Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine

Introduction -- 1. The Colonial Calculus of Veracity: Delegations under Erasure and the Desire for Evidentiary Weight -- 2. Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and Fragmentation under Occupation -- 3. Recitation against Erasure: Planting, Harvesting, and Narrating the Continuities of Displacement -- 4. Itineraries under Duress: Tours across Three Occupations of One City -- 5. Colonial Ruins and a Decolonized Future: Witnessing and Return in Historic Palestine -- 6. “Welcome to Gaza”: On the Politics of Invitation and the Right to Tourism -- 7. Witnesses in Palestine: Imperfect Analogies, Acts of Translation, and Refusals to Perform --Conclusion: On Futurity, Failure, and Precarious Hope

"In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation." --Provided by publisher.