evidence everywhere” (PDF p.228-229). The chapter asks what it means for tourists to come in search of evidence despite the voluminous Palestinian archive, how tourists reconcile expectations with what they witness, and how guides resist performing subjection within a profession relying on that performance; it refuses a good guide/bad tourist framework, troubles who counts as a “solidarity tourist” — diaspora Palestinians returning only as tourists, backpackers who stumble across a tour — and theorizes guides’ studied refusal: harvests, meals and hanging out as foregrounding a Palestine refusing definition solely by Israel’s restrictions, and social life resisting what Lila Sharif calls the vanishment of Palestine (PDF p.229-231). In the section You Almost Can’t Believe It until You See the Tears in Their Eyes, contemporary tourists echo first intifada report-backs: one tourist’s line epitomizes the asymmetry of “occupation tourism” — skepticism and spectatorship demanding a performance of suffering as proof, its “almost” absolving the tourist’s disbelief while centering witnessed suffering. Kelly situates the disbelief not in individual ignorance but in epistemic violence: circulated knowledge positions Israel as a beacon of democracy, US media demands an Israeli perspective to “balance” a Palestinian one, and Palestinians are presumed unable to diagnose their own condition; organizing is thus a refusal to ask “permission to narrate” (PDF p.231-232). Tourists’ imagined geographies are documented: “I didn’t even know where Palestine was!”; “I was literally expecting tents”; “When I thought of Palestine, I thought of hijacking airplanes and the Achille Lauro; I thought of the Palestinians murdering an old Jewish man in a wheelchair”; Palestinian Americans who knew the brutality still found it “one hundred times worse”; Ann Laura Stoler’s “shock of recognition” (PDF p.232-233). Alice Walker’s Gaza account after Cast Lead — “basically unbelievable even as I am standing here” — is parsed as a four-step formula of the report-back: astonishment; translating witnessing for US audiences (“you could never convince anyone that this is actually happening”); endorsement of solidarity tourism (“it’s totally important that people come to visit and to see for themselves”); and a call to action from US complicity — “I have come here, in part, to see what I’m buying with my tax money” (PDF p.232-234).

Chapter 7 — “What Hits Home”: translation and Marietta Macy (PDF p.235-238 / printed p.218-221)

Asked how they translate witnessing for doubtful audiences at home, tourists curate moments that will “hit home”: Maggie Goff shares stories of Palestinians near the Wall separated from relatives; Addis Green shares communicating with children in Jenin through gestures and fragments of English and Arabic; Sarah Alzanoon shares Israeli theft of West Bank water, tangible in drought-conscious California; Olga Negrón finds her pictures most affecting; Marietta Macy shares farming communities and destroyed land (PDF p.235). Macy — a Presbyterian youth minister in Louisville, Kentucky, from a rural Indiana farming family — tailors her report-backs: for Indiana farmers, who know land threatened by corporations and crop mandates, she draws on the Olive Tree Campaign, planting in Jab’a and watching Palestinian kids play on tractors: “City folk [on the tour] were super worried about the kids, but I knew they were fine because that’s what my childhood looked like.” Her legitimacy is positional: “Me—a white girl they know and trust—is talking to them about people they’ve been told are terrorists and deserve everything that is happening to them” (PDF p.236). Kelly reads this alchemy — tourist to expert through whiteness, against both her guides and the undifferentiated Palestinian mass — as a textbook case of the coalescence of sexism, Orientalism, Islamophobia and Zionism in knowledge production about Palestine. For her wealthy, white, Republican Louisville church she relies instead on Bible examples — Jesus riding a donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem would be obstructed by checkpoints at every turn — against Indiana’s “Fox News mentality” (PDF p.237). The labor of the profession, in Baha Hilo’s phrase, is Palestinians “correcting the story the state of Israel sells”, and enabling tourists to correct it at home; that believing Palestinians requires travel, or listening to those who traveled but are not from Palestine, is what makes the project wholly limited by its own starting point (PDF p.237-238).

Chapter 7 — “Translating Palestine”: Jim Crow, South Africa, Turtle Island (PDF p.238-244 / printed p.221-227)

Tourists turn to analogy to understand Israel’s racial taxonomies. Alzanoon, ordered to stay on the bus while Palestinians were ordered off to be searched: “So I kind of felt like there was Black and white people on the bus, and the Black people have to leave the bus to get searched, and the white person … you know? Like I kind of felt like it was a situation like that, where you have people with more rights than others, who are first class and second class. That’s something that really … I was crying on the bus behind my sunglasses, because I was just like, this is so wrong” — an analogy of the Jim Crow South she reuses in report-backs. Yvonne Lory: “only the people who have done civil rights work in the United States or somewhere else, like if they’ve been to South Africa or somewhere like that, those are the only people who kind of understand without having been there” (PDF p.238). Kelly catalogues the scripted analogies — (1) the contemporary West Bank and the Jim Crow South, and after Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, militarized racialized policing; (2) apartheid South Africa and contemporary Palestine; (3) Native American genocide across Turtle Island and settler colonialism in Palestine — and asks what they gain, what they lose, and how they can both resist exceptionalizing Palestine and relegate racialized violence elsewhere to a finished past (PDF p.239). Both Lory and Alzanoon describe witnessing as participatory — enacting segregation: Lory walking Shuhada Street without her Palestinian friends, “they literally could not leave an area to join you, or to join me”, her correction from “you” to “me” indexing complicity (PDF p.240). Public figures echo the hierarchies: Walker called Palestine “more brutal” than Jim Crow; Robin D. G. Kelley, after a USACBI tour, witnessed “a level of racist violence [he] had never seen growing up as a Black person in the States”; Achille Mbembe describes Palestine as worse than the Bantustans and approximating a “high-tech Jim Crow cum Apartheid”; Kelly asks what is gained by positioning Palestine as the “biggest moral scandal of our times” (PDF p.240-241). The Africa Is a Country e-book on the South Africa/Israel analogy is read through Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs: the analogy is apt in conquest predicated on religion and ethnic nationalism, discriminatory laws and displacement, and Archbishop Tutu stated conditions in the West Bank and Gaza are “worse than apartheid”, yet “In pursuing the comparison, there may be as much to learn from the questions of liberation that the South African struggle failed to answer fully”; Kelley’s essay in the volume uses his delegation’s witnessing — the Wall’s path, demolitions, checkpoints, uprooted olive trees, segregated settlements and camps, Absentee Property Law theft — against the claim the analogy does not hold (PDF p.241-242). Loubna Qutami’s account of the Palestinian Youth Movement’s April 2019 delegation to Johannesburg records uneasiness with the analogy’s focus on desegregation over decolonization and its embrace for BDS work, concluding in South Africa as an “incomplete decolonization” requiring joint-struggle analysis and commitment to global, full decolonization (PDF p.242). T. J. Tallie’s essay complicates the analogy through Jodi Byrd on the “ungrievable Indian”: “my own country, the United States, is built upon a history of the ungrievable Indian, a necropolitics that decides that while unfortunate, the death and clearing of Indigenous peoples is a necessity for securing the settler state”; and Tallie, “As a non-native person of color, I understand very well the constant and disproportionate violence meted out to nonwhite peoples within the United States” — claims to belong made through an American identity existing only through Indigenous oppression (PDF p.242-243). Such comparisons often position US colonialism as “settled” and Palestine as still actionable; in Bethlehem in 2019 Baha Hilo asked a tourist from Bethesda, Maryland, “and what do the Indigenous people of Bethesda, Maryland, call their land?”; she balked: “They don’t, I don’t know, no one is alive to ask, they’re all dead.” She was wrong: Bethesda’s land is that of the Piscataway Conoy Tribe and Piscataway Indian Nation, recognized by Maryland in 2012 (PDF p.243-244).

Chapter 7 — analogies’ erasures, Black-Palestine solidarity and RL’s reversal (PDF p.244-248 / printed p.227-231)

Katie Kane’s November 2014 American Studies Association panel use of Visualizing Palestine’s “Uprooted” infographic (figure 7.1) — bulldozers uprooting Central Park to render olive-tree destruction legible to US citizens, admittedly reductive — enacts its own erasure of Native histories on Manhattan; audience member J. Kēhaulani Kauanui intervened for the Lenape people, for whom the uprooting of what is now Central Park was not hypothetical (PDF p.244-245). Tourists, Kelly argues, see Palestine differently and can enact erasure while organizing against it; solidarity organizing’s memes are criticized likewise — “How would you feel?” maps shrinking Canada, the US and Australia, answered for a Canadian group’s tweet by “That’s pretty much how the Indigenous people of Canada do feel” — while corrective Palestinian-Indigenous maps highlight shared legacies relegating neither to the past (PDF p.245-246). After Ferguson, Black Lives Matter and George Floyd’s murder in summer 2020, work on Black-Palestine solidarity is read against posts insinuating the US learned racist state violence from Israel: US police “were born in racist violence” — slave patrols in the South, control of migrant industrial workers in the North and Midwest, coercion of Native labor and immigration enforcement in the West — and, as Nada Elia noted, Israeli training of US police began only after 9/11, while US racist state violence predates Israel by centuries; positioning Israel as teacher absolves the US of its colonial history (PDF p.246-247). RL, a Black artist and organizer with the Dream Defenders interviewed on the last day of a 2019 ten-day tour, reverses the temporal logic: Palestine is not the US’s past but a reminder of legalized segregation and a dangerous prediction of the future — “They drive on separate roads. They can’t move without someone telling them”; “We’re not the only ones. This is a global struggle that we’re in. And if we sit by and just watch it happen, then we’re already dead”; “we need to be right up on that shit as it happens”; “Somebody is actively trying to push all the Black and brown folks out of this world. Why is that? Like, who said that only one person can live on this planet? And then, furthermore, who said only one person can benefit from what this planet produces?” (PDF p.247-248).

