The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine 9781838602710, 9781838602727, 9781838602741

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Plates
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Camera as Revelatory Tool of Exposure
Chapter 2 Camera As Shame-Producer
Chapter 3 Camera as Mirror
Chapter 4 Camera as Shield
Chapter 5 Camera as Evidence
Chapter 6 Camera as Weapon
Closing Words
Notes
References
Index
Plates

Citation preview

THE WEAPONIZED CAMERA IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ii

THE WEAPONIZED CAMERA IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine

Liat Berdugo

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Liat Berdugo, 2021 Liat Berdugo has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Toby Way All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-8386-0271-0 ePDF: 978-1-8386-0274-1 eBook: 978-1-8386-0273-4 Typeset by Newgen KnowlegeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To all those looking at the frames of images.

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CONTENTS List of Figures viii List of Plates xi Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION

1

Chapter 1 CAMERA AS REVELATORY TOOL OF EXPOSURE

23

Chapter 2 CAMERA AS SHAME-PRODUCER

49

Chapter 3 CAMERA AS MIRROR

71

Chapter 4 CAMERA AS SHIELD

91

Chapter 5 CAMERA AS EVIDENCE

115

Chapter 6 CAMERA AS WEAPON

143

CLOSING WORDS

175

Notes 181 References 221 Index 247

FIGURES 0.1 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri, Hebron, August 17, 2007. © B’Tselem. 0.2 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri, Hebron, August 17, 2007. © B’Tselem. 0.3 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri, Hebron, August 17, 2007. © B’Tselem. 0.4 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri, Hebron, August 17, 2007. © B’Tselem. 0.5 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Hebron, April 19, 2014. © B’Tselem. 0.6 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Nasser Nawaj’ah, South Hebron Hills, May 1, 2008. © B’Tselem. 0.7 B’Tselem cameras ready for distribution, 2014. © B’Tselem. 0.8 Film still from Divine Intervention (2002), Dir. Elia Suleiman. 1.1 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Ahmed Ziyadah, Madama (Nablus region), February 10, 2017. © B’Tselem. 1.2 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Ahmed Ziyadah, Madama (Nablus region), February 10, 2017. © B’Tselem. 1.3 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Ayat al-Ja’bri, Hebron, August 9, 2017. © B’Tselem. 1.4 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Ayat al-Ja’bri, Hebron, August 9, 2017. © B’Tselem. 1.5 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Ayat al-Ja’bri, Hebron, August 9, 2017. © B’Tselem. 1.6 Video still from anonymous testimony, Breaking the Silence, May 6, 2015. 1.7 Film still from Z32 (2008), Dir. Avi Mograbi. 1.8 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Bilal a-Tamimi, a-Nabi Saleh, February 18, 2014. © B’Tselem. 1.9 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Hebron, March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem. 2.1 Tweet from Allan Sørensen, July 9, 2014. 2.2 T-shirts supporting Elor Azaria, Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images, Ramla, August 9, 2017. 2.3 Tweet from Channel 13 News, March 12, 2017. 2.4 Jewish settler dressed as Elor Azaria, Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images, Hebron, March 12, 2017.

2 3 4 4 5 9 10 15 24 24 34 34 35 38 39 41 41 50 55 56 57

Figures

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2.5 Video still from Elor Azaria’s return to Hebron, Tzipi Shlisel/TPS, Hebron, July 3, 2018. 57 2.6 Facebook post from Eden Abergil, 2010. 62 2.7 Video still from testimony of Dotan Greenvald, Breaking the Silence, April 10, 2011. 66 2.8 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Iyad Hadad, Beitillu (Ramallah region), October 7, 2012. © B’Tselem. 69 3.1 Israel-Gaza fence, photographed by Oren Ziv/Activestills, Nahal Oz (East of Gaza City), April 6, 2018. 74 3.2 Protest against the separation wall, photographed by Yotam Ronen/Activestills, Bil’in, September 23, 2005. 76 3.3 Protest against house evictions, photographed by Oren Ziv/ Activestills, Sheikh Jarrah (East Jerusalem), January 1, 2010. 77 3.4 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Hebron, March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem. 79 3.5 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Hebron, March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem. 79 3.6 Arkadi Zaides performing Archive (2014), photographed by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. 82 3.7 Arkadi Zaides performing Archive (2014), photographed by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. 82 3.8 Film still from Mirror Image (2014), Dir. Danielle Schwartz. 85 3.9 Film still from Mirror Image (2014), Dir. Danielle Schwartz. 85 3.10 Videotapes in storage at the B’Tselem headquarters, photographed by Liat Berdugo, Jerusalem, June 10, 2015. 88 4.1 Atta Najar, Salam Najar and Mi’ad Najar at a B’Tselem video training seminar, Burin (Nablus region), March 2014. © B’Tselem. 94 4.2 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah, Hebron, January 16, 2007. © B’Tselem. 97 4.3 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Mai Da’na, Hebron, August 24, 2017. © B’Tselem. 99 4.4 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by B’Tselem staff, Hebron, March 6, 2013. © B’Tselem. 100 4.5 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Suzan Zraqo, Hebron, June 2, 2018. © B’Tselem. 102 4.6 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by the Jundiyeh family, a-Tuba (South Hebron Hills region), August 11, 2007. © B’Tselem. 106 4.7 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Muna Nawaj’ah, Suseya (South Hebron Hills region), June 8, 2008. © B’Tselem. 106 4.8 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Issa Amro, Hebron, January 19, 2008. © B’Tselem. 108 4.9 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by a Ta’ayush Activist, near Mitzpe Yair (South Hebron Hills region), May 21, 2012. © B’Tselem. 110

x

Figures

4.10 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Ahmed Ziyadah, Madama (Nablus region), February 10, 2017. © B’Tselem. 4.11 Detainment of a demonstrator wearing a mask of Martin Luther King, Jr., photographed by Oren Ziv/Activestills, Hebron, March 20, 2013. 5.1 Excerpt from WITNESS’s Video As Evidence field guide (2016). 5.2 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Nayef Da’na, Hebron, February 24, 2015. © B’Tselem. 5.3 Altered image of smoking building in Beirut from photographer Adnan Hajj/AP, 2006. 5.4 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, investigation into the Killing of ‘Itaf Zalat, Tulkarm, October 18, 2006. © B’Tselem. 6.1 Engraving of Etienne-Jules Marey’s Fusil Photographique, published in La Nature n. 464, April 22, 1882. 6.2 Two Jewish snipers are stationed above Palestinians the field below, photographed by Beno Rothenberg/Israel State Archive, al-Nasirah/Nazareth, 1948. 6.3 Video still from Israel Defense Forces on YouTube, aerial footage from Israeli Air Force strike, October 6, 2012. 6.4 Instagram post from Mor Ostrovski, 2013. 6.5 Video still from former B’Tselem Video Director Oren Yakobovich’s TED talk, 2014. 6.6 An IDF Combat Cameraman, photographed by Shai Levy/Mako, 2011. 6.7 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Bilal a-Tamimi, a-Nabi Saleh, December 19, 2014. © B’Tselem. 6.8 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Mahmoud Abu Haya, Hebron, April 7, 2015. © B’Tselem. 6.9 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Mai Da’na, Hebron, January 31, 2018. © B’Tselem. 6.10 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Mai Da’na, Hebron, January 31, 2018. © B’Tselem. 6.11 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, Hebron, May 1, 2012. © B’Tselem. 6.12 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Zidan Sharbati, Hebron, exact date unknown (likely 2012). © B’Tselem. 6.13 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Bassam Ja’bri, Hebron, June 4, 2012. © B’Tselem. 6.14 Video still from Human Rights Defenders on Facebook, Hebron, October 29, 2017. 6.15 Video still from Ofer Ohana on Facebook, Hebron, June 11, 2018.

111 113 117 121 129 134 145 148 148 149 151 157 158 160 163 163 165 166 167 168 168

PLATES 1 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Li Lorian, Umm el-’Amad (South Hebron Hills region), April 20, 2013. © B’Tselem. 2 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Abd al-’Alim al-Salaymeh, Hebron, January 14, 2014. © B’Tselem. 3 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Abd al-’Alim al-Salaymeh, Hebron, March 14, 2012. © B’Tselem. 4 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Abd al-’Alim al-Salaymeh, Hebron, March 14, 2012. © B’Tselem. 5 Painting by David Reeb, 2010. 6 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah, Hebron, November 8, 2007. © B’Tselem. 7 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah, Hebron, November 8, 2007. © B’Tselem. 8 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah, Hebron, November 8, 2007. © B’Tselem. 9 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Muhammad Atalah a-Tamimi, a-Nabi Saleh, February 25, 2012. © B’Tselem. 10 Protests carry a banner depicting a camera, photographed by Oren Ziv/Activestills, Bil’in, June 9, 2006. 11 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, Hebron, May 4, 2016. © B’Tselem. 12 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, Hebron, May 4, 2016. © B’Tselem. 13 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by a 14 year-old Palestinian girl, Ni’lin, July 7, 2008. © B’Tselem. 14 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Li Lorian, Bil’in, March 17, 2008. © B’Tselem. 15 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, with photographs of killing of Mustafa Tamimi by Haim Scwarczenberg, a-Nabi Saleh, December 9, 2011. © B’Tselem. 16 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, cell phone footage, Huwarah-Jit road (Nablus district), December 13, 2018. © B’Tselem. 17 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, cell phone footage, al-Jalazun Refugee Camp (Ramallah district), December 14, 2018. © B’Tselem. 18 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, cell phone footage, al-Jalazun Refugee Camp (Ramallah district), December 14, 2018. © B’Tselem.

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Plates

19 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, set of four synchronized security cameras, Tulkarm, December 4, 2018. © B’Tselem. 20 Video still from Israel Defense Forces on YouTube, aerial footage from Israeli Air Force strike, December 27, 2008. 21 Diagram from Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the 2009 killing of Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, 2010. 22 Diagram from Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the 2009 killing of Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, 2010. 23 Video still from Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the 2018 killing of Luai Kahil and Amir Al-Nimrah, 2018. 24 Video still from Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the 2018 killing of Luai Kahil and Amir Al-Nimrah, 2018. 25 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Muhammad ‘Awad, Beit Ummar (Hebron district), November 27, 2013. © B’Tselem. 26 Video still from B’Tselem on YouTube, filmed by Muhammad ‘Awad, Beit Ummar (Hebron district), November 27, 2013. © B’Tselem. 27 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Suzan Zraqo, Hebron, October 3, 2018. © B’Tselem. 28 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Hebron, March 9, 2015. © B’Tselem. 29 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Bilal a-Tamimi, a-Nabi Saleh, February 18, 2014. © B’Tselem. 30 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Ahmad Hreni, Umm el-’Amad (South Hebron Hills region), April 27, 2013. © B’Tselem. 31 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Hebron, March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem. 32 Video still from B’Tselem archives, filmed by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Hebron, March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was born out of the B’Tselem video archives. I am enormously grateful to the current and former staff of B’Tselem who welcomed me and guided me through a navigation of its material and answered all the questions I asked along the way: Yoav Gross, Helen Yanovsky, Ehab Tarabieh, and Rima Essa. Thank you to the B’Tselem field researchers who organized my field visits with volunteers and spent their days with me on my visits: Musa Abu Hashhash, Salma a-Deb’i, and Manal al-Ja’bri. Thank you to the B’Tselem volunteers who opened their doors to me, sat me down in their living rooms and shops, and told me about their work: Thawra ‘Eid, Suzan Zraqo, Arij al-Ja’bri, Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, and Wydian Zaban. I am indebted to all the B’Tselem volunteers whose work appears in this book—Issa Amro, Muhammad ‘Awad, Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah, Mahmoud Da’na, Mai Da’na, Nayef Da’na, Thawra ‘Eid, Iyad Hadad, Mahmoud Abu Haya, Ahmad Hreni, Abd al-Karim J’abri, Arij al-Ja’bri, Ayat al-Ja’bri, Bassam Ja’bri, Manal al-Ja’bri, the Jundiyeh family, Khadrah ‘Abd al-Karim, Muna Nawaj’ah, Nasser Nawaj’ah, Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, Abd al-’Alim al-Salaymeh, Lubna Saleh, ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Zidan Sharbati, Bilal a-Tamimi, Muhammad Atalah a-Tamimi, Wydian Zaban, Ahmad Ziyadah, and Suzan Zraqo—as well as all the volunteers who take up cameras with the hope of one day changing what there is to see in the first place. I’d like to thank the organizations and individuals whose support made this work possible. Thank you to the Dorot Foundation, whose fellowship sparked this work and whose awards made repeated travel to Israel–Palestine possible. Thank you to the University of San Francisco, which supported the development of this book with investments of resources, and especially to the dean’s office in the College of Arts and Sciences, which supported this book with the granting of a sabbatical. Thank you to the Santa Fe Art Institute, whose Truth and Reconciliation Residency granted me time and space to undertake the writing of this book in earnest. Thank you to Jeremy Sugerman for counsel on contracts, and thank you to Yuval Orr for expert translations. I’d like to especially thank Design Incubation, whose Fellowship Program generously taught me how to approach the book writing process from a place of strength in the visual and communicative arts. I am especially grateful to Aaris Sherin and Robin Landa, whose mentorship has stretched above and beyond duty and into true generosity. Like most works this book was born out of collegial dialogue. I am especially grateful to David Herbert, Stefan Fisher-Høyrem, John Boy, and Justus Uitermark, who organized the 2017 Social Media & Social Order conference in Oslo, Norway, that critically considered how social media have been linked to democratization of communication across the world. Thank you to my colleagues Paula Birnbaum,

xiv

Acknowledgments

Kate Luscheck, Dorothy Kidd, Elisabeth Jay Fridman, and Lisa Cartwright whose feedback, engagement, and dialogue about this project were formative to its development. Thank you to the editors of Real Life and Quarterly West, who commissioned my early writing on this topic and trusted that this material had a place in the world. Thank you to my dear friends and family members who spent countless hours discussing this work, reading it, critiquing it, and bolstering it: Jason Huff, Danny Sherman, and especially Noa Grayevsky, Noam Dorr, Linda Dittmar, Leora Fridman, and Peninah Berdugo. Your feedback has been honest and brilliant and lifted up this book when it was most needed. I would like to especially thank my spouse Charlie Macquarie, whose support has been unwavering throughout this project and who does not merely cheerlead but provokes—gently, over dinner—the things that need to be said the most.

I N T R O DU C T IO N

On Friday, August 17, 2007, Jewish settlers held an impromptu festival on the land of the J’abris, a Palestinian family residing near the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba in Hebron. The settlers erected a tarp to shade nearly fifty adults and children as they played with balloon animals, ate popsicles, talked animatedly, and blasted loud Hebrew music. On the festival’s perimeter stood Israeli Border Police and soldiers, who safeguarded the Israeli settlers and forbid the J’abri family from setting foot on their land. This was not the first time that Jewish settlers had encroached upon the J’abri’s field. Earlier, settlers had erected a tent-like structure they claimed to be synagogue, which remained even though Israeli courts declared it illegal on multiple occasions.1 Land encroachments are common in Hebron, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank and the only Palestinian city in which Jewish settlers have established residence in the midst of local Palestinian inhabitants. But on this day, the event proceeded differently because of one key factor: the J’abri’s video camera. Abd al-Karim J’abri was issued a video camera by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization which had recently begun distributing cameras to Palestinians living in high-conflict areas. These cameras were meant to give Palestinians power to expose human rights violations in an effort to seek redress. Abd al-Karim J’abri’s video of the Jewish festival opens with a panning shot. A  few children run in the family’s field, but most Jewish settlers huddle under the shaded tarp to escape the harsh summer sun (Figure 0.1). The Israeli settlers’ bicycles are strewn about, indicating the proximity of the J’abri land to their settlement. Their green and white “synagogue” tent is visible in the corner of the J’abri’s field, still erect though it had been deemed illegal. Abd keeps panning until he catches sight of five Israeli Border Policemen who are stationed between the J’abri family and the festival. Reports published afterward indicate that these soldiers prevented the J’abris from walking across their land, using their fields for grazing, or approaching the gathering in any manner.2 Suddenly a Border Policeman pulls out a monocular—a single-eyed version of binoculars, also called a scope—to examine the activities of Abd al-Karim J’abri. Abd zooms in and fixes his lens on the soldier, who in turn fixes his scope back on Abd (Figure 0.2). For a few moments the two men are locked in

2

The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

Figure 0.1  An impromptu festival of Jewish settlers is held on the land of a Palestinian family named the J’abris, Hebron, August 17, 2007. Filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri. © B’Tselem.

a stalemate of gazes, each enabled by their own tools of enhanced visuality. Their acts of surveillance and countersurveillance are not covert but public. Each openly employs visual means to see the other, to capture the other. Finally the soldier relents and puts away his scope, perhaps satisfied that Abd has seen his threatening visual cross-examination. Abd’s camera is not the only one present on the scene. A Jewish settler takes snapshots of his fellow festivalgoers who smile and pose arm-in-arm. This settler’s camera produces a personal documentation of the gathering, while Abd’s camera produces a political documentation of property violations that the Israeli army has sanctified with its presence. Soon the Jewish settlers begin to use their cameras for other purposes. They appear to grow annoyed with Abd’s act of filming, which is legal under Israeli law so they cannot seek official intervention. The settlers therefore point their lenses back at Abd, focusing their documentary gazes on his act of countervisuality— perhaps to give him a taste of his own medicine. First, a group of young Israeli boys shoots at Abd from the fringes of the festival, one with a video camera and another with a simple point-and-shoot camera. They stand in a cluster, with younger children clinging to the older boys with the cameras, wanting a piece of the action. The boys appear to be playfully amused by—and proud of—their counter-countervisual tactics (Figure 0.3).

Introduction

3

Figure 0.2  An Israeli Border Policeman examines the videographer through a scope. He and his fellow soldiers keep the J’abri family off their land as a result of the Israeli settlers’ festival. Hebron, August 17, 2007. Filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri. © B’Tselem.

Then an adult joins in: a religious Jewish settler takes out his camera and films Abd while walking menacingly toward him. The settler wears tzitzit, a religious garment with woolen tassels to remind of God’s commandments, including to love the other and not to oppress the weak.3 The Jewish settler plants himself directly opposite Abd and keeps filming (Figure 0.4). The face-off between cameras lasts for a long thirty-five seconds before the settler lowers his eye, his camera. As I  sifted through the video archives of B’Tselem, the human rights organization that gave Abd his camera, I began to find hundreds of instances of dueling cameras: hundreds of instances where a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli simultaneously videotape each other with personal recording devices. Each side faces each other, sees the other, and captures the other in a direct tension of visioning. I wondered: Who would look away first? What would each do with their footage? What was each hoping these images would prove? What would be the impact of Palestinian sousveillance and of Israeli simultaneous, echoing countersurveillance? And what are the implications for me, or for any viewer—the meta-spectator in the spectral fight for visual rights in Israel–Palestine? These clips comprise what I call “shooting back at shooting back”—a conflict that has spread to a surrogate battle between cameras. This is a conflict over looking, seeing, being seen, being free from sight (of surveillance, for instance),

Figure 0.3  Jewish settler children gathered on the fields of the J’abri family use their own video cameras and point and shoot cameras to film back. Hebron, August 17, 2007. Filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri. © B’Tselem.

Figure  0.4  A religious Jewish settler films back while walking menacingly toward the Palestinian citizen videographer, Abd al-Karim J’abri. The settler wears tzitzit, a religious garment with woolen tassels to remind of God’s commandments. Hebron, August 17, 2007. Filmed by Abd al-Karim J’abri. © B’Tselem.

Introduction

Figure 0.5  A settler blocks the view of a B’Tselem videographer ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh with his own cameraphone as ‘Imad films an IDF detention of a Palestinian minor. Hebron, April 19, 2014. © B’Tselem.

and over the obstruction of visual recordings (Figure 0.5). Israelis have countered Palestinian cameras with wet substances like spit and Coke, as well as by blinding camera sensors with too much light through mirrors and the sun.4 Many times, Jewish Israeli “filming” is performed in a simple attempt to obstruct the vision of the Palestinian lens. In one archival clip from the South Hebron Hills, Palestinians and leftist activists try to videotape, but Israeli soldiers immediately surround them with their own cameras and smartphones. Soldiers follow the Palestinians’ and activists’ cameras—move for move—to block their visual field. In the end each camera captures nothing but the other’s nose (Plate 1). In the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), soldiers “carry smartphones alongside their army-issued rifles,” and some brigades have embedded camerapersons—a practice that became common in Israel’s 2008–9 Operation Cast Lead.5 Such embedded photographers produce what Judith Butler calls “compliant” images, namely images that adhere to a regime’s visual perspective on armed conflict.6 The IDF has its own YouTube channel to disseminate this footage and, as of January 2007, also released its first encrypted smartphones for official army use.7 More recently, the IDF has welcomed the use of its soldier’s personal smartphones in the field, though soldiers may not disseminate this footage or post it on their personal social media accounts (Plate 2).8 Israeli visual surveillance structures extend much further, employing watchtowers, aerial photography, surveillance drones, unmanned surveillance vehicles, and brigades of female soldiers who serve as Tazpitaniot (“Watchers”), patrolling live cameras from remote viewing stations. In 2011 Jewish organizations began providing cameras to Israeli settlers to film back at their Palestinian counterparts in direct response to B’Tselem’s camera

6

The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

initiative.9 Tazpit Press Service (TPS) offered cameras to Jewish settlers living in Hebron, though it has since pivoted to offering summer “journalism” courses in Israel–Palestine to international Jewish college students.10 Many Hebronian settlers have continued to take up cameras, which they carry through the city alongside semiautomatic rifles. Other, more renegade groups have also armed themselves with cameras—notably Esh Kodesh, an Israeli settler outpost in the West Bank that is infamous for its tag mechir or “price tag” revenge attacks against surrounding Palestinian villages.11 Notably, one thing that distinguishes the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the freedom to record. Israeli law is more lenient on recording in public than the US state of Massachusetts. In a letter to B’Tselem from a public inquiries officer, the IDF Central Command states, “filming in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] is permitted, including filming of IDF soldiers, so long as nothing about the filming interferes with the forces’ operations or serves to collect classified information.”12 Volunteers who film for B’Tselem sign an explicit legal document with the IDF. Certain things are off-limits to the Palestinian camera’s eye, such as court proceedings, army facilities, any persons working for Israel’s internal security services (“Shabak”—similar to America’s FBI), and checkpoints.13 The face-offs between cameras make it clear that in zones of conflict, the very site of visual capture—the camera itself—has become a surrogate fight between opposing factions. Cameras duel in a weaponization of image capture. Even the bodies that carry cameras battle each other not “to the death” but to the image. Each body struggles to secure a clear camera shot as the camera’s temporary, embodied tripod. Each body struggles to block the other lens’s clarity and its power to either uphold or destabilize the dominant scopic regime of the Israeli occupation. *** This book addresses the relationship between the visual and the political in Israel and Palestine. It is empirically focused on the visual recordings produced by B’Tselem, whose video archives contain over 4,500 hours of footage, only a fraction of which is publicly accessible. The works in the archive are used to explore how video cameras have become weaponized and deployed in this asymmetric, settlercolonial conflict in which filming is both highly legal and widely ubiquitous. Much has been written about the counterhegemonic potential of new technology in giving power to the repressed, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings.14 However, this book’s analysis of citizen videography in Israel–Palestine questions dominant tropes of exposure, objectivity, image-as-evidence, forensics, data justice, and the ways images are circulated in the visual economy as a tool to effect change to a prevailing sociopolitical order. B’Tselem, also called The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, was originally established in 1989 by a prominent group of attorneys, academics, journalists, and Knesset (Israeli parliament) members. Its goal was to document human rights violations in the Occupied Territories and Gaza and educate the Israeli public, with the hope that such actions would minimize the violations of what it assumed to be a temporary occupation of Palestinian

Introduction

7

territories. B’Tselem published statistics, testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and reports in an effort to combat denial and create a human rights culture in Israel.15 In 2005—the same year that YouTube was founded and video was gaining prominence on the internet—B’Tselem welcomed video into its repertoire. It hired a video coordinator and publicly included videos as a main navigational component on its website.16 At that time, B’Tselem’s videos largely comprised videotaped testimonies of Palestinian victims, framed as talking heads, with subtitles in both Hebrew and English. These videos bolstered the organization’s long-standing initiative to collect written testimonies from across the Occupied Territories.17 B’Tselem also filmed and produced short documentaries that catalogued hardships suffered by Palestinians under the Israeli occupation.18 The video coordinator, Oren Yakobivich, was housed within B’Tselem’s public relations department, signaling the organization’s belief in the communicative potential of moving images. In 2007 B’Tselem staff toured Hebron to see the conditions of Palestinians living adjacent to Israeli settlements.19 Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank and the only Palestinian city in which ideological Jewish Israelis have settled. Due to frequent settler attacks and stonings, Palestinian residents living in close proximity to the settlements were forced to erect metal grates around their houses. These houses became known as “cage houses,” as it appeared that Palestinians had been shut inside cages by Israeli settler violence. B’Tselem wished to document the violence suffered by these Palestinian residents and, as a result of its tour, resolved to give a video camera to one family who lived inside a cage house: the Abu ‘Eishahs. In January 2007, Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah filmed the “Sharmuta” or “whore” video—a short clip in which an Israeli settler attempted to shut her into her house (“Sit here, in the cage!”) and then bullied her by calling her a “whore” nine times in a hissing, menacing tone.20 The Sharmuta video became the first ever citizen-recorded video in B’Tselem’s Camera Distribution Project.21 It circulated widely within Israeli and international media outlets and has become part of Israeli lexicon.22 Yoav Gross, B’Tselem’s Camera Project director at the time, said that the footage derived its power from its distinctly Palestinian perspective:  “The video puts you in the Palestinians’ shoes, instead of in the shoes of Israeli or foreign cameramen, which is how you usually see what goes on in the occupation.”23 The footage’s power also derives from its clear and harsh depiction of the settler-colonial violence. The Jewish settler attempts to colonize the street by claiming it for herself and her fellow Jewish settlers. The Abu ‘Eishahs resist, signifying their resistance with words (“I’ll leave the house as I please!”) and with continued and unwanted documentation by the camera’s gaze. The launch of B’Tselem’s Camera Distribution Project came three years before the Arab Spring brought vast attention to the power of technology in the hands of the oppressed. At the time of its initiation, B’Tselem’s Camera Project was titled “Shooting Back,” with the notion that Palestinians armed with cameras could shoot back against their Israeli counterparts, who were armed with guns.24 Both cameras and guns can “shoot,” each with varying degrees of symbolic and literal power. The

8

The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

aim of “Shooting Back” was to expose human rights violations in an effort to seek redress. The project later changed its name to the “B’Tselem Camera Distribution Project” or simply the “B’Tselem Camera Project” after it lost a court bid to Washington, DC-based NGO titled Shooting Back, Inc., which did not appreciate the conflation of its program teaching American at-risk youth to film with what it considered to be B’Tselem’s reckless endangerment of civilians with videography.25 Within its first year and a half, B’Tselem’s Camera Project distributed over one hundred cameras to Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories and hired two more staff members to support its growth.26 B’Tselem used its preexisting network of paid Field Researchers to collect the footage from local volunteers and transfer it to headquarters for cataloguing and archiving. B’Tselem ran training sessions to teach volunteers how to film their daily realities in a clear, safe, and verifiable manner. For instance, in a 2008 training session in the South Hebron Hills, a staff member taught Palestinians how to stabilize their cameras with the “T-Rex” position, in which elbows are tucked into one’s side and the camera is held tightly to the chest for stability (Figure 0.6). All of the footage in the B’Tselem video archive is amateur:  it is blurry, shaky, and mostly tripod free. But stable, clear, and rich images are what subvert dominance by demanding accountability without obstruction. The stability of an image is its power.27

Figure 0.6  B’Tselem volunteers were taught the “T-Rex” elbow position to stabilize their footage in a “Shooting Back” training session in the South Hebron Hills on May 1, 2008, filmed by Nasser Nawaj’ah. © B’Tselem.

