Weapons of the Weak or The Culture of Everyday Resistance ... · Weapons of the Weak . or . The Culture of Everyday Resistance to Power Relations . Dr. Eitan Ginzberg . Faculty of

Weapons of the Weak or

The Culture of Everyday Resistance to Power Relations

Dr. Eitan Ginzberg Faculty of the Humanities, Kibbutzim College of Education

Tel Aviv, Israel

Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Sapir Academic College Sderot, Israel

[email protected]

Abstract - Who is responsible for the downfall of “bad” regimes throughout history? Are they the “brave”, the small number of dissidents who can be found in every political system, turning openly against it, while endangering themselves, often even their lives, because they are tired of living in a lie? Or are they rather the “cowards,” those millions of subject-citizens who, though unwilling to risk their lives, engage in daily, small, yet fully conscious acts of subversion against a hated government, and slowly but surely undermine it from within, until its downfall? This question will be discussed in this paper. Its final attitude is based on the pioneering work of the American political scientist and anthropologist James Scott over the last 45 years, and his theory of the “weapons of the weak,” or what is at the center of his thought, namely the culture of everyday resistance to power relations. Keywords- Albert Camus, authentic consciousness, hidden transcript, ideology punctuation, infra-politics, James Scott, manifestation of an overall consent, mystification, naturalization, pre-politics, quiescence, rebellion, resistance, revolt, Vaclav Havel, weapons of the weak.

Mottos “I had endeavored so to conduct myself as not become bnoxious to the white inhabitants, knowing as I did their power and their hostility to colored people . . . First, I had made no display of the little property or money I possessed, but in every way I wore as much as possible the aspect of slavery. Second, I had never appeared to be even so intelligent as I really was. This all colored at the south, free

and slaves, find it particularly necessary for their own comfort and safety to observe.”1 “O Bhante [glance at] our slaves . . . do another thing with their bodies, say another with their speech and have a third in their mind.”2 “The young people started to boo. They jeered as the President, who still appeared unaware that trouble was mounting, rattled along denouncing anti-communists forces. The booing grew louder and was briefly heard by the television audience before technicians took over and voiced-over a sound track of canned applause. It was a moment that made Rumanians realize that the all-powerful leader was, in fact, vulnerable. It unleashed an afternoon of demonstrations in the capital and a second night of bloodshed.”3 The realities of power require that they either be spoken by anonymous subordinates or be protected by disguises such as rumors, gossip,

1Lunard Lane, The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, North Carolina (Boston, 1848), quoted in Gilbert Osofsky (ed.), Puttin'on OleMassa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells and Solomon Northrup, in James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, )New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990(, pp. 2. 2Dav Raj Chanana, Slavery in Ancient India, (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1960), quoted in Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 35. 3"Ceausescu's Absolute Power Dies in Rumanian Popular Rage", The New York Times, January 7, 1990, pp. A15.

DOI: 10.5176/2251-2853_3.2.151

Received 04 Mar 2014 Accepted 11 Mar 2014

GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014

©The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access by the GSTF

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DOI 10.7603/s40741-014-0003-4

mailto:[email protected]

euphemism, or grumbling that dares not speak in its own name.4 The Rebel Rebellion, says Albert Camus in his book The Rebel (L’Homme révolté, 1951), “is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms.” It is to impose “a limit to history,” that would ensure that a “promise of a value is born . . . It is the affirmation of a nature, common to all men, which eludes the world of power” (Camus 2012: 248–249). Or, to express it more succinctly, rebellion is the largest human effort to be an object of history. It is, following Camus’s logic, the Promethean experience to fight against the more or less arbitrary edicts of polity that are imposed on man in view of his social nature — and place a limit to it. And who is the rebel himself, Camus asks, and he replies: the rebel “is a man who says no” — a man who until recently has remained silent and has accepted the circumstances of his life, although he believes them to be unjust (Camus: 11–12); a man who suddenly turns and faces injustice, and is looking for a more valuable life, because “every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value” (Camus: 12). A necessary condition allowing for an act of rebellion, explains Camus, is evidently a clear perception of the true nature of reality, wholly devoid of illusions or mystification. The rebel is not necessarily a revolutionary; certainly not a revolutionary who “arrogates to himself the power of life or death over others” (Camus: 244). The revolutionary claims to liberate all men, while he actually liberates “a few by subjugating the rest” (fascism); he “aims at liberating all men by provisionally enslaving them all” (communism). (Camus: 244–245). The rebel, on the contrary, “limits himself, as a matter of principle, to refusing to be humiliated without asking that others should be. He will even accept pain provided his integrity is respected” (Camus: 16). Thus, “the very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master,” says Camus, “he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery” (Camus: 12). He becomes a free man. The revolt trail of the greengrocer from Prague In his article “The power of the powerless” (1978), playwright, dissident and president to be of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel tells about a greengrocer in Prague who put a

4 Scott, 1990, pp. 156.

cardboard with the slogan “workers of the world, unite!” on top of a piles of carrots and onions on display. The slogan had not been written at the initiative of the greengrocer. It was given to him, along with the onions, carrots and other products, and probably not for the first time, by a government-owned chain store (Havel 1990b: 41–42).5 The greengrocer hesitated whether to display the cardboard. He knew only too well that he would “get into trouble” if he did not. Therefore he decided to renounce any act of protest, and exhibit the slogan, convincing himself that “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” (Havel 1990b: 48). The greengrocer was indifferent to the slogan, observes Havel. Placing it there, in front of the shop window, over a pile of carrots and onions, was merely “one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society,’ as they say” (Havel 1990b: 41). In other words, the man was afraid, and preferred to live a lie, to live in a system that uprooted his humanity and made him its object. But, to console himself and reduce the burden of humiliation, he wrapped himself in ideology, for had he dared to confront his act, he would have had to admit painfully, “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient” (Havel 1990b: 42). To avoid taking a stand against the “low foundations of his obedience,” the greengrocer exhibited the slogan while expressing “a level of disinterested conviction.” To enhance this he could also add dubiously, but calmly, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?”

