Scrutinizing a Fieldwork Experience: Challenges in Doing Research With Social Movement Actors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Abstract

This paper examines fieldwork experience in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs). The research utilized participatory action research (PAR) and focused on a Palestinian community resisting demolition order for their homes in the South Hebron Hills. The paper addresses the critical difficulties faced during the planning and execution of fieldwork within a colonial regime that sustains Apartheid. This study aims to initiate a broader discourse within the sociological academic sphere regarding fieldwork encounters, their restitution, and the connections that academics establish and cultivate with the communities they engage with.

Introduction

During the summer of 2015, when I was preparing to travel to the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank with an Italian NGO, I was a twenty-one-year-old, excessively naïve, with insufficient knowledge to anticipate the experiences awaiting me in the field. I resided in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (hereafter OPTs) for 3 months. Afterward, I returned for a brief visit lasting a few weeks before starting my Ph.D. On this occasion, the Israeli Security Service at the airport viewed my trip with suspicion, leading to a shorter visa duration being granted. Subsequently, as a researcher, I made two trips between 2019 and 2022, totaling seven more months in the region. Tourist visas are limited to three months, and my inability to disclose the true purpose of my visits prevented me from applying for a work visa. This is the effect of researching a regime born out of a settler colonial movement (Veracini, 2006). A consistent part of the international scholarly community increasingly uses “settler colonialism” to describe the Israel regime-type. Before it, the Zionist movement was imposed in the land known as “historical Palestine ¹ ” (Kedar, 2003; Khalidi, 2020; Masalha, 2015; Rodinson, 1973; Shafir, 2016). In an edited volume recently published on “Decolonizing the Study of Palestine” (Sa'di & Masalha, 2023), the authors try to set an agenda that proceeds from Elia Zureik’s (1979; 2001), Zureik & Salter (2005), Zureik et al. (2010) most prominent works and conceptualization of settler colonialism as the departing point to approach the Palestinian cause. As they recall, “While the impact of Zionist settler-colonialism on historic Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and on the Palestinians as a whole has been devastating, this colonialism has failed to rob the Palestinians of their humanity” (Sa’di & Masalha, 2023, p. 9). Any study that wishes to discuss the Palestinian question from any perspective needs to depart from this statement.

A growing strain of literature tries to decolonize methodologies and their effects on the communities involved in research more broadly. One of the most influential certainly is Linda Smith Tuhiwai’s work on decolonizing methodologies (2012). Various works on feminist research methods (e.g. Laliberté & Schurr, 2016; True & Ackerly, 2010) and feminist epistemologies (e.g. Doucet & Mauthner, 2012; Grasswick, 2011) go in the same direction. Similarly, Leslie Brown and Susan Strega’s edited volume on anti-hierarchical and resistance-based research methods (2005). As far as social movement studies are concerned, we can refer to Donatella Della Porta’s book on methodological practices in social movement research (2014), as well as Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle’s book on militant activist research methods (2007).

All the sites I have visited are part of an Apartheid system, which has implied the need to deal with Occupation, violent clashes, military controls, and crossing and closure of checkpoints (Challand, 2018). By considering the impact of persistent colonialism on researchers, this paper aims to scrutinize a field experience running through the main challenges encountered and not necessarily considered before going to the field. I will achieve this by sharing excerpts from the field notes I have constantly taken during all my stays in Israel-Palestine. This has been a complex process.

At the moment of writing, the very division of powers is threatened by the newly elected far-right Israeli government headed, once again, by Benjamin Netanyahu. The leader of the Likud party allied with far-right, racist, homophobic, and politically violent parties and representatives who have recently proposed to amend the Basic Law so that the executive should no longer be subject to the control of the Israeli High Court (Shpigel, 2023). Since January 2023, Israel has witnessed a movement that contests the reform of the judiciary and is fighting “in defense of democracy." The campaign started with limited numbers; eight to nine thousand people in Tel Aviv experienced a crescendo, exceeding 150 thousand demonstrators of different social classes. The climax was reached at the end of March 2023 with the general strike called by the leading Israeli trade union, Histadrut, which caused the reform of the judicial system to be temporarily suspended. The reform consists of four elements – summarized by two Israeli journalists, Meron Rapoport and Oren Ziv, in The Nation (2023) – guarantee the government total control over the appointment of new judges; make it nearly impossible for the Supreme Court to overturn laws that violate human rights; allow the Knesset (parliament) to reverse these decisions in the rare cases in which they will be taken; abolish the power of the courts to review decisions taken by national and local authorities. In Israel’s unicameral system, where the government de facto controls the Knesset, there is no constitution, and the courts are the sole guardian of the executive arm, such reforms would give the government nearly unlimited powers. A broad spectrum of fragmented Israeli society has been in the street, clashing with the police: young people, the middle class, employees of the high-tech world and start-ups, professionals, intellectuals, judges and prosecutors, the military, and also a good portion of the right-wing electorate who see the reform as crossing a red line. However, the significant absence is, once again, the Palestinian population. In the first protests, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship participated, and someone even spoke out, trying to link the movement’s claims with the system of structural discrimination that suffocates Palestinians on both sides of the wall. Quickly, however, they disappeared. The reason behind it is that this mobilization does not challenge that status quo and does not question the colonial nature of the Zionist movement and, therefore, of the Israeli state. Defending the Israeli Court means to support the same institution that authorizes actions such as evictions, land seizures, and demolitions and maintains military control over the Occupied Territories. It is far from being a bastion of democratic principles. Beyond the Separation Wall, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza (East Jerusalem is a distinct case, as Israel considers it part of its state territory and its capital, in violation of international law), the Israeli judicial system plays a role in upholding the military occupation, which commenced in 1967 and is deemed illegal under international law. It perpetuates a state of exception that is permanent but, paradoxically, temporary in its nature. Operating under the guise of apparent emergencies, it leans towards a structural objective: annexation to the State of Israel. Given this ongoing pro-judiciary mobilization, experts raise questions about the feasibility of a genuinely free and independent judiciary in a profoundly entrenched military occupation and institutional discrimination based on ethnicity and religion, raising concerns about violating human rights.