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B’Tselem focuses on distributing cameras to Palestinians living in what it calls “hotspots,” such as homes at the fringes of Palestinian villages located close to Jewish settlements, families that live adjacent to checkpoints, and so forth. Manal al-Ja’bri, one of B’Tselem’s Field Researchers in Hebron, told me, “Before every volunteer became a volunteer, they were first a victim.”28 By this she meant that the decision to give a family a camera comes after the family has suffered attacks, testimonies of which have been gathered by B’Tselem. B’Tselem researches its volunteers extensively before issuing them cameras to ensure they are noncombatants and not involved in violent activities. Once a Palestinian family is issued a camera, all adult members of that family are generally listed as B’Tselem volunteers, as cameras are frequently passed from person to person in a household over time, or even during the course of filming a single incident.29 Once distributed, the video cameras remain the property of B’Tselem. This property demarcation enables the organization to spearhead campaigns to retrieve seized cameras from the IDF or Israeli settlers. But functionally, the cameras belong to the volunteers: B’Tselem never asks for cameras back once distributed, and it distributes multiple memory cards to its volunteers in an acknowledgment that they may wish to film personal events, like weddings or birthdays, on separate media.30 Volunteers are never sent on assignment and may freely choose what footage they wish to turn over to B’Tselem: nothing is compulsory. The freedom of choice means that B’Tselem’s videographers are volunteers rather than employees, a demarcation which requires no commitment from its citizen participants. The organization does encourage its volunteers to turn over footage that might help their fellow Palestinians, stating, “If you feel even one person” might be aided by this footage, “let us know, we’d love to take it.”31 Today there are around two hundred B’Tselem-issued cameras in the field, and B’Tselem has amassed an archive of over 4,500 hours of raw footage.32 Its staff and interns catalogue each video in an asset management software called CatDV, which is used primarily in the film and broadcast industries as a media database. B’Tselem uses the software for the assignment of metadata such as original dates, videographer names, locations, and other explanatory notes. B’Tselem edits and publishes a fraction of this footage on YouTube and on its website, often adding subtitles and other demarcations for the public. The bulk of the remaining footage is viewable in B’Tselem headquarters with prior permission from its staff after a mutual agreement has been reached over the nature of viewership. B’Tselem’s Camera Project is notable for the breadth of its geographic reach in the Occupied Territories, the scope of content covered by its material, and the consistency of its video publication: the project has published an average of one video per week since its conception.33 Other Palestinian citizen camera projects are limited to single sites, such as Youth Against Settlements (Hebron), Human Rights Defenders (Hebron), Nilin Media Group (Ni’lin), and Tamimi Press (a-Nabi Saleh). These organizations are far less resourced and less active and tend to focus on the documentation of civil demonstrations rather than on the breadth of human rights violations that characterize the Israeli occupation.34 Other video-centered organizations such as Shashat, an association of Palestinian women filmmakers

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

that aims to make Palestinian women “producers of Palestinian culture and not only consumers of it,” focus on filmmaking rather than on the documentation of human rights violations.35 Finally, some Palestinian citizen videography comprises independent action, such as that of Palestinian activist Emad Burt who recorded his village’s resistance to the separation barrier, as seen in Five Broken Cameras (2011). B’Tselem is therefore unique for its consistent activity, breadth of content, and geographic diversity across the Occupied Territories in Israel–Palestine. Because B’Tselem’s Camera Project is a documenting and witnessing tool that speaks to the broad and ongoing settler-colonial violence in Israel–Palestine, its visual recordings comprise the majority of case studies examined in this book. B’Tselem has made a concerted effort to distribute video cameras in particular— not smartphones or point-and-shoot cameras—in part because smartphones with video capabilities were not widespread when its “Shooting Back” project was launched (Figure 0.7).36 Today it still encourages the use of its video cameras in place of personal smartphones to ensure footage’s quality and the verifiability of its metadata. Its video cameras also promote the clarity of footage, as volunteers are less likely to become distracted by incoming calls or notifications in the midst of filming chaotic situations. Because B’Tselem is an Israeli organization, some Palestinians who work with or volunteer for it fear normalization, which is the concept that Palestinian involvement with Jewish Israelis makes the ongoing occupation seem “normal” or a sustainable status quo.37 B’Tselem Field Researcher Manal al-Ja’bri told me that her family was initially opposed to her work with B’Tselem due to the organization’s Israeli

Figure 0.7  B’Tselem cameras ready for distribution, 2014. © B’Tselem.

Introduction

11

identity. But after recognizing the importance of her work to defend Palestinian rights, her family’s attitude shifted, and now two of al-Ja’bri’s brothers and one of their wives are volunteer videographers with B’Tselem.38 In other cases, Palestinian videographers have founded their own Palestinian-led video organizations in response to normalization fears. ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh founded Human Rights Defenders in Hebron to mobilize his Palestinian community who were resistant to working with B’Tselem. ‘Imad himself does not consider work with B’Tselem to constitute normalization, as the goal of both parties is explicitly to end the ongoing Israeli occupation. ‘Imad makes a point to tell his fellow Palestinians that, in his words, “B’Tselem is protecting the rights of Palestinians more than most Palestinians are.”39 As a former B’Tselem volunteer, ‘Imad credits the organization with teaching him everything he knows about citizen videography and continues to share his footage with B’Tselem as a means of dissemination.40 The B’Tselem Camera Project has undergone significant changes since its inception in 2007, largely under the stewardship of its three different directors and under changing political climates. The project’s original director, Oren Yakobovich (2007–9), conceived of the Camera Project as creating a cohort of investigators that amassed what Jamais Cascio calls a “participatory panopticon.”41 Under Yakobovich’s stewardship the Camera Project worked closely with the Israeli army and police, who encouraged the organization to film and file investigations. The IDF responded to B’Tselem’s reports promptly and the organization published the IDF’s replies as part of its effort to seek redress for human rights organizations.42 The following director, Yoav Gross (2010–16), focused more on community building among the organization’s volunteers through training workshops.43 Gross noted that the content of the footage changed under his stewardship: it captured not only the spectacular, explosive violence of the occupation such as “graphic images of attacks with clubs, or shooting[s]‌,” said Gross but also the occupation’s less eruptive violence—what Rob Nixon calls “slow” violence or what Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir call “suspended” and “withheld” violence.44 As director, Gross said in December 2015: Images now are [taken] from the Palestinian house, like the Israeli military searches …. In the footage we see events that are part of the routine …. It is legal to search in the house, but this is also what is awful about it. It becomes part of the regulation, the permissible; what is perceived as natural … These are the materials that now we are receiving by the Palestinian volunteers—not sensational images but rather images of policy.45

While the Israeli occupation was once perceived as a temporary state, the change in tenor of the visual recordings reflects the occupation’s persistence and structural calcification as it continued into its fifth and sixth decades. B’Tselem volunteers continue to record such images to this day, including routine housing demolitions, ambulance detainments, water piping confiscations, and night searches of the Palestinian domestic sphere.46 These recordings highlight the ongoing

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

settler-colonial violence of the Israeli occupation, which extends uneven settler rights to Jewish Israelis and denies rights from native Palestinian inhabitants.47 Under the video department’s third director, Ehab Tarabieh (2016–present), the Camera Project became more practically focused on the effects of its footage in the public economy of images. It began collecting footage filmed on cell phones, sometimes by nonvolunteers, to corroborate or replace footage uncaptured by its volunteer network on B’Tselem-issued video cameras.48 Also at this time, B’Tselem as an organization made significant changes to its relationship with the Israeli army and police. In 2016 it announced that it would cease to file reports with, or cooperate with, the Israeli military law enforcement system. After a data-centered study found that only 3 percent of cases it filed resulted in indictments, B’Tselem felt that its cooperation with the IDF was “whitewashing” the occupation, or offering a semblance of justice to the deep structural injustice of the Israeli regime’s military control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.49 Thereafter B’Tselem’s published videos included a higher frequency of video annotations, in a move away from raw footage that might serve legal purposes and toward edited or annotated footage that is more easily comprehensible to distant spectators in the court of public opinion.50 In Hebrew, the word “B’Tselem” means “in the image of ” and derives from the biblical creation story in which “God created humans in his image” (B’Tselem Elohim).51 The word “B’Tselem” therefore connects the religious text at the foundation of Judaism to a human rights culture that seeks dignity for all, in the vein of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ first article that states, “All human beings are born equal in dignity and rights.”52 Notably B’Tselem’s name connects human dignity specifically to images, not to other markers of inherent humanity. It is the organization’s explicit belief that “images provide a direct experience that cannot be ignored, compelling the viewer to face reality and see the violent routine of life under occupation.”53 Therefore B’Tselem has come to rely on the capture and circulation of images to advance its human rights agenda and its goal to end the ongoing injustices of the Israeli occupation. *** Dominant regimes exercise their power by controlling the frames of images. Judith Butler teaches that before an event can be captured by a frame, a regime exercises an “unmarked delimitation of the field itself ” such that “a set of contents and perspectives … are never shown.”54 Likewise Nicholas Mirzoeff has defined what he terms the “right to look” as a right to see the self-authorizing perspective of a regime’s “complex of visuality.”55 A regime’s complex of visuality supplements its force and is hegemonic in that it is grounded in a specific historical perspective and a specific point of view. The “right to look” is thus a “boundary of visuality”— meaning its frame.56 Such a right refuses the policeman who says to the crowd, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here,” because the crowd knows that when an authority makes such a proclamation, there is something to see. Mirzoeff writes that the right to look “refuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to domination, first as law and then as the aesthetic.”57 State power acts to

Introduction

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structure the frame of what is visible, but remains invisible: it is not a subject that appears in the frame but rather the operation of power that determines the frame’s field of representability. Like other settler-colonial regimes, the Israeli occupation is maintained largely through “forces that tend to escape the threshold of visibility,” notes Gil Hochberg, such as “systematic discrepancies in the allocation of public funds, systematic cultural discrimination, and various acts of so-called soft-racism.”58 At the same time, the Israeli occupation is also maintained by a set of hyper-visible systems and structures that radically limit one’s line of sight, such as the eightmeter-tall concrete separation barrier that literally blocks noncitizen Palestinians from Jewish Israeli view. Ruchama Marton and Dalit Baum note that the wall is opaque and “ugly” because “it serves the need to create the illusion of an evil, ugly monster on the other side, rather than ordinary people.”59 Paradoxically, this hyper-visible structure of the Israeli regime’s complex of visuality has also been touted as a bonus: real estate developers near the West Bank have used it to “promise the luxury and security of gated communities to wealthy Israelis, as the local Palestinian inhabitants were barricaded out of sight,” noted Israeli historian and activist Gadi Algazi.60 Israeli state power thus functions invisibly and visibly to demarcate the boundaries of images, producing a regime-made visuality with its own, singular interpretation of the real. It is therefore not a stretch to look at this conflict—and many conflicts like it, such as the conflict that manifests as repeated violence against black and brown bodies by the US police force—as one that has produced an inequality of visual rights. Drawing from the scholarship of Gil Hochberg, these visual rights include rights to see and to be seen; rights to look and to surveil; rights to be out of sight (of surveillance, for instance; rights to have one’s body removed from the street and from view in a dignified amount of time); and rights to have one’s image trusted (rather than subject to a digital suspicion through claims of photoshopping, cropping, falsification in postproduction, or simply mistrusted as in, “he was running towards the camera so had it coming”).61 If “the gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates,” as Foucault has written, then the seer has power over the seen.62 An uneven distribution of power in the realms of economics, politics, natural resources, equality, and justice within a conflict zone also reaches the realm of visuality itself. We can therefore understand the role of combat cameramen embedded within IDF brigades, or remote “watchers” such as the IDF’s Tazpitaniot, not as an unexpected weaponization of sight but a natural evolution of the uneven distribution of power entailed in the militarization of the gaze. In Israel–Palestine such militarization extends to Israeli civilian bodies as well, in an effort to surveil and control Palestinians. Architect Eyal Weizman has noted that Jewish settlements are often placed on hilltops or mountains, overlooking Palestinian villages that reside in fertile valleys below, thus creating a distinctly vertical separation between populations even as they are horizontally mixed.63 In Israeli settlements the directions of roads, plots, the houses, and windows jointly direct an Israeli civilian gaze “out and down” over the Palestinian residents below, enlisting a

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

civilian population to act as a watchful eye to monitor Palestinian action.64 Such settlements have transformed the West Bank into a network of visual monitoring stations, staffed by civilians who might also be “enjoying the view” below.65 However Palestinians may not look at these Israeli Jewish settlements. According to the rules of engagement as of 2003, IDF soldiers may shoot-tokill any Palestinian caught observing IDF activities near Israeli settlements with binoculars or in any other “suspicious manner.”66 Jewish Israelis thus maintain what Weizman has called a “one-way hierarchy of vision” over their Palestinian counterparts.67 Or put differently, Palestinians are refused the “right to look” by Israel’s hegemonic visual regime. They are denied agency to a wide subset of their visual rights while simultaneously being subjected to an authoritarian scopic regime that subjects their bodies constant and unescapable visual scrutiny. It is against this backdrop that B’Tselem launched its Camera Distribution Project. Cameras in the hands of Palestinians were meant to reverse the normal order of visual domination under the Israeli occupation. Israelis are empowered with the unidirectional gaze via inspection, watchtowers, metal detectors, and other technologies of seeing (including the visual strip search), while Palestinians are reduced to the position of displaying their bodies and IDs—especially at Israeli checkpoints. If this natural order is disrupted, it is thought, catastrophe ensues. A fantastic example is a scene in Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s film, Divine Intervention (2002), in which the Palestinian female lead, Manal Khader, walks through the Qalandia checkpoint and refuses Israeli soldiers’ orders to halt. The soldiers are left flabbergasted, and their watchtower collapses—presumably causally—as Khader walks on unscathed. This spectacular scene provokes a real question:  Does the noncompliant Palestinian gaze cause a failure of Israeli vision? Normally, Palestinians at a checkpoint report averting their eyes to seem nonconfrontational to dominant Israeli vision. In the normal visual order it is the Palestinian whose vision must fall to the ground in the containment of subjugation. But in Divine Intervention, Khader creates a reversal of this hierarchy: she looks squarely at the Israeli soldiers, even lifting her sunglasses for a long moment to meet their gazes directly and boldly (Figure 0.8). The Israeli occupation’s hegemonic and authoritarian scopic regime is what the B’Tselem’s Camera Project—and this book—aims to delegitimize. This book follows in the wake of recent scholarship in visual studies that has proposed an examination of conflict through visuality, from scholars such as Ariella Azoulay, Judith Butler, Gil Hochberg, Simon Faulkner, Ruthie Ginsburg, Thomas Keenan, Adi Kuntsman, Alisa Lebow, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Sharon Sliwinski, and Rebecca Stein.68 The radical act of examining conflict through visuality means foregoing questions of what “really happened” or other such lines of inquiry that assume an underlying, essential truth that can be “re-presented” through the media. Instead a visual studies approach means asking questions of how we see a conflict, visually— in place of how visual media represent what “objectively” occurred. I define visual questions about a conflict to include: What tools of visioning are being used in the conflict, and who or what holds them? Who can see, what can be seen, and

Introduction

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Figure 0.8  Film still from Divine Intervention (2002), Dir. Elia Suleiman.

how are they seeing or being seen? What is out of sight or hidden from the frame? What are the technologies of seeing, and who has access to them? What tensions of visioning arise, and whence? The concepts in this book build off Jacques Ranciere’s conception of politics as a space of the sensible. Ranciere theorizes that the political status quo is maintained by a “police order” that controls the field of what appears—of what is sensible, perceptible, visual—to a civic population.69 In Israel–Palestine the “police order” of the Israeli occupying regime maintains a separation of populations as the prevailing mechanism of distributing the sensible.70 Israelis living in the West Bank are subject to a separate, civil track of Israeli jurisprudence while Palestinians who live alongside them are dragged through the harsher IDF military judicial system. Separate and visually isolated roadways have been built through the West Bank for Israeli citizens and Palestinians, preventing even what Eyal Weizman calls the “possibility of a cognitive encounter,” or mental and visual interleaving, on roadways.71 Forests have been planted over the ruins of Palestinian villages, and the names of Arab streets and towns have been supplanted with Hebrew ones.72 An estimated one in four Palestinian citizens of Israel who were internally displaced after the 1948 war have been given the paradoxical status of “present absentees,” having lost the deeds to their land because they failed to prove ownership with physical presence, even though many were driven from that land by violence.73 These “present absentees” are subjected to a reduced state of being, with their presence being both recognized and invalidated in the same term. As others have noted, the Zionist phrase, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” sloganizes a deep colonialist blindness to the presence of Palestinians.74 Thus it is a distinctly political act to distribute cameras to Palestinians, collect their footage, and disseminate it in the image economy. Such acts disrupt the visible and sensible separation of populations maintained by the Israeli policing-principle

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

and instead visibilize the horror that such a separation produces. In the face of a reduced state of visibility and visual subjugation, a Palestinian armed with a B’Tselem camera is—at the most basic level—a demand to be seen. After all, as Ariel Handel put it, “Under normal circumstances only soldiers are allowed to see Palestinians.”75 The cameras function like Manal Khader’s long, bold gaze in Divine Intervention, enforcing not only the “right to look” but also the right to be visible in the first place. The Israeli Border Policeman who guarded the Jewish festival on Palestinian land raised his scope to look carefully at B’Tselem volunteer Abd al-Karim J’abri, because there was suddenly something to see. Abd had altered his Palestinian reduced state of visibility by shooting back with his camera. *** Throughout this book I  argue against the simplistic notion that citizen video cameras, as technological objects, cause change to a sociopolitical order. Not only is change difficult to quantify, but theorists of social movement production argue that such change occurs through the alignment and resonance of a movement’s frame with an individual’s.76 This book therefore complicates the notion that visual evidence alone can secure justice—that “seeing is believing”—because spectators arrive to the act of seeing with their own frames. Believing precedes seeing, and therefore seeing fails to alter belief. Indeed many photographic theorists, like Susan Sontag, go so far as to argue that images, unlike words, cannot “speak” for themselves.77 Instead images and videos act through captions, interpretations, expert witnesses, or even the mobilization of visual forensics to evoke a more scientific and objective relation to truth. Certainly images “speak,” but what they say is—and will always be—up for debate. However visual recordings and the civilian cameras that produce them change the landscape of the sensible, and in doing so make significant alterations to the visual and political landscape of zones of conflict. Instead of arguing on behalf of a single and hegemonic reading of images as change-makers, I argue in favor of asking a host of more nuanced questions about citizen videography in Israel– Palestine. Chapter 1 challenges the concept of exposure and the related belief that change occurs when citizen videographers expose human rights violations via cameras. Inherent in the exposure assumption is the notion that videographic exposure counters both what is unseen by and what is concealed from sight to spectators who have not yet become witnesses by creating what Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples have termed an “image event.”78 However, this chapter proposes that images are necessary but not sufficient to spark a distant spectator’s action. Instead, the theoretical framework set forth in this chapter mutates Ariella Azoulay’s notion of a “civil contract of photography,” arguing that the failure of the exposure assumption makes room for viewers to acknowledge and contend with the passivity that emerges from the gap between representation and civic responsibility.79 Chapter 2 puts forth questions of shame, such as: Are cameras meant to shame perpetrators into aligning themselves with agreed-upon ideals? Is shaming via citizen videography functionally operative? This chapter dissects what Thomas Keenan has

Introduction

17

described as the “mobilization of shame” by human rights organizations, whereby they seek to exercise power to enact change extrajudicially by exposing violations and bringing perpetrators into a state of shame and thereafter of compliance.80 The mobilization of shame relies on concepts of exposure laid out in Chapter  1 but instead posits shame as the key affective means by which exposure might align individual actors and nation-states alike. However, examples surveyed in this chapter show that—rather than fearing the shame of videographic exposure— perpetrators in Israel–Palestine perform brazenly and shamelessly for the camera. As a result Palestinian civilians and human rights organizations alike repeatedly attempt to cast shame on Israelis where it is absent, mobilizing cameras to disrupt the affective economies of the Israeli occupation in what Sara Ahmed would call an “affectual reorientation.”81 Ultimately shaming fails because Jewish Israelis understand the shame cast at them to be merely “image shame”—the shame of how an action appears—instead of the more intrinsic “moral shame,” meaning the shame of an action’s inherent rightness or wrongness.82 Questions of mirroring and self-reflection are the study of Chapter 3, which asks: In spite of a well-documented aversion of settler-colonial societies to consider themselves accountable for ongoing conflict, can citizen-recorded media produced by an occupied population spark introspection by mirroring society back to itself?83 This chapter traces acts of mirroring through three critical veins: capture, meaning the use of physical mirrors to block B’Tselem videographers; reflection, meaning the use of physical mirrors in demonstrations as well as the reflection of video footage back to those captured in it; and self-alienation, meaning the use of mirrors to cause a rupture with one’s self-image. While this chapter ultimately argues footage cannot demand self-reflection any more than it can demand an Azoulaian active spectator needed to fulfill the civil contract of photography, it posits that, when archives of citizen videography are mirrored on computer servers as data, they offer potential for future change-making as they circulate in the image economy. Chapter 4 asks questions of protection, such as: Do citizen video cameras act as shields to those who carry them in conflict? Or, do cameras turn Palestinian civilians into targets? This chapter traces the protective qualities of citizen videography, which are highlighted for women videographers in particular because of the gendering of victims in war. This chapter also surveys cases in which Palestinian citizen video cameras have been accused of inciting violence instead of shielding from it. Accusations that cameras incite are read through the lens of political affect to show that claims of incitement result from the socially and historically produced affective economy of the Israeli occupation. Thus conceived, attacks on cameras are displaced acts of violence to dismantle the symbolic power of citizen videography’s counterhegemonic gaze. Chapter  5 interrogates matters of visual evidence as produced by citizen videography to ask questions such as: What is the relationship between images and truth? For which “court” are cameras intended to produce evidentiary material— the court of law or the court of public opinion? This chapter traces how the majority of B’Tselem videos are not leveraged as proof of Israeli criminality but are