By putting up the slogan, states Havel, the greengrocer differentiated himself from the “thousands of nameless people who try to live within the truth,” people who had received similar slogans, but had decided not to display them. He separated himself from all the people who chose to live an “existential” life and were willing to risk their existential security and perhaps their very lives. Our greengrocer, however, preferred to join the millions who also wanted an ‘existential’ life, but could not afford to, “perhaps only because to do so in the circumstances in which they live, they need ten times the courage of those [the courageous]

5. The cultural historian Derek Sayer said about Havel's article: "This brilliant essay is to my mind one of the most important contributions to the sociology of power in recent years".(Sayer 1995: 374, n. 5)



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who have already taken the first step”( Havel 1990b: 78, 84–85). Those who didn’t possess this degree of courage, including our greengrocer, had no choice but to live a lie, that is, to live a disrupted life. This decision, says Havel, turned our greengrocer and millions of others like him into servants of the system, the very people who allowed it and legitimized its existence.

Why did the greengrocer have to choose between such options, knowing that his choices and behavior might eventually be seen as quite despicable? The answer is simple: he hid behind a so-called unique and unfallible ideology, and by adopting it uncritically found justification for his actions, convincing himself that it wouldn’t hurt anyone. To this he added another consideration: namely the expected loss of economic security provided by the Communist welfare state, should he refuse to put up the slogan.6 At the same time the greengrocer gauged the legitimacy of the regime, concluding that the regime indeed relied on a legal code that had so far gained international recognition (here he had to repress the disturbing memory of the Communist takeover of May 1948, headed by Clement Gottwald), and operated within the law, thus obviously demanding unquestioning obedience. These three components, says Havel, apparently persuaded the greengrocer to join the scores of cowards who chose to follow suit, deceive themselves and hide behind the safe, fortified walls of a false consciousness.

As to Camus’s claim, would it have sufficed if the American slave had decided not to accept the system and act in a subversive and clandestine way, as described above? Would it have been enough if the Romanian citizen had posited a visible, yet anonymous, borderline to take a stand against the distorted, pervasive personal and political conduct of Nikolai Ceausescu? And, as to Havel’s greengrocer, was putting up the slogan indeed an expression of cowardice, humiliation, and submission? Did the greengrocer’s face actually fit the mask he was wearing (for certain he didn’t like the slogan), to use an image used by George Orwell in his Shooting an Elephant?7

Or is a different interpretation possible, arguing that the greengrocer wasn’t actually

6 Rolf Hochhuth, in his famous The Deputy, a Christian tragedy, cites Charles Maurice de Talleyrand "incontestable observation that a married man with family will do anything for money." (Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy, pp. 230). 7 See also Knight 1995: 39

hiding behind the official ideology, but rather “punctured” it in his quiet and introverted way, totally ignoring, as Havel argued, both the slogan’s meaning and its significance, placing it reluctantly behind his store’s vitrine (Havel saw lack of deliberation as a moral disrobing)? This constraint removed another building block (in retrospect perhaps even a supportive block) from the evidently false wall of proletarian unity upon which the whole communist ethos was based, and whose sacred worship our greengrocer had just joined? Could it be presumed, that our greengrocer was actually part of the “stew seething underneath the apparent compliance and deference” (Knight 1995: 43; Sayer 1995: 369)? A sober and conscious stew, significantly far-off from the apparent docility that eventually inflamed the whole Communist system in 1989? So far it is clear, however, that both Camus and Havel reject this interpretation. The literature on resistance issues generally supports them. It seems that the only scholar who systematically dealt with our suggested standpoint, while attaching to the eligible “family of man” not only the greengrocer, but also other oppressed, including prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and that London’s “monstrous (prole) woman, solid as a Norman pillar” who “was singing in a powerful contralto” a song composed by a versificator (Orwell 1977: 137–138), is the American politologist and anthropologist James Scott. Scotts' studies on life in isolated rural communities in Southeast Asia led him to develop a theory — which we could refer to as the “authentic consciousness theory” — that explains how weak subalterns develop both effective and safe means of resistance to the harsh (“Aurelian”) or less harsh (post-totalitarian, as Havel named it) living conditions imposed on them, so as to make their lives more meaningful and valuable.

The discussion will be based on three of Scotts’ studies, on several academic and literary writings and on some illuminating historical examples. We will then return to Camus and Havel’s thesis and to the greengrocers’ case study, being then better equipped conceptually, in order to offer some critiques to Scott’s authentic consciousness theory, and in trying to solve our core question: was the greengrocer from Prague and million others who acted like him in Czechoslovakia of his time and throughout history, guilty of cowardice and demoralization, as Havel suggests (Havel



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1990b: 39), or guilty in some ‘lesser humanity’ as suggested implicitly by Camus? Or were these fiercely dominated people innocent of all charges, and entitled to full recognition of their humanity and their decisive contribution to the universal struggle against tyranny and against any pretentious omnipotent power, softening it, and sometimes even banning it altogether, as Scott suggests (Scott 1990: 70–107)? Concerning the literary sources used here I feel obliged to make an important methodological note. It seems that literature (and imagination altogether) has great importance for the development of our discussion. For Azar Nafisi there is no doubt. “What we search for in fiction” she says, “is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.” (Nafisi 2003: 1). “Fiction,” she adds, “was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.” (Nafisi: 280) And assuming that writers wrote books to tell us something about the reality in which we live, they certainly had a clear vision concerning it, even when engaged in fiction. Furthermore, since we cite here commended authors, we can be confident of their capacity to penetrate reality with great sensitivity and offer us useful illuminative testimonies on the human way of considering crucial questions. Negatively speaking, it is hard to see how such an article is written without any writer’s testimony. A few observations Before we proceed to discuss Scott’s approach, we would like to note several distinctions related to Camus and Havel on the one hand, and Scott, on the other hand, which would enable us to penetrate in depth into the upcoming discussion. The first distinction is related to the concepts of resistance and rebellion. Camus speaks of revolt. Scott speaks of resistance. What stands between them? Let’s look at their points of departure. For Scott, resistance begins where compliance stops. Therefore, resistance includes “any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-à-vis those superordinate classes.” (Scott 1985: 290). Must resistance contain anti –hegemonic ideological motives and “some short-run individual or collective sacrifice in order to bring about a longer-range, beneficial goal”?