Chapter 7 — “Witnessing, Contextualized”: Noelle Farasha, witness for (PDF p.248-253 / printed p.231-236)

For diaspora Palestinians “allowed” entry, the tour is the only way back. Noelle Farasha, over mint tea and cigarettes in eastern Occupied Jerusalem in 2019, chose an activist delegation emphasizing cultural production and the arts — she is a practitioner of Palestinian embroidery — as the only option for a return, however fleeting, to her father’s village Silat ad-Dhahr: “It’s either Jenin or Nablus, depending on who you’re talking to” Her grandfather was working construction in Kuwait in 1967 when Israelis invaded the village; her grandmother left via Jordan with the children to protect them, a generational memory of the Nakba playing a factor; “My dad’s family is split between three, well, four places, technically. Jordan, Kuwait, the United States, Palestine.” With family ties severed — “What the occupation does is force you to not have that connection” — she asked, “If I just went back by myself, what actually would I be getting out of it? Really? Because they’d be like, Who’s this woman showing up?” and, with a partner from Gaza who cannot go back and a father who probably never will, “How do I safely go to the homeland? And be able to see it and experience it?” (PDF p.248-249). Entry meant hours of interrogation — her campus activism already monitored by Canary Mission — “These risks are the reasons why a regular Palestinian wouldn’t come” Her witnessing is not to violations but for others: “I think the best way for me as a Palestinian is just the witness part of this. Witnessing my homeland for other people”; “A big part of this trip was being in Palestine for other people” (PDF p.249-250). Her father opposed the trip: “When it comes to Israel no one can or will help you—trust me. There are many fine examples out there for you to consider. When you’re dead, in prison, or seriously injured, there’s little to nothing that can be done for you. Do not like the idea” [as printed] (PDF p.250). After interrogation she emerged to a failure of solidarity: the delegation and organizers, avoiding the “risk” of waiting, had left for the Jerusalem hotel an hour away; she took a taxi alone, at her own cost: “If you’re a young Palestinian woman, that’s kind of like a risky situation; they were like, ‘Good luck! We’re on WhatsApp!’” (PDF p.251). On a day running from Omar Barghouti in Haifa in the morning to Mustafa Sheta at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, kanafeh on Nablus’s outskirts and Nabi Saleh by evening — a tourist asked Sheta if he was a Palestinian citizen in Israel — the bus drove through Silat ad-Dhahr without stopping, while she filmed it whole to send to family: “So part of it is being a witness for them, to share that experience with them, because who knows when/if/ever they want to come back to their village”; “I would have loved to stop in my village, for, you know, just like five minutes. You know? And I wish that had been more of a priority for their Palestinian delegates. Like, this is like a return, in a way. So how are you incorporating that idea into the program? Shouldn’t there be at least a free day for the Palestinians to figure out how to get to their village, experience their village, in whatever way they could?” (PDF p.251-252). Kelly argues tours for diaspora Palestinians can enact a politics of radical care, and that the “Occupation Bootcamp” itinerary — unable to wait out an interrogation, unable to stop in a delegate’s village, unable to account for pleasure — misses the chance to mitigate harm and make space for Palestinian joy; the insistence on joy and the slowness of pleasure are radical, necessary acts of care (PDF p.253-254).

Chapter 7 — “Hanging Out in Palestine”: leisure, hospitality and the Flytilla (PDF p.254-259 / printed p.237-242)

Addis Green, a Black queer prison abolitionist from Chicago who came with the Freedom Bus to counter the combative “Have you been there?”, mused: “I never thought there would be hanging out in Palestine.” After ten Freedom Theatre playback performances “lost its charm”, the nonorchestrated moments — meeting children in Jenin and Bethlehem, connecting one-to-one — mattered more; in “the fragments between scheduled events” a Palestine appeared not defined only as “always under attack”, and “Hanging out with people” resonated “because I felt like we weren’t ‘witnessing’ them, because it wasn’t like a safari adventure through a war zone. It deviated from that” (PDF p.254). Hanging out — recipes, movies, tea, jokes, music, food, singing, laughter — is for Yazan al-Zubaidy a necessary end-of-day detox for guides and tourists alike; Green wanted to be in “real time”, not accumulating evidence: “You have to honor the thing” Green also names tourists’ helplessness and the preoccupation with tourists’ feelings, boredom, discomfort and “feeling good”, endemic to tourism (PDF p.255). Against the claim that enjoyment weakens the case against occupation, Green: “People want to put the most horrific images out there to create the urgency and to vilify the occupation, but there aren’t enough images of Palestinian people, framed in a way that doesn’t mitigate [critiques of] Israel, images of the hospitality, kindness, images that aren’t about witnessing them” (PDF p.256). Olga Negrón’s surprise at hospitality — “We witnessed the extreme kindness, generosity, and friendliness of the Palestinian people. It was actually quite startling to me that, even though living under years and years of the occupation, people wouldn’t be hardened or bitter toward outsiders, especially Americans”; “one of the most welcoming people I have ever visited” — raises Kelly’s question: why do Palestinians have to be welcoming to be free? The “friendliness of the Native” is a colonial trope (Kincaid, Alexander, Walcott), yet in Palestine hospitality also answers a state that polices and surveils tourism itself (PDF p.256-257). In 2012 the “Welcome to Palestine” campaign, the Flytilla, brought activists to Ben Gurion declaring they were going to Palestine; they were not let in, often not allowed to board in their home countries; Flytilla organizer Mazin Qumsiyeh: “Even prisoners are allowed visits” (PDF p.257-258). Kelly closes the part: leisure, hanging out and hospitality answer a state apparatus seeking to keep Palestinians isolated; guides’ hanging out refuses the subjection they are expected to perform, reverses tourist tropes, and works against the accumulation of evidence in a context where evidence abounds; the Olive Tree Campaign’s reversal — tourist presence reframed not as tourists’ gift to Palestinians but as Palestinians’ gift to tourists — opens a feminist, prismatic reading of solidarity tourism as both industry and anticolonial praxis, treating the evidence of settler colonialism as already real, with or without witnessing (PDF p.258-259). The next section, “Solidarity Tourists, the Incoherence of a Category, and Joy Reconsidered”, begins by returning to the chapter’s opening tourists. [Chapter 7 continues in part 6.]

Chapter 7 closing — “Solidarity Tourists, the Incoherence of a Category, and Joy Reconsidered” (PDF p.260-261 / printed p.243-244)

The section that began at PDF p.259 closes the chapter: tourists sift the evidence Palestinians have been marshaling since before 1948 for resonant pieces to convince skeptical audiences back home, while differently positioned tourists relate differently to the invitation — for Noelle Farasha, witnessing is witnessing for one’s family, a policed and surveilled return, but a return nonetheless, in the place of those who cannot. Guides’ and organizers’ labor is to navigate and refuse tourist expectations that hosts will rehearse their dispossession and reenact their trauma of exile, even while the profession traffics in walking tourists through evidence of destruction; guides slowly and deliberately attempt to shift tourists’ allegiances and must make space for tourists who, like Farasha, may be in Palestine to step foot in a village their family cannot return to (PDF p.260). Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail spectacularly. Solidarity tourism is a project only possible where violence at the site of knowledge production — the Epistemic Violence Gayatri Spivak outlined in 1988 in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” — has structured the guide-tourist relationship, against the celebration of Israel as a moral and modern democracy and of the tourist as “saving” the subaltern. Sara Ahmed: evidence is “what you accumulate when you are not given places to go”; “evidence of walls does not bring the walls down” yet still you accumulate it — guides are “not given places to go” literally (movement foreclosed, geography circumscribed) and in narration (stories prewritten, expectations predetermined, accumulated evidence too often ignored), and their itineraries are sometimes so scripted they cannot make space for the exiled whose stories make up the tour (PDF p.260-261). Because Palestinians are “not allowed visitors” and often not allowed to leave, or to return if they leave too long, particularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank, tourism is also the only place they are given to go. Guides know providing evidence is not enough — tourists’ work is catalyzed, not begun, in Palestine — and measure success as teachers do: “If I have a tour of twenty, and I reach five people, or one, I consider that a success.” Part of that success is evidencing not only displacement but Palestinians living and crafting pleasure under occupation, refusing to rehearse the performance of their own suffering and refusing the foreclosure of their own joy (PDF p.261). [Chapter 7 ends.]