The first challenge discussed in doing fieldwork in a settler colonial entity is psychological pressure and the meaning of a “risky” or “difficult” field. This definition sometimes fails to include the risks associated explicitly with colonialism, where most of the challenge is related to correctly assessing such risks that are sometimes entirely unpredictable. This could prove exceptionally challenging, considering the discretionary manner in which this colonial-style regime wields power. This manifests in what will be referred to as “unpredictability” and an imposed flexibility that manifests in two different ways: from the sudden closure of a checkpoint to an interview that evolves in a focus group. Here, the necessity to be prepared to face diverse situations may clash with the need to embrace ‘unforeseeability’ as a way of proceeding. The third section will address positionality in relation to gender identity. This fieldwork was a constant negotiation between my values of being a person who mobilized – and still does – in her local feminist collective and living for months in a gendered-segregated society. Finally, reflections on ethics, emotions, and commitment will also be considered.

Difficult Fields

The literature abounds on the notion of “difficult fields” (Boumaza & Campana, 2007; Nilan, 2002), but what should be scrutinized is in what way they differ from “colonial fields.” Kovats-Bernat (2012, p. 208) defines the firsts as: “those sites where social relationships and cultural realities are critically modified by the pervasion of fear, threat of force, or (ir)regular application of violence and where the customary approaches, methods, and ethics of anthropological fieldwork are at times insufficient, irrelevant, inapplicable, imprudent or simply naïve.” While this definition applies to the OPT case, it is essential to acknowledge that certain fields are undoubtedly far more perilous and hazardous than the ones under consideration. However, colonial control involves other types of risks.

The Zionist state, being a colonial regime, lacks the motivation to permit Western scholars to conduct research within its territory, particularly when they deal with its discriminatory policies towards Palestinians. The numbers are not certain, but researchers are denied visas by Israeli border authorities on a recurrent basis. ² One facet of the colonial strategy is to preserve confidentiality concerning Israel’s political actions and the violence it employs. Consequently, Israel can instantly reject visa applications at the airport or other border points without providing explanations or the necessity to substantiate its choices. This represents a wholly arbitrary policy that generates persistent psychological stress for researchers visiting the OPTs and having to deal with a “colonial field.” Hence, risks for researchers in Israel-OPTs can be personal (physical and psychological) and legal (Rothenberg, 2015). The first type of risk most commonly discussed includes the threat to the safety and well-being of the researcher (Grimm et al., 2020). The legal danger also represents a genuine risk, which comes from the authority and its arbitrary way of exercising power, not from the communities that participate in research (Darlington & Scott, 2002). Numerous researchers have recounted being followed, interrogated, having their phone tapped, being expelled from the country, and having their visa requests rejected. This aspect is linked to the dimension of colonial capillary control.

The periods I spent on the field were very different in the level of colonial violence experienced. The first time, the tension was not exceptionally high. Ramadan 2022, instead, was everything but calm. There were continuous demonstrations that ended up in a confrontation with the Police and the Military, and the gatherings at Damasus Gate were often tense; Israeli Civilians were murdered in Tel Aviv and Ber Sheva, the IDF sieged the city of Jenin for several weeks, and the violence in that area has been escalating since then. I found myself stuck with the closure of checkpoints on the wrong side of the wall several times. I have endured the military getting increasingly aggressive at the checkpoint while violence escalated. I have experienced intimidation, interrogation, visa restriction, checkpoint controls, and an explicit invitation to “not to come back” even during calmer periods. I could not cross checkpoints because they were looking for some stone-throwers, and I saw the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) coming to take Palestinians from their homes in the middle of the night, covering their faces so they could not know where they were being taken. I have been threatened by settlers and the military and run away from situations when I was told it was unsafe to remain because of the risk of escalation. I have experienced catcalling both in Israel and Palestine. I had to cancel an interview when I found out that the person in question was known to be sexually explicit with international women.