(Scott 1985: 291). Scott doesn’t demand that. For him resistance (including for example, gossip, slander, condemnation, theft, foot-dragging, desertion, evading paying taxes or inflicting damage to property) will be considered as such, whether its perpetrators acted against the system as an act of “world rectification” or whether they operated in defense of their personal interests, seemingly egotistical or beneficial. Why? Because in both cases - the ‘ideological’ and the ‘egoistic’ - the superordinate class was injured, and therefore had to redefine its relationship with its subordinates. For example the case of the mass defection from the Russian army after the revolution of March (February) 1917 (according to various estimates about two million soldiers deserted), which contributed to the success of the revolution in November (October), a desertion motivated only by the chance to win free land. (Scott 1985: 293–294)

8 After all, Scott reminds us, compliant with John Dunn, in most cases resistance will come about not because of some “expression of optimism about the future,” but because of distress. (Scott 1976: 226, n. 7). This same position is not accepted by Camus and Havel. “Their” rebellion is born according to Camus as a reaction to “unjust and incomprehensible” conditions of life. Therefore a revolt is a cry against the “flagrancy” and a demand “that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock. Its preoccupation is to transform.” (Camus: 8). It is a revolt of an idea, of the mission, of a scale, and contrary to the position of Scott, also an expression of optimism about the future. The American Declaration of Independence, for example, could be considered as a revolt of this kind. It was a rebellion of measure, of transcendence... A second distinction deals with the scene of resistance and rebellion. According to Camus and Havel, the motivation for revolt or rebellion, forces that seek to act on reality, requires, by definition, a political framework, although not necessarily public. Scott requires the same political framework, but it need not be public by definition. As for him, covert

8According to the Israeli historian Michael Confino this chaotic process ended in the distribution of 95.5% of the Russian nobility's land, actually the greatest agrarian revolution of all times in human history and the first stage if not the most essential of the 1917 revolution in Russia. See: Michael Confino, "Russia: 1917 and the road to it", Zmanim (Hebrew) 27–28, (1998 [1989]): 23–24.



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resistance measurements, or what he generally defines as “infra politics,” are political acts of resistance to all purposes, even more importantly, a condition sine qua non for the emergence of an exposed, wide-open resistance. When Lulu, the Indonesian stepfather of Barack Obama, told Obama’s mother “when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve”: “[In this country] guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford…like saying whatever pops into your head” (Obama 2007: 46),9 he actually explained to young Obama, that in Indonesia, when you criticize the regime or act in defiance against it, you do it silently, otherwise something bad will happen to you. This is because each phrase that expresses disapproval of the political regime is considered powerful enough to undermine it and even overthrow it. Hence, what is not considered at all by Camus and defined as pre-politics (meaning – still not politics) by Havel, gets full recognition as political by Scott, and even crucial for all intents and purposes. A third distinction relates to the question what are the targets of revolt and resistance: Changing the system from within, or destroying it and replacing it with another? Camus, it seems, accepts a resistance work within the system. “His” revolt, as presented above, doesn’t essentially require the destruction of the existing system. Havel’s resistance strongly requires it (certainty in communism, where life meant to live permanently within a lie). In this context Camus’s revolt is not the end of all contradictions but mainly the effort to deal with them and resolve them at least partially. Camus also limits the violent record of any uprising. “The rebel rejects violence in advance, in the service of a doctrine or of a reason of State” he states. Goals are sacred and should be sanctified, he emphasizes, not means. The revolt should keep faith in human destiny not sacrifice it for abstract goals. Therefore “authentic arts of rebellion will only consent to take up arms for institutions that limit violence, not for those which codify it.” The only exception could be “when the end is

9Obamas adds some more to this sharp and clear

understanding: "She [his mother] didn’t know what it was like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself. She didn’t know how crowded and treacherous the path to security could be. Without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward. He was right, of course. She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy. That possibility negated anything she might say to Lolo." (Obama 2007: 46).

absolute, historically speaking, and when it is believed certain of realization, it is possible to go so far as to sacrifice others.” But, when this is not the case “only oneself can be sacrificed, in the hazards of a struggle for the common dignity of man.” (Camus: 290). In other words, the very non-violent rebellious phenomenon may limit its objectives and direct the revolt to act within the existing system more than trying to topple it. As for the inherent resistance of Scott, there are, he admits, rare cases, and yet, impossible to predict, of “explosive moments of power,” defined as “Saturnalia of power,” which may bring solid political systems down (Scott 1990: 340-350).10 Their rarity is understood in light of the fact that “most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites” (Scott 1990: 136). The fourth distinction seeks to find out who the rebels are. I think that the cases we examined so far point at the subordinated, i.e. the subaltern groups. In Camus this insight derives from the typical characteristics of “his” rebellion and its objectives, as well from his assertion that the rebellion is, among other things, “the affirmation of a nature, common to all men, which eludes the world of power.” As for Scott, peering at his research among peasants, tenants, sharecroppers and agricultural day laborers, brings me to believe as a point of departure he considered these people rebellious (or generally speaking quite all rural population).(Scott 1976; Scott 1985; Scott 1990) Bourdieu offers us a broader distinction of those who were expelled by the neo-liberal state. Thus, his weakest are, among others, the social workers, the teachers, various low-level judges and youth leaders, which Bourdieu defines as ‘the true soldiers of governments’; their left hand; those who make its function possible. The strong, however, are the right hand of the State: technocrats from the Ministry of Finance, from private banks and ministerial cabinets. In the neo–liberal state, which identifies the public interest with the interests of the market and abandons its role as a welfare state, the ‘left hand’ confronts the right hand (Bourdieu 1998: 1–3). In this state of affairs, where people are required “to

10 George Orwell himself pointed out that socialism was

better for the middle classes and not for the working classes. In terms of acting, for all these people who met at the local pub, socialism said better wages, less hours, and less presence of the bosses. (Scott 1990: 349). Georg Lukacs in turn, showed that farmers never imagined a revolutionary. (Scott 1990: 350, n. 101).