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

instead mobilized as exculpatory evidence on behalf of Palestinian videographers themselves, who seek to prove their own assumed criminal bodies to be innocent.84 “When you are a Palestinian living in a place like Hebron, you are considered by the Israelis to be guilty unless proven innocent,” said former B’Tselem volunteer, Issa Amro. This chapter also questions the recent trend toward amassing citizenrecorded videos into “visual investigations” or “visual forensics” and argues that forensics reinscribes a dehumanizing abstraction on Palestinian bodies at the very moment it seeks to invoke universal humanity for human rights discourse. What visual forensics does succeed in doing, this chapter argues, is make clear the appeal to a higher order of injustice, or what legal scholar Nancy Fraser terms “metapolitical injustice,” to the extrajudicial public or forum it amasses as its viewership.85 Finally, Chapter  6 asks questions of weaponization, such as:  What are the figurative and positional relationships between the camera and the gun in Israel– Palestine, with each bearing the capacity to “shoot”? What forms of Israeli media mimicry have developed in response to the Palestinian lens? And, what does the weaponization of cameras mean for the viewer? This chapter traces the joint mechanical histories of cameras and weapons, as well as direct face-offs between Palestinian cameras and Israeli guns—what Rabih Mroué has termed “double shooting.”86 It argues that double shootings hold affective power by aligning the camera with the eye of the spectator in moments of perceived mortal threat. As such double shootings destabilize what Ariella Azoulay calls the “photographic object,” instead shaking viewers awake to the more potent event of photography.87 Finally, this chapter directly expands upon “shooting back at shooting back,” the counter-countervisual tactics adopted by Israeli actors in response to Palestinian citizen videography. It proposes that the infinity mirror of images produced by citizen surveillance and countersurveillance offers the spectator an opening to reread and reframe the conflict in terms of what Slavoj Žižek has termed its “objective” violence, in which the very legalistic, operational, institutional, and economic mechanisms of the Israeli occupation become visible.88 This book is not a comprehensive study of images produced from the Israeli– Palestinian conflict. Indeed the works surveyed in this book move away from traditional images of the conflict, such as suffering Palestinian women, armed IDF soldiers, civil demonstrations turned obscure by thick clouds of tear gas, and bombings on both sides of the Green Line. Instead this book foregrounds the images produced by Palestinians and activists to counter the visual dominance of the Israeli regime. Most of the images surveyed in this book are pulled directly from the B’Tselem video archives of predominantly unpublished material, as a remarkable source of “citizen camera-witnessing” in the West Bank.89 When videos have been published, I  link to their publicly accessible viewing locations. I  also draw upon interviews I conducted with B’Tselem staff, as well as with volunteers in the West Bank, between 2014 and 2019. This book also engages with works of fiction by Palestinian and Israeli professional filmmakers, such as Elia Suleiman, Avi Mograbi, and Danielle Schwartz, as well as by Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides, who construct their

Introduction

19

own fantastical or documentarian frames to comment on the visual conditions of the Israeli occupation. I  also include works published by the IDF YouTube channel, video testimonies collected from former IDF soldiers by Breaking the Silence, photographs from the Israeli State Archives and from the photojournalist collective Activestills, citizen-recorded videos by right-wing Israeli activists, visual investigations by Forensic Architecture, and a small selection of visually rich social media posts by or of Jewish Israelis in relation to the militarized occupation. Certainly there is a difference between productions of visuality—whether they be visual recordings, films, or works of dance—that are made in artistic contexts and those that are made by everyday citizens suffering from settler-colonial violence. However, unlike the formalist or social historicist approaches of a field like art history, this book adopts an approach distinct to visual culture studies, which does not differentiate between “artistic” and “nonartistic” works of visuality, nor “real” or “fictional.” Rather, visual studies purposely examines diverse media together in order to theorize the production of cultural meaning across the visual spectrum. In this book, the videos, films, works of art, images, visual testimonies, visual forensic analyses, and social media posts come together to form a discriminated view of the visual landscape of the Israeli occupation. It is this visual landscape that citizen videography seeks to upend with its countervisual tactics, one that demands consideration for the impact of such images on the spectator, the image economy, and the archive. In its broadest sense, this book is a taxonomic study of countervisual citizen videography in Israel–Palestine. It presents a wealth of case studies from the B’Tselem video archive, as well as interviews with volunteer Palestinian videographers, as a means to theorizing the complex relationship between Palestinian camerapersons, Israeli actors, and distant spectators. It not only questions the civic responsibilities of spectators but also queries the photographer’s intentions of documenting and the Israeli subjects’ response to the photographic act, which taken together form a triadic relationship through the event of citizen videography. The main contribution of this book lies in its meticulous empirical assessment of one specific communications initiative—the B’Tselem Camera Project— and the longitudinal considerations of this initiative’s civilian infrastructure. This book provides a nuanced and systematic examination of the relationship between Palestinian video sousveillance and Israeli state and civilian surveillance. Simultaneously, this book also addresses growing understandings of the complex interplay between images and meaning-making, where seeing is not believing. As such, the works examined in this book build off of Hannah Arendt’s argument that “Being and Appearing coincide” in politics—that is, politics is intrinsically tied to visuality and cannot be guided by an invisible or unseeable force—to show that what is visible, and indeed what is viewable, is already a matter of politics.90 *** In 2014 I visited an IDF unit of exclusively female soldiers called the Tatzpitaniot (“Watchers”) in an army base in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As a woman and a Jewish Israeli citizen myself, I had long been interested in the Israeli military

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

and its gendered roles. Under Israeli law I  would have been conscripted into service had my dual-status as an American citizen and resident not exempted me. My visit thus evoked a vision of a life that might have been mine, but which I had, for better or worse, dodged. The sole job of the Tatzpitaniot is to watch live video streams of the IDF’s network of 1,700 security cameras mounted along key sites in the West Bank and Gaza, in an effort to surveil Palestinians and secure Israel’s borders.91 They watch multiple screens at once, staring at live video feeds for hours at a time and reporting any “suspicious” visual activity to army superiors, who order on-the-ground action when deemed necessary.92 Put differently, the sole task of a Tazpitaniah, a “watcher,” is to weaponize her sense of sight. I wondered what I  would see had I  been a Tazpitaniah. More specifically I  wondered what I  would not see:  what my own upbringing, social structures, and political views would render invisible to me. Growing up, I  learned to call the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (sichsuch) by its other name, “the situation” (ha’matzav). In modern Hebrew, “the situation” is often used in the greeting, Ma ha’matzav? (“What’s up?”). But it also refers euphemistically to the ethnonational and political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which is steadied by the suspended violence of the Israeli occupation and which periodically erupts into overt war. “The situation” turns the common meaning of a word into a polite reference for something else—something considered too ugly, improper, or harsh to be uttered directly. The situation can be made present (as in, “The situation is horrible! All the fighting!”) or absent (“What situation? I’m drinking a coffee, the sun is shining!”). To say “the situation” instead of “the conflict” opens a space for denial, for a failure to see. Anthropologist Michael Taussig calls this a “public secret,” meaning “a secret that is known to the public but which the public chooses to keep from itself through various cultural strategies and mechanisms.”93 A  public secret is about “knowing what not to know,” about “living with … complexity within violence, about participating in and sustaining social institutions of racism ….”94 In Israel–Palestine, this public secret means that Jewish Israelis have developed social contracts that condone ethnonational racism, that contain state violence, and that suppress the conflict from view. The euphemistic “situation” structures and cements an ideology of ambiguity that has been repeatedly mobilized by the Jewish Israeli regime. If one could say, as Edward Said did, that “the whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible,” then the whole history of the Israeli “struggle” has to do with the desire to make the conflict invisible—indeed, to render unutterable the conflict’s very name.95 The occupation has produced what Ann Stoler calls “colonial aphasia,” or a regime-made inability of its constituents to locate the words to name what one sees.96 At some point I simply began looking. Or, more accurately, I began searching for a way to see the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that was obscured from my view. As an Israeli citizen, I was—and still am—legally forbidden from entering Palestinian urban centers like Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, or Hebron (though I have since discovered ways around these measures). I could see images disseminated by Israeli

Introduction

21

media or those popularized by international news outlets, but not Palestinian perspectives. Around that time, I was living in Tel Aviv and met B’Tselem’s video director, who graciously allowed me to visit the video archives whenever there was a free computer. I went to the B’Tselem archives to flood myself with a vision that was not my own. Over the years I have spent countless hours in the B’Tselem archives. I came to know the cadence of B’Tselem volunteers’ breath behind their cameras, what they sound like when they film, and what the views out their windows look like. I have come to know the physical feeling of nausea that builds in my stomach after watching video after video of eruptive atrocity or latent violence. My stomach has been fed oranges and waffle cookies by the dozens of active B’Tselem volunteers and their families who welcomed me into their living rooms to tell me about their work. Throughout the years, I have become sobered in my expectations of what cameras can do to the sociopolitical order and what kind of justice cameras can bring forth. Instead I  began to see the nuances in the ways citizen cameras are held, talked about, and mobilized in zones of conflict. I am still trying to find the words to dismantle my colonial aphasia. I am still grappling with the dyadic nature of the public secret, which is both public and secret at once, visible and invisible, just like the euphemistic “situation.” I see the Palestinian citizen camera as a move to “out” the public secret of the occupation— to make visible its invisibility—and the Israeli blocking of that camera as a move to reinforce the public secret. The blockage is not total, nor is the outing of the occupation. Instead I find hope in the archives, where material is subject to new reinterpretations and where the very frames of images are visibilized within their containers. “When the business of war is subjected to the omnipresence of stray cameras,” Judith Butler has written, “time and space can be randomly chronicled and recorded, and future and external perspectives come to inhere in the scene itself.”97 The B’Tselem video archives address not only the spectral but also the specter:  the haunting occurs when conflicts are visually recorded and can be replayed, recirculated, relieved, and republished, haunting us as they search for a reckoning.

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Chapter 1 C A M E R A A S R EV E L AT O RY T O O L O F E X P O SU R E

“Your face can be seen” In 2017, a B’Tselem volunteer named Ahmad Ziyadah videotaped his own violent arrest by Israeli soldiers.1 The video begins: Ziyadah films as he approaches a line of three Israeli soldiers who blockade his path on a road outside the West Bank village of Madama. “Go home,” the lead Israeli soldier commands in Arabic, but Ziyadah replies that he is home already, asserting ownership of the land as his place of dwelling. A standoff between the soldiers and the videographer ensues. The commanding Israeli soldier speaks into his radio in Hebrew, stating that he is not “too bothered” by Ziyadah’s filming. However Ziyadah fails to comply with the soldiers’ order to leave, and the soldier reports through the radio that he will seize Ziyadah’s camera and detain Ziyadah, himself. Ziyadah seems to understand that the encounter will shortly escalate. His camera, which had been fixed on the commanding Israeli soldier, pans to the two other soldiers. “Here’s the second one,” he narrates to his camera, pausing on the second soldier’s face, “and the third,” he states. Ziyadah’s narration indicates that his motive is to clearly expose the identity of all three perpetrators on camera. He creates videographic mug shots of the soldiers, cataloguing their faces as if biometrically for use against their future acts of violence. The encounter between Ziyadah and the three Israeli soldiers does indeed escalate. The commanding soldier moves to apprehend Ziyadah’s camera, but Ziyadah refuses to give it over. The soldier then grabs the camera, and Ziyadah shouts “Not the camera!” three times in an effort to protect his instrument of revelation. As a struggle for the camera ensues, the footage degrades from its prior clarity into shaky color blurs (Figure  1.1). Finally, Ziyadah declares, hauntingly: “Your face can be seen” (Figure 1.2). Notably, the face of the Israeli soldier cannot be seen at the moment of this revelatory declaration (“Your face can be seen”). All that can be seen are fields of color, oscillating between the tan of the dirt road, the olive of the soldiers’ uniforms, and the blue-white of the sky as Ziyadah and the Israeli soldier both struggle to control the camera. Yet with this declaration, the Palestinian citizen videographer addresses the soldier with an assertion of visual exposure—an assertion that threatens and an assertion meant to carry the gravitas of visual capture.

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

Figure 1.1  An Israeli soldier attempts to seize a B’Tselem video camera during an arrest. Location: Madama; Date: February 10, 2017; Filmed by Ahmed Ziyadah, © B’Tselem.

Figure  1.2  The B’Tselem Camera Project volunteer declares the exposure of an Israeli soldier as he is violently detained. Location: Madama; Date: February 10, 2017; Filmed by Ahmed Ziyadah, © B’Tselem.

Exposure and Human Rights Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories have long been subjected to a uniquely reduced condition of visuality to Jewish Israelis. Scholar Gil Hochberg calls this a condition of “public invisibility,” a public state of

Camera as Revelatory Tool of Exposure

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diminished visibility caused by removed rights.2 It is a condition of invisibility in which a person fails to appear as a person, as a citizen, or as a human being at all. It is a lack of visibility before the sphere of rights, and a condition paralleling that of a stateless refugee. Against this backdrop, a key goal of B’Tselem’s “Shooting Back” project was exposure. The project aimed to make Palestinian invisibility visible to Jewish Israelis and to overcome “the hostility that was blocking the gaze of Israeli addressees,” as Ruthie Ginsburg put it.3 As part of its mission, B’Tselem states: B’Tselem works to expose the injustice, violence and dispossession inherent to the regime of occupation, to deconstruct the apparatuses that enable it, and challenge its legitimacy in Israel and internationally.4

Likewise, in an acceptance address for the French Republic’s 2018 Human Rights Award, B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad said, “We are here not only to further expose the truth—but also to bring an end to the injustice.”5 At its highest organizational levels, B’Tselem ties together the very act of exposure with possibilities of justice. Using citizen videography as a tool of visuality, B’Tselem’s project aims to turn Palestinian public invisibility into what Hochberg calls a “visible invisibility”— namely, an invisibility that is made visible to the public eye.6 A visible invisibility would expose ongoing settler-colonial violence, structural forms of racism, ethnopolitical supremacy, and religious dominance of Jewish Israeli actors over an occupied Palestinian population. Indeed, camera-wielders seek to expose with the belief that these exposures will cause change—a belief that I call the exposure assumption. In Israel–Palestine, Palestinian videographers expose the acts of Israelis in an effort to reveal atrocities, human rights violations, illegal activities, or even acts of ordinary complicity produced by an ongoing and repressive occupation.7 More intricately, the exposure assumption is a belief that photographic or videographic exposure counters both what is unseen and what is concealed from sight. Once exposed, the subject—be it a perpetrator, an event, or an occurrence—cannot continue as before. Exposure mobilizes a virtual community of spectators into action and thus brings about change that was not possible without the act of photography or videography. Importantly, in its revelatory capacity, the camera implies that atrocities or violations have not yet been seen. Instead, the exposure assumption posits they have been concealed, hidden, or unknown to a public. The image then exposes precisely by making public. Of course, a camera can be said to expose in two different senses, as Ginsburg has noted.8 In the first sense, a photographic exposure is a photochemical or photoelectric act that results in an image. The image produced is called an exposure. The image can be overexposed if there is too much light and underexposed if there is too little. This exposure, then, relates to the casting of light onto a photosensitive surface. In the second sense the camera exposes when a resultant image is circulated in the visual economy and reveals its real-world referent, its index, to an audience

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

that has not previously seen it.9 It is this latter sense of exposure that human rights organizations worldwide seek with cameras. Expose violations and justice will follow:  thus goes the logic of this somewhat enhanced version of the exposure assumption. Notably, this formulation ties justice tightly to the concept of revelation and circulation within a visual economy of images. This sense of exposure is linked to what English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham called “publicity,” which he celebrates as the “very soul of justice.”10 Publicity—meaning the circulation of material in the public sphere— works intimately with the process of the juridical. The ability to enact justice is not only tied to the visible but also justice should be served visibly. As the English aphorism goes, “Justice should not only be done, but should be seen to be done.”11 Notably, Bentham also employed his conceptions of visuality to his formulation of the panopticon, leveraging the mere possibility of visual exposure as a tool for social control of inmates within an architectural institution of state power.12 When human rights organizations capture images for circulation in the visual economy, they produce what Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples have termed an “Image Event.”13 These are events that are intended to be seen both by eyewitnesses and by virtual spectators at a distance through visual documentation. Such image events can be used in a myriad of ways to advance a human rights discourse: they can be mobilized to further a cause (as protest images), to bring about a humanitarian response (via what Robinson has termed the “CNN-effect”),14 or to provoke an imagination of a world where the visual reality was otherwise and atrocities have been prevented. However, the act of exposure is far more complex in practice. This chapter explores the complexity of the camera’s role in exposure and the revelatory attempts of the camera in the hands of the oppressed, repressed, and those seeking change through the potential of images. It argues that images are necessary but not sufficient to spark a distant spectator’s action and instead contends that the failure of the exposure assumption makes room for viewers to acknowledge and contend with the difficult gap between representation and civic responsibility.

The Audience of Exposure Let us return, for a moment, to Ahmed Ziyadah’s video and his haunting declaration, “Your face can be seen.” For whom does this exposure of the “face” carry weight? Is it for the soldier himself, whose identity has been revealed? Is the exposure for a possible juridical realm, in which the “face” is used as identifying evidence of a perpetrator? Or is the exposure for the spectator of this video, who will apprehend the identity of the soldier, pass judgment upon him (and the state that he represents) within the public sphere of discourse? Exposure has an audience that is outside of the self. The act of exposure seeks an Other. Exposure seeks exteriority. Etymologically, “exposure” derives from the Latin root exponere, meaning to “place out” as if for others to see.15 Placing something “out” is a method of inviting others to “evaluate and judge what stands

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before them,” as Ginsburg has noted.16 Or, as Jean-Luc Nancy has written, “ ‘To be exposed’ means to be ‘posed’ in exteriority, according to an exteriority, having to do with an outside in the very intimacy of an inside.”17 At its core, exposure notions toward an exterior audience. I posit three possible audiences for Ziyadah’s act of exposure. The first is the Israeli soldier himself. The declaration “Your face can be seen” possesses an addressee: it is proclaimed to the “you” who appears with the face and is identified by his facial features. Ziyadah’s act of exposure thus implicates the soldier as its first audience and aims to threaten him into better behavior. The second broadly constituted audience of Ziyadah’s exposure is a juridical one—lawyers, judges, jurors, or human rights commissions. This is an audience that has been imbued by a regime with power to adjudicate and to be the “law speaker” (Latin ius dicus, from which the word “judge” is derived). However, as of 2016, B’Tselem ceased cooperation with Israeli legal investigations into the state’s wrongdoings, as it concluded that its participation in Israel’s unjust legal system only served as a fig leaf for the continued militarized occupation of the West Bank.18 Therefore, this video has not been and will likely never be mobilized for a juridical audience. The seeing of the face that “can be seen” is an action taken not only by the Palestinian eye—Ziyadah’s eye, his very literal retinas—or even by his camera. This private Palestinian seeing does not publicly expose the soldier. Only by broadening the audience of seeing—that is, by circulating this video within a public, or what Eyal Weizman calls a “forum”—can the exposure achieve its revelatory potential.19 Thus the third audience is brought about. It is a forum, a public, a “we.” This potential public constitutes the third audience of exposure. Yet this third audience requires more differentiation. As Susan Sontag asked when discussing disturbing images of people in pain, “Who are the ‘we’ at whom such shock-pictures are aimed?”20 Sontag notes that “suffering must be acknowledged as having an audience,” meaning that suffering is not held alone, in private.21 When Sontag tries to identify the audience of images of suffering, she casts a broad stroke. For her, the audience includes “not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but—a far larger constituency—those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country.”22 What Sontag gestures toward is what Sharon Sliwinski calls a “virtual community” in her book, Human Rights in Camera.23 Sliwinski theorizes that the circulation of images creates a virtual community between spectators where the “ideal of humanity literally comes into view.”24 Through spectatorship and what Shoshana Felman has termed “the alignment of witnessing,” Sliwinski argues that human dignity can be “imaginatively extended to (and withdrawn from) distant others,” providing an opportunity for tele-pathos—affective response to distant suffering.25 It is through this affective response, theorizes Sliwinski, that images can effect change. I asked B’Tselem video volunteers whom they conceived as the audience for their footage. They offered three different responses that divide the “we” of the virtual

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

community into increasingly local audiences. At first the volunteers cast a broad stroke, angling for “the world” to be the audience. Thawra ‘Eid, a B’Tselem volunteer cameraperson and resident of the Palestinian village of Burin, told me, “I’m documenting for the world what’s happening for us.”26 Likewise, B’Tselem volunteer Wydian Zaban globalized her audience, saying, “It [my footage] reflects not only their [the Israelis’] behavior but also shows the whole world what they are doing.”27 Some B’Tselem videographers narrow their focus, targeting a second audience:  Jewish Israeli society. B’Tselem fieldworker and videographer Manal al-Jab’ri told me, “The act of filming can break the sympathy that Israelis inside Israel might have for the settlers, by seeing how they [the settlers] act towards Palestinians, that they don’t treat them as human, even.”28 Al-Jab’ri’s projected audience mirrors that of the B’Tselem Camera Project at its inception, which aimed to change the opinion of Jewish Israelis in particular by exposing them to acts of settler and state violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories carried out in their names. Finally, I  found that Palestinian videographers most frequently named a third audience:  their own Palestinian community. Such was especially the case for volunteers from Hebron, who live in close proximity to the encroachments of radical Jewish settlements. A B’Tselem volunteer named Suzan Zraqo told me, I want people in the world to see this footage, and for it to affect public opinion. But my first goal is to protect people—the kids—and the people on the street, because they don’t have any protection otherwise.29

While Zraqo indicates her wish for her footage to circulate widely, she names her own community as her primary audience. She told me that the situation has “lightened” since she began filming, and she and her Palestinian neighbors feel much safer in her neighborhood. Zraqo reported that Israeli settlers would previously harass Palestinians every day in the big open plot in front of her house, but the settlers disappeared once the B’Tselem cameras entered the scene, indicating what she called “clear evidence of the power of the camera.”30 Likewise another Hebron-based B’Tselem volunteer, Arij al-Ja’bri, answered my question of audience thus: The first and most important thing is to protect the kids. It could happen that the whole world will see the films, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is to protect the children, and the people who are protecting the children.31

To both al-Ja’bri and Zraqo, the camera’s intended audience is their own Palestinian community. Notably, it is not that this community will constitute the spectators of their footage. In most cases, their community will never see the footage.32 Instead, the community is the audience not of the footage but of the effects of the mere presence of video cameras in their community. These cameras threaten a possible future exposure of Israeli soldier or settler violence, and with this threat they (at times) deter action.33

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Yet in al-Ja’bri and Zraqo’s comments I  see a considered narrowing of the conception of audience—akin to Meg McLagan’s conception of “smart narrowcasting,” meaning the use of images to speak “to a particular audience at a particular time, and seeking a distinct change in policy, behavior or practice.”34 It is a constriction of scope that directs the countervisual tactics of these B’Tselem volunteers toward precise—and indeed, perceptible—effects within their community.

The Future: A “Possible Anterior Exposure” I’d like to suggest a key characteristic of the audience of human rights videos: their potential to be seen by a future audience. As recorded media they carry the possibility for an anterior exposure. They can be circulated and replayed. Unlike live events, videos have no eyewitnesses, only a growing number of viewers as time marches forward. Moreover, the “archive”—be it B’Tselem’s video servers or the published collection of B’Tselem footage on YouTube—plays a key part in creating the possibility of a possible anterior audience by cataloguing, preserving, and contextualizing the footage for later viewership. Take Ziyadah’s footage of his own violent detainment. The audience of this video is not just those half-million people who have watched it on YouTube.35 The audience is also those who have not yet seen it, but might one day; those who have been told about it; those who heard a passing reference to it; those who might one day show it to others. This video produces not just an exposure for a public but also a possible anterior exposure, which is to say, the chance of exposing the soldier’s face in the future. It is this future in which the soldier’s face “can be seen,” with the verb, “can,” containing in its conjugation the possible future action rather than the present action of the verb, “is.”36 This footage contains not just exposure but also the possibility of exposure. Like its possible anterior audience, exposure itself does not require visuality but instead the potentially visual.37 This is why a market exists for fake security cameras:  they threaten exposure with their high-fidelity replication of cameras, even though they cannot record. It is enough that their likenesses suggest the possibility of image capture. Indeed as Ariella Azoulay has shown, the event of photography does not need to result in a photograph. Azoulay theorizes that “the act of photography is not the equivalent of the photograph” because most people do not see the photographs that are taken of them.38 Thus, she divorces the photographic act—an act that results in the document of a photograph—from what she calls the “event of photography”—namely, a set of relations between a photographer, a subject, and a spectator that can be constantly reimagined and reinterpreted. Due to the prevalence of cameras in the contemporary era, Azoulay makes the bold claim that “photography always constitutes a potential event, even in cases where the camera is invisible or when it is not present at all.”39 A camera must not be visible in order to construct the set of relations of the event of photography. It is enough to imagine that it is present, perhaps “secreted invisibly” by a person,

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

installed as a surveillance camera, or captured by a surveillance drone.40 It is enough for the event of photography to contain what Azoulay describes as “the potentially penetrating effect of the camera,” meaning the possibility of being within range of a camera’s lens.41 Like the event of photography, the act of exposure requires only the potentiality of a future anterior audience to organize its relations. Its audience, therefore, is future oriented and constantly open to new and shifting spectators. It is exactly the potentiality of a future, anterior audience that “protects the children” in Hebron once B’Tselem cameras were deployed. When al-Ja’bri and Zraqo spoke of their children and their community as a local audience of their footage, they meant that this audience enjoys the benefits of a reorganized set of relations between Palestinians and Jewish Israeli settlers as a result of the event of photography—or merely the potential event of photography. Thus the local conception of an audience can more accurately be interpreted as resulting from the threat of the potential visual exposure of the videotape as well as the potential, anterior audience.