The settler colonial character of the Israeli state exercises constant psychological pressure. For example, I have never declared that I was a researcher when applying for a visa at the airport. It was clear that everything linked to the OPTs or Palestinians would constitute a ground of suspicion and provoke long-lasting interrogations – that I have experienced anyway, once at the airport and checkpoints. An Israeli citizen, who was strangely speaking perfect Italian, offered to guide me on a tour of the Dead Sea and followed me on several occasions. I will report part of the interrogation I have undertaken to give an idea of the questions other researchers may encounter.

They make me wait in a room with other people who all need to be questioned. The waiting room opens onto three doors to three different interrogation rooms. The first two white doors have a sign with the same writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and English that says: “Do not enter.” The third door on the right has a single sign with what I believe to be Cyrillic. I’m very nervous. I’m afraid they won’t let me into the country or give me a visa. A boy comes out the door with Cyrillic writing, and a girl demands what they asked him during the interrogation. He looks shocked at her and replies, “I just can’t tell you.” More or less an hour passes. A man sits next to me. He has an Israeli passport. He starts talking to me in Italian, saying he is of “Arab origins.” Other activists have warned me that this often happens. If they suspect you are an activist, they know you will not reveal anything during interrogations. Then, they try to get spies to approach you to see if you show anything that allows them to send you home by establishing a relationship of trust. He tells me a lot about the part of his family living in Bergamo and about the discrimination Arabs suffer in Israel. Finally, he asks me about the reason for my trip. I give evasive answers; I say that I came to meet some friends and take an Arabic course in Jerusalem. I never express any intention to go to the occupied territories. He asks me if I’ve ever been to the OPTs, and I say no; he then offers to accompany me for a visit to the desert and the Dead Sea. I tell him I hope to do those laps with my friends, and I change the subject by returning to his family in Italy. After another hour, they finally call me.

Officer: Spell out your name.

I do that.

Officer: What do you do for a living?

Me: I work at the University.

Officer: What do you do at university?

Me: I work on a research project on women’s equality

Officer: So why are you here?

Me: I want to improve my Arabic because many migrant women I work with in Italy speak Arabic, and I have friends in Jerusalem I met during my Erasmus, and they told me to come here and study.

Officer: Who pays for your trip?

Me: My university.

Officer: How come? Why should they?

Me: Because they have funds for learning foreign languages.

Officer: Do you plan to go to the Territories?

Me: To Bethlehem because it is a Christian religious site.

Officer: Do you plan to go to Gaza to take pictures of the soldiers shooting at the people on the border?

Me: (with a shocked voice) What?!? Centrally not!

Officer: Do you have a husband?

Me: No

Officer: Do you plan to marry a Palestinian?

Me: I have a partner in Italy, and I am Catholic.

Officer: Do you support the BDS?

Me: B…D what?

Officer: The Boycott Disinvestment and Sanction of Israel.

Me: Never heard of that.

Officer: I don’t believe you. Why you are actually here, and who is paying for your trip? (Field note, 17 July 2018).

It went on like that for another hour; sometimes, he asked me to spell my parents' names and other random questions. He made me go out. He called me in again. He took my fingers and eye prints, and when I asked why, he said they would be able to identify my body through the eyes if I died in an explosion. The fourth time he called me, he told me he knew I would go to the Occupied Territories, but they did not know how to prove it, and they gave me a two-week visa. He told me they would not allow me to enter again if I joined in any political actions. I took my stuff and ran out of the airport. I still have nightmares related to that interrogation. At that time, I did not join any political action. I met with my activist friends, who all agreed that playing safe was better. That was what I did, allowing me to come two other times after that.

The arbitrariness and unpredictability of the questions posed during these interrogations vividly underscore the colonial character of Israeli authority. The objective is to discourage and obstruct researchers from entering the country for research purposes while continuously reinforcing the dominance of the settlers. This element represents a clear cutline with the general definition of “risky field”. This paves the way for us to proceed to the next section, which deals explicitly with the issue of power.

Power Asymmetry

Palestinians are the occupied, the Native, the Indigenous people; Israelis are the Occupiers, the Settlers, the Colonizers. Palestinians are unable to freely travel within their historic homeland without obtaining permits. They cannot access air travel from Palestine due to the absence of airports, lack access to their currency, and are subject to a military presence that exercises control over borders, including imports and exports. They are under the discretionary authority of the Israeli military, which has the power to determine individuals' fates, including matters of life and death. In particular, the Israeli Administration dictates who is granted permission to construct structures and where, as part of a continuous effort to obliterate Palestinian lives, homes, and properties, thereby enabling the resettlement of new occupants in their place. The power differences between the two groups are fundamental and have repercussions on people’s lives. This is noticeable just by walking in a Palestinian and Israeli city, within Israel, in a Palestinian or Jewish neighborhood, or the West Bank, in a Palestinian village or a Jewish settlement. The class difference is striking, and the Palestinian ‘underdevelopment’ (Taghdisi-Rad, 2014) directly results from the Occupation. Looking at inequalities and asymmetries of power also makes necessary a severe reflection on the researcher’s positionality and the approach White researchers from Western institutions take while doing research. This is why most of the work I have done followed the line of Participatory Action Research.