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nothing more than a material contribution requirement but without any commitment or enthusiasm,” the people reject the state. They refer to it as a foreign power; all you have to do is use it against itself in order to advance your selfish private interests. (Bourdieu 1998: 4–5). In Scott’s terms, as we tested them above, we have here a show of resistance to all intents and purposes. But the distinction of Bourdieu expands the concept deeply into the professional and educated middle classes, essentially the same wherefrom Havel’s rebels come. The theory of authentic consciousness Havel confirms that the greengrocer understood exactly the situation he encountered. He knew what was expected of him. He knew the options available to them. He knew why he chose to let the slogan hang at the end of his quandaries, and why it was a terrible choice in both private and public perspectives. The greengrocer also knew how to forgive himself wracking his mind with the ideology by which he soothed his tormented conscience, and added a few other substantial considerations like the heavy duty of obedience and his commitments to his family. According to Havel, our hero knew that he sticks to his conscience by shifting the center of gravity of his decision and the embarrassing truth underneath it, to the calming ideological fiction.

Scott rejects this reasoning. For him the dominated are not misleading in their judgment of the power structure in which they operate, and thus they neither make any naturalization nor mystification around it. The reasons they seemingly display a “manifestation of an overall consent” and do not climb on barricades, even when it is absolutely clear that the regime doesn’t work according to their interests, are very prosaic. Fear, for example, is one of these. And it seems there is no need to say much more about it.11 Another reason is the prevailing belief that their conditions of inferiority are not the last word of a possible promotion of their interests and for improving their overall situation. And still another reason relates to the general tendency of most subalterns, as discussed above, to focus their efforts on working out

11 “Naturally, fear is not the only building block in the

present social structure. Nonetheless, it is the main, the fundamental material, without which no even that surface uniformity, discipline and unanimity on which official documents base their assertions about the 'consolidated' state of affairs in our country could be attained” (Havel 1990a: 6).

their handicaps inside the existing system rather than trying to replace it, due to their suspicions regarding utopian alternatives offered to them. This is not defeatism or false consciousness pertaining to the real state of things. This is an entirely well calculated decision of those who clearly see the nature of power and what it demands (in Havel’s concept, living in a lie and in shared rituals of accord with the existing oppressing system) on the one hand, and which are their final goals (living in truth) and the alternatives and courses of action available to them, including the inexhaustible repertoire of what Scott calls the weapon of the weak at their disposal, on the second hand. (Scott 1985: 255–289; Scott 1990: 136–182) Concerning Scott, selecting a passive or a patient position of quiescence towards power is not derived from mystification or false consciousness. On the contrary, this position stems precisely from a sense of reality and an authentic consciousness towards it. The most striking evidence of this is the existence of efficient use of weapons of the weak, whose effectiveness in changing reality and adapting it to the “existential” needs of life of the dominated (i.e. “living within the truth”) is well proved. But, and here we take the freedom to interpret Scott, in order to realize the effectiveness of this weapon in changing realities, often to the rank of historical change, and to show that it is not a weapon of cowards but a weapon of pragmatic o live in oppressive political environment, and thus prefer not to get on barricades and risk themselves, one must run anthropological research methodologies and be, therefore, more humble when it comes to judge the “human nature.” The use of sociological research and analysis methods made by Havel, not only do not fit here, but mislead. In the end, these research tools again stand on the prevalent and false view (or at least non-critical) of “human nature”; a human being who is by nature flawed, weak and impaired. Series of literary masterpieces and theoretical works can help establish this theory. The story of the arduous and sophisticated struggle of the poor peasants in Burma, Vietnam and Malaysia, is documented in a painstaking detailed manner in two of the most prominent works of Scott: The Moral Economy of the Peasants: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976), and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985). The outstanding studies of Clifford Geertz, such as Peddlers and Princes (1963),



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The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (1979), also belong to this genre. The story of the long and desperate struggle of the black slaves in the U.S. South for some “existential” life of literacy, property, family life, ancestral memory and worship – all prohibited whatsoever, and the long series of moves targeted to weaken a sophisticated mastery (like trickster stories, petty thefts, arson or flight for example), eloquently described in the book Roll Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made of Eugene Genovese (1976), in My Bondage and My Freedom of the former slave Frederick Douglas (1855), in the documented project of Alex Haley Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), and in the thrilling novel of James McBride “Song Yet Sung (2001) – to mention only a few of a vast amount of books on this subject. Ingenious coping with poverty and with the “tool box” of measures discussed above, by peasants, is handled in Les Paysans of Honoré de Balzac (1844), in George Orwell’s famous book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and in the bestselling book by Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dime: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001). Azar Nafisi tells us how she overcame the horrors of a fanatical regime which prohibits any exposure to Western and classical Arab literature, and heavily annoyed its population, especially women, in her book “Reading Lolita in Tehran” (2003). In his dystopian chilling novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) George Orwell told us how much power totalitarianism had to invest in order to subdue its fellow citizens. In this masterpiece Orwell showed us how people, who were looking for intimacy and love in face of draconian laws and horrified procedures of control which prevented it, fought back as much as they could by creatively using weapons of the weak, only to see how even the tiniest steps they have taken were banned due to their highly dangerous political significances to theirs as to any authoritarian regime whatsoever. A highly sophisticated and efficient display of the weapons of the weak by poor Burmese against frustrated British rulers is excellently exhibited by Gorge Orwell in his already mentioned short story “Shooting an Elephant” (1936). Something similar was introduced by Hans Fallada’s depressing book Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Alone in Berlin) (1947). Stories on hundreds of super risky ways of resisting the razor’s edge life in ghettos and concentration camps where the Nazis herded

millions of Jews, Gypsies, prisoners of war, forced laborers and dissidents in 1933–1945, are at our disposal. We note here two of the most famous: Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (1946) by Viktor Emil Frankl, a prisoner at Auschwitz, which describes the use of a life-saving weapon called Logo – therapeutic; and Primo Levi’s book, If This Is a Man (1947), depicting life-saving tip moves and use of careful and sophisticated practices of resistance to a death fate imposed on him and his friends.