Conclusion — “On Futurity, Failure, and Precarious Hope” (PDF p.262-269 / printed p.245-252)

The Conclusion opens with Donald Trump’s January 2020 “Deal of the Century”: a 181-page plan, a continuation of US-backed Israeli state policy intent on annexing as much land as possible, authored by Jared Kushner, who explained he was expert enough to divide Palestinian land because he had read twenty-five books on “the conflict”. Its cheery tourism note “gifts” Palestine investment, likens the future Gaza coast to Beirut, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore and Tel Aviv — “Unique and exciting characteristics give the West Bank and Gaza the potential to transform into a successful global tourism destination” — and, co-opting language approximating Laila el-Haddad’s You Are Not Here, writes in brochure form about Ramallah’s Rukab’s Ice Cream and Nablus’s kanafeh. Positioning tourism as a “Breakout Venture”, the Peace to Prosperity plan specifies $750millioninconcessionalfinancing,$200 million in grant funding and $375 million in loans for the “rehabilitation and development of tourism sites”, producing a Palestine even further segmented — segregated roads, racialized enclaves connected only by roads and tunnels controlled by Israel — in Yara Hawari’s words a plan of “total Palestinian capitulation”, an acceleration of the dystopian archipelago Julien Bousac envisioned in 2009. It demonstrates how tourism is intrinsic to the colonial project, and the danger of imagining postcards from Gaza without liberation first (PDF p.262-263). Tourism matters in Palestine because Israel has expropriated Palestinian narratives as it has expropriated land, and through tourism; the tourist formula of shock, disbelief and outrage is coupled with how impossible it was to prepare, and Kelly asks why tourists cannot believe it until they see it. Solidarity tourism is in many ways about failure — guides’ last-ditch attempt to “get through” to internationals, and audiences’ failure to believe Palestinian narratives until they witness them — and the recognition it catalyzes can itself fail when tourists do not read Palestine relationally, seeing US financial and political support for Israeli rule but not the “settler solidarities” and settler logics shared between the United States and Israel (PDF p.263-264). It has everything to do with privilege — to deny, decide to learn, travel, move, leave, demand evidentiary weight — which makes it impossible and irresponsible to romanticize it as an exemplar of resistance or a foolproof model for movement building; yet it cannot be dismissed as merely “occupation tourism” either, which would erase guides’ labor, refuse a generous reading of tourists interrogating their own complicity, and erase Palestine within Jerusalem and across Israel and Palestinians in the diaspora forced to experience return as tourists (PDF p.264-265). Kelly’s retelling spans over a century and traverses Historic Palestine without mirroring its fragmentation — diaspora visitors, Gaza-West Bank video chats, West Bank and 1948-border organizers who can never meet in person in Palestine, Tel Aviv and Bethlehem organizers meeting in Cape Town — tracing an ongoing Nakba from Zionist afforestation uprooting native trees in 1908, through Jerusalem dispossession in and before 1948, exile before and after 1967, and collective punishment in both intifadas, with resistance and joy cultivated at every stage (PDF p.265). Guides have formulated a tourism wholly invested in ending Israeli colonial rule, anticipating its own obsolescence: “I would love to not do this. If the occupation ended tomorrow, I would do something else. But it hasn’t, so I am here”; “We’ve tried violent resistance; we’ve tried negotiations; we’ve tried peace talks; we’ve tried complying with what the United States told us to do by working toward a two-state solution. The only thing left is to show the international community what is happening and compel them to do something”; “It’s part of the struggle now. If the third intifada happened tomorrow, our strategies would change” (PDF p.266). With Lori Allen, Palestinian cynicism is read as awareness and a motor of action; like Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, optimism and pessimism function in concert, and conditional futures — a third intifada, an end to colonial rule — animate the “now” of a pedagogy whose success is impossible to quantify and whose daily work is haunted by the possibility tourists will do nothing (PDF p.266-268). Yet, as Bisan Kassis explained, “one small thing will recalibrate you”: some tourists begin divestment initiatives, lobby their organizations to boycott Israeli academic institutions, give report-backs, bring others back, build working relationships with Palestinian farmers, scholars and archivists, or do nothing other than talk to friends, families, students or colleagues — defined by many guides as a success in itself (PDF p.268). Solidarity tourism positions hope, like solidarity itself, as “an incomplete and sometimes impossible endeavor, yet one that is altogether necessary”, recalibrated by “1 percent positive” in a sea of “99 percent negative”; an invitation that is both introduction and valediction, not meant to last forever, an indictment of colonialism and a labor of decolonization constrained and defined by colonial restrictions, refusing narratives of peace that sediment dispossession and demanding the impossible (PDF p.269). [Conclusion ends.]

Notes to the Introduction and Chapter 1 (PDF p.270-279 / printed p.253-262)

The Notes supply the book’s full citational apparatus. The Introduction notes ground its concepts: Muñoz on disidentification and Pratt’s contact zone (note 1-2); settler-colonial studies for Palestine, including Barakat on Indigenous studies as Palestine studies’ more fitting home, and Spivak’s coining of “epistemic violence” for violence at the site of knowledge production (notes 5, 8); Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi’s “solidarity industry” insight, from a November 2012 interview and the October 2013 MESA panel (note 7); the settlements definition under Article 49 of the Geneva Convention and the Nakba figure of 750,000-800,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced in 1948 (notes 10, 19); the witnessing literature and Kelly’s twofold witnessing / witnessing to, following Susan Harding (note 27); militourism’s genealogy in Teaiwa’s conversations with Louis Owens (note 33); and Kelly’s patchwork ethnography, stitched together because the project was not legible for full-year anthropology grants and she was unwilling to affiliate with an Israeli institution to extend fieldwork (note 45) (PDF p.270-275). The Chapter 1 notes record that delegations were not inaugurated in the first intifada — Malcolm X’s 1964 Gaza trip and Huey Newton’s 1980 trip are documented (note 1); Barbara Harlow’s dissertation-defense verdict — “Now I’m even more convinced by this project and even less convinced by solidarity tourism!” (note 3); Esmeir on humanizing subjects by declaring them subjects of the law, applied to humanizing by witnessing (note 39); Gluck’s unspoken invocations of Blackness (note 65); Israel’s 2014 Anti-Terror Bill seeking to recriminalize the Palestinian flag (note 79); the Alternative Museum delegation members’ biographies as Denson gives them (note 96); and the June 2021 Susan Greene / Art Forces virtual delegation to Silwan for the “I Witness Silwan” mural project (note 109) (PDF p.275-279).

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 (PDF p.280-289 / printed p.263-272)

The Chapter 2 notes source the archipelago figures to B’Tselem, “Taking Control of Land” (2013 data) (notes 7-11); record Bousac’s insistence his map is diagnostic, not about “drowning” the Israeli population (note 2); give John Kerry’s Brazil statement on settlement illegitimacy (note 22) and Said’s two long quotations on refugees’ public approbation and on Oslo’s redivision of Palestinian territory (notes 37, 42); name the sameness-narrative delegations — the 2011 Women of Color and Indigenous Feminist Delegation, the African Heritage Delegations of 2011, 2012 and 2014, and the 2015 Ferguson / Black Lives Matter / Black Youth Project 100 / Dream Defenders delegation (note 52); borrow “rearranging desire” from Spivak (note 54); and record the 2020 Jeopardy! ruling that Bethlehem is not in Palestine (note 77) (PDF p.280-284). The Chapter 3 notes give the JNF’s extended record: created in 1901 as a WZO subsidiary to “acquire lands in Palestine and Syria” for “persons of Jewish race, religion, or origin”, funder of the Zionist military effort in 1947-1948, recipient by 1954 of 35 percent of the land of internally displaced peoples and refugees, controller of 13 percent of the land in Israel in 2007 exclusively for Jews, and holder of six of thirteen Israel Land Authority seats, “continuing to play a key role in the policies and programs pertaining to 93 percent of the land of Israel” (note 14); Cohen’s three purposes of post-1948 planting — “security groves”, memorials, and “planting to hold the land” — plus the fourth, covering up village remains (note 33); Haganah-to-IDF and Dayr Yasin dates (note 21); the fifty thousand Palestinians living in the Seam Zone (note 54); the policed staples beyond olives — za’atar, thyme, cardamom, cumin, goats, donkeys and cattle — and the dictum attributed as alleged to Henry Kissinger, “control food and you control the people” (note 59); al-Araqib destroyed eighty times at dissertation filing (spring 2015) and 186 times by press (note 60); B’Tselem’s 2013 harvest record, eight of twenty-one attacks on land near settlements accessible only in harvest season under military coordination and escort (note 65); and Price Tag Attacks since 2008 (note 71). Hilo note 45 records the change between 2012 and 2019 research: organizers’ lamented inability to sustain face-to-face relations across fragmentation giving way to West Bank / inside-Israel collaboration, paralleled in the May-June 2021 Unity Intifada (PDF p.284-289). The Chapter 4 notes begin: Waste Siege on waste as everyday life, and Kelly’s Grassroots Al-Quds-derived use of eastern and western Occupied Jerusalem, since Israel occupied West Jerusalem in 1948 as well as East Jerusalem in 1967 (notes 1-2) (PDF p.289).

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 (PDF p.290-295 / printed p.273-278)

The Chapter 4 notes source residency revocation to Al-Haq (notes 9-13); record the Simon Wiesenthal Institute’s involvement in the 2014 firing of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in Robin D. G. Kelley’s account (note 16); Jacir’s Ex Libris (2010-2012) documenting the thirty thousand books appropriated by the Israeli state in 1948 from Palestinian homes, libraries and institutions, six thousand labeled “AP: Abandoned Property”, and Brunner’s 2012 documentary The Great Book Robbery (note 44); the IDF/IOF naming note (note 57); and Ali Jiddah’s biography — an Afro-Palestinian Jerusalemite whose family is originally from Chad, attacked by two teenage settlers in the Jewish Quarter while leading a French tour group in 2012, whose group stayed with him at the hospital all night (note 58) (PDF p.290-292). The Chapter 5 notes record Zochrot’s fee practice — regularly scheduled tours free, designed tours for other organizations charged (note 9); Davis’s Palestinian Village Histories (2010) on over four hundred depopulated villages’ memory books and Kadman’s Erased from Space and Consciousness (2015) on the 418 villages depopulated in 1948 (note 4); the BADIL-Zochrot Cape Town study-visit report-back in full citation sequence; Barclay’s “Exile and Return to Miska” in sequence; DAAR’s Studio in Exile and Zochrot’s “Truth and Redress” conference archive (notes 84-85); and the WAFA reports on Palestine VR (notes 90-92) (PDF p.293-295).