“Both participatory action research (PAR) and feminist research have been developed by researchers aiming for involvement, activism, and social critique for liberatory change” (Gatenby & Humphries, 2000, p. 85). Participatory action research can, therefore, be defined as a praxis that aims for social change. It is a collaborative, liberatory, and ethical method. Reason (1994) underlined three critical elements of PAR: first, a commitment to social justice movements; second, a commitment to honoring the lived experience and knowledge of the people involved, often people from subaltern and underrepresented groups; third, a commitment to “genuine collaboration” in the research. These guidelines hold significance not solely because research operates within the confines of numerous subjugations and biases but also because settler colonialism, like any form of authority, depends on exercising power. However, within the colonial regime, this dynamic is intensified due to the fact that coloniality establishes two distinct groups, both of whom derive their collective identities from the specific context of colonization. As a result of this reality, some individuals possess power while others do not.

Force Flexibility: Accessing and Remaining in the Field

I collected roughly one hundred pages of field notes in March/April 2022. The access to the field was connected to the necessary need for flexibility and sometimes acceptance of lack of control over the field experience given by the impossibility of foreseeing the reaction of the Israeli government to certain events and its discretional use of power. Flexibility and powerlessness are articulated in two different ways: on the one hand, flexibility meant interviews and meetings postponement, endless trips in shared taxis, hitchhiking, roads, and checkpoint closure. On the other hand, it meant realizing the methods I learned during my education in Western universities were inappropriate or fell short of speaking to the targeted groups of my field. I will provide two examples for both cases.

Imposed Flexibility

The weekend was approaching, and I naively thought to get a bus and visit a Palestinian friend who lives in Ramallah to spend the evening together.

“Tonight, I have dinner with Samira, and we chat about many things. She has found a car that will finally arrive in a month and a half. Kate and I spend time together; we draw, we play with her dolls, while I speak with Samira. Kate wants to sleep in the same bed with me; she and I are reading stories. There is an attack in Tel Aviv: I received a message from the Italian foreign ministry. Samira tells me that these attacks make no sense: it is not by hitting civilians that you get things to change. She starts calling her friends (Israeli and Palestinian) who live in Tel Aviv to ensure they are all okay. I try to make Julia sleep, but she feels her mum’s concerns. After listening to a bed-story podcast, she falls asleep. Me with her. I will live on my skin the repercussions of this attack the day after” (Field note, April 7th, 2022).

The following day, I had to go back to Jerusalem to meet with other activists for an assembly, but I will never reach the agreed meeting place. I could have never anticipated a violent armed attack in Tel Aviv and that the consequence would have been the general closure of the West Bank. Here is what happened:

“Israel closed the checkpoints, and it became impossible for me to move and go back to Jerusalem in time for the meeting. They reopened at 4 when it was too late. I waited for the reopening for six hours, and now I feel exhausted. I think I pulled the rope a little too hard and reached a point dangerously close to burnout.” (Field note, April 8th, 2022).

The extract above underlines tiredness and resignation towards an unpredictable situation that strongly affected my research and everyday life plans. The majority of Palestinians residing under Occupation endure these experiences daily. The colonial framework at play involves imposing collective punishment upon all individuals who share the same nationality as the assailant, deeming them responsible and expendable. The Zionist regime displays little concern for the consequences of an average Palestinian losing a day of work due to checkpoint restrictions, potentially resulting in job loss or insufficient funds to cover expenses. Their goal is to sustain control by instilling uncertainty across all facets of life, which also has ramifications for researchers.

Something similar happened another time. I was staying in the South Hebron Hills in one of my contentious sites. An Israeli activist friend of mine invited me to spend Pass Over with her family in a small town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

“Rachel invites me to spend the Jewish Passover, Friday evening, with her family who lives in Ramat, a village founded in the 70s by a community to allow life in common between Arabs and Jews. The problem is getting to this place because Israel has forbidden entry to all Palestinians, even with permits, to allow Israeli citizens to celebrate “their Easter safely.” The result is that there is no transport from where I am staying to get to Jerusalem. I wait an hour and am about to give up, but then Rachel calls me. She is an anti-occupation activist, and she knows that I don’t want to consider this option, but she suggests I get to the closest settlement, show my passport, and take a settler bus. I am scared and confused. These same people attacked us in the field when we accompanied the community we work with. I start walking towards the settlement. I realize that settler buses pass indeed quietly. I am terrified to enter the settlement, but I take out my passport and take courage. The guard, a boy younger than me, is watching some hilarious videos; he lets me in and doesn't even look at my passport; he continues to giggle for God knows what video. I get to the bus stop, and not only do many buses pass for the whole West Bank and Israel, and they go to Jerusalem, but they take me right to the bus station where I have to take the connection to Ramat. The settler bus does not stop at the checkpoint. A very young settler (15 years old?) has a tattoo on his arm of what for me is historic Palestine: from the river to the sea, but which I fear for him represents Eretz Israel.” (Field note, 15th April 2022).