All real and fictional characters that are described in the studies and literary works mentioned here, worked out the “weapons of the weak.” An almost infinite repertoire of symbolic and material moves, saturated with imagination, creativity and full of human wisdom, undermining the authority waged upon them and threatening in varying degrees to control them, undermine their identity, humiliate them, use them or recruit them to its needs or even kill them. Some managed to outwit the oppressive regimes and dissolve its ranks in full or partial success. Among these weapons adhering to traditional particularism, fierce loyalty to the “little homeland” (parum patriae), management of traditional rituals (what Scott calls a “spirit possession”), evasive indifference, spreading rumors, gossip, humor, deception, camouflage, theft, foot dragging, using encoded media, data distortion, concealment and pretense. And there were also trickster stories (always showing how the weak win the strong), “strange dances” (shifting blame from senior leadership to lower bureaucratic levels, allegedly operated as though the superiors didn’t know or allowed if they had known), bunching up tight (this chilling means mordantly described by Orwell in his Shooting an Elephant”), acts of public protest well tucked behind a wall of anonymity (like the infuriated "boooo" Ceausescu heard in the gigantic gathering of December 21–22 1989 in Bucharest, in context of previous clashing in Timisoara), utilizing carnival frames to pop grievances and mock leaders or even to “settle accounts” with some rich and powerful people, as carefully described in the Carnival in Romans account of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1979 ). Those are as shown by Scott, sharpened weapons that do not leave a trail; a whole accumulation of hidden transcripts, or well unobserved formulae of action, against any oppressive hegemony. A multitude of ideological perforations, which exploit the inherent weaknesses of power ideological rifts



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in the top leadership; gaps between ideological pretensions (and declarations) and poor implementation; breaches inside the deputy executive leadership, only to name a few of them (Scott 1990: 5–6, 184–187, 191–192); systematic subversive mass operations, that undermine immune regimes, like those millions of “poorly paid workers, who consequently “goldbrick” and work slowly” and caused “calculable, invisible, and gigantic waste which no Communist regime has been able to avoid.” A waste nobody has taken the responsibility for, let alone “noting” the errors and promising to “correct” them with no real intention to do so whatsoever, as described by the Yugoslav politician and dissident Milovan Djilas. (Djilas 1964 [1957]: 119–120). It is seen, therefore, how effective is the power of millions of “cowards,” who come to work every day and make themselves working. What is the power of millions of people who live a split personality, that Havel is quick to invalidate, but Djilas, perfectly knowing the reality Havel talked about from its inside, completely vindicates them- and his compelling reasons drawing in his mind: “A citizen in the Communist system lives oppressed by the constant pangs of his conscience, and the fear that he has transgressed. He is always fearful that he will have to demonstrate that he is not an enemy of socialism, just as in the Middle Ages a man constantly had to show his devotion to the Church.” “Even under Communism men think, for they cannot help but think. What is more, they think differently from the prescribed manner. Their thinking has two faces - one for themselves, their own; the other for the public, the official” (Djilas: 132–133).

In his book “Seven Deadly Sins,” Aviad Kleinberg, the Israeli historian, sets the same picture and states: “Millions and millions of workers got up each morning and tried to evade work and punishment trying to do less for the socialist homeland and more for their own sake.” And he adds: “For those who wield authority over other people’s time – employers, supervisors, professors, parents – laziness has nothing positive about it. It upsets timetables, trespasses deadlines, and disrupts projects. Instead of living up to expectations, laziness simply lies down and twiddles its thumbs. It is core; this kind of laziness is a subversive act, a peculiar type of disobedience. Open rebellion stimulates the power system into action and spurs the ruling classes into moral outrage warlike ardor, and a thirst for blood. But sloth is a quiet revolt, without

manifestos of ideology. It is a social judo – 'the gentle way'. It obtains results by exhausting the timekeepers. Since it is both ubiquitous and low-key, sloth prevents them from mobilizing all their forces for the decisive stroke. They find it difficult to decide what to do; they become hoarse and weary. Finally they shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes and throw away the stopwatch. Soon they will contract the very sin they are combating. Sloth is infectious.” (Kleinberg 2008: 35–36)

To summarize our discussion so far we can say that weapons of the weak are not weapons of cowards. It isn’t the pre-politics that waits for those few brave, the declared dissidents that will turn it into open and defiant politics, as Havel thought. Weapons of the weak are threatening weapons to begin with. They are Infra - politics, which, according to Scott, are politics for all intents and purposes (i.e. power), and a prerequisite condition for every explicit public politics, if and when it may appear. Its power lays not necessarily at its open manifestation, in the “dissident” stage as Havel thought. Its power is also manifested in its concealed primate stages, where its performances are powerful enough to bring about important political (as well as social, cultural and else) changes, including major historical ones. Let’s analyze, for example, the pressure France’s third class imposed on Louis XVI through its "cahiers de doléances", full of “strange dance” tricks, their demand to appear at Versailles (at the Estates General of 1789) with a delegation of 600 elected (instead of 300), seemingly without changing the voting rules, but actually applying pressure to vote by head and not by class, etc. Attest to it the fall of the walls in 1989, the liberalization in China, the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2012, the ethnic revival around the world, or the striving of a multitude of ethno-cultural groups, to return to their traditional identities after many years of “identity ironing” under hegemonic national states, the enormous changes of women’s status all over the world, etc. All these processes cannot be understood unless we assume that pressures of life, as Havel puts it, overcame the limitations of politics, or in our terminology, the infra-political activity of millions of people were forced upon arrays of regimes, companies, opinions, perceptions and arrangements; in some cases dragging them into complete revolutions.



