Protective Presence and the Machinery of Control
An insight into some of the lesser known dynamics underpinning liberal and zionist protective presence organizations in Palestine.
By Cody O’Rourke and Lara Kilani
O’Rourke and Kilani write to provide a general review of liberal and zionist protective presence programs, drawing on their combined eighteen years of experience in close proximity to these organizations. The authors reframe the dynamics underlying liberal and zionist protective presence work in Palestine, illuminating elements of organizational infrastructure that are not divulged online, openly shared with participants and, generally, are obscured from Palestinian “co-resistors”. Rather than pointing to specific events or spotlighting certain liberal and zionist organizations, the authors hope that this analysis will give readers the tools to look critically at such organizations in Palestine and far beyond it.
The Model of Protective Presence
Each week, international and Israeli volunteers descend on the South Hebron Hills and Jordan Valley equipped with GoPros and cameras, documenting demolitions that Palestinians have already documented, witnessing violence that Palestinians have endured and witnessed for generations, and constructing organizational infrastructure that Palestinians will never control. For observers outside Palestine unfamiliar with the landscape of protective presence, viral footage of international and Israeli activists enduring verbal assault and physical violence may appear to represent the apex of solidarity. For those of us working within these spaces, however, the calculus is more complex: Palestinian liberation requires more than the substitution of one beaten body for another. Watching settlers beat activists alongside Palestinians before returning to film the rubble is not a program for liberation — it is a bizarre ritual of witness that mistakes presence for power.
Protective presence programs organized predominantly within liberal and zionist frameworks promise solidarity but deliver something structurally ambiguous. This includes both the programs of liberal and zionist organizations, some of which are founded and maintained by Jewish internationals who move to take up settler citizenship in Palestine, and those maintained by a community of international volunteers on the ground and abroad. These tend to be built on a model in which Palestinian suffering is meticulously recorded and commodified, yet rarely linked to winnable advocacy campaigns designed to dismantle the structures of zionism. When solidarity is conditioned on Palestinians accepting the legitimacy of the settler (as it is by all organizations which name “occupation” rather than zionism as the primary issue), when donor lists and email databases remain locked in the organizations’ infrastructure outside the access of the people which it is supposed to serve, and when the international visibility of a Palestinian village requires what amounts to a stamp of approval from Israeli partners, the mechanism of protection becomes indistinguishable from the machinery of control. In this article, we examine how organizations such as the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and Achvat Amim, among other organizations founded and maintained by internationals or Israeli settlers, advance settler-colonial logics through multiple mechanisms: the misrepresentation of protective presence; systems of resource capture that builds donor infrastructure inaccessible to Palestinians; the lack of meaningful advocacy interventions; and the facilitation of Jewish immigration and settler citizenship acquisition by their own members. We also propose concrete reorientations toward solidarity frameworks that center anti-zionist praxis — not to dismiss the impulse toward solidarity, but to redirect it toward frameworks that transfer infrastructure and decision-making to Palestinian hands, the development of winnable advocacy campaigns, and measure success by the material advancement of Palestinian liberation rather than the visibility of international witnesses.