Notes to Chapters 6 and 7 and the Conclusion, and the Bibliography opening (PDF p.296-305 / printed p.279-288)

The Chapter 6 notes date the virtual delegation to August 17, 2017 (note 1); update the You Are Not Here sites — the Arts and Crafts Village damaged by Israeli strikes in July 2018, Kazem’s Ice Cream Parlor factory destroyed by Israeli shelling in May 2021, and ten members of the Abu Hatab family, eight of them children, murdered in May 2021 at al-Shati (Beach) Camp (note 4); record Kane’s noted problems with the Bourdain episode — no mention of the Nakba or return, and no mention of Israel’s 2008-2009 and 2012 bombing campaigns in Gaza (note 41); and, in the Gaza 2050 sequence, attribute to McIntosh and Alfaleet the note that Moshe Dayan, a central actor in the Apollo statue’s looting story as a general and amateur archaeologist, “claimed that he would license a Palestinian fighter pilot before he would ever license a Palestinian tour guide” (note 84) (PDF p.296-298). The Chapter 7 notes give the chapter’s earlier version in Feminist Formations 32, no.2 (2020) (note 1); Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (note 29); the Apartheid Israel e-book’s publication history around the February 2014 American Studies Association boycott endorsement and the November 2014 African Studies Association meeting (note 39); Elia’s note on shared US-Israel settler solidarities — shared technologies of violence, shared weaponry, shared settler logics — with historical specificity retained (note 54); the Flytilla note that Israel banned visits entirely for prisoners from Gaza in 2007-2012 and severely restricted them after, and that some 70 percent of Palestinians have had a family member imprisoned (note 84); and the “center of life” note dating the policy to Israel’s 1988 Supreme Court judgment (note 87) (PDF p.298-302). The Conclusion notes source the plan to the Trump White House, “Peace to Prosperity” (notes 1-2), cynicism to Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, 16 (note 9), the post-tour working relationships to Perfect Potion, Harvest Peace and Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, begun as a summer 2013 delegation (note 10), hope to Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia and Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (note 12), and the refusal of intractability to Spade (note 13) (PDF p.302-303). The Bibliography opens at PDF p.304 and runs alphabetically; this part reads its A entries through Amiry, Golda Slept Here (2014) (PDF p.304-305). [Bibliography continues in part 7.]

Key passages

• “They called me a tourist, which I found insulting.” — a first intifada delegate’s reflection, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.18 / printed p.1).

• “I argue that solidarity tourism is a fraught anticolonial strategy in Palestine that follows a series of conventions.” (PDF p.19 / printed p.2)

• “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 / printed p.4)

• “You do far more for our movement by writing your members of Congress than you do by getting shot by a rubber bullet at a demonstration.” — guides’ repeated formulation, as reported by Kelly (PDF p.24 / printed p.7).

• “By Historic Palestine, I mean all of Palestine.” (PDF p.33 / printed p.16)

• “the suturing of witnessing to evidence is a central problem of solidarity tourism. What Palestinians confront is not a question of evidence but a question of epistemology.” (PDF p.44 / printed p.27)

• “We’ve said this many times, in different ways, the PLO as well, it’s not possible that you haven’t heard. You didn’t want to hear!” — Palestinian hosts to the February 1988 Physicians for Human Rights delegation in Gaza, as quoted in its report-back (PDF p.54 / printed p.37).

• “What is this road show all about? This isn’t a picnic here. Why are you in our homeland?” — a Palestinian woman in Gaza to American delegates, as recalled by Deborah Willis (PDF p.59 / printed p.42).

• “Yet, for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms.” — Edward Said, After the Last Sky (1999), as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.66 / printed p.49).

• “It is clear, both then and now, that what Palestinian tour guides, organizers, and hosts confront is not a question of evidence. Evidence of the violence of Israeli settler colonial state practice is as accessible as it is abundant. What Palestinians confront is a question of epistemology.” (PDF p.74 / printed p.57)

• “We don’t have a Palestinian brand. What we promote is pilgrimage; that’s what Israel promotes.” — Michel Awad of the Siraj Center, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.82 / printed p.65).

• “Israel, Israel, Israel.” — Baha Hilo, ending his summary of the one supported narrative, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.83 / printed p.66).

• “I’ve seen more of Palestine than a large portion of the Palestinian population.” — Maggie Goff on her ten-day 2012 tour, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.96 / printed p.79).

• “Just to stay where you are. And to live.” — Yazan al-Zubaidy on what tourist income does for a Hebron family, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.102 / printed p.85).

• “Once you accept their money,” he said, “it’s all over.” — Nabhan Mousa, farmer in al-Khader, on refusing Israeli money for annexed land, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.106 / printed p.89).

• “The Israelis destroyed one hundred trees. We came back with three hundred.” — Baha Hilo on the Olive Tree Campaign in al-Walaja, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.107 / printed p.90).

• “We inherit the loss.” — Baha Hilo, refusing to “move on” from refugeehood, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.109 / printed p.92).

• “The B is going brilliantly, the D is going brilliantly, and we need you for the S” — Bisan Kassis to Olive Tree Campaign tourists, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.126 / printed p.109).

• “Your family never lived here.” — the Eastern European resident of Villa Harun ar-Rashid to George Bisharat in 1977, as quoted by Kelly from Bisharat’s essay (PDF p.137 / printed p.120).

• “Your presence here is very important for my people. It shows them someone is listening. But your work is not here.” — Ali Jiddah at the end of his Old City tours, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.148 / printed p.131).

• “This is where the sidewalk ends.” — an ICAHD tour guide at the edge of an East Jerusalem settlement, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.149 / printed p.132).

• “Imagine how painful it is for me to see flags on those windows and those doors.” — Fayrouz Sharqawi on Israeli flags in an East Jerusalem neighborhood, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.152 / printed p.135).

• “Here you will not see checkpoints, but if you know the layers, you will see occupation.” — a Palestinian citizen in Israel introducing a tour of Historic Palestine, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.156 / printed p.139).

• “I am not a tour guide. I am a history teller.” — Umar al-Ghubari opening Zochrot’s JNF Erasure of Palestine Tour, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.160 / printed p.143).

• “If only there was Facebook Live when this shit happened.” — a tourist at Haditha, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.162 / printed p.145).

• “At the base of this epistemology of shame”, she continues, “is the directive that Palestinians must repeatedly evidence their worthiness” — Sherene Seikaly, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.163 / printed p.146).

• “I wanted to take it, but I left it there in case they came back.” — an elderly Israeli man recalling a Palestinian house in 1949, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.163 / printed p.146).

• “Today, we’ll be talking about settler colonialism, the same history as you have back home with Native Americans.” — Bilal Dirbas opening his Bil’aaks tour, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.165 / printed p.148).

• “The village mosque is now used as a bar and restaurant. The minaret is gone.” — Bilal Dirbas on ‘Ayn Hawd/Ein Hod, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.166 / printed p.149).

• “They say they need more water than us” — “Why? Because they are cleaner than us? They drink more than us? They need flowers more than us? It is a racist mentality” — Yacoub Odeh at Lifta, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.171 / printed p.154).

• “We tell this story so we don’t forget. I was small. I didn’t forget. This is our village. We should return. We will never forget. I have a right to go back to my home. We can build a democratic state together.” — Yacoub Odeh, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.172 / printed p.155).

• “Preservation … is incommensurate with restoration (or deruination). If preservation serves settlers’ interests, then restoration serves Indigenous interests.” — Rana Barakat on Lifta, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.173 / printed p.156).

• “This is the West Bank”, “We are outside the Green Line” — Umar al-Ghubari at Canada Park/Emwas, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.174 / printed p.157).

• “I remember every road and every stone” — an Emwas village elder, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.175 / printed p.158).

• “We made a model village as a plan for return.” — Dima Abu Ghoush, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.175 / printed p.158).

• “I’m not kicking you out. I want us to build the village. I want to be your neighbor.” — Palestinian refugees to Israelis, as reported by Umar al-Ghubari (PDF p.179 / printed p.162).

• “How am I to imagine a postliberation future when I am still under occupation?” — a BADIL participant on the South Africa study tour, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.183 / printed p.166).

• “It’s amazing what this Wall is doing” — “It’s not only a Wall blocking their movement. It’s also blocking their ideas, their imagination. They can’t see beyond the Wall” — Umar al-Ghubari, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.184 / printed p.167).

• “instead of fences they want to open the fence and plant some flowers” — Umar al-Ghubari on the Miska countermapping workshop, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.185 / printed p.168).

• “The right of return is the right to the urban, to a condition of heterogeneity and multiplicity that may already distinguish the sites of origin.” — DAAR exhibit abstract (2014), co-authored by Umar al-Ghubari among others, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.189 / printed p.172).

• “There is an app for everything these days, and this one will show all the places that have been wiped off the map.” — Raneen Jeries of Zochrot on iNakba, as quoted by Kelly from Ian Black (PDF p.193 / printed p.176).

• “It’s tourism shopping time! As you can see by the sign on the door, we’ve now reached the self-proclaimed first tourist shop in Palestine: the PLO Flag Shop.” — Laila El-Haddad, You Are Not Here, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.203 / printed p.186).

• “As we made clear to all media outlets we spoke with, this is not a normalization initiative.” — Laila El-Haddad on You Are Not Here, Gaza Mom, November 17, 2009, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.203 / printed p.186).

• “When I drive, I speed. I feel free.” — Betty Saadeh of the Speed Sisters, on Parts Unknown, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.206 / printed p.189).

• “Something amazing happened on CNN last night. Palestinians were portrayed as human beings.” — Amer Zahr on Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.207 / printed p.190).

• “My boy Anthony brought Gaza to me.” — Maysoon Zayid, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.208 / printed p.191).

• “you can’t discuss Palestinian food without talking about the Occupation.” — Essa Ghrayeb to Yasmin Khan, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.209 / printed p.192).