I still recall this episode as one of the most challenging moments in my fieldwork for two reasons. On the one hand, I have friends who live on both sides, and I wanted to spend the Jewish holiday with my Israeli friend. However, to get there, I had to do something my friend and I believe to be unethical: use settlers’ facilities and, hence, use our White privileges. On the other hand, this event perfectly depicts Israel’s overarching control over the Territory and its colonial dimension. Israelis are entitled to spend a “safe holiday,” and vis-à-vis this right, they can disrupt other people’s routines. However, Palestinians can be harassed during Ramadan in the second most important Islamic location: Al-Aqsa. On the night between the 5^th and 6^th of April, 2023, the Israeli Army entered Al-Aqsa mosque and physically harmed people in their daily praying during the most critical festivity for Islam. This is undoubtedly a type of colonial violence (Al-Mughrabi & Abu Mayzer, 2023).

I guess I will never know if that was the right choice. I spent a fantastic night with my friend’s family; everyone made me feel extraordinarily welcome, and I learned many things I did not know about Pass Over and the history of this tradition. The day after, my friend and I returned to the South to our Palestinian friends. The settlers attacked us, and the IDF searched our car. I was sure they would have deported me that day, but just 24 hours before, I was on a settler bus.

Methodological Flexibility

Following Sandra Harding’s distinction between methods and methodology, we can define the former as ‘techniques for gathering evidence,’ while the latter is more related to epistemology and ontology as a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed’ (Harding, 1987, p. 2–3). In terms of methods, most of my data comes from participatory observation, interviews, and focus groups. In terms of methodology, this research followed the insights from participatory action research that involved leaving a lot of space for the participants to discuss and direct the conversations/encounters and constantly following my participants' leadership both on the field during dangerous occurrences and more research-oriented moments. I will report another example from my field notes that goes in this direction.

“In the afternoon, I am supposed to interview Aisha, Yousef’s sister, who runs a women's organization in the South Hebron Hills – an extremely gender-segregated area. She tells me about the Occupation and takes me under her wing. Her daughter combs my hair while we do the interview. While we’re talking, other women enter the house to greet Aisha. They ask her what we are doing, and when they understand what is going on, they want to join the conversation. Aisha’s sister brings us some vegetables to clean. I join the women in this work. The interview becomes a focus group. There are Palestinian women, some kids, and myself. They all take off their veils. It is boiling these days. They all have different memories from the 2015 campaign, but they all recall the intensity of marching together with activists from all over the West Bank and Israel to save their village. Aisha went to talk to the American Congress to save the village. The other women are very proud of her, it’s evident”. (Field note, 1st of April, 2022).

I did not plan to do a focus group; I am not even sure this can be appropriately considered as such because I did not define strict criteria for the focus group participants in advance as it should be. However, this is more spontaneous and authentic than most focus groups are at the end. Additionally, this is something unpredictable that I could not wholly plan. I would have never been able to set up a meeting with all those women of the community by organizing it and sending them an invitation with an email. However, they were all there on a Friday, relaxed and happy to talk in an all-women’s space. I found myself flexible enough to embrace this moment and not let methodological strictness, which is very different from methodological rigor, dictate the direction of my research.

The Gender Dimension

Fine (1994), while describing the process of ‘othering’ underlines the presence of a recurrent ‘colonizing discourse’: “Researchers probe how we are in relation with the contexts we study and with our informants, understanding that we are all multiple in those relations.” (p. 72). The reflectivity of how we are in relation to the field and the people who inhabit it inevitably leads us to consider the gender dimension cautiously. England (1994) warns that “fieldwork might actually expose the researched to greater risk and might be more intrusive and potentially more exploitative than more traditional methods.” Additionally, “exploitation and possibly betrayal are endemic to fieldwork” (p. 85). Here, the positionality of the researcher may strongly influence the type of questions and the results’ interpretation. As a feminist activist in my country of origin, a country that, despite the image it can have from abroad, is still dominated by an eradicated patriarchal culture, ³ it was, and still is, sometimes hard to negotiate with my identity of activist and my identity of foreign researcher. On the one hand, many researchers are aware of the need to involve women because their agency has been historically ignored and misrepresented; however, on the other hand, there is always a risk of evaluating and understanding their experiences through Western categories of interpretation (Mohanty, 1984). Additionally, sometimes, it might be difficult for researchers to meet with women in safer spaces in extremely gender-segregated or dangerous settings. Similar dilemmas arise from the present fieldwork experience, too. In the following paragraphs, I will illustrate some of the episodes that bring me to reflect more intentionally on the gender dimension, and I will try to reconcile it with my positionality. The day I speak of in these field notes, I was staying in the village of Al-Bab together with Jim, my Israeli activist partner. We followed our usual routine in the morning of accompanying shepherds to their grazing fields, but in the afternoon, we heard of a settler attack on a shepherd of another village. Therefore, people from the usual activist circle contacted us and talked to Jim and Yousif, the Al-Bab community leader.