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Back to the story of the greengrocer from Prague What, then, brought Havel to blame the greengrocer from Prague of cowardice and demoralization? What led well known scholars such as Richard Bogart to state, that when UK workers saw that they have no way to change the difficult situation they lived in, adopted a kind of fatalism and gave up the search for alternatives? Or what brought Anthony Giddens (in his Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis [1979]) and Paul Willis (in his Learning to Labour [1977]) to claim that what seems inevitable to people turns over time to be deemed as just (Scott 1990: 75–76)? What made Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) argue that every institutionalized system tends to produce (at various levels and by various means) naturalization of its own arbitrariness (Bourdieu 1977: 164)? The origin of this false impression is primarily the difficulty to understand the meaning of quiescence, and to define it. The common tendency is to understand it as a “manifestation of an overall consent”. Relating to that, Scott says that power relations could never be agreed upon or accepted by any weak: not thick or enthusiastic (“legitimizing,” as defined by Philip Abrams [Abrams 1998 [1977]: 75, 77, 82] or “involving a positive popular endorsement of the status quo” as Alan Knight understands it [Knight 1995:43, n. 1]), nor thin or “resigned,” as defined by Alan Knight (ibid.) – a kind of acceptance that relates to the existing power building as though it was an unavoidable natural phenomenon (Scott 1990: 79). And because hegemonies aren’t tolerant in varying severity, to those who oppose them, the visible silence is not but a strategy of action against these systems with invisible tools, yet wholly political ones. Their goal is to work tacitly on the system and weaken the oppressive or limiting aspects of it, while promoting some tactical alternatives. This activity as a whole is the basis and condition for the emergence of explicit politics, if and when it would appear; for example, in moments of Saturnalia, or moments of “hydraulic” outburst, which goes to the end with no regard to price (Scott 1990: 77–78). Studies on farmers in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; studies on Southeastern Asian farmers in the twentieth century, on slaves and slavery in North America and on the untouchables in India, and even on inmates in prisons, some of which

were mentioned above, may support this thesis (Scott 1990: 79). These people, as seen here, knew not only to hamper the system, but also to leverage it to their needs. The mutual concept of the feudal system, Francois Louis Ganshof described in his Feudalism (1964); the sophisticated manipulations made on communal deeds by the indigenous people of Hispano-America during the colonial period, preventing privatization and liquidation of their property (Smith 1991: 124–125; Florescano 1994: 119–120; Van Cott 2000: 14, n. 3); methods of behavior of prison inmates (Scott 1990 : 82–85); survival techniques of Nazi concentration camps prisoners (known as “standing” or “spiritual resistance”); the tremendous power that totalitarian, dictatorial and terror powers had to subdue existential life desires in their domains (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Communist China, Communist North Korea, Muslim Iran etc.) shows plainly the tremendous and uncompromising strength of the desire to live in truth, as Havel puts it; a desire which throughout history has challenged every power whatsoever.

There is another reason for the above mentioned error: the weak hide their transcripts and try not to leave traces so research finds it difficult to follow (Scott 1990: 17–28, 33–36). The highly sophisticated methods displayed place another barrier to any effective study. Who could imagine that peasants in the collective Soviet farms would avoid direct confrontation with the government they hated for confiscating their private lands, by placing their women in the front stage of the collective farms, or flourish their tiny negligible pieces of land of less than on acre around home, that produced more than one-third of the total agricultural output in 1960 (Nove 1982). To this category we can add all misconceptions concerning the true nature of carnivals as safety valves (which they are not, as Scott shows), and the little knowledge the academic community has about the art of disguise and concealment.

Vaclav Havel couldn’t see any of these through his sociological approach. That’s the reason he was so severely judicial of human nature. Camus couldn’t see it either, by his conservative analytical approach. Neither Havel nor Camus could see the infra-political layers laid beneath the manifested reality, like the greengrocers’ real deliberations and the hidden transcripts he developed. Nor could they of course estimate its impact on the totalitarian and later the ‘post-totalitarian’



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regimes they have known. They couldn’t see, for example, how the greengrocer slightly shifted the slogan to one side. Folded its corner to the left, say, to signal to all that shared his feelings (perhaps also the woman from the office that passed by) what he thought about the regime and how one should react to its burdens. Neither Camus, nor Havel could see where exactly had the greengrocer put the slogan behind his vitrine: on the sweet carrots (a sign of solidarity?) or the tart onions (a sign of disapproval?) Havel couldn’t know what kind of interpretation the greengrocer gave to the slogan. Did he, for example, say in front of the slogan the following: “See, you miserable regime, I know what you want from me and that you’ll get it. But if you think there is any connection between the slogan and what I feel towards you, you’re wrong. I despise you. I’ll never forget the coup of May 1948. I’ll never forget Edward Benes washing up, and his death a few months later of a broken heart. Although I’m unable to break up with you and your slogan, I’m hanging it in contempt, disgust and protest.” There are good reasons to think that this was the inner dialogue the greengrocer made in front of the slogan. Could have Havel been more forgivable towards the greengrocer if he had known what we know today after being exposed to Scotts’ findings? Would Camus have been less demanding in his revolt theory, had he known the inner dialogue the greengrocer made and the well concealed but creative repertoire of tiny acts he operated in order to live in truth within the lie?

The Critic Every political system, highly distorted and extreme as can be, shall bring forth those who would believe it and follow its adventures, whether they might be bizarre or even inhumane. Let’s examine the case of Order Police unit number 101 that operated in 1942–

1944 in the region of Lublin, as studied by Christopher Robert Browning, and brought to our knowledge through his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 (1992). How should we define the 12 officers who broke ranks, at any cost, because they disagreed to attend the murder and deportation of innocent Jews which the battalion was ordered to carry out (Browning 2013 [1992]: 57)? How should we define other 100 officers or so, who disapproved the murderous mission of their battalion, but decided to resist it in between the lines (through hiding, turning blind eye, aimless or unintentional shooting, ignoring Jews, encouraging Jews to escape or hide, avoid shooting) because they suspected that the offer made to them, by their battalion

commander Wilhelm Trapp, to leave the lines was risky? (Browning: 127–131, 159) And how can we define the remaining 400 officers that adhered faithfully and tenaciously to the mission? Those 400 officers and their 100 bleeding hearted colleagues that killed and deported 84,000 Jews to their deaths (Browning: 225–227)? Is there not a danger that once we agreed that under the conditions prevailed we cannot maintain distinctions between the 12, the 100 and the 400, trying to extract some fertile insights concerning “human nature” or human convoluted relationship with those in power?

