Solidarity is not solid. If we could paint it, it would be striated and seamed, remarkably aged and ragged, but with bits of hopeful new growth—winding wildly in spirals or staggering in one direction only to switch sharply to another.
As I write this, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah is terrorized by Jewish settlers who are brazenly evicting Palestinians from their homes. Again. And Hamas is lobbing rockets into Israel, while Israel targets and kills Palestinians in Gaza. An editorial in the Washington Post by Noura Erakat and Mariam Barghouti describes the situation as what it is—“the ongoing process that seeks to remove Palestinian natives and replace them with Jewish-Zionists.” The anniversary of the Nakba is just around the corner, they say. With the Biden administration and/or the usual American policy approach in mind, Erakat and Barghouti end with a call: “We do not need more empty both sides-isms, we need solidarity to overcome apartheid.”
The expectation or longing for solidarity is a cry for justice against a universe determinedly insensitive to our demands. When we think of solidarity, maybe we think of a line of people, hooked arm-in-arm, facing down the police. Or a woman’s refusal to cross a picket line at the factory gates. The Black Power fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Maybe something as simple and brave as standing in front of a bulldozer aimed at destroying Palestinian homes—and paying with your life. All of these are impassioned visions, offering a performance of moral clarity and a willingness to take a stand.
But solidarity is more than an ideological/intellectual statement; it is infused with feeling. Those on the political Left often dream of it, as outcome and object. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, I think of solidarity as being as much an emotion as an action, not that the two could be easily separated. As an emotion, solidarity connects, it is social, operating through exchange: “[I]t is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “I” and “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.” Thus emotions, for Ahmed, do not arise from inside the person and move outward (like we think of love or anger), nor start from outside and move in (like a wave of feeling in a crowd), but circulate, through signs, between bodies. We are impressed upon by a situation, a person, an object, and in this way we turn toward or away from it. “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.”
The contributors to this book show clearly just how difficult solidarity is, how sticky an object, freighted with expectations and histories. Objects shimmering with affect can lead us to lean in or turn away. They can orient us variously. As Omer and Lupo comment in the introduction, this book includes examples of people who, in multiple situations, are “unable to participate in an intersectional vision of emancipation that transcend national boundaries.” The limits of that imagination are shaped by the hegemonic frameworks of state powers, racial hegemonies, religious divides, and modernist projects. If solidarity is our designed object, the desired good around which the book is oriented, then the disappointed hope that it will solidify is what marks the tenor of the project. We see in these chapters a kind of call for new affective objects, networks rewired to allow for larger, more expansive connections. Omer and Carmi call for marginalized Israelis to find solidarity with each other and/or Palestinians; Hammer’s analysis shows how American women organizing against Trump failed to move beyond the forms of silencing of pro-Palestinian speech that shaped the Women’s March of 2017; Gürel unpacks why Iranian and Turkish Muslim women could not find solidarity in the face of a global system that made Iranian women’s offers of support seem toxic to a devout Turkish politician. These are instances of analyzing ideology, its imbrication in religion and ideas about religion. But they necessarily imagine what could have been otherwise.