“We return to Al-Bab, where we accompany Yousif with his sheep, but no settler comes to disturb us this time. We prepared lunch with Yousif. The preparation is enjoyable. Yousif is very kind to me, and his wife does practically nothing: he is the chef. This feminist honeymoon ends at lunchtime. The women eat at a different table, making me sit with the men next to Jim (also visibly embarrassed). I don't say a word. Although I am guaranteed a privileged seat at the patriarchal table, it is only because of my European origins. The sense of exclusion and discrimination is even stronger because I know I am both an oppressor and oppressed. I am made to understand that surely, my ethnicity and passport make me “superior,” but in any case, my gender does not put me on the same level as the men at the table. I did not react fast enough; otherwise, I would have gone to the women's table. I blame myself for the whole meal. Jim tries to include me in the conversation, but everyone else does not; this is not my place. Fortunately, lunch ends quickly. And we go to Al-Noor, a small village nearby. The settlers beat a Palestinian boy out with his flock. We see how he is and document what happened. The boy is in bed with a badly bruised and bleeding leg and is in pain. There are only men in the room, and I honestly don't want to look further. The whole situation is alarming. I realize that entering the room would break some explicit gender norms, so I don’t enter; I stay outside and wait.

The boy’s sisters come to my aid. They have been expecting us since we arrived because they immediately opened the front door for me and ask me many questions. I answer with my improvised Arabic. Once inside the house, they immediately surround me. There are only women. They ask if they can take pictures of me. I say yes, and I ask why. “We have never met an Italian girl! We want to tell all our friends!” We take selfies together, and they offer me tea and coffee. First, they bless me in all possible ways to be in Palestine, be there with the X organization, and tell their stories abroad. Then they ask me what I do. I answer that I do research and I am exploring in the region of the South Hebron Hills. Another set of blessings follows. They ask about my family, and I ask about theirs; they are 12 brothers and sisters. The younger sisters push each other to get closer to me on the sofa. I realize there is a lot of physical contact among women. I ask Huda what she does. She tells me that she stays home and never goes out. She has studied but has not yet married; she is 25 and takes care of her house with her mother. We talk about what happened to their brother. She tells me there were three settlers; first, they beat him with a stick, and then they ran away. She is worried because she doesn’t know if he can walk again and knows the settlers will go unpunished. I tell her I am very sorry and that we are there for that: we take pictures, collect the testimony, and see what can be done with the lawyers. She asks me what I think of Palestinian women and if I find them sweet (I checked after we spoke, and she just used the word sweet). I tell her that she and her sisters are very sweet and were very nice to let me in; for me, it is a great honor because I think that Palestinian women are strong enough to resist and live under Occupation. Unfortunately, it is time to go; Jim hasn’t forgotten me and comes to pick me up. We accompany Yousef, who greets us and tells me that Jim is like a brother to him. Seeing them together really gave me the idea of how the relationships of trust and resistance I speak of in my work are real. They are made up of whole days spent together, both in action and inaction. The only problem is that they are highly heteronormative relationships. They are two men, and although they come from two different communities, they both are male. This certainly plays a big part in the matter, and I do not know how to rationalize that.” (Field note, 17th March 2022).

As these sections from my field notes underline, the element of gender intertwines with the one of race and knowledge production. This element was probably harder to scrutinize and come to terms with because it opens the debate of how much we want to reproduce the activist struggles we experience and support. Here, it is essential to delve deeper into the issues of racial positionality and white complicity in colonization processes. The question can be framed like this: how can a feminist White scholar help decolonize Palestine? Positionality is a central concern in the context of settler colonialism, as emphasized by Patrick Wolfe. As a White academic, one cannot engage in this discourse at any level without recognizing and internalizing the historical complicity of knowledge production within settler society in supporting its practices and privileges. However, positionality can also serve as a refuge for White anxieties to the extent that it legitimizes detachment and inaction. Nevertheless, it is not only about identities and privilege; it is also about a sense of belonging. In my case, I undeniably belong to a marginalized group, residing in a Christian and conservative nation like Italy, where a woman is killed every three days, non-heterosexual individuals lack essential civil and political rights, and although abortion is legal, it is not readily accessible in most regions of the country. Discrimination remains a pressing issue even within academia, exemplified by the fact that only five universities nationwide have female directors. This underscores that I do not believe that advocating for Palestinian liberation necessitates forsaking feminist concerns. Initially, I held somewhat condescending views on gender equality when I first arrived in Palestine. However, I eventually resolved that I would not tolerate differential treatment from men, trying not to disrupt Palestinian cultural norms through my actions. In such instances, I would openly communicate with those close to me about behavior I perceived as discriminatory. On the other hand, it is not up to researchers and White people to lead these feminist struggles. The Palestinian society is still highly gender-segregated, but there has been a Palestinian feminist movement that, starting from black feminist insights, is trying to fight sexism within their societies; we can follow their lead and express our solidarity (Stagni, 2023). Even though, as researchers, we might use Western feminist lenses to understand certain social phenomena, it is not our place to pass judgment. I believe the maximum we can do is to listen, understand, identify contradictions, and act in a way that does not cause harm.