For that matter, how should we understand the story Gunter Grass presents us in his book “Peeling the Onion” (2006) about his enthusiasm for the military as a teenager and a member of the Hitler Youth and the uncompromising stance of the boy in his unit (“This exception was a lanky boy who was so blond and blue-eyed… He was a Siegfried” [Grass 2007: 83–86]), that didn’t want even to hold a weapon because “We don’t do that” (Grass: 86) — were humiliations, scolding and beatings which he suffered as many as they were? How to understand the behavior of some of those 400 killers from battalion 101 that became enthusiastic Jew hunters, ready to handle every brutal informal mission whatsoever? Or, alternatively, how should we relate to the singular mission Otto Quangel from Hans Fallada’s Alone In Berlin had taken on himself - condemning the Nazi regime by means of tiny postcards he distributed secretly in Berlin, in front of a huge citizenry which hadn’t done anything like that, but simply sat in its homes and suffered constant bombing? (Fallada 2010) How should we define the dissidents in all dark regimes that were willing to pay any price for their truth? Aren’t they really the brave, the courageous, certainly more than those operating against the regime under its nose — the million subversives of Djilas and Kleinberg, or the Russian peasants hiding behind their wives while struggling against collectivization? And how we may define these Righteous among the Nations, such as those who saved my parents in Holland during the Second World War, arguing that “God commanded us”; people who didn’t hesitate for a moment, whatever the price? And what definition might we give to all those who feared to do as my parents’ saviors did? Do we need more than this simple inference to distinguish the brave from the cowards? Is sociology so wrong in the division it makes



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between the few brave who rose-up against oppressive regimes, and the many cowards, who muttered with their whiskers or even cooperated with the oppression?

We will raise here another difficulty: even if we assume that infra-politics works, and over time gives desired results, doesn’t its avoidance of overt (‘brave’) action prolong the suffering of big masses? Has time no weight as well? What about the weapons of the strong? After all the strong have their own tools to neutralize the weapons of the weak and easily disable its infra-political activity, so about what efficacy of the weak are we talking? Moreover, is anthropology really so well equipped to penetrate this clandestine underworld and support us with a reliable gaze on the grandiose qualities of the weapons of the weak? Isn’t it that we are actually some kind of “intellectual victims” of self-righteousness of Western anthropology, which echoes here its relativistic approach, and is content to convince us that it has something interesting to say about it? Indeed, do the weak not mystify reality? If not, why do they support leaders that hurt them? Isn’t it that many Germans did like Hitler, disregarding the atrocious havoc he had caused, including to his own people as well? Was it not that many Italians, Russians, Chinese and Cambodians respectively followed Mussolini, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, and other horrified dictators like them, while giving them full legitimacy? How can we explain the decision making of those students who wholeheartedly adopted the metaphysical authority that ordered them to kill people in Milgrams’ experiments? Is this not eventually a learned mystification of a concrete social and political reality that works as Havel describes it and not as Scott describes it? Another criticism of Scott’s position is uttered by Derek Sayer. Sayer approaches the hegemonic story from a completely different perspective from the conventional one known from Antonio Gramsci. The aim of power, he says, is not to acquire consent or inculcate beliefs or ideology, as Gramsci believed. That the state knows it won’t get. Its main concern is therefore something else - entirely deeper and pervasive, and far more cynical, deceptive and insidious: a public participation of its citizenry in a false ritual, strictly understood to every single person, that constitutes over and over again the “material forms of sociality” (Sayer 1995: 373—375). This is a worship that loads the spirit needed for dealing with spurious images (such as “Workers of the

World Unite!” for example), and many other well-known false ‘truths’ the regime needs for its own sake. This is a common worship that extracts all mental energy from its perpetrators, leaving them well conscious but totally helpless to the mercy of the regime. At that point, exactly the moment Havel outlines in his greengrocer’s story, says Sayer, people become spiritual and material parts (actually spare parts) of the state as an idea and a system, while simultaneously legitimizing it and constituting it all along the way.

State says Sayer, is much more significant than is commonly thought. It dominates and controls not only the public sphere but also the private sphere of existence, and determines the boundaries of all private activities. It does so by laws (laws of education, health, work, salary), procedures (all mechanisms of licensing and arrangements for obtaining licenses for professions, employment, business, finance, transport, housing, etc.) and authority (control over time - including day and night timetable and national calendar — the national emergency system, control over natural resources, raw materials and energy), that penetrate every corner of the individual life and agenda. Living that way, it prevents the individual from having both a cause and measures to stimulate resistance (Sayer: 375). For the inhabitants, however, there is no choice but to stick to these frameworks, let alone all public performances required of them. In these manners, state power not only limits the individual but also empowers him and opens horizons for him. Who, who will cleverly use the cards the State entrusts him, will succeed and move forward, and in doing so would be grateful and thus permissive to his regime. But there is also a honey trap: in these circumstances the distinction between the individual and the State disappears: the two become one.

This cynical state, but at the same time beneficial, absorbs its citizenry both as substance and as an idea. Hence the distinction between civil society and the state, wherefrom Scott’s theory originates and where it finds its rationalization, turns by Sayer to be so artificial and unrealistic that it takes this theory all the way down. In this sense it is clear that the greengrocer, who faced a State which “lives in and through its subjects” and does not require him any ideological incorporation but only a “performative incorporation,” will hang the slogan. So also the dissidents will do that which Havel is praising, because ultimately what brought Havel to Prague Castle



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(Presidency) was, according to Sayer, neither a more or less systematic resistance movement, nor a dissident movement, but the “rejection of the Brezhnev Doctrine by Mikhail Gorbachev”; to say it another way - the inner voluntary change in the character of the Soviet regime itself (Sayer: 376).

