Suchergebnisse

Tourism is an expanding battleground of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the founding of the state, Israel's supporters have used tourism as a mechanism to socialize diaspora Jews and other travelers into supporting Israeli institutions, namely the military. As a counterforce to this mobilization, Palestinians, alongside Jewish/Israeli activists, have also been employing tourism as a method to garner support for justice and human rights in the region. This dissertation examines the power and limits of tourism to engender transnational solidarity.In a wider sense, this dissertation sheds light on the power of exposure, empathy, and intercultural contact to shift political sympathies and allegiances. I investigate these topics through a case study of Jewish Americans' experiences on alternative tours to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Based on an analysis of 87 in-depth interviews, 400 survey responses, as well as three years of participant observation, I use tourism as a lens to examine the barriers to Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Given the ways that Jewish Americans are typically shielded from Palestinian perspectives and encouraged to support the state of Israel, I use these tours as a microcosmic case to understand what happens when privileged populations are exposed to injustices suffered by marginalized peoples in the Global South.These tours challenge participants' stereotypes of Palestinians as dangerous and primitive along with participants' absolutist ideas of Jewish moral purity and victimhood. In addition to these outcomes, the visceral experience of witnessing Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israeli violence causes many participants to develop greater animosity towards settlers and right-wing segments of Israeli society. I argue that this focus on settlers, as aberrations from Israeli institutions rather than extensions of them, can function to organize participants' outrage around a population that remains conceptually separate from wider state institutions.Simultaneously, while participants move past stereotypes of Palestinians as inherently violent, a differential conception of Israeli versus Palestinian violence remains in place. Despite empathetic, emotional reactions to sites such as the checkpoint, participants continue to understand Israeli participation in military violence as involuntary and often necessary. At the same time, participants continue to unequivocally oppose all forms of Palestinian violence. This inconsistency appears rooted in participants' associations of Israeli violence with a form of social control, and associations of Palestinian violence with disruption and deviance. The persistence of these fundamental currents of privilege and racism within tourists' ideologies reveals the ways that allegiances to unjust status quos can remain in place, despite increased levels of empathy and intercultural understanding.My findings demonstrate the ability of tourism and intercultural contact to expand compassion and to mobilize transnational activists. On the other hand, they also reveal the ways that tourism, as a medium for social change, may preserve some of the most fundamental elements of inequality, due to economic forces within the tourism industry. Taken together, these conclusions illuminate how racialized conceptions of the right to violence often go unnoticed and unchallenged in progressive movements for social change. Lastly, through revealing the limits of appealing to those with power through empathy, this dissertation urges movements for social change to prioritize the redistribution of power, rather than focus exclusively on the ideological transformation of those in power.

The deployment of tourism to strengthen diaspora ties is well documented, however sociologists have yet to examine the use of tourism to complicate transnational diaspora allegiances. Jewish tourism to the Palestinian Territories offers a compelling case to study this growing trend, as more non-Israeli Jews are foregoing standard trips to Israel and instead visiting sites in Israel/Palestine that challenge dominant Zionist narratives. Using a mixed methods approach that combines pre/post tour surveys with longitudinal in-depth interviews, I investigate how this emerging form of tourism shapes participants' political views, identities, and activism. I find that tourists often experience significant ideological tension when they criticize a base country, while still seeing themselves as part of its national collective. However, rather than compel participants to sever their ties to the base country (Israel), this tension can actually lead to increased engagement on the part of the diaspora member, even when it is in the form of activism directed against the state. Jewish tourism to the Palestinian Territories appears to facilitate this kind of diasporic tension, while also causing participants to "humanize" a previously demonized population, Palestinians. Though such "humanization" does not always lead to overt changes in political views, it influences participants' willingness to embrace counter national narratives. These results suggest that this unique form of "homeland" tourism can engender political criticism within diaspora populations, while simultaneously solidifying transnational ties. It is this contradictory process - solidifying ties to a base country while promoting political criticism of it - that I discuss in my thesis.