Zoom In, Get Closer Let us return to B’Tselem’s stated organizational goal of exposure. In the field, the camera exposes and reveals only when it captures action clearly. Clarity has numerous dimensions, such as the stability of footage (is it handheld, shaky, tripod free?) and the quality of footage (is it SD? HD? Has it been compressed by video applications or by rapid transmission across the internet?).42 Clarity has yet another dimension: proximity, which is to say, image capture that occurs close to action. Proximity is achieved in two different ways: either videographers can station themselves close to action or they may employ the technological tool of zooming to bring the action closer to them. An unpublished tape filmed by B’Tselem volunteer Iyad Hadad documents the ways B’Tselem has trained its videographers to employ proximity as a tool for exposure.43 The tape captures a B’Tselem Camera Project training session led by Oren Yakobovich in 2009, in which new Palestinian volunteer videographers were given video cameras and trained in their use. The training sessions also included the staging of mock altercations between Palestinians and Israelis so that new volunteers could practice filming under stress. I am unable to include images from these video clips as they are for B’Tselem’s private, internal use only. Instead, I will describe them. Iyad Hadad’s clip opens offering a vision of a room with the English alphabet spray painted on a wall—it is a school or community hall, perhaps. A  lone Palestinian man runs through the hall. Suddenly, four other Palestinian men rush into the schoolroom carrying themselves with a violent sense of urgency: they are acting as Israeli soldiers chasing after a wanted Palestinian man. The four fake soldiers run their Palestinian pursuee into a corner and make him crouch down. Then one of them looks back as if to ask the B’Tselem trainer-turned-scene-director, “What happens next?” They are given a clear signal from outside the boundaries of

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the video frame and commence a mock assault upon him with pretend kicks that never reach his body, arms raised as if to initiate blows that never land, and shouts that are accompanied by the confused smiles of occupied Palestinians enacting the role of the occupiers. From the vantage point of Hadad’s camera, the “soldiers” now block the Palestinian victim from sight as they tower over him. The B’Tselem staff member shouts to Hadad and his fellow cameramen-in-training, “Go, get closer! Get closer!” These cameramen must learn proximity: they must get close to the action so that they may expose it properly. In another video clip from the same tape, Hadad learns to employ another tool of proximity:  the camera zoom. Hadad walks toward a mirror holding his new B’Tselem camera. Hadad is not looking at himself; instead, he looks intently at the camera’s LCD viewfinder, watching his likeness mediated through the camera’s screen. He glances up once at himself in the mirror, then zooms in on himself and looks at himself once more. In the background we can see a room filled with decorative objects and crafts. He zooms in so much that his face becomes completely blurry, then zooms back out until it is just in focus. His image is multiplied by the mirror and clarified by the zoom. In the B’Tselem video archives is a plethora of these zoomed-in shots, where the Palestinian camera lingers on the faces of presumed Israeli perpetrators. The B’Tselem videographers produce what cinematographers call the “close-up shot”: a detailed image of a subject that fills the camera’s frame. In cinematic productions, close-ups are a tool of character development as they show the emotional response of an actor’s face. Such close-ups are filmed at a short range: the cinematographer minimizes the camera’s distance from its subject so that the subject appears large in the video frame, as if consuming it. Palestinian videographers in the field do not necessarily have the privilege of a close-range shot; nor, might I add, do they have compliant videographic subjects. Palestinian volunteers tend to film close-ups by zooming. With this trope of the close-up zoom, B’Tselem volunteers enlarge the face of the Israeli subject as if to expose its criminality. The history of portrait photography shows that the face has long been split between its representational ability and its biometric capacity to identify, often for evidentiary or juridical use, as Daniel Mann has written.44 Moreover, the force of the Israeli military—or any military—derives in part from the uniform likenesses of its soldiers, each acting as unindividuated members toward a collective state regime. Individuating the faces of Israeli soldiers weakens the force of the IDF’s collective power. As Mann has written, Images of the faces … can be singled out as a new Achilles heel for a longstanding and highly media conscious military regime. The state derives its power, in part, from the way its agents appear as a homogeneous whole and cohere into an undifferentiated group of representatives.45

What does this individuating look like in practice? In an unpublished B’Tselem video, filmed in 2012 by a volunteer named Abd al-’Alim al-Salaymeh,

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zooming dominates. The clip opens with a panning shot through al-Salaymeh’s surroundings:  trees blur in the foreground and buildings form the background in an outdoor panorama of Hebron (Plate 3). Al-Salaymeh then zooms into the face of an Israeli soldier stationed above him, producing a close-up. He zooms in and out of this soldier’s face twice, then zooms into the face of a second Israeli soldier who is stationed below him, and finally focuses back onto the first soldier, zooming in and out twice more. At the end of all this zooming, the soldier commands other soldiers nearby to apprehend al-Salaymeh’s camera: he does not like all this zooming. Israeli soldiers approach al-Salaymeh and confiscate the camera while it is still recording. We hear one soldier ask in Hebrew, to his mates, “Does anyone know how to delete this?,” indicating a desire to erase the clip that identifies the soldiers’ faces. The close-up shots are so zoomed-in that we can even see chromatic aberration around the fringes of his face (Plate 4). This optical effect results from the failure of the camera’s lens to focus all colors of light to the same point. Colors of light are emitted at different wavelength, and with extreme magnification the wavelengths are bent by the lens in such a way that they no longer converge to a single focal point.46 The close-up therefore not only focuses and exposes the Israeli soldier’s face but also blurs his edges. It is as if the clarity of the face begins to decompose at the very edges of technological possibility, akin to what Eyal Weizman has described as the “threshold of detectability.”47 In the B’Tselem archives, the close-up is not only possessive or obsessive but also an enhancement of perceived criminality. These close-ups function as in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow-up, in which a fashion photographer discovers he has unwittingly captured a crime on camera in a local park. In his darkroom, the photographer repeatedly enlarges his images, revealing a hand with a gun in the bushes and an abstract shape that could be a body. Thinking he’s both seen crime in action and prevented it by photographing, he telephones his friend and declares, “Something fantastic has happened. Those photographs in the park—fantastic. Somebody was trying to kill somebody else. I  saved his life!” Antonioni’s infamous photograph enlargement scene betrays the belief that close-up imagery will reveal criminality—even accidentally—and may stop criminality in its tracks. But the plot does not end there. The photographer later discovers he has not prevented a crime but merely documented a murder that has already been consummated. Blow-up is a fictional work of media and as such differs from B’Tselem’s citizenrecorded media in most ways. Yet when B’Tselem videographers zoom in on Jewish Israeli subjects, they—like the fashion photographer in Blow-up—attempt to expose criminality or prevent violence entirely. As with the case of Ahmed Ziyadah, their cameras—like that of the fashion photographer—do not prevent violence. However, unlike the fashion photographer, B’Tselem volunteers are keenly aware of the violence they record as they record it. They do not discover it after the fact, in darkrooms or other safe spaces full of artistic freedom. They live in it each day.

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Concealment: A Denial of Exposure Thus far I have explored the ways in which the countervisual tactics of B’Tselem volunteers function to produce exposure. Exposure works to end concealment, notes Ruthie Ginsburg, “even if exposure does not amount to divulging a secret.”48 Exposure and concealment work at opposite ends of the visual spectrum. Because concealment is directed against exposure, acts of concealment can generally direct our attention toward the very occurrence of exposure. Such is the case in a 2017 clip from B’Tselem volunteer Ayat al-Ja’bri, in which a squadron of Israeli soldiers discuss how to prevent her from filming their operation in and around her house in Hebron and conceal their actions from her camera.49 To understand this clip, it is important to know that we never learn conclusively why the soldiers were at al-Ja’bri’s house. They seem to be planting some kind of technological device and looking through the house for the most ideal location to situate it. The IDF spokesperson has denied that anything was planted. At any rate, al-Ja’bri’s videos are remarkable for the transparency and openness with which Israeli soldiers discuss their motivation to conceal their actions from her camera and for their repeated escalation of concealment attempts. Initially, as the mass of Israeli soldiers works in the stairs below al-Ja’bri’s front door, she films them from above. One soldier guards her from outside the video frame. This soldier stands beside her passively until another soldier commands him transparently:  “Don’t let the camera be on them [the soldiers below]” (Figure 1.3). The guarding soldier replies, “What? I don’t understand,” to which the commanding soldier replies, “Get in the way of the camera.” The soldier then turns to al-Ja’bri and states, “You’re not allowed to film.” “What? What?” she asks in English. The soldier holds up his hand in front of the camera and repeats, in Hebrew, “You’re not allowed to film.” Al-Ja’bri continues filming. After this first effort toward concealment fails, another soldier blatantly suggests that they prevent the camera’s expository gaze by ordering a body search of al-Ja’bri, herself. “Come, I need to check you” says a female soldier in accented English. Al-Ja’bri tries to brush her off with a claim to the professional nature of her volunteer filmmaking:  “I am in my work!” she castigates, as if the status of “work” itself might protect her activities. The Israeli soldier achieves some semblance of a search, but al-Ja’bri continues filming. It is notable that this second attempt at concealment was enacted through a body search: a procedure entailing the exposure of a subject’s body. The Israeli soldiers sought to conceal their own actions from the Palestinian lens by exposing the Palestinian body. After this second attempt at concealment also fails, the soldiers openly discuss further avenues to block the camera. Finally one soldier says, “Should I simply blind her with the flashlight?” (Figure  1.4). The soldier shines her militaryissued flashlight into the camera’s lens, obliterating its sensor with too much light. When they see that this distinctly optical tactic has succeeded, the soldiers laugh and celebrate. They have blocked the camera’s gaze by overexposing it (Figure 1.5).

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Figures  1.3 and  1.4 Israeli soldiers strategize how to conceal the exposing gaze of the camera during a nighttime operation in the Muhawel neighborhood of Hebron, in the Occupied West Bank. Location: Hebron; Date: August 9, 2017. Filmed by Ayat al-Ja’bri, © B’Tselem.

Camera as Revelatory Tool of Exposure

Figure 1.5  Israeli soldiers continue to strategize how to conceal the exposing gaze of the camera. After many physical attempts, they settle on an optic solution: to blind the camera sensor with a flashlight. Location: Hebron; Date: August 9, 2017. Filmed by Ayat al-Ja’bri, © B’Tselem.

Rather than representing isolated instances, these examples of concealment gesture toward the manner in which concealment is manifest and legitimized at the highest Israeli governmental levels. In 2018, a member of Knesset proposed a penal bill titled the “Prohibition against photographing and documenting soldiers,” which criminalizes both “the photographing and documenting” of IDF troops as well as the circulation of such documentation.50 The proposed bill aimed to address the recording of Israeli soldiers by groups that right-wing Israeli politicians consider pro-Palestinian, including B’Tselem. As the bill’s explanatory note states: For many years now, the State of Israel has been witness to a worrisome phenomenon of video, photo and audio documentation of IDF soldiers by antiIsrael and pro-Palestinian organizations the likes of B’Tselem, Machsom Watch, Breaking the Silence, and various BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] organizations. In many cases, these organizations spend entire days next to IDF soldiers, waiting patiently for an activity that may be filmed in a biased and slanted manner to cast shame on them. For the most part, the documentation is performed while interfering with the ongoing operational activity of IDF soldiers, and sometimes even while hurling accusations and insults at them. The filming is tendentious and edited in a one-sided manner, with only one objective—to break the spirit of IDF soldiers and the citizens of Israel.51

This statement accuses those who record of manufacturing incidents where they are absent, of falsification by selective reporting and selective editing, and of

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ultimately intending to degrade the State of Israel with “one-sidedness.” The bill moreover claims the purported sole objective of exposure to be the “breaking of the spirit” of Jewish Israeli citizens and soldiers, which is starkly different than the goals of exposure catalogued in this chapter. Those goals of videographic exposure include: to challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation in Israel and internationally; to cause change to the sociopolitical order; to end the injustices of the occupation; to deter violence by Jewish Israeli actors; to create a “virtual community” of distant spectators who will respond to images of the distant suffering of others; and to create a possible anterior audience of exposure, whose very potential existence can reorganize present sociopolitical relations between settler-colonial forces and those colonized. In the original version of this bill, violators would face five years in prison if documentation was found to be “undermining the spirit of IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens” and ten years of prison if the documentation was determined to harm Israeli state security.52 While these sentences were later reduced to a maximum of three years, this bill directly seeks to conceal Israeli military action. As Michael Omer-Man, editor in chief of +972 Magazine, wrote, “Clearly, exposing the reality of occupation is a threat to the occupation, and by extension, to the current Israeli regime.”53 If the occupation results in unfavorable exposure for Israel, then this Israeli bill seeks to conceal the very act of exposure. It proposes concealment as a nationalist agenda.54 In the lead-up to the preliminary vote on this legislation, Israel’s Keshet television network hosted a prime-time debate between B’Tselem’s executive director Hagai El-Ad and Knesset member Moti Yogev of the right-wing Habayit HaYehudi (“Jewish Home”) party. Predictably, Yogev argued in favor of criminalizing the documentation of Israeli soldiers, while El-Ad argued for ending the occupation that results in such documentation. El-Ad said, This is a law where it’s difficult to decide whether it’s more stupid, or more dangerous …. The danger it has is to erase reality. The occupation … is evil. Evil things photograph badly …. Many of these photos are gut-wrenching, and it’s difficult to see them …. If you don’t want your gut to be wrenched, remove the soldiers from the picture …. If you don’t want these photos, end the occupation.55

In other words, to prevent these images from exposing the current reality, the Israeli government must remove their real-world referents—meaning the ugly reality of the occupation to which they point, indexically. The concealment bill passed its first reading on June 20, 2018.56 Thereafter, the bill has been transferred to the Justice Committee for normal parliamentary proceedings, and debate and amendments will follow.57 Certain reporters believe that this bill is dead on arrival and that no further action will be executed to propel it forward through the government.58 B’Tselem video department director Ehab Tarabieh told me that the bill was so absurd that the department did not give it much thought; however, they commenced a series of meetings to discuss how to protect their volunteer videographers in case the bill were to become law.59 As of

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this book’s publication, the bill had not yet been taken up by the Knesset to advance it beyond its initial stage. The bill’s passing through its first reading, though, signals the Israeli government’s stunning willingness to conceal oppositional content and to curtail the visual exposure of the occupation by cameras.

Concealment as Permitting Exposure Concealment signals the presence of exposure and limits exposure—but can it ever permit exposure? I argue it can. The cleanest way to understand this is through the power of anonymity: anonymous subjects reveal information precisely because their identity is concealed. We see this with whistle-blowers, with political informants (like America’s Deep Throat), and even with judicial witnesses who take the stand only after being promised enrollment in witness protection programs. Among B’Tselem volunteers, women have been growing in number in recent years, with 49 percent of the Camera Project’s training sessions including women as of the organization’s most recent annual report.60 Many women volunteers who film for B’Tselem chose not to leave the home, instead concealing themselves inside buildings as they employ their cameras as concealed tools of exposure. Scholar Ruthie Ginsburg has researched the phenomenon of Palestinian women who film out their windows, making their own very private spheres sites for anti-colonial activism.61 Of course, their homes are never quite private; the Palestinian home is constantly subject to the intrusion of the Israeli colonizing power, which “makes its presence felt” through house searches, seizures, and demolition threats. But when women film out their windows, they achieve a superior perspective of looking down at activity on the street, as if with the powerful view of Israeli hilltop settlements, just for a moment. Moreover women who film out their windows remain in their own distinct space, separate from the action “out there.” Their acts of documentation therefore cannot be inhibited by physical assaults on the camera (such as grabbing, hitting, or breaking) because the camera resides in a separate space from the sphere of action. As Ginsburg has noted, a woman’s “distinct space functions as a camera obscura—a darkroom where she sees and is unseen, watching the event without being a part of it.”62 In these cases, the Palestinian woman recording activates a mode of visual documentation in which her gender conceals her from the public sphere—or, to put it crudely, her gender protects her footage. In broader Israeli society, a prime example of how concealment promotes the exposure can be found in the practices of Breaking the Silence (“Shovrim Shtika”), an NGO created by former Israeli soldiers who confidentially document and disseminate testimonies of the atrocities committed (or witnessed) by Israeli soldiers, in their own voices, during their military service. With a few exceptions, soldiers who testify for Breaking the Silence do so under the cloak of anonymity.63 The concealment produced by anonymity is the very means through which their testimonies are exposed. Breaking the Silence has indicated that exposure and its subsequent backlash would prevent testifiers from coming forward:

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East One must remember that exposing oneself as a Breaking the Silence testifier comes at a high social cost in Israel, indicated through harsh threats and feedback faced by many individuals associated with Breaking the Silence. To protect and defend our testifiers from this wild unbridled incitement, their personal details are not made public for as long as they wish to remain unexposed.64

The testimonies of former and current IDF soldiers further the expository mission of Breaking the Silence, which is to “expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.”65 Exposure itself is the stated goal, and concealment of soldiers’ identities enables it. In video testimonies, Breaking the Silence blurs the faces of those bearing witness (Figure 1.6). In a 2015 testimony a former soldier describes a case in which he opened fire at a window after suspecting movement behind it during Operation Protective Edge (2014) in the Gaza Strip.66 Thereafter, the suspicious movement stopped. The testifier does not know if he killed a Palestinian inside the house or if the movement he saw was just a breeze through curtains. Either way, he offers his testimony to indicate the unethical readiness of the Israeli army to shoot to kill, even when the target could have been an innocent bystander. The soldier delivers his chilling testimony under the blur of anonymity. Concealment plays a leading role in the 2008 film, Z32, by Israeli director Avi Mograbi. The film is a documentary that follows a veteran of an elite IDF unit who, together with his battalion, committed a revenge killing of a Palestinian policeman. As in most of his documentaries, Mograbi is himself a minor character in the film, which he categorizes as a “musical-documentary-tragedy.”67 In one scene Mograbi sings for the camera, surrounded by a small orchestra assembled

Figure 1.6  Breaking the Silence video testimony in which the testifier is blurred to preserve confidentiality, published on May 6, 2015.

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in his living room much to the chagrin of his wife, asking, “Do I give the floor to a killer?” By “killer” he means the veteran—who is only ever identified as “Z32,” his Breaking the Silence anonymized identification number.68 The majority of Z32 follows the veteran as he tries to reconcile his past actions with himself and with his girlfriend. Mograbi promises Z32 that his identity will be concealed, but he struggles to do so on film. He seeks a mode to show Z32’s eyes and mouth—facial features that convey the emotionality of testimony to viewers. At first Mograbi uses special effects to blur the veteran’s face while keeping his eyes and mouth in focus, so that he appears on screen as an amorphous blurry head with strangely clear orifices. Unsatisfied with the results, Mograbi attempts a more manual concealment tactic: he glues a skin-toned mask with holes for eyes, nostrils, and a mouth onto Z32’s face. But this too fails. The physical mask keeps slipping down the soldier’s forehead as he speaks, threatening to fall off. Finally, Mograbi enlists the aid of three-dimensionally rendered computer graphics to supplant an entirely new face onto the soldier in postproduction. Even this final “face” is not perfect: it is programmed to be the topmost layer, resting above the original footage. Therefore, everything that might normally be visible in front of a face—such as a hand scratching the cheek, a cigarette being brought to the lips—become uncannily suppressed in space, appearing underneath this digital mask (Figure  1.7). The digital mask otherwise looks quite realistic, and for minutes at a time a viewer can forget it’s just a mask. However every time the soldier touches his own face and his hand is obscured by the mask, we are reminded of the concealment. The mask conceals. Like other acts of concealment—such as the IDF soldiers who blinded a B’Tselem videographer with their flashlight—it signals that exposure is taking place. The soldiers were attempting to conceal their present

Figure 1.7  Film still from Avi Mograbi’s film, Z32 (2008).

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actions in the face of the citizen camera lens, whereas Z32 sought to conceal his past actions from the documentarian’s artistic lens. These constitute different lenses and different tenses, but in both cases the concealment directs our attention toward exposure. The digital mask in Z32 also directs viewers’ attention away from his individual identity as a specific person, gesturing instead toward a generalized IDF combat veteran. The mask asks: could this soldier have been anyone? It at once conceals and abstracts. The mask asks viewers not to merely consider the guilt or absolution of Z32 himself but of the entire military apparatus that sustains its violent occupation of the Palestinian territories.

The Ethical Demands of the Face Not all generalizations of IDF soldiers seek to ask larger, critical questions of the occupation as in Mograbi’s Z32. As Daniel Mann has shown in “ ‘I Am Spartacus’:  individualising visual media and warfare,” individuation is an active threat to military ideology and practice that seeks to present its actors as a unified and unindividuated front via uniforms and other dress codes.69 To deter the individuating exposure of cameras, Israeli combat soldiers routinely wear balaclavas—or ski masks as they are known in common parlance—while on active duty. Balaclavas function to suppress exposure, obscuring soldiers’ facial identities as possible or actual perpetrators of atrocity. Notably, balaclavas were traditionally made not for concealment but for warmth: they were constructed out of wool to retain the body’s natural heat in cold climates. As the balaclava’s military function shifted away from temperature and toward concealment in Israel–Palestine, different materials were needed for its construction. Today Israeli combat soldiers commonly wear the Agilite brand “SF Balaclava” in the field, a balaclava designed specifically for obscuring the face in the heat of “extreme Middle Eastern climate conditions” using a fabric technology militaristically dubbed Combat Cool™ (Figure 1.8 and 1.9).70 Agilite—a company founded by Israeli and American army veterans—leverages its Israeli identity to market its products as deriving from an active Israeli–Palestinian battlefield, which it sloganizes as “the toughest place on earth.”71 They advertise that the SF Balaclava is used by Israeli Special Operations for facial concealment, as if this client proves the success, durability, and ruggedness of the mask.72 Unlike many other countries, Israel allows masks in public. Other countries such as the United States and France have passed antimask laws to forbid the concealment of identity, which is considered a threat to public safety or even a “social hindrance” for communicative potential (as in the strict French antiburqa law). In the United States most antimask laws were passed to prevent the violent and racist actions of Ku Klux Klansmen, who wore while linen hoods with only two holes—one for each eye—to hide their identities. By prohibiting facial concealment, these laws sought to prohibit violence.73

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Figure 1.8  Israeli soldiers entering and searching houses, wearing army-issued balaclavas. Location: a-Nabi Saleh, a village near Ramallah; Date: February 18, 2014. Filmed by Bilal a-Tamimi © B’Tselem.

Figure  1.9  Israeli soldiers enter and search a Palestinian house, wearing army-issued balaclavas. Location: Hebron; Date: March 10, 2015; Filmed by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh © B’Tselem.

The idea that exposure to a person’s likeness—seeing the “face” of an other—can prevent violence or urge a person to take action has a long philosophical history, notably through the work of Emmanuel Levinas.74 Levinas philosophized that the face does not merely humanize an other but makes ethical demands upon an other

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that cannot be refused.75 Like photographs, the face cannot speak; but nonetheless it conveys the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” which we might more broadly understand as an ethical demand not to harm another human being. Levinas insists that the face be “unmediated” in order to make these ethical demands. Like meeting “face to face,” something special happens between people when they encounter each other’s unmediated faces. Levinas theorizes that it is the “immediacy” of the face that makes it have a “first philosophy” prior to any ideas of the other. With these abstract concepts or prejudgments set aside, the face commands. The kind of mediation Levinas seeks to remove is not “through the media” (such as photographs, videos, tweets) as we conceive it today but instead is a mediation through philosophical abstraction. When we look at an image of a victim, does their face make an ethical demand upon us to act? When a B’Tselem videographer films the suffering of a fellow Palestinian, are we as spectators called to respond? In her brilliant and careful reading of Levinas, Judith Butler writes that “to respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself.”76 Butler understands war as coming about through a perception of inequality in the precariousness of human lives. All lives are precarious in that they can end, but war promotes a “differential spread of grievability” across populations.77 Put succinctly, war divides populations into those whose lives are considered grievable and those whose are not. This differential spread of grievability directly corresponds to our conceptions of the differential allocations of precarity that are assigned to populations and is in direct contrast to the reality that no human life transcends injurability, precarity, and mortality. In other words, acts of violence are carried out when the framing of a society, of a regime, or of a political ideology denies citizens the ability to apprehend a person’s life as life at all. To translate Butler’s theory into Levinasian terminology, war—or ongoing settler-colonial violence, in the case of Israel–Palestine—denies the ability to encounter an unmediated face. It is the unmediated face that IDF balaclavas obstruct. Israeli soldiers encounter Palestinians with masked faces, presenting as an unindividuated military regime to occupy what is considered the unindividuated, mass enemy of Palestinian bodies. And it is the countervisual tactics of Palestinian video cameras that aim to restore visibility to Palestinian suffering. Crucially, these cameras expose, and with their exposure they seek to expose the lack of Palestinian grievability and the denial of Palestinian precarity as conditions that are politically produced, socially shared, and ethnonationally sustained by Israeli state violence. Yet it remains difficult to turn the “public invisibility” of Palestinians—their public state of reduced visibility caused by reduced or removed rights—into a “visible invisibility,” to use Hochberg’s terminology, meaning a kind of invisibility that becomes seeable to a public.78 How might exposure work to bring about action? In the case of Ahmed Ziyadah, his video garnered much attention, but to what end? Ziyadah was ultimately arrested and held for six days without any stated reason. As B’Tselem wrote, “No one will have to answer for Ziyadah’s detention and no one will give him back those six lost days,” only to conclude with

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resignation, “This is what life under occupation looks like.”79 In what ways might B’Tselem’s videos expose the continued violence of the Israeli occupation against Palestinian society?