Conclusions If we adopt Sayer’s concept, we have to acknowledge that historical change occurs, not as we were naïve enough to think — from below, but due to pressures from above. A pressure that gives the dominated who live in a constituted bluff, the signal to say safely what they held deeply unspoken or silenced. This historiographical approach we know well from Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856), where he offered an explanation to the French Revolution's success, precisely where absolutism became soft enough, the softest regime of its kind in Europe. If we adopt this approach, we have to admit that all the major historical changes, including the revolutions and counter-revolutions, came out of regimes that were weakened from within; regimes that have lost vitality, and thus implicitly suggested some changes. And because all these were so powerful and so well inserted into society, a little nuance of weakness was enough to release the resisting forces, laying there at the bottom – both in Havel’s’ dissident movement and in Scott’s underground popular forces (among them greengrocers and alike people) – forces that eventually toppled the whole System.

But here we must make it harder and to ask where from emanated the weakness Tocqueville and Sayer talked about. How and where from appeared the cracks that caused a total inward collapse of these strong, tough and rigid political systems we heard about above? Isn’t it inconceivable that this weakness was infested precisely by folk activity at the bottom? By grinding pressure, never tired, never ends, that slowly but persistently debilitated those regimes and revealed their inner cracks – ever there, waiting for erosive pressures to make them appear openly? Had Louis XVI been to his Canossa (the Estates General meeting of 1789) after 175 years of happy royal life without conventions, and a double sized third class, because he simply got tired of the absolute monarchy and favored constitutionalism? Or may it be that a financial and judicial-parliamentary crisis forced him to

convene the assembly and compromise with the third class, lest it won’t appear at all, or would require its own assembly, or else would avoid paying taxes? Wasn’t it the nobles that understood after many years of hated lordship that the feudal era was over and some compromises with the third class should be made? Wasn’t it the King who somehow used the weapon of the weak, trying to weaken his stubborn nobility by accepting the demand of 600 representatives in the ranks of the third Estate?

Had the Soviet Union collapsed because Gorbachev suddenly believed in democracy and decided to dismantle the Soviet empire he headed, or because the management of the empire was impossible in light of the economic pressures that started somewhere among the workers, as pointed by Djilas? (Evtuhov and Stites 2004: 474-475) Was Gorbachev announcing his Glasnost (openness) had he not been exposed to strong pressures from his grumbling republics (mainly Hungary and Lithuania), trade unions, simple people waiting in endless lines each day in hope to find some food in governmental stores in Russia and its satellites, people who were tired of austerity imposed on them by their regimes (in the U.S.S.R and other adjacent Republics such as Romania for example)? (Service 2009: 438, 456–457) Had Gorbachev been going to Perestroika (restructuring) without the enormous exposure of the growing Soviet society to the West, the setback in Afghanistan, the costly Space Race with the United States and the shocking disaster of Chernobyl, seen as “a metaphor for the conditions in Soviet public life”? (Service: 446)? Wasn’t it the UN Security Council’s decision against apartheid (S.C. Resolution 569 from July 1985), the US Congressional mandatory sanctions against South Africa and the heavy international pressure, accompanied by a gradual expansion of blacks in the industrial towns, despite segregation, or effective long-run daily protests of tens of thousands ANC members all over South Africa and outside it, that changed the official South African mind in the late 1980s? (Clark and Worger 2004: 94–95; Eades 1999: 88–96; Nanda 1991: 8–16; Gutteridge 1995: 123–

144).

Our propensic interpretation does not allow us to drop the attention from the pressures that came from below. On the contrary, we tend to give them primacy. There is no doubt concerning the importance of the “brave.” But we believe it is important to understand that



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these people that risked themselves, suffered and often paid with their own lives for their truth, could not stimulate scale changes mentioned here. This could be done only by millions; millions of ordinary weak people, who used weapons of the weak, and cut diagonals in their oppressive systems, until they were changed or collapsed. Millions, as stated above, following Havel that overcame the limitations of politics.

As cynical and intrusive as the State may be; as resourceful though it may be; would the established traditions, norms, arrangements, ideologies be as solid as they may; the moment there appears an essential discrepancy between them and the public, however, or in Barrington Moore’s Jr. definition - a violation of the manifested “social contract” between state and state organs and citizenry, as described in his Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, the State will be exposed to a full scale resisting wave from below, be its preventative measures difficult and violent as they may (Moore 1978: 3–48, 81–83). What will ultimately determine the fate of the system is not the activities of dissidents (although they may serve as an example and a paragon) which are easy to locate, isolate and silence, but this wave of undermining activities of the masses; their systematic uncoordinated and well concealed transcripts, hard to trace and prevent, which no system can successfully cope with, and thus, must be changed (sometimes radically) if it strives to survive. In adopting this position we can once again confirm the effectiveness of the weapons of the weak and the principle of authentic consciousness standing in the background, and provides the subversive mass with an accurate reality test. This testing doesn’t suffer euphemism and has the appropriate tools to deal with reasoning by deception, concealment and mystification, and to lead civil society to an honorable life within the truth.

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Eitan Ginzberg was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1950. He received his undergraduate degree in history and political science from the University of Haifa in 1976 and an MA and Ph.D. in history from the University of Tel-Aviv, in 1991 and 1995 respectively. From 1996 to 2012 he was a lecturer of Latin

American history at the University of Tel-Aviv, and since 1994 and 2006 respectively, he is a senior lecturer of history and culture at the Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel-Aviv and at the Sapir Academic College. Dr. Ginzberg is the author of two books and as many as 25 articles. He also serves as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Culture Analysis, edited by Sapir Academic College. His research focuses on questions of infra-political resistance, on law-intensive wars, history and culture of Latin America, and the study of genocide. Dr. Ginzberg serves as a researcher at the Sverdlin Institute of Latin American History and Culture at the University of Tel-Aviv, is director of the Sapir Forum for Debate and Research of Culture – an Israeli forum of culture researchers, and is a director of a special program of intellectual and cultural teachers' training for high school education at the Kibbutzim College of Education. `

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