• “What, you don’t have babies in your country?” — a West Bank tour guide’s wanted question to tourists photographing Palestinian children, as reported by Kelly (PDF p.211 / printed p.194).

• “The cat found something to play with. But what about our children?” — a Palestinian man in Banksy’s Welcome to Gaza, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.217 / printed p.200).

• “Nearly 50 percent of us are unemployed and we are very available to show you” — Abdallah AlQassab of the Gaza Parkour Team, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.219-220 / printed p.202-203).

• “So come, and discover us, and make Gaza your destination.” — the Gaza Parkour Team, After Banksy, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.221 / printed p.204).

• “What do you say? Come to Gaza. I will wait for you here.” — Hadeel Assali, “Postcard from a Liberated Gaza” (2020), as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.226 / printed p.209).

• “There is evidence everywhere.” — an Aida Camp guide to a tourist disappointed a bullet-riddled school had moved, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.229 / printed p.212).

• “You almost can’t believe it until you see the tears in their eyes.” — a solidarity tourist, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.231 / printed p.214).

• “Me—a white girl they know and trust—is talking to them about people they’ve been told are terrorists and deserve everything that is happening to them.” — Marietta Macy on her report-backs, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.236 / printed p.219).

• “and what do the Indigenous people of Bethesda, Maryland, call their land?” — Baha Hilo to a tourist from Bethesda, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.244 / printed p.227).

• “A big part of this trip was being in Palestine for other people.” — Noelle Farasha on witnessing for her father and husband, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.250 / printed p.233).

• “I would have loved to stop in my village, for, you know, just like five minutes.” — Noelle Farasha, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.252 / printed p.235).

• “I never thought there would be hanging out in Palestine.” — Addis Green, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.254 / printed p.237).

• “Even prisoners are allowed visits.” — Mazin Qumsiyeh on the Flytilla, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.258 / printed p.241).

• “what you accumulate when you are not given places to go” — Sara Ahmed on evidence, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.260 / printed p.243).

• “If I have a tour of twenty, and I reach five people, or one, I consider that a success.” — solidarity tour guides, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.261 / printed p.244).

• “Unique and exciting characteristics give the West Bank and Gaza the potential to transform into a successful global tourism destination.” — the Trump White House “Peace to Prosperity” plan, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.262 / printed p.245).

• “I would love to not do this. If the occupation ended tomorrow, I would do something else. But it hasn’t, so I am here.” — a tour guide, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.266 / printed p.249).

• “We’ve tried violent resistance; we’ve tried negotiations; we’ve tried peace talks; we’ve tried complying with what the United States told us to do by working toward a two-state solution.” — a tour guide, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.266 / printed p.249).

• “one small thing will recalibrate you” — Bisan Kassis, as quoted by Kelly (PDF p.268 / printed p.251).

Evidence the work relies on

• Participant observation on one hundred solidarity tours over a decade, and interviews with Palestinian guides and organizers in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and inside Israel, Ashkenazi Jewish Israeli organizers and guides, Palestinian citizens in Israel leading tours to depopulated villages, and US solidarity tourists across demographics including diaspora Palestinians returning for the first time (PDF p.32-33).

• Archival material from first intifada delegations held at the Freedom Archives in San Francisco, and pamphlets, report-backs, speeches and artist statements from those delegations (PDF p.16, 33, 35).

• Sherna Berger Gluck, An American Feminist in Palestine: The Intifada Years (1994), read with a spring 2019 interview with Gluck (PDF p.40, 51-52).

• Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the Intifada, the edited volume of a March 28-April 24, 1989 delegation, including G. Roger Denson’s and Deborah Willis’s contributions (PDF p.53-54).

• A February 1988 Physicians for Human Rights delegation report on Gaza (PDF p.54).

• Tourism-sector statistics as cited in the Introduction: West Bank tourist volumes, hotel capacity and occupancy 1994-2000, tourism employment and share of GNP, second intifada unemployment, and licensed guide counts for 2013 (PDF p.23-24).

• Scholarship cited as framework: Edward Said on the “permission to narrate” and citation; Sara Ahmed on citation; Audra Simpson on refusal; Teresia Teaiwa and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez on militourism; Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place; Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins on the ISM; Debbie Lisle on the tourist gaze; Pamela Pennock on the Arab American left; Melani McAlister on 1967 and US culture (PDF p.20-21, 23, 25, 29, 31, 51, 55).

• First intifada costs and hospital material (part 2): Al Fajr’s March-April 1988 coverage of the Birzeit conference and the Salfit killings; the anonymous 1989 Link diary “From the Diary of an American in Occupied Palestine”; Denson on floating blood banks and delegate blood donation (PDF p.57-58, 62-63).

• Edward Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1999) (PDF p.65-66).

• The Alternative Museum exhibition and volume Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the First Intifada (1990), including works by Terry Berkowitz, Magda Dajani, Marylu Meibers, John Morita and Deborah Willis, and the Break the Silence Mural Project (PDF p.68-73).

• Julien Bousac, L’archipel de Palestine orientale (2009), based entirely on B’Tselem data (PDF p.76-77).

• Post-Oslo land figures as cited in Chapter 2: Areas A/B/C proportions and restrictions, settlement-council jurisdiction, “state land” and “survey lands” percentages, and 165 Area A/B “islands” in Area C (PDF p.79-80); Wall length and incursion, Bethlehem’s 87 percent Area C, and Hebron/Shuhada Street closure and shop/home figures (PDF p.92-93, 96).

• Interviews (part 2): Michel Awad (Siraj Center), Baha Hilo (Joint Advocacy Initiative / Alternative Tourism Group’s Olive Tree Campaign), a Hantourism organizer, and tourists Maggie Goff, Yvonne Lory and Sarah Alzanoon, and guide Yazan al-Zubaidy (PDF p.81-84, 88, 96-98, 102).

• Scholarship and public statements cited in Chapter 2: Noura Erakat and Ilan Pappe on Oslo; Raja Shehadeh’s walks; Rashid Khalidi on the “continuity of the settlement enterprise”; Yara Hawari (al-Shabaka); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, on guilt and shame (PDF p.80-81, 90).

• Interviews and fieldwork (part 3): the JAI-ATG Olive Tree Campaign’s 2012 planting program (al-Khader, Beit Ummar, Jab’a), BADIL and ARIJ lectures, and interviews with Baha Hilo, Ayman Abu Zulof, Bisan Kassis and an unnamed longtime harvesting organizer (PDF p.106-111, 118-119, 124-126).

• Afforestation history as cited in Chapter 3: Susan Slyomovics on Ein Houd/Ein Hod; Joseph Massad and Ella Shohat on “making the desert bloom” and the “Switzerland of the Middle East”; Lawrence Davidson on perceptual depopulation; Simon Schama on JNF tree planting; Walid Khalidi on Dayr Yasin; David Bloom on Jayyous; Shaul Cohen on Katannah; Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (1974) and Tawfiq Zayyad’s “The Olive Tree”; Oxfam (2011) on the Seam Zone; Raja Shehadeh (2012); B’Tselem field researchers’ 2013 harvest testimonies (Ibrahim Salah, Salah Radwan) and olive-tree-destruction case figures 2005-2012; Irus Braverman on the “regulatory regime” (PDF p.112-123).

• Jerusalem material (part 3): Visualizing Palestine on demolitions; Love Under Apartheid (founded by Tanya Keilani); Zochrot’s Omrim Yeshna Eretz (Once Upon a Land: A Tour Guide) and its September 2012 West Jerusalem tour with Tamar Avraham and Umar al-Ghubari; George Bisharat, “Rite of Return to a Palestinian Home” (2003); Khalil Sakakini’s journals and Hala Sakakini’s memoir as read on the Zochrot tour; Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (1992), introduction; Ghassan Kanafani, “Returning to Haifa”; Rana Barakat on the fellahin; Sophia Azeb; Grassroots Al-Quds, Wujood, on the Moroccan Quarter, Damascus Gate and tourism as a colonial tool; interviews and tours with Ali Jiddah, Fayrouz Sharqawi and an ICAHD guide (PDF p.132-152).

• Zochrot fieldwork and interviews (part 4): Kelly’s September 2012 interview with Umar al-Ghubari at Zochrot’s Tel Aviv office; the mid-September 2019 JNF Erasure of Palestine Tour (Ben Shemen, Britannia Park); and Zochrot’s 2014 park sign replacements and 2013 “From Truth to Redress” conference (PDF p.157-165, 189).

• Scholarship and archives cited in Chapter 5: Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora (1984) and All That Remains (1992); Nurit Peled-Elhanan on Israeli textbooks; the 2018 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East forum “Palestine: Doing Things with Archives” (Lila Abu-Lughod, Sherene Seikaly, Timothy Mitchell and Anupama Rao); Rana Barakat, “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History”; the Ein Hod Artists Village website; UNESCO’s Lifta description as submitted by the Permanent Delegation of Israel; and Ahmad Barclay in Sedek on DAAR and Miska (PDF p.156-163, 167-173, 187-189).

• Tours and testimony (part 4): Bilal Dirbas’s Bil’aaks Alternative Tour on an August 2019 Eyewitness Palestine delegation to Ein Hod and the new ‘Ayn Hawd; Yacoub Odeh’s July 2019 tour of Lifta for an international student group; the Eyewitness Palestine visit to Emwas/Canada Park and the Ramallah meeting with Dima Abu Ghoush and Emwas refugees, with the refugees’ booklet of demands and postcards (PDF p.165-176).

• Zochrot-BADIL “Practicalities of Return” documents: the workshop record from Miska (2009 onward), study tours to Cape Town (January-February 2012), Serbia/the former Yugoslavia and Istanbul, the twenty-five-page “Study Visit to Cape Town” report-back introduced by Hazim Jamjum, and the Miska countermapping (figure 5.12, photo by Einat Manof, July 30, 2010) (PDF p.179-186).