Exposure’s Inner Workings: A Civil Contract I want to take seriously the potential for exposure to spark action, as many human rights organizations like B’Tselem claim it can. How might exposure function to bring about justice? I will consider the theory that Ariella Azoulay puts forth in her celebrated 2008 book, The Civil Contract of Photography. While I ultimately argue that exposure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the kinds of action, justice, and remediation that human rights organizations like B’Tselem desire, I  put Azoulay’s theory forward to consider exposure’s mechanisms of action— mechanisms that I see at play in B’Tselem’s video archives. In The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay argues for a new ontological– political conception of photography that demands an “ethics of the spectator” in which the spectator is called to take part, to move from the addressee’s position to the addresser’s position in order to take responsibility for the sense of such photographs by addressing them even further, turning them into signals of emergency, signals of danger or warning—transforming them into emergency claims.80

Indeed like Thomas Keenan, Hito Steyerl, Susan Sontag, and other contemporary photographic theorists, Azoulay argues that photographs do not speak for themselves.81 Photographs do not contain embedded “speech acts,” to use J.  L. Austin’s phrase, and what photographs convey is never predetermined.82 Instead, Azoulay argues that—unlike the Levinasian face—a photograph is subject to constant renegotiation in a way that imbues spectators with power. The spectator’s power is one to “suspend the gesture of the sovereign power which seeks to totally dominate the relations between them as governed—governed into citizens and noncitizens, thus making disappear the violation of citizenship.”83 Photography creates a “borderless citizenship” and “bear[s]‌traces of a plurality of political relations that might be actualized by the act of watching, transforming and disseminating what is seen into claims that demand action.”84 Azoulay calls the resultant set of relations that occur between a photographer, a photographic subject, and a spectator a “contract” in order to discard the more vague notions of affective responses (like empathy, shame, or pity) and to instead indicate photography’s power to create a political covenant that restores citizens’ rights under a regime—namely, the rights of Palestinians within the State of Israel. Azoulay’s conception of a civil contract is compelling for many reasons:  it posits the visual realm as always mediated by a regime seeking to dominate and control what is visible; it acknowledges persons as subject to the citizenship rules of a regime; and it lays out a method by which, through photography, spectators

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can create their own civil relations that demand a reconfiguration of citizenship, rights, and power. Yet Azoulay acknowledges that a civil contract of photography requires work on the part of the spectator. The set of relations she lays out does not simply happen. Instead spectators must learn how to look at photographs with what Azoulay describes as “civic skill.”85 She writes, When and where the subject of the photograph is a person who has suffered some form of injury, a viewing of the photograph that reconstructs the photographic situation and allows a reading of the injury inflicted upon others becomes a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic appreciation.86

Unlike Sontag, who theorized that a certain degree of passivity was necessarily implied in the act of spectatorship, Azoulay’s conception of a spectator is active: it demands that spectators not merely “look” at photographs but “watch” them.87 Watching is the verb used for movies, and Azoulay uses it intentionally to ask for a kind of spectatorship that reinscribes both movement and time to still images. This kind of spectatorship reanimates photography and in doing so offers new civic responsibilities and potentialities. It is precisely because Azoulay’s spectator is active that this “spectator” does not name all of us. We do not all look at images and reanimate them with civic skill. We do not all watch videos and feel responsible because we see them. Our looking and our watching do not always catalyze our civic action. In the United States, video of police violence against black and brown bodies has yet to stop the wide-scale state violence, though—as in Israel—individual state actors have been convicted. For many spectators, visual recordings engender what scholars have dubbed “compassion fatigue” or “image fatigue,” whereby the onslaught of images causes a lack of empathy or even motivates spectators to simply stop looking.88 This fatigue is one of the ways the exposure assumption decomposes under wider scrutiny. Rather than discarding the exposure assumption entirely, I propose something new:  that photographic exposure of atrocity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for change. In philosophical logic, the terms “necessary” and “sufficient” determine the causal relationship between two entities. “If A then B” means that B is both necessary and sufficient for A to occur. If today is neither a Saturday nor a Sunday, then today is a weekday. The exposure assumption is an “assumption” precisely because it asserts both necessity and sufficiency: it asserts that, if images of atrocity are captured and circulated, change will occur. In philosophical terms, images guarantee the existence of change (sufficiency), and change cannot occur without images (necessity). I argue that photographic or videographic images do not stake out a sufficient relationship to social change. Images do not guarantee change, nor do they guarantee justice. The civil contract requires an active spectator, which precludes many of us who change the channel, flip between browser tabs, or look away from photographs and videos. Carolyn Dean has written extensively on the gap between

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“representation and responsibility” that opened after images of the Holocaust’s horrific concentration camps circulated in 1945.89 Viewers bore witness to images of atrocity but failed to understand and to act. As Sharon Sliwinski wrote, these photos produced an “ethical abyss” in spectators.90 Cameras have not fulfilled the ideal of cessation of suffering by making the suffering visible. What remains is an “ethics of failure,” as Sliwinski calls it, writing, “[a]‌lthough the spectator of human rights now finds herself an extreme proximity to political events of distant places, this proximity has failed to produce ethical or moral certainty.”91 In Israel–Palestine, images of Israeli violence or of Palestinian suffering have yet to deconstruct the apparatuses of control and domination contained in the occupation that causes them. Yet photographic or videographic images surely seem to possess an element of necessity with respect to change. These images are indexical pointers to a realworld event. They are the “pics” that fulfill the skeptical demand, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” It is because photographic exposures indexically point to real-world referents that photographs and videos possess a special relationship to reality that is not present in other visual representations like paintings or drawings and can serve as catalysts if not fully causal galvanizers of action. As Teju Cole wrote, “Taking photographs is sometimes a terrible thing to do, but often, not taking the necessary photo, not bearing witness or not being allowed to do so, can be worse.”92 The decomposition of the exposure assumption is a key crisis for photojournalists who are part of the Activestills Collective in Israel–Palestine. Activestills’ mission statement offers a belief in the revelatory role of the camera, stating its establishment was borne “out of a strong conviction that photography is a vehicle for social and political change” and that the collective “believe[s]‌in the power of images to shape public attitudes and raise awareness on issues that are generally absent from public discourse.”93 However, as the organization has matured it has departed from its original and idealistic belief in the power of exposure. Activestills’ cofounder Oren Ziv no longer believes in revelatory potential of cameras, saying, “These days, I know that the problem is not the lack of information.”94 Ziv experienced a self-described crisis when his belief in the exposure assumption cracked. Now Ziv photographs as an act of solidarity, saying, I have no expectation that the photograph I take will reach a public and convince them of anything. The main power of photography for me is still its ability to express solidarity with the struggle and those who are engaged in it. This is not some theoretical solidarity with an abstract concept of “the oppressed,” but one of standing together with those who have chosen to struggle against oppression.95

For Ziv and others like him, all that remains in the image-making process is symbolic potential. The image has been stripped of its agency and operativity, leaving behind an embodied and concrete solidarity with photographic subjects.

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If the failure of the exposure assumption brings about a feeling, it must be anguish. It is distressing to come to terms with the failure of images to bring about change. Yet there is some good—some utility, even—in ceasing to believe the exposure assumption. We need more than images of violence to stop violence. We need more than images of suffering to change the root cause of suffering. Instead we need a reality where images of violence cause a rupture within the visual realm, itself. To constantly ask for images of atrocity, as if they were necessary and sufficient, is precisely to miss the point. As Judith Butler wrote, The demand for a truer image, for more images, for images that convey the full horror and reality of the suffering has its place and importance. The erasure of that suffering through the prohibition of images and representations more generally circumscribes the sphere of appearance, and what we can see and what we can know. But it would be a mistake to think that we only need to find the right and true images, and that a certain reality will then be conveyed. The reality is not conveyed by what is represented within the image, but through the challenge to representation that reality delivers.96

Butler references reality’s “challenge to representation,” meaning the ways of questioning the very frame of the image itself. Change requires more than images. It requires a challenge to what is both representable (what can be seen) and what is comprehensible (what can be understood). When images cause a rupture, a dissensus, in their own regime-controlled frames, they can spark a clear understanding of the gap between representation and responsibility. The gap demands the spectator to keep looking and not to give in to compassion fatigue. The gap can rouse the passive spectator into becoming the “active” one demanded by photography’s civil contract. The gap echoes, reverberates, and haunts visuality as it seeks redress from the spectator. When we watch a video of an Israeli soldier blinding a B’Tselem camera with a flashlight, we witness a challenge to the very act of representation itself. In the blindness of the light, the spectator is invited not to look—because nothing is clear; nothing can be seen—but to wonder, in the absence of visual capture, what might have been seen. That curiosity is active, and that curiosity activates a spectator who must now contend with the gap in visuality. I will end this chapter with a scene from the film Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman that acutely captures the gap in Palestinian representation. While quite different in form, context, audience, and goals than B’Tselem footage, the scene shows that the kinds of “challenges to representation” that Butler describes can and do appear in images produced as art as much as in images produced as documentation. In the scene, we are first introduced to a character named E. S., who is played by Suleiman himself. E. S. is back in Palestine from voluntary exile in New  York, where he will speak to an audience about his new Palestinian film about peace. The audience applauds as Suleiman approaches the podium and opens his notes. But from that point forward noise prevents E.  S.  from speaking about his film. First a baby in the

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second row wails, then the microphone—which had been functioning without error—produces deafening audio feedback. A technician runs to assist E. S. but none of his adjustments quell the noise. Cell phones begin ringing loudly and audience members answer them. E. S. blows into the microphone to test it. The technician tries to help again. E. S. tries to speak again, but a siren wails. Finally the scene ends. We are left with nothing but the reverberating echo of what he tried to say, of what he might have possibly said about seemingly impossible topic of peace in Palestine. We are left considering the absence, the gap. Just like the failure of the exposure assumption leads to a consideration of the gap between representation and representability, so too does the failure of E. S.’s speech leave us with a sense of the haunting, echoing absence of a peaceful resolution in Israel–Palestine.

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Chapter 2 C A M E R A A S S HA M E - P R O D U C E R

The Shaming Hypothesis One night in July 2014, Jewish Israelis gathered on a hill outside the town of Sderot to watch—and cheer—as Israeli military bombs fell on Gaza. Part of a newly initiated Operation Protective Edge, the bombing would ultimately leave 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza dead and reduce wide swaths of Gaza to rubble.1 The Israelis snacked on popcorn as they applauded the real war unfolding quasi-cinematically in front of them. A journalist named Allan Sørensen captured a cell-phone image of this impromptu gathering and tweeted it with the byline, “Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs 2 hilltop in sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard” (Figure 2.1).2 The tweet quickly went viral, as Twitter users were horrified by the Israelis’ enjoyment of the new war and their witnessing of it from an elevated position of safety and power.3 The Sderot cinema exemplifies how the act of looking is a form of power. Israeli citizens on the hill were empowered with the gaze—with the right to look— whereas Palestinians became subjects attempting to hide from sight (of the aerial photograph or of the camera-enabled warhead). Israelis on the hill embraced the spectacle of war and relished the sight of the sublime inside catastrophic violence.4 Yet I’d like to suggest an alternative reading of Sderot Cinema, one that interprets it as a distinctly affective incident entailing a lack of shame. Those on the hill shamelessly and openly celebrated the mortal catastrophe of an other. It is their brazen shamelessness, I suggest, that prompted the tweet’s virality. Shame is a powerful emotion. It functions to align actors—individuals, groups, and even nation-states—with accepted norms from which they have deviated. Therefore it’s not surprising that shame is used frequently in human rights discourse. Thomas Keenan has noted that human rights organizations predominantly operate under the principle of “mobilizing shame,” whereby they exercise power to enact change by exposing violations to the public eye, thus bringing perpetrators into a state of shame and thereafter compliance.5 Acts of shame mobilization occur extrajudicially, where the law falls short or cannot reach. Shame mobilization works because perpetrators are subject to the force of public opinion and, like individuals, are vulnerable to feelings such as embarrassment, dishonor, ignominy, disgrace, and, of course, shame. Shame mobilization necessitates the involvement

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Figure 2.1  Sderot Cinema Tweet, 2014.

Camera as Shame-Producer

of a social network and is bolstered by publicity within the image economy of that network. The hypothesis that the exposure of violations will cause perpetrators to feel shame and thus rectify their actions is what Keenan has dubbed the “Shaming hypothesis” of human rights discourse.6 The shaming hypothesis is intimately related to the exposure hypothesis laid out in Chapter  1, which assumes that photographic exposure of a perpetrator’s actions will cause change. While both hypotheses rely on public exposure, the shaming hypothesis posits a means by which exposure causes change:  shame. Shame becomes the key motivational tool for change-making, an affective tour de force for extrajudicially aligning individual actors and nation-states alike. Key to the shaming hypothesis is that shame possesses a direct relationship to morality.7 As an example: one would feel ashamed if they were caught shoplifting. One might also feel a host of other morally significant emotions, such as regret, remorse, and guilt. These affective responses are tied to one’s own sense of whether one is living up to the moral ideals tied to citizenship and ethics. Indeed criminals who are deemed shameless are considered the most dangerous offenders. Unlike shame, other emotions such as joy or sadness do not possess a relation to morality: for instance one might feel sad because it’s raining, but that sadness has nothing to do with whether rain can be considered “moral.” Indeed it is the avoidance and fear of shame that discourages violations of moral ideals and which is at work in the gay shaming, slut-shaming, and victim shaming that results when ugly conservative moral ideals are enforced. Israeli army veterans have expressed shame at their actions as soldiers.8 In testimonies gathered by Breaking the Silence, veterans reported feeling ashamed of violating the privacy of Palestinian homes, of border detainments they executed, and upon realizing their enjoyment of the feeling of power.9 Upon his release from army duty, one IDF First Sergeant testified that he felt very proud of myself that I  was a combatant, so I  finished my service feeling strengthened. But there’s a lot of shame, many thoughts afterwards, and for years now I’m still thinking about it. Did I behave properly during that incident? Should I have opened fire? Did I not need to? Was I right to shout “uskut” (be quiet) at some Arab?10

This veteran’s shame causes him to replay scenarios and second-guess his actions in hindsight, presumably because he could not reconcile his actions with his own self-perception. Krista Thomason has pointed out that shame “arises out of tension between our identity and our self-conception: those things about which we feel shame are part of our identities, but they are not part of our self-conception.”11 Likewise one IDF veteran who served in Hebron described his inability to answer his girlfriend when she asked him what he did that day without feeling shame, saying I just didn’t know how to tell her “what I did today,” or for the past week, without feeling ashamed of myself …. This feeling of not being able to face myself and

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East say to the person closest to me in the whole world, not being able to tell her what I did, that for me is the greatest mark of discredit.12

This Israeli soldier’s shame caused a rupture between his identity and his selfconception—he could not “face himself ”—as well as a rupture within his personal relations. His shame produced a deep avoidance of intimacy with his girlfriend, to whom he could not even divulge the daily activities of his service in Hebron. Does these Israeli soldiers’ shame bring about change? Is the shaming hypothesis correct in Israel–Palestine? In this chapter I argue that it is not; instead perpetrators in Israel–Palestine perform for the camera, brazenly and shamelessly. Moreover in the absence of shame, human rights organizations and Palestinian civilians alike repeatedly attempt to cast shame on Israelis where it is absent, seeking to reinscribe the shaming hypothesis as a valid measure toward change in the sociopolitical order. Such organizations and individuals mobilize cameras as a tool of shaming to disrupt the affective economies of the Israeli occupation in what Sara Ahmed would call an “affectual reorientation,” seeking to change inoperative emotions to politically operative ones.13 Ultimately this shaming fails, I argue, because Jewish Israelis read the shame cast at them as merely “image shame”—the shame of how an action looks—instead of the more intrinsic “moral shame,” meaning the shame of an action’s inherent rightness or wrongness. The pernicious focus on how actions appear undermines shame’s operativity in Israel–Palestine. Shaming is not all for naught, though; I end with one hopeful example of shame’s ability to cause self-reflection upon an Israeli perpetrator’s past actions and to galvanize a look toward the future with a more humane lens.

Where Shame Falls Short In his 2004 seminal essay, “Mobilizing Shame,” Thomas Keenan lays out the shaming hypothesis and considers not only where it falls short, but where it is flat out wrong. Instead he considers cases in which perpetrators carry out their acts in broad daylight, unfazed by—or even on behalf of—the public eye, the camera, or the photograph. As Keenan puts it, What difference would it make for human rights discourse to take the photo opportunity seriously? Not the photo ops on behalf of human rights, but the ones coming from the other side, the other sides. What would it mean to come to terms with the fact that there are things which happen in front of cameras that are not simply true or false, not simply representations and references, but rather opportunities, events, performances, things that are done and done for the camera, which come into being in a space beyond truth and falsity that is created in view of mediation and transmission?14

Keenan argues that these photo ops have caused a deep crisis for human rights in which perpetrators do not avoid exposure, they instead enjoy the exposure or

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even self-expose their acts on camera. To Keenan these performances signal an “effective erasure of a fundamental axiom of the human rights movement,” namely that perpetrators fear exposure and curb their actions to avoid it.15 Whereas the act of witnessing was once an “active intervention,” shame’s failure to cause exposure avoidance in perpetrators has reduced it to merely watching.16 By way of example, the human rights organization WITNESS opened an online repository for human rights videos in 2007 called the Hub.17 Though it has since closed, while the Hub was active, one of its most-viewed videos was of Egyptian civilians being abused by police as the police recorded.18 The police slapped a bus driver over and over, unashamed of their brazen disregard for ethical and civil codes of conduct.19 WITNESS’s Program Director Sam Gregory noted that it is people on both sides of conflicts who now film, not merely the oppressed: “it is both the abuser and the abused, the implicated and the observer, who are documenting.”20 It is no longer the case that abusers fear the shame of exposure:  they are self-exposing their own crimes. Notably WITNESS operates under the slogan “See it, Film it, Change it,” illustrating its organizational belief in countervisual recording tactics as agents of change. Yet the police officers filmed their violence to perpetuate it, not to change it. Such perpetrator-shot photo ops are extremely threatening to human rights discourse because they shatter the basic assumptions of shame and exposure that undergird the use of cameras to fight for human rights. Like the Egyptian police, Israeli soldiers have been known to document their beatings of civilians—or rather, to perform these beatings for the camera. In an undated testimony gathered by Breaking the Silence, one former Israeli soldier described an incident in which an IDF officer beat a Palestinian shopkeeper in Hebron for violating a curfew as a fellow soldier photographed.21 The presence of the camera transformed the beating into a performance of shamelessness staged in brazen noncompliance with the IDF’s rules of engagement, and the universal declaration of human rights more broadly.22 In another incident, an IDF Border Police soldier ordered a Palestinian to perform for his camera. He required the Palestinian to sing “Ana behibak mishmar hagvul” (“I love the Border Police”) while slapping himself as hard as possible.23 The video represents a staged incident filmed to harass and embarrass Palestinians at the border. Rather than fearing the camera’s exposure of his perpetration, the Israeli soldier weaponized it to embarrass Palestinians. This video circulated widely—over 2,800 times, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz—before it was removed for violating YouTube’s policy on harassment and bullying.24 I  find it notable that it was the policies of a for-profit technology company, rather than a feeling of shame on the part of the perpetrators, the IDF, or the State of Israel, that ultimately withdrew this video from circulation. Even more disturbing is an incident that occurred in Hebron in 2002, in the midst of the Second Intifada. During the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, a battalion of Israeli soldiers was dispatched to raid a Palestinian house they had searched just two weeks earlier. After asking about the confounding order to research this house, the soldiers were told that a television crew was going to film them eating

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celebratory sufganiyot, traditional Hanukkah doughnuts, inside the Palestinian home. The TV crew “prepared everyone, brought us doughnuts, to show us happy and strong,” said one soldier, adding, “Slowly we start[ed] to understand that they sent us in [to the Palestinian home] to film us for TV.”25 That same evening the clip aired on Israel’s Channel 2 News for twenty seconds. The operation was in essence a photo opportunity performed inside a Palestinian home occupied by Israeli military presence for the sake of the “homey atmosphere” it produced in the shot.26 The soldiers smiled for the camera, celebrating Hanukkah—a holiday that commemorates a successful Jewish uprising against Greek rule—while quelling the Palestinian uprising at hand. The shame of needlessly violating the intimacy of a Palestinian home failed to catalyze change, instead producing a photo opportunity. The collapse of the shaming hypothesis is clearest when perpetrators create a photo op to express pride, shame’s opposite. Pride seeks the public (“Look what I accomplished!”) whereas shame avoids it. A proud person feels positively evaluated by others whereas an ashamed person feels negatively evaluated.27 With pride an actor swells (one can be “bloated” or “inflated” with pride) whereas with shame an actor shrivels (one can “shrink” in shame). Pride was one of Australia’s stated goals of its truth and reconciliation commission to address what its governor-general described as the “national shame” the country felt for its treatment of native inhabitants.28 Pride can surface only after the castigating lens of shame has been removed. Elor Azaria, also known as the “Hebron Shooter,” displayed pride for cameras. Azaria was a 19-year-old IDF combat medic in 2016 when he shot and killed a Palestinian man named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, who was suspected of a knife attack against an Israeli soldier. Al-Sharif was lying injured and immobilized on a Hebron street when Azaria shot him at point-blank range.29 In part because B’Tselem videographer ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh captured the incident on camera, Azaria was convicted by the Israeli judicial system. He was found guilty of manslaughter rather than the stronger crime of murder and was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Azaria served only nine. Azaria became extremely popular in Israel over the course of his nine-month trial and subsequently abbreviated imprisonment. Jewish Israelis who advocated on Azaria’s behalf mobilized his image on banners and custom-printed T-shirts to symbolize solidarity and national pride (Figure 2.2). During Purim, a Jewish holiday marked by the donning of costumes, a right-wing activist named Itamar Ben-Gvir dressed up as Elor Azaria, wearing army fatigues, brandishing a large rifle, and periodically holding up an image of Elor Azaria to ensure that his costume wasn’t lost on anyone (Figures  2.3 and 2.4).30 He paraded through Hebron, the city in which Azaria killed al-Sharif, arm-in-arm with his comrade Bentzi Gopstein who was dressed as Donald Trump. They told the press that their message was: “Azaria would have been treated as a hero had the shooting occurred under a Trump presidency,” intimating that American politics—not moral codes— were the only dividing line between heroism and criminality in Israel–Palestine.31 That same year, another Jewish Israeli staged an Elor Azaria costume competition for children, urging and incentivizing them to heroize Azaria and saying, “He’s a

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Figure 2.2  Supporters of Elor Azaria wearing T-shirts with his likeness, reading “Free Elor Azaria” and “Don’t Be Afraid, Elor! The Nation of Israel is with you.”

fighter and was sent to protect us and I’m proud to see children dressing up like him.”32 Elor Azaria received a hero’s welcome upon his release from prison:  Jewish Israelis clapped, danced, and hoisted Azaria up on their shoulders. Cameras rolled as confetti and Israeli flags completed the scene of abounding national pride.33 A banner was strung up at Azaria’s home in Ramleh that read, “It’s so good to have you home Elor, the soldier of all of us,” declaring national solidarity and a yearning for Azaria like a mother yearns for her son.34 In celebration of his early release from prison, Jewish settlers also invited Azaria back to Hebron, the site of his crime. Azaria accepted this invitation and jogged a victory lap of the city with an Israeli flag draped around his neck as a symbol of national pride (Figure 2.5). Azaria did not express shame or remorse for killing al-Sharif; rather he flaunted his freedom for the camera, telling a TV crew, “It’s fun after two years—almost two and a half years—to come back here.”35 Azaria termed his victory lap “fun” as if Hebron were some kind of an amusement park to him. Azaria could move freely, traipsing about while Palestinians in Hebron have their movement choked by an ever-changing network of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks.36 Yet it was Azaria himself who comprised the entertainment that day by performing for camera, giving a speech and receiving applause. Azaria’s victory lap was a show of pride, and his audience of Jewish Israeli settlers clapped at the end of a show. Overall, the national declaration of Azaria as a hero expresses a kind of pride that opposes shame. A hero is one who is elevated, lifted up, iconized,

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Figure 2.3  For the Jewish holiday of Purim in 2017, Bentzi Gopstein and Itamar Ben-Gvir dressed up as Donald Trump and Elor Azaria, respectively, and paraded down a street in Hebron as Israeli Channel 13 news recorded.

Camera as Shame-Producer

Figure 2.4  For the Jewish holiday of Purim in 2017, Itamar Ben-Gvir dressed up as Elor Azaria and paraded down a street in Hebron. He displayed an image of Elor Azaria to complete his costume.

Figure 2.5  Video still of Elor Azaria speaking to camera crews, saying it was “fun” to return to the scene of his crime, while Jewish settlers cheered him on in the background. TPS/ Shlisel

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modeled (as in statues), and even mimicked (as with costumes). Azaria was heroized in front of the camera in performances that brazenly expressed pride, shame’s opposite.

