An Orchestra of Civil Resistance: Privilege, Diversity, and Identification Among Cross‐Border Activists in a Palestinian Village

Fluctuating forms of diversity have evolved as a result of cross-border
interventions by civil resistance activists. Such diversity is nurtured by the
inflows and outflows of individuals form very different backgrounds on a
local stage of action. Discussing civil resistance as an arena in which such
fluctuating diversity produces multilayered patterns of identification, this
paper looks at Israeli and international activists who interject themselves
temporarily into the local sphere of civil resistance in a Palestinian village.
Here, solidarity activists form a highly diverse and shifting assemblage of
actors who divide among themselves according to power-related ascriptions
and privileges. As in a musical orchestra, individual activists and
groups of activists each follow their own “score,” but align their distinct
functions with one another to wage a struggle collectively. Within this
orchestra of civil resistance, diversity is not the obstacle to collective
action but its very basis.