• Digital projects (part 4): Zochrot’s iNakba app (2014) and Ian Black’s May 2014 article with Raneen Jeries; the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy’s Palestine VR app and Salem Barahmeh (PDF p.191-195).

• Gaza virtual tourism (part 4): the August 2017 US Campaign for Palestinian Rights / Interfaith Peace Builders virtual delegation with Raji Sourani; Mushon Zer-Aviv and Laila El-Haddad’s You Are Not Here (2007-2009), its archived maps and eight recordings, the Tourist Hotline, and El-Haddad’s November 17, 2009 Gaza Mom post; Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode (CNN, September 15, 2013) with commentary by Maysoon Zayid (Daily Beast), Amer Zahr and Alex Kane, and El-Haddad as Bourdain’s Gaza guide (PDF p.196-208).

• Gaza visual and virtual projects (part 5): Yasmin Khan, Zaitoun (2019), and Essa Ghrayeb; Tanya Habjouqa, Occupied Pleasures (2015; photographs 2013), figures 6.3-6.9, with James Estrin’s New York Times piece; Banksy, Welcome to Gaza (February 2015), figures 6.10-6.13, and the Gaza Parkour Team, After Banksy: The Parkour Guide to Gaza (2015), figures 6.14-6.16, with Abdallah AlQassab and Shadia Mansour’s music; the Gaza University-Indiana University Gaza 2050 project and Virtual Museum of Gaza in Ian McIntosh and Jamil Alfaleet’s article, including Operation Protective Edge casualty, housing, infrastructure, school, business and cropland figures as cited there; Hadeel Assali, “Postcard from a Liberated Gaza”, +972 Magazine New Futures project (December 25, 2020), figure 6.17 (PDF p.209-227).

• Conclusion and Notes apparatus (part 6): the Trump White House, “Peace to Prosperity” (2020), with Yara Hawari, “Trump’s ‘Peace’ Deal”; Sara Ahmed, “Evidence” (Feministkilljoys, July 12, 2016), on evidence accumulation in university sexual-harassment settings; Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), as the source of “epistemic violence” (Introduction note 8); Lori Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, 16, on cynicism; the full Notes citation sequences for the Introduction and Chapters 1-7, including interview dates for every guide and tourist quoted in the running text (Awad, August 16, 2012; Hilo, July 23, 2012; al-Zubaidy, September 6, 2012; al-Ghubari, September 12, 2012; Kassis, September 3, 2012; Goff, September 14, 2013; Lory, October 4, 2013; Green, July 31, 2013; Alzanoon, November 22, 2014; Negrón, November 25, 2014; Macy, October 14, 2014; Farasha and RL, August 23, 2019; Gluck, April 27, 2019); B’Tselem, “Taking Control of Land” and “Olive Harvest 2013”; BADIL, “The Jewish National Fund”, and Mahajneh, “Situating the JNF in Israel’s Land Laws”, for the JNF figures in Chapter 3 note 14; Al-Haq, “Residency Revocation” (July 3, 2017); and the Bibliography’s A entries (PDF p.270-305).

• Tourist testimony and analogy literature (part 5): interviews with tourists Maggie Goff, Addis Green, Sarah Alzanoon, Olga Negrón, Marietta Macy, Yvonne Lory, Noelle Farasha and RL; Alice Walker’s Gaza account after Operation Cast Lead; Ann Laura Stoler’s “shock of recognition”; Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs (eds.), the Africa Is a Country e-book on the South Africa/Israel analogy, including Robin D. G. Kelley’s essay; Loubna Qutami on the Palestinian Youth Movement’s April 2019 Johannesburg delegation; T. J. Tallie, drawing on Jodi Byrd; Achille Mbembe; Nada Elia on US police training and racist state violence; Visualizing Palestine, “Uprooted” (2011), figure 7.1, and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s intervention; Mazin Qumsiyeh on the 2012 “Welcome to Palestine” Flytilla, figure 7.2 (PDF p.228-259).

Analysis

Kelly’s method is interdisciplinary feminist ethnography: interviews are directed at guides’ daily labor rather than program directors’ accounts, and at tourists’ ethics of presence and conduct after return, and her interview practice refuses to elicit rehearsed trauma (PDF p.31-32). Her central analytic move is generic: the invitation, the report-back and the statistic-to-human conversion are treated as repeated conventions whose repetition does political work, rather than as individual tourists’ sincerity or failure (PDF p.20-21, 39, 43). The evaluative question — whether solidarity tourism “works” — is explicitly refused in favor of asking what work it does, for whom, and what change it effects inside Palestine (PDF p.21-22). The argument’s limits as presented in part 1: the category terms (“solidarity tourist”, “solidarity tour guide”) are declared incoherent by the author herself, and the Gaza material rests on secondary research rather than fieldwork there (PDF p.20, 34). Claims in this part rest on the archives, memoirs and interviews itemized above; sector statistics are carried with their footnotes but their underlying sources are in the Notes (read in part 6). In parts 1-2 the same analytic move is extended to space itself: Chapter 2 treats the itinerary as a text guides write against the archipelago Oslo produced, and treats repetition — of narration, of checkpoint handoffs, of seasonal planting — as the counter-citational practice to Orientalism’s repetition, an argument built from guides’ own formulations (Awad on branding, Hilo on discrediting, al-Zubaidy on staying) rather than from tourists’ evaluations (PDF p.83-84, 102-104). In part 3 the same method is applied to landscape and infrastructure: Chapter 3 builds its afforestation history from the scholarship Kelly cites (Slyomovics, Massad, Shohat, Schama, Khalidi) and then tests it against the Campaign’s daily practice, while Chapter 4 reads Jerusalem’s trash, sidewalks and cranes as evidence tourists misread through the same colonial logic that once read Palestinian groves as “nothing” — the guides’ counter-narration, not the tourists’ impressions, carries the analysis (PDF p.112-117, 129-130, 149-150). Kelly also turns the critique on her own sources, noting that Zochrot’s West Jerusalem itinerary can flatten Palestinian class differences by pivoting loss on mansions (PDF p.144). In part 4 the method turns to futurity: Chapter 5 reads the tour as an archive and a blueprint — Zochrot’s signposting, countermapping and report-backs, Barakat’s preservation/restoration distinction, and the Zochrot-BADIL study tours are treated as planning documents whose open questions (class, demography, mandate) are part of the evidence, not resolved by the author; Chapter 6 extends the invitation analytic to its limit case, where the invitation cannot produce presence at all and is read instead as a performance of the rights to movement, tourism and invitation themselves (PDF p.182-183, 197-198). Kelly repeatedly turns the critique on the tours themselves in this part: commemoration can foreclose seeing present demolitions, tours can flatten Seikaly’s nuance, the rushed itinerary (“Occupation Bootcamp”) precludes listening, and Bourdain’s prison analogy is faulted even as his episode is credited (PDF p.162-163, 172, 206-207). In part 5 the same method is applied to images and analogies themselves: Habjouqa’s photographs, Banksy’s video and the Parkour Team’s answer are read as competing visual economies, not illustrations, and the students’ Gaza 2050 museum is treated, like Zochrot-BADIL’s blueprinting, as a planning document interrupted by the destruction it was imagining beyond (PDF p.210-225). Chapter 7 then turns the analysis on the tourists’ own genre: the report-back is formalized as a four-step formula, translation is shown to be labor shaped by the translator’s racial position — Macy’s whiteness doing the evidentiary work Palestinians’ narration cannot — and analogy is treated neither as true or false but by what it gains, loses and erases, with the strongest counter-examples (PYM in Johannesburg, Tallie, RL) drawn from tourists and delegates who refuse to consign US or South African colonialism to the past (PDF p.234, 236-248). Farasha’s account is the part’s limit case for the book’s category terms: her “witnessing for” is distinguished from tourists’ witnessing to, and the tour’s failure of care at the airport and at Silat ad-Dhahr is presented as evidence about solidarity tourism’s organizers, not only about the Israeli state (PDF p.250-253). In part 6 the Conclusion restates the book’s method as a refusal of evaluation in both directions — neither romanticizing solidarity tourism nor dismissing it as “occupation tourism” — and reads the Trump plan’s tourism chapter as the colonial use of the same medium the guides rework, so the contrast is carried by the two tourism texts themselves (the plan and the itineraries) rather than by an external verdict (PDF p.262-269). The Notes, read in full in this part, show the running text’s figures resting on the cited organizational sources itemized above (B’Tselem for the archipelago and harvest figures, Al-Haq for revocation, BADIL and Mahajneh for the JNF), and the interview dates show the ethnography’s two main waves, 2012-2014 and 2019, with Gluck interviewed in 2019 (PDF p.270-303).