“Shame on You!” Jewish Israeli society welcomes pride and has become increasingly intolerant of shame. In 2018, a popular Israeli media personality and radio host named Kobi Meidan wrote that he was “ashamed to be an Israeli” after the IDF shot 15 Palestinians dead at protests at the Gaza border.37 Meidan’s boss considered his expression of shame to be a violation of the radio station’s code of ethics. Therefore Meidan retracted his shame and apologized for it publicly to save his job. Only after his apology was determined to be “honest and genuine” was he retained in his position.38 Shame was—and remains—an unacceptable ethnonational position for a Jewish Israeli figure to hold within the public sphere. In the absence of shame, Palestinian and Israeli civilians, international spectators, and human rights organizations alike repeatedly attempt to cast shame upon Jewish Israelis. Such shame-casting seeks to reinscribe the shaming hypothesis as a valid and effective measure toward altering the sociopolitical order. For instance, let us return to the Sderot cinema incident in which Jewish Israelis cheered on an asymmetrical, mortally devastating operation against Palestinians in Gaza. On Twitter, the shamelessness of the Israeli spectators was called into question. Users responded to the journalist Allan Sørensen asking, “Did you talk to them? Do they realise what kinds of humans they have become?”39 Others cast shame upon the Israeli crowd, saying, “That is just inhumane, abominable and disgusting. Shame on you, Israel.”40 Some users even offered to take on the shame of these Israelis where it was visibly absent (“I feel shame for these people”).41 The desire to believe in the shaming hypothesis—to save it, preserve it, keep it strong—resounds in these kinds of sentiments. Likewise in the B’Tselem archives one phrase is repeated over and over again from the lips of Palestinians—Shame on you! It is an utterance meant to reinstate a feeling of shame where it is absent in Israeli actors. In 1992 a Palestinian man named ‘Abd al-Jabar Shaq ‘Abd a-Rahman testified that Israeli soldiers raided his home in the Ramallah district and beat his son as the women in his house shouted “Shame on you!”42 In a 2004 testimony Bashir a-Tamimi describes asking Israeli soldiers why they were interrogating young Palestinian children of the village a-Nabi Saleh, saying: “Children may be throwing stones, but why are you forcing two-year-old children to come out of their homes …. Isn’t it a shame to do that?”43 In a 2012 video an Israeli settler attacked a B’Tselem field researcher named Nasser Nawaj’ah in the South Hebron Hills and broke his camera while the Israeli soldiers present did not intervene. The B’Tselem field researcher shouted to the settler, “Why are you hitting me? You should be ashamed of yourself!”44 In a 2015 detainment in Beit Rima, a Palestinian mother shamed the Israeli soldiers as they attack and beat her son, shouting, “For shame—What are you doing?”45 In 2017

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Israeli police officers assaulted a 15-year-old girl in Silwan during a house search as her mother shouted, “Shame on you! She’s a young girl!”46 These examples form a trend of Palestinians casting shame upon Israeli settlers and soldiers in the midst of their actions. Moreover they betray a belief in the shaming hypothesis, namely that shaming Israelis will catalyze a change in action: a stop to the beating, a cessation of interviewing minors, or a hesitation in the Israeli hand that raises to break the Palestinian camera. At times this shaming invokes religious or biblical overtones. Ta’ayush, a grassroots organization of Arabs and Jews working against the occupation, documented a 2013 incident in which the IDF arrested a shepherd who was herding his flock outside the West Bank village of Umm al-’Amad, seemingly without cause.47 The shepherd’s mother castigated the commanding IDF officer, saying Haram ‘aleyk, shame on you. You should be ashamed of yourself. Who do you think you are? Allah sees everything.48

The mother invoked God (Allah) to tie the shame she cast to its religious or biblical root. The word “shame” in Hebrew is boosha, a word etymologically linked to labesh meaning “to clothe” or to have one’s nakedness covered. The word boosha first appears in the biblical creation story when Adam and Eve were naked in the garden of Eden, but “unashamed” of their nudity.49 Only after eating from the mythical tree of knowledge did Adam and Eve come to perceive their uncovered nakedness as shameful. Likewise the English word “shame” derives from the IndoEuropean verb meaning “to cover,” meaning that the idea of concealment is at the very root of shame.50 With shame, the desire to cover arises precisely because of a failure to take cover: exposure has already occurred in places where coverage has failed, as Sara Ahmed notes.51 Nakedness is a thing that can be demanded of a person within a policed setting by a strip search, for instance. A strip search is a tool of visual exposure to see that a body doesn’t conceal contraband from sight. In Israel–Palestine, it is the visually empowered Israelis that order these searches upon subjugated Palestinian bodies. A strip search shames its subject with forced exposure of the intimacy of nudity. B’Tselem documented a 2018 incident in which Israeli soldiers ordered an elderly Palestinian woman named Huriyya Jarar to strip as part of a search of her home in Jenin.52 Jarar testified that she cried during the strip search, moved by feelings of sadness and helplessness. Then she said, “Shame on you” to the Israeli soldier, casting the shamefulness of her nudity back upon those who had demanded it.53 After the incident, Jarar asked questions of exposure:  “How could a young soldier force an old woman like me to take off all my clothes in front of her and expose myself like that?”54 Such a question betrays a shame that manifests as the desire “to cover.” The shame arises precisely because coverage has already failed and exposure has already occurred. It is a shame (boosha) of a failure to clothe (labesh). Indeed shame itself can feel like exposure: in moments of shame, “one

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is visible and not ready to be visible” as Erik H. Erikson has written.55 Jarar was ashamed because she was naked and seen to be naked: she was exposed.56 Because shame feels like exposure, one of the key responses to shame is concealment. The physical and gestural manifestations of shame are a dropping of the head and an aversion of the eyes. Therefore, the Palestinian shaming of an Israeli soldier can be read as an attempt to castrate the soldier’s exposing gaze. Jarar casts shame upon the Israeli soldier who searched her body, and had the soldier felt shame, perhaps she would have averted her eyes instead of looking boldly at Jarar’s nudity. It is not only Palestinians that shame Israeli actors in the occupation but also Israelis themselves. In its official language B’Tselem repeatedly decries Israel’s “shameful disregard for human life,” its “shameful conduct,” and its actions carried out in a “shameful manner.”57 Likewise Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, a volunteer organization of Jewish Israeli women who monitor the actions of Israeli officials at West Bank checkpoints, also document their eyewitness testimonies in language riddled with shame. Their published reports—each one filed in a woman’s own words—contain mentions of the “shameful” acts of Israeli soldiers and action carried out by Israeli soldiers who exhibit “no shame” even while they ought to.58 I’d like to take seriously both the meaning and the function of shaming in Israel–Palestine. Can you give shame to another? Is shame contagious? Is shame an arrow that can be slung? Or can shame only be transmitted to another if the shamer’s evaluative judgments mirror one’s own? Shaming is certainly a way of assigning guilt: saying “shame on you” means that you are guilty of moral corruption. However shame is subtly different from guilt. Shame is typically assigned to the wholeness of a subject whereas guilt is assigned merely to a discrete part of a subject. Shame questions the all-encompassing characteristics of a person. One feels guilt over what one has done but shame over who one is. Actions (what one has “done”) and being (who one “is”) direct attention in different directions, notes moral philosopher Bernard Williams: What I have done points in one direction towards what has happened to others, in another direction to what I am. Guilt looks primarily in the first direction … Shame looks to what I am.59

Shame points inward to the self. Unlike the temporary condition of guilt, shame can be quite steadfast. “Shame sticks to you like tar,” Monica Lewinsky said famously.60 Sarah Ahmed notes that shame differs from an emotion like disgust in which a subject is filled up with a sort of temporary badness that is then expelled and adheres to a different subject.61 With shame that badness is not expelled; instead it sticks within the self. A key factor of shaming is that it requires the subject to be interested in the Other. By saying “shame on you” I bring the “you” that is shamed in relation to me. This is a crucial part of casting shame: it brings you close to me by declaring that I am in relation to you, I see you, you appear before me, I appear before you (or

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as Arendt would say, I take up the “space of appearance”), and you must care how I see you.62 Shaming demands the subject to care about how the Other sees them. But Israeli perpetrators do not always care about how Palestinians see them enough to be shamed into compliance, especially as shame has increasingly become an unacceptable Jewish Israeli position in recent years. This is where the citizen video camera enters the scene. The Palestinian who records with a camera—who shames with the camera—widens the audience of exposure. The spectator is no longer merely the Palestinian witness but also all possible future spectators of a video clip. The broader audience includes those in front of whom the Israeli might feel shame. It is because the casting of shame requires mutual evaluative judgment—that the ashamed care about the other’s evaluations in some way—that the Palestinian-recorded footage, which threatens to reach a spectator whom the Israeli might care about, increases its potency to shame. The camera attempts to bring the Israeli perpetrator into a state of shame in front of this widened audience of spectators. The resounding chorus of the declaration, “Shame on you!” by Palestinians toward Israelis is therefore a way of demanding to be seen and considered, if not on behalf of their own humanity then on behalf of the judgments of others. I also argue that Palestinians cast shame at Israeli perpetrators in part because other utterances are less impactful. Palestinians might say, “Stop!,” but they lack the power. They might say “This is wrong!” or “This is immoral!” but the Israeli might disagree. They might say “Empathize with me!” but often there is an enormous communicative barrier, as well as a barrier of lived experiences between them and their Jewish Israeli counterparts. They might ask some variant of “Why?,” “Why me?,” or “Why are you doing this?,” which are interlocutions that demand a response from the Israeli who can easily deflect with the retort, “I was ordered to.” Finally Palestinian victims of injustice might declare, “You should be embarrassed of yourself!”; however, embarrassment is less essential to one’s core being than shame. Embarrassment is about how one appears whereas shame is about how one is. Therefore, “Shame on you!” remains a way to castigate the other and make demands of the other within a realm of political affect. Ultimately, this shaming lacks operativity, too, because Jewish Israelis interpret it as image shame rather than moral shame, as I will show in the next section.

Image Shame The Jewish Israeli public has, at times, been scandalized by how images appear as opposed to what they depict. In 2010, an Israeli journalist published Eden Abergil’s Facebook album, “IDF—the best time of my life,” containing photographs of her posing with handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinians during her service to the Israel Defense Forces. She poses lasciviously, puckering up and looking right into the camera as the Palestinian detainees behind her are blind to the world, to the camera, and to the image-capture (Figure 2.6). The power differences are tactile: Abergil, a Jewish Israeli, can move her body, can see, can document, and

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Figure 2.6  Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posing in front of Palestinian detainees, 2010.

can share documentation as souvenir—as war-spoil (“You’re sexiest like that,” commented one of Abergil’s friends under the original Facebook photograph).63 The Palestinian detainees cannot move, cannot see, cannot document (“I wonder if he’s on Facebook! I have to tag him in the photo!” replied Abergil).64 The Israel Defense Forces wrote Abergil off as one exceptional, disgraceful, bad apple of a soldier. Abergil told Israeli army radio she didn’t “understand what’s wrong” with the photographs, since they were taken, in her own words, “out of excitement, to remember the experience.”65 Abergil’s “nothing wrong” comprises blindness to the slow, suspended violence that encompass the visual acts of ordinary complicity of the Israeli occupation at the national and political levels. Perhaps this “nothing wrong” is the result of an occupation that has devoted considerable national effort to a distinctly visual erasure, obfuscation, and deletion. Taken together, these inflict at best a partitioned vision and at worst a failure to see: planting forests over ruins of Palestinian villages; supplanting Arab street and town names with Hebrew ones; creating separate and visually isolated roadways through the West Bank for Israeli citizens; creating an eight-meter-tall concrete wall that literally blocks noncitizen Palestinians from sight. As others have noted, the Zionist phrase itself, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” sloganizes a deep colonialist blindness to the presence of Palestinians.66

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At its core, Abergil’s denial of wrongdoing is a denial of shame. It was precisely Abergil’s denial that garnered so much media attention in Israel and abroad. As one Israeli columnist wrote in Ynet News, What caught the attention of the public eye around here and of media worldwide was the fact that she felt no shame being photographed like that and no shame sharing the photos. Throughout her military service, she did not deal with people, who may feel pain if stabbed. She published photos featuring mere objects from her military service days.67

Shameless, Abergil held firm to a public stance of “not guilty.” Along with renouncing culpability Abergil also eschewed a shame that the Israeli army claimed they wanted her to feel (“This was shameful behaviour by the soldier” an official IDF statement read).68 In the fallout from the Abergil affair, two kinds of public reactions coalesced in Jewish Israeli society. One reaction took issue with Abergil’s actions, decrying them as immoral and unjust. The second and more popular reaction only took issue with Abergil’s sharing of her photographs. In this latter reaction Abergil’s actions themselves are not to be decried, only her documentation of them. Many in this second camp called Abergil’s shamelessness mere stupidity, as if Abergil were too stupid to recall that daily acts of suspended violence carried out for the Israeli occupation must remain what Michael Taussig has called a “public secret”: a secret that is known to the public but which it agrees to keep hidden through agreed-upon social norms.69 Abergil declined to comply with this social contract, shamelessly staging and disseminating images as war spoils. Certainly there was a gendered element to the scandal of the Abergil photographs, not unlike the 2004 case of American soldier Lynndie England who appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs tormenting prisoners. By appearing to take pleasure at the subjugation of male detainees, both Abergil and England upset what scholar Gol Hochberg has called the more usual or “banal” visual iconography of war, in which it is men who torture and women who appear as the tortured victims of violence.70 Such images do not scandalize; instead they follow known and gendered paths of power. When the gender roles are reversed, the images make greater waves in the image economy. Additionally, there was a racist element to Abergil being labeled “stupid” by Jewish Israeli society, which operates under a racialized ethnic hierarchy in which Ashkenazi Jews of European or “Western” descent dominate over Mizrahi Jews, meaning Jews of the predominantly Arab societies of the Middle East or North Africa. Mizrahim have experienced widespread structural racism and discrimination in Israeli society, including a common stigmatization as “stupid” or uneducated compared to their Ashkenazi counterparts. Critical sociologists note that this stigmatization was further institutionalized by the creation of two educational tracks in Jewish Israeli schools: a normal track for the Ashkenazi elite, which served as a “springboard to an academic education,” and a vocational track for Mizrahim to provide “appropriate” occupational training for working-class

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lives in what became an ethnically segregated Jewish Israeli economy.71 In calling Abergil “stupid,” Jewish Israelis thus perpetuated a ethnoracial stereotype already pervasive in their society.72 But Abergil was not merely stupid. Many Jewish Israelis also reported having their own prisoner-of-war photographs from their army days, with the only divergence between them and Abergil being her shamelessness at sharing the images.73 It is as if Abergil’s actions themselves were not shameful, only their exposure (her being caught). Such logic suppresses the moral relevance of shame to align actors and instead minimizes and condenses shame to images only. Allow me a brief departure into the philosophical taxonomy of shame. Thus far the shame discussed in this chapter has been moral shame, which is shame arising from something a person has control over and which transgresses moral boundaries or undermines an agent’s moral standing. But one can also feel shame at things that are uncontrollable, like one’s appearance, a stutter, a scar, or another bodily deformation. Philosopher John Rawls labeled this kind of shame natural shame, meaning a shame over nonmoral characteristics, and one that concerns something for which one is not and cannot be responsible.74 Most importantly for this chapter, a third yet related kind of shame has been conceived by Allpress et  al., called image shame, namely the feeling of shame “that arise[s]‌from the perception that one’s social image has been undermined.”75 Image shame is concerned “solely with the image and reputation of the group” and is an intensely social feeling.76 Both natural shame and image shame concern themselves with appearances and, unlike moral shame, have nothing to do with good or bad, right or wrong. Under this taxonomy the shame that human rights organizations and Palestinians cast at Israelis is an invocation of moral shame. It is a shame of ethical transgressions for which responsibility can be taken. It is a shame that decries Eden Abergil’s actions themselves, not merely her documentation and dissemination of images of those actors. However, the shame that Jewish Israelis expressed when they decried Eden Abergil’s publication of images, not her actions, is image shame. This shame was cast at Abergil for disturbing the IDF’s image in society. Allpress et al. have noted that such image shame “makes [the perpetrator] look bad” rather than “makes [the perpetrator] treat them [the victims] better.”77 This shame leads to social distancing from the victims, and even to feelings of hostility toward them. Such a hostile sentiment can be seen in the 2018 Israeli Penal Bill that would prevent the filming of soldiers, as the images recorded “slander them” rather than dutifully highlight human rights violations, as moral shame would.78 Image shame is a pernicious kind of shame that fails to provoke meaningful realignment on the part of the perpetrator:  it is a shame that sees images as the problem, not the real-world referents to which the images point indexically. Such image-conscious logic is highly prevalent in the IDF. One veteran Israeli soldier testified that he and other IDF Border Police used to loot the bags of Palestinian boys who traveled through an Israeli checkpoint with goods

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to sell. In 2002 an Israeli television crew happened to be nearby and caught the looting on camera. The soldiers’ commander scolded the whole company, saying, “ ‘How could you possibly think you wouldn’t be seen?’ ”79 The commander did not reprimand the soldiers for their actions (as in, “How could you do such a thing?” or “Looting is immoral, illegal and will not be tolerated!”). Instead the commander admonished the soldiers for allowing their actions to be seen. Here, shame produced an avoidance of images, not an introspection upon immoral action. The shame became not about the morality of the act of looting but about the image of it. Imagery of shame is powerful. Understanding the power of the Abergil photographs, Palestinians and activists took it upon themselves to restage her images at a 2010 protest in the West Bank village of Bil’in. Five activists reperformed the role of Palestinians in the Abergil photographs, posing as if they had already been arrested. They donned blindfolds and handcuffs and sat immobilized on the ground like detainees (Plate 5). Nearby stood a line of IDF soldiers sent to contain the protest. Instead of standing back and witnessing the restaging of these photographs, the soldiers became “unwilling participants” in it, as Simon Faulkner has described, when they actually detained one of the demonstrators performing as an already-detained Palestinian.80 The soldiers completed the Abergilian restaging with this arrest, transforming the protester’s staged detainment into a real one. The restaging of the Abergil affair was a recasting of shame at the soldiers. It was a move to reproduce the look of shame—if shame can be said to “have a look”— and to offer shame’s representation to Israeli soldiers for the taking. When the activists restaged the Abergil photographs, they invited the Israeli soldiers to look at detained Palestinian bodies and make a different choice with their actions.81 The activists invoked moral shame and invited Israeli self-reflection on militarism in the face of civil demonstration. Of course shame is an unwelcome offering, and ultimately the invitation to reflect was one that the soldiers did not accept.

The Delayed Shaming of Video Footage I have shown that human rights organizations and Palestinian civilians alike attempt to cast shame on Israelis where it is absent, seeking to reinscribe the failed shaming hypothesis as a means to change the sociopolitical order. Shaming fails because Israelis take the shame cast at them as merely “image shame” instead of the more intrinsic and punishing “moral shame.” However there are examples to the contrary. In one incident an Israeli soldier was changed by his own shame—a shame that suddenly beset him as a result of video footage. In a video testimony gathered by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli army veteran named Dotan Greenvald describes that a fellow soldier recorded many hours of his army unit’s operations on a personal video camera.82 At some point Greenvald got a hold of this footage, which he had never previously seen. He describes rewatching a routine arrest of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in an unnamed village in the West Bank together with his family members—his parents, his sister—as if to show

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Figure  2.7  Dotan Greenvald, an Israeli army veteran from the Nahal Brigade, testifies about his shame at rewatching an arrest he conducted in the West Bank. Breaking the Silence testimony 56098.

them a sliver of his responsibilities in the army. He explained the technicalities of the arrest procedure to his family: how his brigade surrounded the house, used the radio to affirm their positions, aggressively entered the house, searched the rooms, and so forth. But in the middle of his explanation, Greenvald suddenly saw what he describes as the “human side” of the arrest: the detained Palestinian was led out of his home into the rain and mud, barefoot, as his mother stood at the threshold of the house hysterically, pulling her hair out and wailing for her son. Greenvald expresses disbelief in his own participation in the arrest. He asks, “Wow, did I do that?” (Figure  2.7). He cannot believe he had caused such distress in a mother, nor that he arrested such a young boy, a barefoot boy. Greenvald immediately separated himself from his family, shut himself in the bathroom, and started to cry. “I was ashamed,” he said, adding that he felt shame twice over: first, he was ashamed of his actions in the Israeli army, and second, he was ashamed to cry at his own striking realization of the first shame. Greenvald’s shame results from his inability to distance himself from his own prior actions. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas theorized that shame derives from an incapacity to move away or take distance from oneself: What appears in shame is therefore precisely the fact of being chained to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide oneself from oneself, the intolerable presence of the self to itself. Nudity is shameful when it is the obviousness of our Being, of its final intimacy …. What is shameful is our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves. It reveals not our nothingness but the totality of our existence. What shame discovers is the being that discovers itself.83

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Levinas explains that shame arises precisely from the intimate, internal place where the self wishes to distance itself from the self, but cannot. For Greenvald the camera’s footage is this final intimacy of the self to itself, a chaining of one’s likeness to oneself in ways that re-enliven past perpetrations. The arrest footage shamed Greenvald with its ability to be replayed, recirculated, and revisited. Crucially the very existence of the footage allowed Greenvald to see it with a new audience: with an older, civilian version of himself who was no longer subject to militaristic logic of active duty. His family’s presence also serves as a reminder of civilian life. Greenvald ends his testimony by adding another, future audience member: “You wonder how you’d tell your son, you know?” He acknowledges the future circulatory potential of this footage. This footage sticks around, recirculates, rewounds with its Barthesian punctum.84 If shame can be said to wound this Israeli veteran, it is a wound that stirs up not self-pity but an urgent desire to reflect on past actions. Self-reflection galvanized the soldier to look toward the future with a lens that demands self-study as a preliminary step toward peace. When asked why he chose to testify for Breaking the Silence—an action that comes with a hefty social cost in Jewish Israeli society— Greenvald replied: Before we reach an agreement, or peace or whatever we want so we can live with the Palestinians, we first have to understand what we’re doing, what we’ve done over the years …. We have to understand, we have to look … to look at ourselves, at what we’re doing, and understand that this is who we are.85

This soldier expresses a need to reckon with past perpetrations and to reconcile with shame as a relation of the self to the self, as video footage has sparked him to do. Only then, he posits, can Israeli society advance a different future where peace is possible.

Shame’s (In)operativity One of the key and most difficult questions we must ask about the camera as a tool of casting shame in Israel–Palestine is whether shame is an operative emotion. “Operative” in this case means that shame functions:  it is efficacious, it has the “power to produce effects.”86 Can shame align actors with ideals, with communities? When the camera is used as a tool of shaming, its images are meant to disrupt what Sara Ahmed has termed the “affective economies” of the Israeli occupation, meaning the way emotions “mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.”87 Rather than viewing shame as a psychological state held by a particular subject, Ahmed urges a consideration of emotions that understand subjects as nodes in an affective economy in which emotions move and are moved by individuals and collectives alike. Such an economy of affect is social, material, and psychic. Shame as an emotion can be

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operative—it can do something—in that it might bind people together or make them averse to one another. The operativity of shame is assumed in the shaming hypothesis, where it is the desire to avoid shame that functions to align actors extrajudicially. But we must admit the places where shaming fails and where cameras that are used as tools to expand exposure and broaden the audience of a perpetrator’s shame have instead “created new opportunities not just for activism and awareness, but also for performance, presentation, advertising, propaganda, and for political work of all kinds,” as Keenan described.88 These are the performances of an Israeli soldier who films the beating of a Palestinian, of the Israeli citizens who comprise the impromptu Sderot Cinema, of Elor Azaria’s victory lap of Hebron, and of the subsequent Purim costumes of Azaria that perform national pride in the place of national shame. In these cases the camera does not prevent perpetrations by casting shame, it instead circulates the image of prideful actors who unabashedly perform perpetrations for the camera. With the failure of the shaming hypothesis, I have shown that Palestinians and human rights organizations alike attempt to cast shame back on Israeli actors. They cast shame with their language (“Shame on you!”) and with their cameras. Counterintuitively shaming offers up a vision of an alternate future: one in which perpetrators are given the benefit of the doubt that they could be otherwise, that they are well-meaning and have simply lapsed in their ethical or moral judgments.89 At best we can see shaming as a confirmation that the other possesses values that can be invoked: “Were one to lack the capacity to feel shame one would have no sense of what one values,” wrote Jennifer Manion.90 Shaming functions as a reproach to a lack of ethical responsibility, as in the phrase, “Have you no sense of shame?”91 In a case where values are questioned, as in Israel–Palestine, shaming demands a reexamination of those values. Shaming jolts a forced reflection, calling for a selfreflection that is indicative of shame’s affective status as a relation of the self to itself. Shaming is at once a castigation as well as an olive branch, a hopeful offering of change. Dotan Greenvald, the IDF veteran who watched a video of his own past actions, experienced a kind of shame that activated his moral compass. His story is a hopeful one. Yet in his story, his self-reflection arose spontaneously rather than arising from a casting of shame. His shame arose from rewatching footage taken by one of his own—a fellow soldier, someone on his “side” of the conflict—rather than an activist or Palestinian citizen videographer, whose footage collectively is subject to delegitimization via digital suspicion, as Kuntsman and Stein have shown.92 Indeed, many Palestinians who videotape with B’Tselem do not express this kind of optimism in shame’s potency. I  visited a B’Tselem volunteer named Wydian Zaban, whose home on the upper slope of the West Bank village of Burin makes her family the frequent target of Israeli settler attacks from nearby radical Israeli hilltop outposts. Zaban records these attacks and transfers her footage to B’Tselem. I asked her if she felt her footage would shame the Israeli attackers, to which she replied:

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Shame? They [Israeli settlers] don’t feel shame. These people who are committing all these crimes, do they feel ashamed? How many times have people been killed? How many times have kids been killed on their way to or from school? How many times has someone gone out to work to feed his family and been killed? How many times have they tried to run us over [with their cars]? There’s no shame.93

Zaban responds to me with disbelief: there is no shame. More precisely, there is no moral shame—no shame over what is right or wrong, including shame over committing crimes or killings. Indeed I have shown in this chapter that, in place of evoking moral shame, cameras elicit image shame in Israeli actors. The shame does not arise from action but from how that action appears in the image economy. It is image shame that caused Jewish Israelis to call Eden Abergil “stupid” rather than to decry her actions themselves; and it is image shame that prompted an Israeli commander to ask his looting soldiers, “How could you possibly think you wouldn’t be seen?”94 It is not that shame has become rendered impotent or inoperative, it is that shame over morality has been demoted below shame over how things appear. The operativity of moral shame has been replaced with the demoted (in)operativity of image shame, which causes social distancing and hostility.95 What might one say to evoke moral shame instead of image shame? At times I have seen B’Tselem videographers at a loss for words, wanting Israeli soldiers to change their behavior but tongue-tied for what utterances might engender such a change. In a 2012 clip from outside Ramallah, a Palestinian videographer named Iyad Hadad videotaped as an Israeli soldier patrolled the aftermath of an Israeli settler attack. Annoyed at Hadad’s filming, the Israeli soldier took out his own cell phone and filmed back, sticking his cell phone directly in the lens of Hadad’s camera (Figure 2.8). Hadad seemed to enter a state of disbelief at this response. In broken Hebrew Hadad said to the soldier, “Atah Chayal!,” meaning, “You’re a

Figure 2.8  An IDF soldier films back at B’Tselem volunteer Iyad Hadad in Beitillu, October 7, 2012. © B’Tselem.