“After a day in the fields with the shepherds confronting settlers, I can finally relax in Jim’s over-warm pick-up. He drives like crazy, but I fell asleep anyway. We arrived in Jerusalem, and he smiles at me and thanks me for going with them. He probably does not even understand how much this means to me. His friendship allowed me such privileged access to the field. He confesses that they have very few female activists and that it would be crucial for him to reach a larger women’s involvement in the movement. He understands, however, that being in a context where most interactions occur only among men (Palestinian activists and Israeli settlers) might be a deterrent for joining. Once in Jerusalem, we say goodbye in torrential rainfall.” (14th November 2019).

This last quote leads to a further reflection that connects the gender and the fieldwork dimension (Sharp & Kremer, 2006). On the one hand, it underlines a general hardship for women to participate in activism under challenging contexts: there are many more barriers and risks to accessing these fields. First, a security dimension makes such a field physically riskier for females than male activists. Second, this type of activism and its confrontations often occur between activists and the settlers accompanied by the military. For this reason, they are often characterized by blatant exposure to toxic masculinity. The result is that the space for female activists in these contentious fields shrinks. Hence, a further dimension certainly comes from the additional difficulty related to barriers present to engaging and entering these spaces from an equal standpoint. Women are socialized to be meek and calm and to follow what has been said. Men are more likely to challenge authority and hierarchies (hooks, 2015). A third element concerns race. For Palestinian women, joining a movement that does not overtly advocate for the Palestinian/national cause is disproportionately hard. For Israeli women, it might be slightly more manageable. However, it is also not immediate to participate in activism in contexts such as South Hebron Hills, where most women perform very segregated gender roles. Hence, international activists may find themselves divided between their support for the Palestinian cause and the value they attribute to gender equality and respect for women’s rights that have long informed their behavior and life in their society of origin. On the other hand, the presence of women in whatever movement further legitimates the movement itself.

Ethical Concerns

Participatory action research inevitably changes the researcher, sometimes painfully, sometimes in exciting, lasting ways. The self-reflexivity on such changes comes from a feminist understanding of knowledge. Muhammad et al. (2015, p. 1046) believe that participatory action research cannot be properly applied unless unequal power relations are identified and addressed. They underline the importance of understanding power, and privilege while approaching communities from an academic standpoint. In this regard, as for the ethical considerations, I have found myself questioning several times, my role of power as a foreign researcher, and the effect that this would have caused on the communities I was working with. While researching marginalized communities, researchers encounter the potential for the reproduction of gender, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities. “Academic researchers represent centers of power, privilege, and status within their formal institutions and the production of scientific knowledge itself. Researchers also may have power and privilege from their class, education, racial/ethnic backgrounds, or other identity positions” (Muhammad et al., 2015, p. 1047). However, on the other hand, Patricia H. Collins (1990) reminds us that new knowledge is essential for individuals' consciousness change and economic institutions' social transformation (p. 221).

Indeed, fieldwork in an area of conflict raises additional serious ethical questions. This is because the researcher “modifies the field of action through their participation in it”, through the way they interpret the data and the type of affective links they develop with the participants to the research (Routledge, 2002, p. 486). The researchers have a responsibility towards their informants, and they have to ensure that the people they interview will not be threatened because they participated in the research, either during the fieldwork or afterward. Protecting their identity is a researcher’s responsibility. The researcher’s obligation also goes beyond the fieldwork time; once analyses are produced and published, one must wonder how the collected data can be used (Nash, 2007, p. 223), especially by the authorities. In the case at hand, the question is central because of Israel’s capillary control over all aspects of Palestinian life. However, even if the material collected was not highly sensitive, having it confiscated or directly managed by the authorities would pose a moral and ethical problem. Before taking the flight back to Europe, I sent all the material collected on the field to a trustworthy person in Italy via Telegram, who stored everything for me. Then, I deleted everything from my computer; the same was done for photos, documents, and fieldwork notes. These strategies aimed at protecting the people to the same extent that they tried to protect me from invasive control when leaving.

The field chosen for this research is profoundly political and emotionally intense, loaded with difficult situations, injustice, violence, and moral dilemmas. A deep involvement was inevitable and represented a human position more than a political one. Similarly, the new strain of literature that aims at “decolonizing methodology” aims at a fairer production and diffusion of knowledge. These reflections go toward applying methods while continually being “self-reflexive about one’s position as a non-Indigenous researcher connected to colonizing institutions like the university” (Fortier, 2017, p. 22). It means not to “just” confess Western researcher privilege, which is commonplace in many activists and academic circles, but to empower research participants to help dismantle structures of domination that ensure White privilege.