People, organizations, places and events

People: Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Sherna Berger Gluck, Ahed Tamimi, Bassam Tamimi, Fida al-Sharafi, G. Roger Denson, Deborah Willis, Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, Edward Said, Salim Tamari, Zachary Lockman, Raji Sourani, Haidar Abd al-Shafi, Geno Rodriguez, Julien Bousac, Michel Awad, Baha Hilo, Maggie Goff, Yvonne Lory, Sarah Alzanoon, Yazan al-Zubaidy, Mustafa al-Arraj, Noura Erakat, Raja Shehadeh, Ilan Pappe, Rashid Khalidi, Yara Hawari, Audra Simpson, Rafeef Ziadah, Bisan Kassis, Fayrouz Sharqawi, Ali Jiddah, Khalil Sakakini, Umar al-Ghubari, George Bisharat, Golda Meir, Martin Buber, Joseph Weitz, Jeff Halper, Tawfiq Zayyad, Emile Habibi, Walid Khalidi, Ghassan Kanafani, Ellah Shohat, Bilal Dirbas, Yacoub Odeh, Dima Abu Ghoush, Hazim Jamjum, Ahmad Barclay, Sherene Seikaly, Laila el-Haddad, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Anthony Bourdain, Maysoon Zayid, Tanya Habjouqa, Banksy, Abdallah AlQassab, Ian McIntosh, Jamil Alfaleet, Hadeel Assali, Alice Walker, Addis Green, Olga Negrón, Marietta Macy, Noelle Farasha, Loubna Qutami, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Nada Elia, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Lori Allen

Organizations: International Solidarity Movement, Physicians for Human Rights, Palestinian Authority, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, B’Tselem, Siraj Center, Hantourism, Break the Silence Mural Project, Middle East Children’s Alliance, Olive Tree Campaign, Grassroots Al-Quds, Zochrot, Jewish National Fund, BADIL, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, iNakba, Gaza Parkour Team, Gaza University, Visualizing Palestine

Documents: Peace to Prosperity

Places and events: Nabi Saleh, West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Hebron, Haifa, Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, First Intifada, Second Intifada, Oslo Accords, Al-Am’ari Refugee Camp, Al-Mughayer, Sebastia, Beit Jala, Checkpoint 300, Aida Camp, Birzeit University, Nablus, Lod, Deir Yassin, Al-Araqib, Silwan, Qatamon, Moroccan Quarter, Har Homa, Lifta, Emwas, Ayn Hawd, Miska, Canada Park, Jaffa, Nazareth

Concepts

Solidarity Tourism, Colonial Calculus of Veracity, Report-Back, Witnessing, Militourism, Voluntourism, Nakba, Epistemic Violence, Zionist afforestation, BDS movement, Museumification, Center of life, Absentee Property Law

How it relates to other sources

• Kelly’s Chapter 7 source on the Negev, in a different register: where Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin treats Bustan’s Negev Unplugged tours as Voluntourism commoditizing Bedouin suffering, Kelly’s Introduction positions voluntourism as one of the forms of international presence that solidarity tourism was designed in part to redirect and curtail (PDF p.26).

• Kelly’s account of Rachel Corrie — a 2003 murder by Israeli military bulldozer that forced a reassessment of protective presence (PDF p.26) — sits alongside Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, where Corrie is remembered among the civil-society actors who challenged Israel where states did not.

• Kelly’s use of Salim Tamari’s critique of researchers “‘doing Palestine’” (PDF p.42) extends the Tamari recorded in Rhetorics of Belonging and ‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954) from identity debates and dedication to a critique of the research economy in Palestine itself.

• The Introduction’s insistence that guides present dispossession as an “ongoing Nakba” (PDF p.24) matches the continuity framing of the Nakba across the settler-colonial studies sources, now carried by tour itineraries rather than scholarship.

• Kelly’s Chapter 3 afforestation history — the JNF’s forests planted over depopulated villages, Dayr Yasin renamed Givat Shaul and planted after the massacre, and Weitz’s green belt around Jerusalem (PDF p.115-116) — extends the JNF and transfer material in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Nakba and Survival with a tourism-specific claim: the forests are themselves tour sites and hiding places whose narration guides contest.

• Kelly’s Zochrot tour (PDF p.134-145) gives the practice behind the Zochrot recorded in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Nakba and Survival and Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: signposting and walking tours of depopulated neighborhoods, here turned on West Jerusalem’s mansions and on the refrain “the family never lived here”.

• Where Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin treats Bustan’s Negev tours skeptically, Kelly’s Chapter 3-4 organizers make the anti-voluntourism discipline explicit from inside the work: the harvest is a gift Palestinians give tourists, and the tourists’ assigned work is BDS at home (PDF p.125-126, 148).

• Kelly’s Chapter 5 gives the return-planning practice behind the Right of Return as the BADIL-Zochrot transitional-justice proponents appear in Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: here the same two organizations move from truth-telling to blueprinting — study tours, countermapping and staged re-emergence — while retaining the disagreement and unanswered questions in their own report-backs (PDF p.179-186).

• Kelly’s Ein Hod/‘Ayn Hawd tour (PDF p.165-170) confirms, from a 2019 delegation, the village’s history as recorded in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation — mosque as bar/restaurant, Janco’s artists’ colony, the unrecognized new village — and adds Dirbas’s narration and the colony website’s own wording.

• Kelly’s Lifta (PDF p.170-174) sits alongside The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’s account of Lifta’s December 1947-January 1948 expulsion: Kelly’s Ben-Gurion quotation matches Pappe’s in substance (“one hundred percent Jews” on entering Jerusalem through Lifta), and her contribution is the 2019 present — Odeh’s tour, Construction Plan 6036 and Barakat’s museumification critique.

• Kelly’s El-Haddad (PDF p.198-208) extends the Laila el-Haddad of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation’s Rafah account: the same writer, denied reentry to Gaza and living in Baltimore, builds a virtual tour of Gaza for Tel Aviv walkers and guides Bourdain through Gaza’s food under siege.

• Kelly’s Chapter 7 treatment of Black-Palestine solidarity and analogy (PDF p.239-248) extends the Black–Palestinian solidarity recorded across the wiki’s sources: here the analogy itself is the object of study, and the delegates who refuse its past-tense form — Qutami’s PYM in Johannesburg finding an “incomplete decolonization”, RL reading Palestine as a future to be tracked — are presented as the genre’s own internal critics, not as its exemplars.

• Kelly’s Gaza 2050 figures for Operation Protective Edge (PDF p.222-223) — 2,131 Palestinians murdered, 18,000 housing units destroyed, 108,000 homeless — are carried as McIntosh and Alfaleet’s project article presents them, for comparison with the casualty and destruction figures in the wiki’s Gaza sources when those are read alongside this part.

• Kelly’s Chapter 7 note on the “center of life” policy (PDF p.302) dates it to Israel’s 1988 Supreme Court judgment, matching the tracing in Rethinking Statehood in Palestine — recorded on Center of life — to the 1988 Mubarak Awad case, against the mid-1990s introduction date in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation as that page records it; the accounts are held side by side on the concept page.

• Kelly’s Chapter 3 note on the JNF (PDF p.285) extends the fund’s record on Jewish National Fund beyond the tour narration of Chapter 3: the 1954 transfer figure (35 percent of the land of internally displaced peoples and refugees), the 2007 control figure (13 percent of the land in Israel, exclusively for Jews) and the Israel Land Authority figures (six of thirteen seats; policies pertaining to 93 percent of the land of Israel) are carried as BADIL’s and Mahajneh’s figures as Kelly cites them.

Open questions

• The Gaza infant’s name is spelled “Fida al-Sharafi” at PDF p.47 (printed p.30) and “Fida al-Sharifi” at PDF p.49 (printed p.32), both as printed in the text copy and byte-verified; held as printed, not reconciled.

• Simona Sharoni’s Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (1995) is credited at PDF p.42 (printed p.25) to “Simona Sharon”, as printed; held as printed.

• Teresia Teaiwa’s name is spelled “Teaiwa” in “Teresia Teaiwa’s” and “Teiawa” in “in Teiawa’s words” on the same spread (PDF p.29, printed p.12), both byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• The Introduction dates the tracing of contemporary tours’ material to “Zionist land expropriation that began as early as 1908” (PDF p.34) and also says the narration “travels from 1901 to 2021” (PDF p.34); the relation between the two start dates is not explained in this part.

• The Moshe Dayan tour-guide quip is given as something Dayan “allegedly” said (PDF p.23); no primary source is given in the running text of this part.

• Rabab Abdulhadi is named in Gluck’s blurb discussion (PDF p.41); no separate page was created in this part because she appears as an endorser rather than an actor in the argument of the pages read so far.

• The sixteen-year-old killed after hosting delegates at al-Am’ari is named “Amel Habid” in Denson’s account (PDF p.58, printed p.41) and a sixteen-year-old from al-Am’ari interviewed two days before his murder is named “Hamad” in Berkowitz’s Somebody’s Brother, Somebody’s Son (Homage to Hamad) as discussed at PDF p.69 (printed p.52); the text does not say whether these are the same youth under two names or two youths, and both are held as printed, not reconciled.

• Gluck’s quoted hospital description prints “shooting and beating causalities” (PDF p.61, printed p.44), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed.

• Gluck’s quoted interview prints “Like I a couple of times would leave the room” (PDF p.61, printed p.44), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• Gluck’s quoted Gaza passage prints “thaubs” for the women’s dresses (PDF p.67, printed p.50), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• Said’s twinned image is quoted as a “man wearing a keffiyeh and mask and carrying a kalachnikov” (PDF p.68, printed p.51), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• Magda Dajani’s name is printed “Dajana” in “Dajana’s Mona Lisa is rendered in black and gray” (PDF p.69, printed p.52) against “Dajani” elsewhere on the same page, both byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• The Aida canister passage prints “vases. cts is stamped on every canister” with a lower-case “cts” after the full stop (PDF p.100, printed p.83), byte-verified as printed, while the expansion “Combined Tactical Systems” follows in the same sentence; held as printed.

• The writer and curator introduced in Chapter 1 as “Writer and curator G. Roger Denson” (PDF p.53) is named “C. Roger Denson” at PDF p.62 (printed p.45, also Chapter 1) for the blood-donation passage; held as printed in each place, not reconciled.

• Bethlehem is described at PDF p.92 (printed p.75) as “87 percent Area C under Israeli control”; no basis for the percentage is given in the running text of this part, and it is carried as the guides’ narration as Kelly reports it.