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soldier!” The soldier shushed him, but Hadad tried to finish his sentence: “You’re a soldier! Be … be … be ….” Hadad wanted the Israeli soldier to be something else, to do something other than film. In the end Hadad became aphasic, seeking the right words to beseech some kind of change. Ultimately, these are words that do not exist, so long as Jewish Israelis only feel shame over how images appear, not what they show.

Chapter 3 CAMERA AS MIRROR

A Mirror to Society Cameras, such as single lens reflexes (SLRs), rely on mirrors to allow the photographer to look at the framed scene before taking a picture. The photographer looks through the camera’s viewfinder and, because of the mirror, is able to see the scene as it is truly framed rather than reflected horizontally or seen from above. The camera’s mirror bounces the incoming light to a viewing system or pentaprism and ultimately out to the viewfinder before lifting up and out of the way for image capture. It is the lifting and dropping of this mirror that makes the notable sound we associate with photography—so notable that smartphone cameras mimic them, foley-style, even when no mirror is needed. Like the mirror in the SLR camera, the work of B’Tselem has often been described as holding up a mirror to Israeli society. This mirror allows society to see things as they appear, rather than distorted, flipped, misframed, mangled, or altogether absent from the visual field. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz wrote, B’Tselem not only reliably and meticulously documents human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, it holds up a mirror to Israeli policy, revealing the dubious guise of legality under which Israel has held sway over Palestinians for nearly fifty years, seizing their land and oppressing them.1

Oz’s words evoke the common phrase demanding self-reflection: “Take a look in the mirror.” You are told to look in the mirror to self-assess:  Do you like how you look? Often this phrase goes beyond appearances and plunges into the depths of one’s being, as in: Can you stand to look at yourself? This is the kind of mirror B’Tselem provides, says Oz. This is the kind of looking entailed in “taking a hard look in the mirror.” For a person who is “unable to look in the mirror,” a trusted friend might take on the role of mirroring. For instance, Barack Obama said that “being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth.”2 The mirroring that B’Tselem provides to Israeli society keeps it grounded, realistic, and “human” as some have argued. Major General Ami Ayalon, former Israel Securities Authority head, said in a 2016 radio interview:

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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East These gatekeepers are the ones that still confront us with a kind of mirror of who we are—although we look very, very bad in the mirror. After all, B’Tselem or Machsom Watch or Breaking the Silence are the organizations that still enable us to maintain some kind of connection with reality …. [I]‌f we lose them, then I’d say that we’d truly become like animals, or any other comparison or adjective that might suit us. At the moment that isn’t the situation—only because of them.3

Likewise, veterans testifying for Breaking the Silence have been described as “holding up a mirror, and it is our [Jewish Israelis’] obligation to look at its reflection.”4 Yet it is not easy to take in such reflections, and as a result, Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem have become increasingly demonized and cast aside as too radical by mainstream, right-leaning Jewish Israeli society. Indeed, when Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi was asked why he thinks Israelis despise the actions of Breaking the Silence, of which he is a board member, he theorized that it is uncommon for members of a ruling society to look toward their own actions when taking stock on, in his words, “why we are in such deep shit.”5 Mograbi said that Breaking the Silence “provides a mirror and given the situation in the Middle East, no one is looking for a mirror.”6 Instead, the search for responsibility and accountability seeks a displaced vessel of blame outside itself. In spite of a well-documented aversion of settler-colonial societies to consider themselves accountable for ongoing conflict, can citizen-recorded media produced by an occupied population spark introspection by mirroring society?7 In cameras, mirrors allow for clear and undistorted line of sight. They enable an enframed reality—a reality situated in its frame, its rectangular context—to be seen.8 Many hope that the resultant footage will hold up a mirror to society, causing it to change. This is what I call the mirror hypothesis of citizen videography: it is the hypothesis that the liberatory potential of images and videos lies in their ability to provoke self-reflection, and thereafter causing a change when one doesn’t like what they see in the mirror-like footage. The mirror hypothesis is similar to the shaming hypothesis explored in the previous chapter in that both shame and mirroring can provoke self-reflection that leads to action. However, shame relies on exposure within a social context—one feels shame in front of an other—whereas mirroring relies solely on introspection. In this chapter I  will trace the mirror hypothesis through three critical veins:  capture, meaning the use of physical mirrors to block B’Tselem videographers; reflection, tracing the use of physical mirrors in demonstrations, as well as the reflection of video footage back to those captured in it; and selfalienation, meaning the use of mirrors to cause a rupture with one’s self-image. I argue that the mirror hypothesis ultimately fails because footage cannot demand self-reflection—any more than it can demand an Azoulaian active spectator as discussed in Chapter  1. However, when archives of citizen videography are captured and literally mirrored on computer servers as data, they offer potential for future change-making as they circulate in the image economy.

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Capture Mirrors are tools of enhanced visibility. They enable a clear line of sight where once there was none, as in the rear-view mirror, the side-view mirror, or even the domed security mirror in banks or corner stores. Mirrors are frequently used at Israeli checkpoints to check the undercarriage of vehicles. Like an enlarged version of a dentist’s tool searching the mouth, Israeli soldiers hold a mirror secured to the end of a long rod under cars to check for explosives or contraband.9 It’s “like you’re checking [the car] for breath,” wrote novelist Joshua Cohen, referencing the “mirror test” in which a living, breathing person would fog a mirror held up to their mouth, thus signaling aliveness.10 At Israeli checkpoints, these undercarriage mirrors do not probe the aliveness of Palestinians; rather, they are militarized tools for protecting the vitality of the State of Israel. Yet just as physical mirrors enhance visibility and clarity in Israel–Palestine, they also block it. One-way mirrors line the Palestinian-controlled border terminals such as those at Allenby Bridge, the main crossing between Jordan and the West Bank. These mirrors are part of an elaborate choreographic system in which Palestinian authorities appear to control the border, while Israeli officials sit invisibilized behind one-way mirrors and make all decisions as to rights of passage.11 These mirrors allow for a politics of deniability in which the Israeli state may claim that Palestinians control their own sovereign boundaries, when in fact they have been enrolled in a flimsy charade of control that has been required to yield to the Israeli regime. Meanwhile, the regime gazes on. In this way the B’Tselem Camera Project, which once again reinstates the gaze to Palestinians and their lens, is a method to take back power. Palestinian lenses look on at Israelis, hoping that their cameras will mirror unjust actions back to them and to society at large through the economy of images. But before B’Tselem’s citizen-recorded footage can mirror Jewish Israeli society back to itself, the footage must first accurately capture that society visually. B’Tselem distributed hundreds of video cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza strip so that they could do just that:  form a distributed panopticon to capture visual recordings of daily life under the Israeli occupation. However in 2007, the first year of the B’Tselem Camera Project, Jewish settlers went to great lengths to obstruct Palestinian lenses in the city of Hebron. Within the B’Tselem archives are dozens of clips in which young Israeli settler children attempted to blind Palestinian cameras with mirrors and the sun (Plates 6 to 8). These children sat on steps in pairs, clutching bathroom-size mirrors and tilting them ever so slightly to catch the light. They gathered in groups and traded mirrors off between each other, as if to share the fun of their new “game” of blinding Palestinian lenses. In some clips, the children discovered that metallic covers of what appear to be take-out containers can also reflect the sun, as if with a mirror. These mirror clips were all from 2007, the first year of B’Tselem’s Camera Project. As such they represent some of the earliest citizen-filmed videos in the collection. No doubt these clips reflect an attempt to address the Palestinian camera’s arrival to

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the scene and the newfound visibility of the settler and state actions that comprise the suspended violence of the Israeli occupation. Even volunteers from Machsom Watch have documented at least one incident in which an Israeli soldier shined a bright light at them with “a mirror which catches the rays of the sun,” presumably to blind them and to disrupt the realm of the visibility.12 In these video clips lies bootstrapping of sorts: an ingenious fight against the camera as an object of penetrative seeing. Israelis have countered Palestinian cameras with wet substances like spit and Coca Cola, as well as with physical obstructions like their hands, their bodies, or their own cameras held up aggressively against Palestinian lenses.13 But mirrors cause a blindness that is aphysical: there is no literal obstruction to the lens, but rather a flood of too much light that overwhelms the sensors and forces a penetrative camera gaze into a momentary lapse. These mirrors compromise the very property of visibility itself. Moreover, because this blinding can be produced at a distance from the Palestinian videographer, it’s “safely” performed by young Israeli children who may not understand the implications of their actions within the larger context of visuality and power. What these children do understand, however, is their target. Palestinians have likewise adopted the use of mirrors to blind vision. In the 2018 protests at the Gaza border fence, a Palestinian protester used a mirror to shine a beam of light upon Israeli soldiers (Figure 3.1).14 These light beams were intended to confuse vision, as if the mirror’s rays might have a chance of contending with

Figure 3.1  A Palestinian protester uses a mirror to reflect sunlight back upon Israeli troops stationed at the Israel-Gaza fence, east of Gaza city, April 6, 2018. Photographer: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.

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the extremely well-equipped Israeli army who were firing with live ammunition.15 Such mobilizations of the mirror are reminiscent of mirror armor, a type of ancient war uniform in which mirrors were worn into battle, typically on the breastplate, and were primarily intended to spiritually protect a soldier by warding off the evil eye.16 One must wonder, though, whether the protection provided by such mirror armor was its ability to blind the opponent, preventing a clear line of sight to a vulnerable body. Each mirror—the Palestinian one in Gaza and the Israeli one in Hebron—sought to disrupt the other side’s clear line of sight. Yet the stakes of that sight couldn’t differ more. The Palestinian in Hebron aims to see in order to document and record, whereas the Israeli at Gaza aims to see in order to control and eliminate. Both the Palestinian citizen videographer and the Israeli soldier “shoot”—but one with symbolic power and the other with lethal power. For the Palestinian, however, even this symbolic power of capture of the ability to see clearly, was blocked by Israeli mirrors.

Reflection: A “Modest Witness” At the onset of the B’Tselem Camera Project, mirrors were mobilized to prevent image capture. Yet throughout history, mirrors—along with the mirror-like quality of a camera and its resultant images—were tools for moral meditation. According to Diogenes, Socrates offered mirrors to drunkards so that they would see themselves “disfigured by wine” and feel morally compelled to grapple with their own internal failures to society.17 Socrates also considered the mirror to be a tool for humbling human beings and helping them realize that they are not gods. As Sabine Melchoir-Bonnet wrote in her historical study of the mirror, Socrates philosophized the mirror to be “tool by which to ‘know thyself,’ ” and he “invited man to not mistake himself for God, to avoid pride by knowing his limits, and to improve himself.”18 The moral appeal of mirrors is one in which one recognizes one’s superficial and subdermal imperfections, thereby leading to self-reflection and change. With this logic, Palestinians have repeatedly used physical mirrors in civil demonstrations. In a 2005 protest against the separation wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in, a demonstrator brought out a large mirror and placed it in front of Israeli soldiers (Figure 3.2).19 The soldiers, who were there to “manage” the demonstration through containment or dispersal methods were instead confronted with their own image. Ariella Azoulay noted that this mirror was meant to signal to the Israelis that they must face themselves as the imperial oppressors, something that they repeatedly fail to see when they stand off against the Palestinians they oppress.20 Likewise, in a 2010 demonstration against house evictions, a Jewish activist stood with Palestinian residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem as they faced eviction by Israeli settlers. The activist held up a concave mirror to ultranationalist counterprotesters who assembled across the street, forcing them to confront their own image as an occupying settler-colonial force that strips property

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Figure 3.2  At a protest against the Separation Wall in Bil'in, a demonstrator stationed a large mirror opposite Israeli soldiers, forcing them to confront their own images, September 23, 2005. Photographer: Yotam Ronen/Activestills.

rights from those they unjustly occupy (Figure  3.3).21 The mirror has one other effect:  it places the likenesses of right-wing counterdemonstrators as if on the opposite side. Their image physically appears alongside the leftists, Palestinians, and anti-eviction activists, proposing an alternate reality in which they cast off their roles within the occupying regime and join the resistance. The mirror at once castigates with self-reflection (“Look at your actions!”) and at the same time offers a glimpse of a different possible future (“See our truth and join our side!”). The use of physical mirrors in protest simplifies and extends Donna Haraway’s conception of a “modest witness” in her critique of objectivity. Haraway writes, The modest witness is the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodiment. And so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts. He bears witness: he is objective; he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects. His subjectivity is his objectivity. His narratives have a magical power—they lose all trace of their history as stories, as products of partisan projects, as contestable representations, or as constructed documents in their potent capacity to define the facts. The narratives become clear mirrors, fully magical mirrors, without once appealing to the transcendental or the magical.22

Haraway notes that, in scientific discourses, witnesses were those bodies who were empowered with the gaze—such as wealthy white men—rather than

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Figure  3.3  At a protest against house evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, a demonstrator holds up a mirror to ultranationalist counterdemonstrators assembled across the street, January 1, 2010. Photographer: Oren Ziv/Activestills.

the object of the gaze—such as women and persons of color. Haraway seeks to disrupt this traditional modest witnessing and replace it with a sort of “mutated” modest witness, a feminist modest witness who engages in “seeing; attesting; standing publicly accountable for, and psychically vulnerable to, one’s visions and representations.”23 Haraway’s modest witness looks on and reflects back, like a mirror. Crucially, Haraway’s mutated modest witness is active in its public, vulnerable, and disruptive act of witnessing society and mirroring it back through its own vision. The role of Haraway’s modest witness has been ascribed to the Jewish Israeli women who volunteer to stand watch over Israeli checkpoints for the organization Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch. These women’s actions are not novel; they watch and write pragmatic and unvarnished reports of what they see, without scenesetting or prosaic flair. What is compelling in these reports has been described as their “matter-of-fact, laconic prose style, which reflects their determination to do nothing more than hold up a mirror and let Israelis see the high moral price of occupation.”24 These women demonstrate a Haraway-esque version of modest witnesses who stand publicly accountable for Israeli society as they see and report the visible. IDF soldiers generally view Machsom Watch antagonistically; but in a rare commendation one Israeli soldier stationed at Qalandia checkpoint said, “I always say to the [other] soldiers: The Machsom Watchers are your mirror. Look into it. If you like what you see, all is well with you, but if you don’t like what you see, consider what it is the mirror reflects.”25

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The soldier who compared Machsom Watch to mirrors expressed a minority position. Very few Jewish Israelis consider Machsom Watch—or B’Tselem, for that matter—to possess the objectivity and pure clarity of a modest witness. It is for this reason that activists and human rights organizations alike have turned to mirrors and cameras: they are tools that bear an indexical relationship to reality and as such hold an elevated epistemic status as witnesses, and therefore might truly be considered to reflect Israeli society back to itself.

Reflection: Hall of Mirrors What might happen if IDF soldiers were to watch B’Tselem footage of their own actions? In one astonishing set of video clips within the B’Tselem archives, a Palestinian videographer named Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh recorded footage of Israeli soldiers looking at recordings of themselves. This footage documents a 2015 night search of the Abu Shamsiyeh household in Hebron.26 The recording begins with Israeli soldiers entering the house, waking up all her children, and photographing each child as if to catalogue them for future acts of violence. The soldiers search the house and subsequently find an external hard drive (Figure  3.4). “What’s on here?” they ask. To answer, ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Fayzeh’s husband, retrieves a Toshiba laptop to display the contents. The soldiers then make ‘Imad sit aside as they take control of his laptop to explore the hard drive (Figure 3.5). What the soldiers find on the hard drive is all the material that ‘Imad and Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh have filmed for B’Tselem recently. “I have permission” to photograph, says ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh. Photography and videography are permitted in the West Bank, including recordings of soldiers.27 “You’ll find lots of images,” Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh explained, “because we film for B’Tselem. Pictures of you, of us, taking pictures as usual.” The soldier continues browsing the hard drive, looking at image after image of their own occupying army and its imperial regime reflected back to them and upon them. In this recording lies the next echo, where the mirroring of cameras plunges into the endless depths and becomes an infinity mirror, a hall of mirrors. Two cameras are present already in these clips—the Palestinian and the Israeli. Also present is footage of soldiers sitting and looking at past footage of soldiers, including footage of their very own selves.28 It is as if the world might explode in paradox at this very moment. Notably, the Israeli soldiers felt the paradoxical tension as well. They chose to confiscate the hard disk (as well as a video camera memory card) rather than to allow these images to continually confront them and circulate.29 They looked into the mirror and did not want their likenesses to look back at them. The hard disk was never returned to the Abu Shamsiyeh family. Instead the Abu Shamsiyehs were informed by IDF Lieutenant Yaniv Chaimovitch, acting on behalf of the Legal Advisor for Judea and Samaria, that no hard disk had been confiscated.30 Their camera memory card was returned to them, with all of its content deleted.

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Figures 3.4 and 3.5  During a night search, Israeli soldiers examine the Shamsiyeh family’s hard disk and view the footage the family has taken as B’Tselem volunteers on a laptop computer. The soldiers ultimately confiscated this hard disk. Filmed by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh in Hebron, March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem.

It was as if the mirror, in effect, had vanished—or instead been relocated to a zone only available to the Israeli regime. We can likewise examine what happens when the Israeli state mirrors footage back to B’Tselem volunteer camerapersons. In a 2012 clip filmed by Muhammad Atalah a-Tamimi, Israeli soldiers raid the a-Tamimi household at night and demand that Muhammad wake his extended family—who lived in two adjacent apartments—and gather them into one room. A-Tamimi videotapes. As the soldiers

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wait in the hallway for a-Tamimi’s relatives to awaken, they grow impatient. The lead Israeli soldier then takes out his Samsung smartphone and plays a video clip for a-Tamimi (Plate 9). In the video played, which a-Tamimi captures as a video-within-a-video via his B’Tselem camera, a-Tamimi is wearing a neon yellow safety vest with the word “PRESS” printed largely across its back. Like now, a-Tamimi is videotaping. A Jewish settler proceeds to assault a-Tamimi repeatedly, and as the video plays, the Israeli soldier and a-Tamimi exchange a dialogue in a mix of Hebrew and English: Soldier: Is that you? a-Tamimi: That is me. Soldier: He is hitting you! a-Tamimi: Huh? Soldier: He is hitting you. a-Tamimi:  Soldier: Why is he hitting you? a-Tamimi: I don’t know. Soldier: He’s saying . a-Tamimi: (in broken English) He don’t [sic] want me to take a picture. Soldier: He’s hitting you! He doesn’t want you to be here! a-Tamimi: Many people … they don’t like that [videotaping]. He’s making problems. Soldier: This one, this person is from this village, and he don’t [sic] want you here.31 Why does the Israeli soldier wish to replay this assault? Why mirror it back to a-Tamimi, who himself is recording? The soldier’s main point seems to be that a-Tamimi is unwanted. He wishes to remind him that he is unwelcome, with the mirror-like qualities of the video footage. The soldier replays the video for didactic purposes—harkening back to the original meaning of the word “document,” from the Latin, docere, to teach. The soldier uses the video as a document and teacher to guide a-Tamimi through a process of imposed self-reflection so that he will reach the premeditated Israeli conclusion: his Palestinian body is unwelcome, and so, too, is his Palestinian camera. Mirrors, of course, provide the opportunity for reflection not present in many difficult situations. Often in the “accidental” killings of civilians, both in Israel– Palestine and elsewhere, police or military officials are acquitted on the basis that they were forced to make a “split second” decision and did not have the luxury of time for reflection. Under this logic, a killer cannot be held accountable for his errors in judgment without the opportunity for reflection.32 Therefore demonstrators foist mirrors upon the opposition to spark a visual self-reflection where it has been judged to be morally absent, and Palestinian and Jewish Israelis alike mirror footage back to stake the same claim. Crucially, within the visual mirroring is an inherent judgment that the actions mirrored are morally

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wrong or unjust and that the injustice is visible once one takes a hard look in the mirror. But it is always possible to look merely at the mirror’s surface. Likewise, it is always possible to look and see a different story beneath reflective glass: as Gil Hochberg has taught, the conflict in Israel–Palestine has already produced a “partitioned vision” in which what one can see results from visual arrangements sustained through differentiation along ethnonationalist lines.33 It is because of this partitioned vision—that each side looks but might not see the same visual reality—that self-reflection cannot so easily be foisted upon another. Instead the self-reflection must be interpreted for the other, as the Israeli soldier did for B’Tselem volunteer Muhammad a-Tamimi when he clearly stated that the Jewish Israeli “doesn’t want you to be here!”

Reflection: Gestuatim What about instances in which self-reflection via footage is not forced, but taken freely upon oneself? Nowhere is this clearer than in the 2014 performance, Archive, by Israeli choreographer and dancer Arkadi Zaides. In Archive Zaides takes the stage alongside footage from the B’Tselem video archives, attempting to reembody the gestures of his fellow Israelis captured by Palestinian cameras. He introduces the work by entering the stage in plain clothes, facing the audience, and announcing: Good evening. Thank you for coming. My name is Arkadi Zaides. I  am a choreographer. I am Israeli. For the last fifteen years, I have been living in Tel Aviv. The West Bank is twenty kilometers away from Tel Aviv. The materials you are about to watch were filmed in the West Bank. All the people you will see in these clips are Israeli, like myself. The clips were selected from a video archive of an organization called B’Tselem.34

From this point onward, the performance is staggeringly simple in its conception: Zaides mirrors the gestures of the Israeli occupation, as seen through Palestinian lenses.35 At first he merely watches the Palestinian-shot footage on a large projection screen behind him, with his back facing the audience (Figure 3.6). Slowly he begins to engage in the very physical act of mirroring the videos, attempting to exactly reproduce the movements of Israelis (Figure  3.7). Zaides employs a very simple handheld remote control to rewind the videos, freeze them, and skip forward. As he flicks and pauses his way through these B’Tselem videos, we see how he physically practices a gestural method of taking on the embodied actions of the Israeli occupation. Zaides’s mirroring has been dubbed “gestuatim,” meaning a kind of gestural quoting of bodily comportments from elsewhere, as if the embodied version of the familiar “verbatim” or direct verbal quotation.36 Zaides uses this mimetic choreography to ask how the body can become, in his own words, “a medium through which one can grasp and question the political situation in Israel.”37

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Figures 3.6 and 3.7  Arkadi Zaides performing Archive, mirroring the gestures of Israelis as captured by Palestinian recordings in B’Tselem footage.