The discourse on privileges is probably the most salient one when it comes to considering ethical dilemmas and ethical challenges. PAR has, in fact, aimed to reconsider the politics of knowledge production by problematizing how ideas are developed and possessed in a way that Western academia usually tends to invisibilize those who are the actual “producers” of knowledge. In this way, nonacademic research partners are not viewed as passive, ignorant subjects but as people with experiential knowledge and expertise as valuable as academic knowledge. On the other hand, as underlined by Guishard (2009) “Action research methods are commodified when they are romanticized and touted as panaceas to institutional racism and structural injustice and when members of disempowered groups are superficially included in research. Recreating existing knowledge hierarchies like an erudite researcher—and the unwitting passive participant is an especially delicate and subtle appropriation of participatory methods” (p. 88). This is precisely why this contribution emphasizes the doubts, the problems, and the difficulties encountered while conducting this research rather than presenting this experience as an idyllic orientalist experience. To give the necessary time and space to emphasize hardship, it is essential to deromanticize such a method and consider it more as a praxis – in the Gramscian sense of the term – that goes toward knowledge sharing rather than knowledge-making. Gramsci recognizes that knowledge is a human product intimately connected to the historical and social context in which it arises. To say that a theory is related to the social context in which it occurs means to affirm that it is linked to the relationships that human beings weave among each other. In other words, it is related to people’s activities to survive. This does not mean practice verifies theory and demonstrates its correspondence to reality. Practice is the key to getting out of the impasse represented by correspondence because it forces us to recognize that knowing means modifying, and modifying it brings with it the root of knowledge (it is a condition of material and not just formal possibility) (Gramsci, 1975, p. 882). This reflection reveals that knowledge is unavoidably situated, but we can try to decolonize how we gather and reproduce it.

Indeed, most of the dilemmas exposed here have not been settled yet. How do we evaluate how much risk a researcher can take to participate in a field meaningfully? What is the level of flexibility that maintains a methodology “scientific"? How is it possible to balance our identity values within gendered-segregated societies? And finally, at the end of the day, we will remain in the palaces of knowledge. As much as our research can be participatory and horizontal, it will always be an asymmetrical relation. How can we compromise with this? These questions will orientate future methodological reflections and inquiries.

Conclusion

In this article on methods and methodology, I have exposed some of the main choices, suggestions, and challenges that characterized the techniques and methods of fieldwork experience in a settler colonial society. The article does not aim to be exhaustive and to provide solutions to the four sections presented. Rather, it wants to show how, through the practice of doubt, error, and discomfort, it is possible to evaluate a fieldwork experience in a dangerous context that is not easy to inhabit either as a research participant or as a researcher.

The four categories considered revolve around the different ethical-political dilemmas that have represented a constant reflection during this field research. The first significant difficulty was precisely that of evaluating and probing these risks. The Israeli-Palestinian context denotes a specific field where we do not see a high-intensity conflict, as regards the presence of frequent and unpredictable military actions, but where violence can escalate quickly and discretionarily is paired with an arbitrary use of state-colonial violence. In addition, the areas where my contentious sites are located are characterized by a constant military presence and, above all, by a conspicuous presence of strongly ideological and often violent settlers. Therefore, this level of violence differs from other areas of Israel or the OPTs and entails another risk assessment, which does not involve only and exclusively the safety of the people involved in the research but also the safety of the researcher. Being associated with activists who demand an end to the Occupation in a non-violent manner carries the real risk of being deported and banished from the country - as has happened to some researchers in other areas of the West Bank. However, in my risk assessment, I have always told myself that using my privilege as a White person belonging to a renowned Western institution was the least I could do to show my appreciation for those who had so warmly welcomed me into their communities. Furthermore, following Gramsci’s insights, I believe that academic and intellectual production cannot be separated from a political commitment; in fact, he was not only an intellectual but the secretary and founder of the Italian Communist Party.

The second challenge was to accept and embrace continuous flexibility, both from an organizational and mental point of view and from a methodological and research standpoint. Both have been difficult because they have involved a necessary relinquishment of control that many researchers in other fields do not experience. Furthermore, it also involved continuous bargaining with existing ideas and values and concrete situations on the ground. The examples mentioned in my fieldwork notes try to give substance to these moments.

Thirdly, reflecting on gender, gender roles, and femininity within a gendered-segregated context was unavoidable at a certain point. I found myself putting these reflections and feelings in remote corners of my mind because I did not want to deal with this aspect of a context and research that was already so complicated and emotionally engaging. Unfortunately, it was impossible. As banal and partial as my reflections are, they try not to fall into an orientalist and Eurocentric narrative of the categories of gender and feminism. However, it was not easy to come to terms with principles and values that I believe are fundamental for society where I want to live as a woman and researcher. This point remains open to me; however, there is a vast literature of Israeli and Palestinian female academics who try to read these concrete experiences through lenses as diverse as indigenous and Black feminism. They probably provide better answers than I do.

Finally, the last element was general ethical concerns related to knowledge production. The ethical matters underlined in the previous section link back to those present in the first part of risk assessment. Recognizing a privilege also means trying to use it in a way that redistributes resources. However, it also means acknowledging that knowledge production is situated and strongly linked to the experiences of individuals. The definition of praxis, as conceived by Gramsci, comes to help us. It means trying to develop a theoretical production informed by an action that seeks to empower participants and society.