• The JNF’s director of afforestation is named “Yosef Wietz” at PDF p.116 (printed p.99) and “Weitz” in “Under Weitz’s authority” on the same page, both byte-verified as printed in the text copy; the book’s Index entry is “Wietz, Yosef” and its Bibliography lists “Weitz, Joseph”; held as printed in each place, not reconciled.

• The 800,000 olive trees uprooted since 1967 carry two different loss figures in the running text of this part: 80,000 families “have lost a total of US$12.3millionfromtheseattacksontheirlivelihoods"(PDFp.119,printedp.102)andthesame800,000trees"withalossof$55 million to the Palestinian economy per year” (PDF p.123, printed p.106). Both are carried as printed, side by side, not reconciled; the underlying Chapter 3 notes, read in part 6, do not reconcile them.

• The lecturer’s line is quoted at PDF p.108 (printed p.91) as “my great-grandfather’s initials” and recalled at PDF p.127 (printed p.110) as “my great grandfathers’ initials”, both byte-verified as printed; held as printed in each place.

• Chapter 3’s close prints “attempting to help Palestinian famers stay where they are” (PDF p.128, printed p.111), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• Bisharat’s essay is quoted with “a visit from un Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold” (PDF p.136, printed p.119), with lower-case “un” byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed.

• Hala Sakakini is quoted selecting “The Beggars, by Al-Jahdh, a ninth century encyclopedist” (PDF p.143, printed p.126), byte-verified as printed in the text copy, and the book’s Index entry is likewise “Al-Jahdh: The Beggars, 126”; no “Al-Jahiz” spelling appears in the text copy; held as printed.

• Walid Khalidi is quoted with “all accruements of middle-class life” (PDF p.142, printed p.125), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• The Old City passage prints “yet walking though the Old City” (PDF p.146, printed p.129) and routes tourists away from “Palestinian-owned business” in the singular, both byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• The ICAHD is expanded as the “Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions” at PDF p.120 (printed p.103) and as the “Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions” at PDF p.149 (printed p.132), both byte-verified as printed; the book’s Index uses “House Demolitions”; held as printed in each place.

• The ICAHD guide’s joke is introduced as “clearly a bit at this moment of his tours” (PDF p.149, printed p.132), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; the phrase is carried as printed, its wording not explained in the text.

• Palestinian neighborhoods are said to be “home to 37 percent of the Palestinian population of Jerusalem” (PDF p.132, printed p.115); the sentence’s referent is carried as printed, without a basis given in the running text of this part.

• The JNF Erasure of Palestine Tour’s starting point is printed “Levinksy Garden” (PDF p.160, printed p.143), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed.

• Ein Hod’s founding is given two years in the same passage: the colony is “established in 1953” and Marcel Janco “cofounded Ein Hod in 1954” (both PDF p.166, printed p.149), both byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed, not reconciled.

• The Emwas refugees’ demands name the third village “Yalu” in demand 1 (PDF p.175, printed p.158), byte-verified as printed, against “Yalo” in the running text of the same part (PDF p.174-176); held as printed in each place.

• The Miska countermapping photograph is referred to in the running text as “(figure 5.10)” (PDF p.184, printed p.167) but captioned as figure 5.12, Zochrot’s Countermapping Miska (photo by Einat Manof, July 30, 2010) (PDF p.185, printed p.168), while figures 5.8-5.11 are the Emwas postcards; held as printed in each place.

• The General Strike is dated “Tuesday, May 19, 2021” (PDF p.191, printed p.174), byte-verified as printed; May 19, 2021 was a Wednesday (computed from the calendar), and May 18, 2021 was a Tuesday. The weekday and date as printed cannot both hold; held as printed, not reconciled.

• The August 2017 virtual delegation’s closing thanks are quoted as “Raji, from the bottom of hearts, thank you” (PDF p.197, printed p.180), byte-verified as printed with no “our”; held as printed.

• Saraya Prison’s history names “Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Hanieyh” (PDF p.202, printed p.185), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• Figure 6.2 (PDF p.204, printed p.187) carries in the text copy the same caption as figure 6.1, Printable maps from the virtual tour “You Are Not Here: Gaza/Tel Aviv (2009)”, although the running text at PDF p.203 describes figure 6.2 as the YANH logo (broken beach umbrella and crossed-out “You Are Here”); the caption is carried as printed in the text copy, its mismatch with the description held, not reconciled.

• Raji Sourani’s organization is given in Chapter 6’s opening as “Palestinians for Human Rights in Gaza” (PDF p.196, printed p.179), as printed; no fuller name is given in this part.

• El-Haddad’s role as Bourdain’s Gaza guide is introduced as “Mirroring her own virtual tourism project of 2013” (PDF p.208, printed p.191), although her You Are Not Here project is dated 2007-2009 in the same chapter (PDF p.197-198); the 2013 date is carried as printed, its referent not explained in this part.

• Operation Protective Edge is given two durations in this part: Kelly’s narrative says the assault “lasted fifty days” (PDF p.222, printed p.205), while McIntosh and Alfaleet’s article, as Kelly reports it, writes of “the fifty-one days of destruction and massacre” (PDF p.225, printed p.208), both byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed in each place, not reconciled.

• The Gaza 2050 students’ sites are numbered both precisely and approximately in this part: the virtual museum identified “252 sites of touristic potential” (PDF p.222, printed p.205), the students “visited and identified over 250 sites” in the spring semester (PDF p.224, printed p.207), and at the year’s end it was unknown how many of “the 252 tourist sites” still existed (PDF p.225, printed p.208); carried as printed in each place.

• Farasha’s father’s warning is quoted ending “Do not like the idea” (PDF p.250, printed p.233), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed.

• The Introduction’s note on settlements says to “See also Julien Bousac’s map that begins chapter 4” (PDF p.271, printed p.254), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; the map in fact begins Chapter 2 in the running text (PDF p.76-77). Held as printed.

• Said’s “Permission to Narrate” is cited at pages 27-48 in Introduction note 6 (PDF p.271), while Chapter 2 note 37 quotes the essay at page 258 (PDF p.282), both byte-verified as printed in the text copy; no edition explaining the two locators is given in the notes read so far. Held as printed in each place.

• “Academics Refute Israeli Claims” is cited at page 4 in Chapter 1 notes 47-48 (PDF p.277), while the Bibliography entry gives the article as Al Fajr 9, no.411 (April 3, 1988): 8-9 (PDF p.305) — the pages Chapter 1 notes 49-52 give for Hamad and Nuseibeh’s “bzu Discusses Uprising” in the same issue. Held as printed in each place, not reconciled.

• John Kerry’s statement is quoted with “Prime Minster Netanyahu” (Chapter 2 note 22, PDF p.281, printed p.264), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed.

• The Chapter 1 notes print the Hamad and Nuseibeh article title as “bzu Discusses Uprising” (notes 49-52, PDF p.277), with “bzu” in lower case, byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed.

• Adnan, father of Yazan al-Zubaidy, is named “Adnan Zobidy” in Chapter 1 note 98 (PDF p.279, printed p.262), byte-verified as printed, against “al-Zubaidy” for the son in the same note; held as printed.

• Chapter 4 note 58 cites “Fischback” for the author of Black Power and Palestine (PDF p.292, printed p.275), byte-verified as printed, against “Fischbach” in Chapter 1 note 1 (PDF p.275) and elsewhere; held as printed in each place.

• Chapter 5 note 7 cites “Peled-Elhannan” for the author of Palestine in Israeli Schoolbooks (p.15 in the note) (PDF p.293, printed p.276), byte-verified as printed, against “Peled-Elhanan” in the running text (PDF p.162-163) and the Index; held as printed in each place.

• Chapter 4 notes 52-53 expand the PLO as the “Palestinian Liberation Organization Negotiation Affairs Department” (PDF p.292, printed p.275), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• Chapter 4 note 51 prints “Grassroot Al-Quds’s Wujood” (PDF p.292, printed p.275), byte-verified as printed, against “Grassroots Al-Quds” elsewhere in the book; held as printed.

• Chapter 4 note 16 uses both “Simon Wiesenthal Institute” and, in the Robin D. G. Kelley passage it quotes, “Simon Wiesenthal Center” within the same note (PDF p.290, printed p.273), both byte-verified as printed; held as printed in each place.

• Chapter 7 note 7 cites “Salamanca et. al” for the authors of “Past Is Present” (PDF p.299, printed p.282), byte-verified as printed; held as printed.

• Chapter 7 note 52 names “Russel Rickford” (PDF p.301, printed p.284), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; held as printed.

• Conclusion note 4 lists Shohat’s essay The Shaping of Mizrahi Studies with no closing quotation mark after the title (PDF p.302, printed p.285), byte-verified as printed in the text copy; the Bibliography gives the full title with its subtitle. Held as printed.

• The al-Araqib demolition count is given in Chapter 3 note 60 through Arna’out and Asmar’s article title, “Israel Demolishes al-Araqib Village for the 184th Time” (Anadolu Agency, March 11, 2021), while the same note says the village had been destroyed 186 times when the manuscript went to press (PDF p.288, printed p.271), both byte-verified as printed; the running text of Chapter 3 gives 186 attempted expulsions since July 2010 (PDF p.122). Held as printed in each place, not reconciled.

• The Dayan tour-guide quip, given as “allegedly” in the Introduction (PDF p.23; see the earlier entry above), is stated in Chapter 6 note 84 as something Dayan “claimed”, in the reversed form “he would license a Palestinian fighter pilot before he would ever license a Palestinian tour guide” (PDF p.298, printed p.281), byte-verified as printed; held as printed in each place.

Coverage

Partial, PDF p.1-305 of 345 read (parts 1-6 of 7). Remaining: part 7 PDF p.306-345.