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Zaides mimics the gestures of fellow Israelis, as seen through the eye of Palestinian lenses, to reflect on the society to which he belongs and ask questions of collective responsibility for the violence of the occupation. Zaides’s mirroring is certainly a critique. Yet it is one that Israeli audiences do not particularly want to see. While Archive has toured very widely across Europe and the United States with upward of 100 performances, it has been presented in Israel only on very few occasions. I attended one of the rare performances of Archive on June 11, 2015, in Tmuna Theater, Tel Aviv, along with a left-leaning audience that was highly receptive to Zaides’s polemical work. At other occasions within Israel, Zaides and his work have been the subject of intense Israeli protests, with obscenities lobbed at him such as “Haters of Israel, you trash, go to hell” and “May they rape your mother, scum.”38 The Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport, which funded Zaides’s artistic work, asked him to remove its logo from Archive’s list of sponsors.39 The Ministry did not like what it saw in Zaides’s work—or rather, how Israel looked as the occupying regime. The violence of the occupation produces a look that Zaides does not like either. When I met with Zaides in Tel Aviv, he shared with me that watching footage of Israeli violence in the B’Tselem video archives leaves him with a physical feeling of nausea.40 As a dancer and choreographer it is no wonder that Zaides reacts physically. He has noted that Dance in Israel is very powerful …. One might wonder where that power, that strength, comes from, and what it can mean. It’s as if our society’s violence had contaminated our gestures, our movements.41

In Archive, Zaides mimetically mirrors the gestures of his fellow Israelis as they commit acts of violence. His reflections and “gestuatim” have, at the very least, produced a change in himself and in how he would like to move through the world. “In the future,” he said, “I would like to … free myself from gestures of violence.”42

Self-Alienation Thus far I  have explored how mirrors—and the mirroring produced in video footage—have been leveraged as a tool to force self-reflection. But the mirror has also been theorized as a tool of separation, and even alienation. Lacan conceived of the “mirror stage,” or the stage in which a child first recognizes itself in the mirror at around six months old, as a crucial stage in child development.43 At this stage, the child looks into a mirror and, for the first time, understands “that person over there is me.”44 This realization entails a kind of objectification of the self, as the self becomes “that person.” It is also a kind of self-alienating realization in that it fundamentally separates the self from itself. Lacan later ceased viewing the mirror stage as merely a developmental stage, but instead as a “permanent structure of subjectivity” with which a human being would grapple with for his or her entire life.45 It is however the child’s first experience with the mirror that

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fundamentally causes this troubling separation of self from itself, and thus the mirror is the primary tool of self-alienation. In her stunning short documentary, Mirror Image (2014), Israeli filmmaker Danielle Schwartz seeks to end the mirror’s power to self-alienate. The film concerns a mirror that her grandparents own, which was apparently taken from the Palestinian village of Zarnuqa in 1948 in what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba. Schwartz sits with her grandparents at their kitchen table and challenges them to address and identify with the mirror’s past. Was the mirror “taken,” or was it “plundered” as war spoil? As Schwartz attempts to write down a story about the mirror, her grandparents repeatedly correct her. The town of Zarnuqa was not “Palestinian,” it was “Arab,” they say—and they stress that this detail is important. They argue at length over what verb correctly describes how the mirror came into their possession. Schwartz claims that anything “taken” during wartime has by definition been “plundered,” but the grandparents disagree. “I don’t see why you need to delve into it so much,” says her grandfather, adding that any version of the story using the word plunder “doesn’t work for me.” Her grandmother adds, “I don’t want to be linked to this subject [of plundering]. Because I’m not like that.” While Schwartz asks them to discuss the mirror’s past openly, they ultimately settle that the mirror must have been merely “taken.” This word is softer, more ambiguous, and more acceptable (Figures 3.8 and 3.9). Moreover if the Palestinian mirror was merely “taken” rather than “plundered,” Schwartz’s Israeli family is able to maintain a “politics of deniability.” This is a stance in which a person plausibly denies knowledge of and responsibility for an unsavory action, and one that requires a willful ignorance of Clintonian measure.46 In Mirror Image, a “taken” Palestinian mirror allows Schwartz’s grandparents to maintain a semblance of denial as to the mirror’s history, leaving their own positive self-images intact. As Schwartz tries to convey an honest story about the Palestinian mirror, her grandmother distances herself from its story, which bears traces of violence and domination. “That’s what happened to the mirror, not to us,” says the grandmother. She uses the verb “to happen” to avoid identifying a subject who actively “took” or “plundered” during war. The grandmother thus estranges herself from her own story, and the mirror becomes a symbol for the kind of self-alienation Lacan describes in the mirror stage as a psychological state that persists throughout adult life. Of course, reconciling one’s history with one’s own identity is an extremely difficult task. It’s a task that many Jewish Israeli families face, including my own, as older generations are confronted by offspring with difficult moral questions about past Israeli actions. What we witness in Mirror Image is thus what Jacques Ranciere would call “dissensus,” meaning “putting two worlds into one and the same world.”47 Schwartz puts the worlds of a “taken” mirror and a “plundered” mirror into one. To Ranciere, politics is “a question of aesthetics and a matter of appearances,” meaning it concerns the social redistribution of what is sensible.48 Possibilities for social change arise only through moments of dissensus, which are moments of “dispute over what is visible as an element of a situation, over which visible

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Figures 3.8 and 3.9  Film stills from Mirror Image, dir. Danielle Schwartz, 2014. The Israeli director Schwartz sits at the kitchen table with her grandparents and discusses the story behind a mirror they own that was “taken” from the Palestinian village of Zarnuqa in 1948; her grandfather cleans the mirror.

elements belong to what is common, over the capacity of subjects to designate this common and argue for it.”49 A dissensus is a momentary rupture in the dominant regime of the sensible, which leaves open the possibility for a new politics with a different, reconfigured distribution of sensible experience. Dissensual moments present difficulties for a person’s previously held conception of politics. One might attempt to avoid a dissensus like Schwartz’s grandfather (“I don’t see why you need to delve into it so much”) or grandmother

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(“That’s what happened to the mirror, not to us.”). Likewise, the IDF soldiers who confiscated the hard disk full of B’Tselem footage from the Abu Shamsiyeh family were also avoiding their very own moments of dissensus:  they were confronted with a mirroring of their own actions and chose to smash the mirror. Arkadi Zaides chose instead to embrace the mirroring of B’Tselem footage, to embody it. What we learn from these examples is that the mirror-like quality of B’Tselem footage offers an invitation for a social change via dissensus, but this is an invitation that one may choose to take—or to leave behind, like Schwartz’s grandparents.

Conclusion What are we to make of the mirror hypothesis of citizen videography—the conception that, simply put, images of atrocities provoke self-reflection, which in turn causes change? Many theorists are skeptical, and rightly so. Meg McLagan theorized that images and videography cannot simply act upon on their own. Instead they always require a very human kind of intervention. She writes, Activists often approach photographs and moving images as transparent mirrors of reality and conflate them with proof; this despite the fact that images always demand interpretation, as countless writers on documentary photography and film have pointed out.50

To McLagan, images that only mirror reality are not enough. This is in part because there is no single “reality” for images to mirror, anyway. Instead images urgently need to be unpacked, contextualized, humanized, and ultimately interpreted for an audience. Images, like text, cannot merely be read—they must also be explicated. Indeed in their most simple and quotidian uses, mirrors are extremely superficial. They are most often used for personal grooming: if you see a hair out of place, you slick it down; if you have something in your teeth, you remove it; if the outfit does not match, you change it. You consider how you look without delving beyond the surface. As Samuel Butler once wrote, “Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.”51 These mirrors reflect our surfaces, and when change results, it is only superficial. Such can also be the case for the changes caused by images and videos: they might pertain only to how things appear (to the “space of appearance,” as Arendt would call it) rather than to the root causes of injustice.52 It is for this reason that Socrates and his pupil, Alcibiades, also expressed a certain discomfort with the mirror. The myth goes that Alcibiades was dissatisfied with the fact that mirrors produced merely replicas, without “both voice and thought.”53 Instead the true mirror was considered to be “the one presented by the lover or friend who offers his eyes and his own soul as mirrors.”54 This conception of the “living mirror” was one that offered a great deal more than mirror images could provide. Notably, we could call this kind of mirror an interpreter, akin to the

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type McLagan reminds us is demanded by any photograph or video that mirrors reality. Perhaps what photographs and moving images ask for is a kind of “affective attunement” from their viewers. Affective attunement is a term introduced by psychoanalyst Daniel Stern to refer to a kind of “matching” of emotional states between infant and caregiver, where the feeling behaviors are shared, but not behaviorally mirrored.55 It is a very social process in which one person attempts to match the inner state of another, but since inner states are necessarily invisible, the person instead matches an outwardly visible behavior associated with the emotion. For instance, if the baby cries—a verbal behavior—the caregiver might make a sad face—a visible behavior. Affective attunement is certainly a kind of mirroring, but one that is quite different than Lacan’s concept of mirroring where “motheras-mirror consolidates child-as-other,” as Lisa Cartwright has written.56 It is a mirroring that allows emotional states to move, to change, and to be authentically represented rather than simply copied. But this asks for an active spectator—one who will “watch” rather than “look” in Azoulay’s terms, who will not change the channel, close the browser tab, discredit the footage with claims of digital falsification, or choose to ignore the presentation of a dissensus.57 The activeness demanded is precisely that required by Azoulay’s citizen contract of photography, and is not present in each and every one of us spectators.58 And because it is not all of us, an Israeli soldier who sees himself in the mirror at a demonstration or sees footage of himself replayed in a Palestinian home chooses not to contemplate his role in a settler-colonial regime, but instead to break the mirror. Self-reflection is a choice, as is facing the rupture, the dissensus, that might be caused by such reflection. It is for this reason that footage, when used as a mirror, does not guarantee change to the sociopolitical order. Yet in zones of conflict it remains true that there is something “better” about using a camera to mirror back injustice to a society, rather than merely one’s eyes or one’s words. Camera footage can literally show—and do so seemingly more objectively—via its indexical relationship to reality. A protest banner from Bil’in captures this relationship beautifully. It reads, “Their Eyes Won’t Stop Showing the Israeli Soldiers’ Crimes,” a slogan that is illustrated not by a drawing of human eyes but instead by a camera (Plate 10).59 Importantly, the slogan does not say that eyes won’t stop watching, seeing, or even witnessing the Israeli soldiers’ crimes. To watch, to see, to witness:  these are the actions of which human eyes are capable. Eyes, however, cannot literally “show” war crimes; only cameras possess this ability.60 I’d like to end this chapter by considering the B’Tselem video archives not in the abstract, but as a concrete entity of physical storage of digital material. Early footage in the B’Tselem collection was recorded and stored on tapes, which lived in the halls of B’Tselem’s former headquarters in West Jerusalem (Figure 3.10).61 Once video recording mechanisms began to transition to SD cards in 2010, the footage was stored on a series of computer servers maintained at an offsite location for security, and most of the original tapes were digitized and added to the collection. These videos are now accessed via a secure network link from B’Tselem headquarters, and a fraction of them have been published online via YouTube and

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Figure  3.10  Videotapes in storage at the B’Tselem headquarters in Jerusalem, 2015. Photograph by the author.

B’Tselem’s website. On the internet, mirroring is a technical term for the wholesale replication of a website on a different URL, but with identical content. Online, mirroring aims for velocity: it reduces web traffic that might clog the network and points users to locally hosted versions of sites that can be accessed more quickly. This kind of mirroring also aims to archive, whether to provide real-time backup and access (as with the Pirate Bay) or historical archiving (as with the Internet

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Archive’s Wayback Machine). These kinds of copies are invaluable even for smaller organizations when, for instance, changes to YouTube’s terms of service result in the automatic deletion of videos, as was the case with hundreds of clips of the Syrian revolution.62 The mirror creates the copy and in the copy resides important qualities for citizen-filmed footage: access, velocity, and permanence. So, while the mirror hypothesis of citizen videography might fail to provoke the kind of reflection or dissensus that causes change to the sociopolitical order of Israel–Palestine, “mirroring” causes footage to live on, physically: to circulate with velocity, alacrity, and permanence as it searches for a reckoning.

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Chapter 4 CAMERA AS SHIELD

Sometimes the presence of a camera can save lives. In other situations, people with cameras are targeted for particular attention. —WITNESS’s Video for Change Field Guide1 A camera is usually discussed in terms of its function: it takes pictures, it makes videos. In Heideggerian terminology this is a camera’s “readiness-to-hand,” meaning a consideration of it as a tool to achieve something.2 Heidegger contrasts this functional view of objects with one that instead observes and theorizes, called “presence-at-hand.” An object’s presence-at-hand often arises when it is broken: if we encounter a broken hammer we might really look at it for the first time, noticing the heaviness of its metal or the grain of its wooden handle. Like a hammer a camera not only is a tool but is also made of matter, of stuff. And a camera—as matter—can act as a physical barrier for the photographer. When Jimi Hendrix famously lit his guitar on fire, photographer Ed Caraeff used his camera to shield himself from the flames as he snapped the picture that became one of the most iconic in rock ‘n roll history. “The thing’s burning right in front of my face,” recalled Caraeff, and he used his camera to block the damaging heat from the fire.3 Cameras can offer physical protection as material barriers to the outside world. Cameras also lend a semblance of protection with their function:  the documentation they produce might deter violence. As a B’Tselem videographer named Mahmoud Da’na said, I used to walk down the main road [of Hebron] and be afraid, but today I feel safer … Before we had cameras [Israeli] settlers would come almost every day, and now it only happens rarely.4

Da’na conveys the sentiment that his video camera acts like personal armor carried into the public sphere of continued military occupation, as if into battle. Notably, shields and video cameras are carried with similar physical comportments: a video camera is worn with a palm strap to secure it to the body of its videographer, and a shield is likewise worn on the body with straps or braces. Like a shield, Da’na’s B’Tselem camera safeguards him.

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A shield is by definition an object of protection. Shields function in a necessarily preventative manner, as defenses not offenses. They assume a kind of danger “out there” from which the body requires protection. Etymologically the word “shield” derives from the proto-Indo-European word meaning to “split” or “divide,” as if to separate the interior vulnerability of the body from the exterior world. The shielded body becomes more impervious to assault. And as a result, the shielded body is emboldened by the protection.5 Do citizen video cameras act as shields to those who carry them in conflict? This chapter surveys cases in Israel–Palestine where cameras do protect those who bear them. I  argue the protective capacities of cameras are most apparent when potential perpetrators urge each other to behave, with utterances such as “Watch out, we’re being filmed.” I also argue that the protective qualities of video cameras are highlighted for women videographers in particular, in part because of their gender and in part because of the gendering of victims in war. Whereas women who film for B’Tselem once filmed from within their homes, pointing their lenses out windows, many now describe their cameras as giving them the protection and strength to leave their domestic spheres and film in the streets. I have found that while Palestinian videographers generally describe their cameras as protective, they also report that cameras have ushered in a new epoch of Israeli visual concealment in which attacks are conducted by masked settlers, or the army operates under the cover of night. But the story does not end there. In this chapter I also survey cases in which Palestinian citizen video cameras have been accused of inciting violence instead of shielding from it. In these cases the cameras seem to act not as shields but as targets, or where “people with cameras are targeted for particular attention,” as WITNESS’s Video For Change field guide notes.6 I argue that the cameras are not inciteful in and of themselves; rather any anger or violence they bring about is a result of a conflict already boiling over. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s theory on political affect, I  argue that the accusation that cameras incite is instead an affectual reorientation of emotion that speaks to the socially and historically produced affective economy of the Israeli occupation. I read attacks on cameras as surrogate, displaced acts of violence to destroy the power of citizen witnessing’s counter-hegemonic gaze.

Cameras as Shields In 2017, ten years after the Camera Project was launched, B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz was asked how the presence of cameras has been changing the Israeli occupation. Gilutz answered that B’Tselem volunteers report increased “restraint” on the part of Israeli soldiers when their cameras are present.7 He added, “I’m convinced the cameras are a deterrent, but this is really only speculation because we can’t know what would happen if the cameras weren’t there.”8 Gilutz must speculate because the presence of cameras changes that which occurs. This is what scientists call the “observer effect,” a phenomenon whereby

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observation changes that which is observed because the tools used to observe a phenomenon change the phenomenon. For instance it is impossible to check a tire’s air pressure without releasing a bit of air and thereby changing the pressure. The observer effect erodes causality: one cannot say what exactly would have happened otherwise, without observation. In Israel–Palestine citizen cameras have become the instrument of observation, changing the very phenomena which they record. Indeed all cameras reorganize the set of relations between a photographer, a subject, and a spectator. As Ariella Azoulay has shown, this reorganization can happen when cameras are not even visibly present because “photography always constitutes a potential event.”9 By this Azoulay means that such relations can be reorganized merely by the “potentially penetrating effect of the camera,” perhaps hidden by a person, installed as a surveillance camera, captured by a surveillance drone, or even imagined to be present by those interacting.10 The presence of a visible camera, however, secures what Azoulay calls the “event of photography” as a distinct and changed set of relations between the photographer and the subject.11 At times the change produced by cameras is helpful—protective even. B’Tselem volunteers widely report a faith in the shield-like qualities of their cameras to deter violence. Longtime volunteer videographer Suzan Zraqo lives in a Palestinian community in H2, the Israeli-controlled portion of the city of Hebron.12 Due to the community’s proximity to Jewish settlements it is subject to more frequent Israeli settler attacks and IDF house raids. Zraqo told me, “My camera protects the area and the community. People here can now go about their lives more safely.”13 Zraqo said that before she began filming, Israeli settlers would abuse Palestinian residents in the streets of her neighborhood. Now her camera protects the community from violence and has prevented a Palestinian exodus from the neighborhood. She said: Since I started filming, it’s really lightened the situation and made people feel safe. If not for the filming, I’m not sure [Palestinian] people would have stayed in the area because you really couldn’t leave the house …. [The filming] is one of the reasons that people are even able to stay here.14

Zraqo told me of an incident that occurred before B’Tselem distributed cameras to her neighborhood. Israeli settlers and soldiers beat her neighbor in the street, breaking the bones of her hand. “Today, it would never happen,” Zraqo told me, conveying her absolute faith in her camera’s deterrence. She added, “It’s impossible that a soldier would come and break someone’s hand because they know there’s a camera and they’re being watched.”15 Zraqo used the word “because” indicating causality between her visual documentation and the cessation of violence. Even before B’Tselem’s Camera Project was launched in 2007 Palestinians expressed a belief in the power of the camera to shield their bodies from harm. On September 28, 2000—the day that the Second Intifada began—a Palestinian photojournalist named Khalid Zinari was documenting Palestinian protests at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Protests erupted after Israeli politician Ariel Sharon paid a visit to the compound, asserting his right as a Jewish Israeli to visit a holy Muslim site and the mosque within it. Israeli police worked to contain and

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disperse the Palestinian protests, at times using violence. Zinari reported that he was attacked by Israeli policemen as he videotaped: At least five Special Patrol Unit policemen approached me and struck me with their sticks. I bent over and covered my head with my hands. They continued to strike me even though they saw my camera.16

In this statement gathered by B’Tselem seven years before the launch of its Camera Project, Zinari testified not only to his bodily harm but also to his disbelief that he was harmed while filming. It was as if the camera should have protected him and acted as a prophylactic against violence.

A Woman’s Defense? Among B’Tselem volunteers women have been growing in number in recent years, with 49 percent of the Camera Project’s training sessions including women as of B’Tselem’s most recent annual report and 40  percent of the total videographers being women (Figure  4.1).17 B’Tselem makes an intentional effort to recruit women as volunteers by offering female-only training courses and by appointing women as high-level, paid employees for the Camera Project.18 Because traditional

Figure  4.1  ‘Atta Najar, Salam Najar, and Mi’ad Najar compare footage during a 2014 B’Tselem training seminar in the village of Burin. The seminar was led by Helen Yanovsky, archive manager of B’Tselem’s video department, and Ehab Tarabieh, B’Tselem’s Video Department Director. © B’Tselem.

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Palestinian culture retains a rather conservative and patriarchal stance on women’s roles, there was at first resistance to women’s involvement as B’Tselem volunteer videographers.19 Yet recently, as these roles have been shifting, women with cameras have reported that their activities with cameras have become accepted and even praised within their communities.20 Palestinian women especially speak of their B’Tselem cameras as giving them strength, as if they were armor to deflect Israeli state violence. A B’Tselem volunteer named Khadrah ‘Abd al-Karim from the Palestinian village of ‘Asirah al-Qibliyah near Nablus frequently videotapes the attacks from the nearby extremist Jewish settlement of Yitzhar.21 Al-Karim has been filming for B’Tselem since 2008, just one year after the Camera Project first launched. She said, Filming the images is helpful to us. It has given me inner strength. I’m no longer scared. When they [Israeli settlers or soldiers] come, I  go out. I  used to hide when the soldiers came by. Now, I go outside with my husband. It has helped me very much on a personal level.22

Likewise, a volunteer named Lubna Saleh began filming with a B’Tselem camera in 2007 after Israeli settlers set her family’s car on fire. Like ‘Abd al-Karim, Saleh also lives in the village of ‘Asirah al-Qibliyah and suffers from Israeli settler attacks. While she had previously felt a kind of fear of the settlers that kept her sealed within the domestic realm of her home, her camera has liberated her. She said, I used to be scared to go out and face them [the Israeli settlers]. Now I’m not scared to go out and film …. True, I worry about getting injured, but I am more concerned about my children …. Sometimes, men ask me why I  film. I  tell them: to protect my home and my children.23

To Saleh, the purpose of filming is to protect her domestic sphere (her home, her children). The camera has become a shield that safeguards the very realm over which she, as a woman, is traditionally responsible. B’Tselem has made a point to call out women as the bearers of a particularly significant and unique burden of the Occupation’s human rights violations: Women are the ones who must find a way to run a household without regular or sufficient water. Women are the ones in charge of caring for children and they are the ones who must obtain food if their homes are demolished. Women are also usually the ones at home during settler attacks, so they are the ones who must shield their children.24

In a traditional patriarchal society, the realm of the woman is the home. Yet the women from the village of ‘Asirah al-Qibliyah describe exiting the home in order to film with their B’Tselem cameras. They speak of “going out” or “going outside” the home as a marked difference from their previous actions of “hiding” inside their domestic spaces or feeling “scared” to be outside. Khadrah ‘Abd al-Karim

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even intimated that the outside realm as a distinctly masculine location when she said, “Now, I go outside with my husband.” “Outside” is the public sphere in which her husband appears and in which she now joins because of her camera. The women who film for B’Tselem continue to resist the conservative gender conventions by taking to the streets with their cameras. A  B’Tselem volunteer named Arij al-Ja’bri told me that she used to film from her living room window, which overlooks the Hebron street below. But because Israeli settlers threw things at her she was forced to install a protective metal grate over the window, degrading the clarity of her footage. Arij was already unhappy with her footage, saying, “… when you film from the window, you don’t see [events] as well through the camera as you do through your eye.”25 She learned how to go to the street, choose an angle for the event, and film from there. Arij told me that Palestinian society is conservative in Hebron, making it unusual for a woman to leave the house by herself and even more so to engage in the dangerous work of documenting Israeli soldiers or settlers. At first she felt strange and uncomfortable, and feared what her family or neighbors would say. With time her community began to see the power of her documentary acts and even asked her to film when altercations erupted. The week that I met her, Arij had filmed at night: “My husband was asleep and I went down to the street to film” as a Palestinian car burned.26 Her husband didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t feel obligated to tell him. It should be noted that many women volunteers who film for B’Tselem choose not to leave the home. Scholar Ruthie Ginsburg has researched the phenomenon of Palestinian women who film out their windows, making their own very private spheres sites for anti-colonial activism.27 Of course their homes are never quite private: the Palestinian home is constantly subject to the intrusion of the Israeli colonizing power, which “makes its presence felt” through house searches, seizures, and demolition threats.28 But when women film out their windows they achieve a superior perspective of looking down at activity on the street, as if with the momentarily powerful view of Israeli hilltop settlements. Moreover women who film out their windows remain in their own distinct space, separate from the action “out there.” Their acts of documentation therefore cannot be inhibited by physical assaults on the camera (such as grabbing, hitting, or breaking) because the camera resides in a separate space from the action. As Ginsburg has noted, a woman’s “distinct space functions as a camera obscura—a darkroom where she sees and is unseen, watching the event without being a part of it.”29 The Palestinian woman who films from her home activates a mode of visual documentation in which her gender “protects” her footage. Palestinian women’s gender has also been used as fodder for sexually charged slurs and attacks against them. The first video clip ever published by the B’Tselem Camera Project has come to be known as the “Sharmuta” or “whore” video. This clip was briefly discussed in this book’s introduction and is returned to now for thorough consideration via the lens of gender and sexuality. As a reminder, in January 2007, a 16-year-old B’Tselem volunteer named Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah filmed an attack by an Israeli settler named Yifat Alkobi. Alkobi was a resident of the Tel Rumeida Jewish settlement in Hebron, the city’s fourth Jewish settlement. The

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presence of the settlers changed life drastically for the nearby Palestinian residents and made them frequent victims of settler attack.30 Metal crossbars were installed around the Abu ‘Eishah house to protect it from rocks and other objects thrown by Israeli settlers, and the house came to be known as the “cage house.”31 The Sharmuta video begins in the street just outside the Abu ‘Eishah’s house, where Rajaa is walking and filming. The Israeli settler Yifat Alkobi attempts to shut Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah into her house (“sit here, in the cage” she shouts) and then she hits Rajaa’s video camera while shouting, “Turn the camera off.” Rajaa is forced into her home by the assaults and Alkobi continues to taunt and insult her from outside on the sidewalk. Alkobi leans against the cage of the Abu ‘Eishah house hissing, “Sharmuta, sharmu-u-u-uta”—the Arabic word for “whore” (Figure 4.2). Alkobi taunts Rajaa with the slur, “whore,” nine times before addressing Rajaa’s mother directly: “You’re a whore, your daughters are, too. Don’t you dare open this door,” pointing to the door of the Abu ‘Eishah’s home.32 The Sharmuta video circulated widely within Israeli and international media outlets and has become part of Israeli lexicon.33 Yoav Gross, B’Tselem’s Camera Project director at the time, said that the footage derived its power from its

Figure  4.2  Yifat Alkobi, an Israeli settler from the Tel Rumeida settlement in Hebron, shouts “Sharmuta” (Arabic for “whore”) as 16-year-old Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah films from inside her home. The metal grate around the Abu ‘Eishah home was erected to protect against rocks and other objects that Jewish settlers threw at the Palestinian family. January 2007, Hebron. © B’Tselem.

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distinctly Palestinian perspective: “The video puts you in the Palestinians’ shoes, instead of in the shoes of Israeli or foreign cameramen, which is how you usually see what goes on in the occupation.”34 The footage’s power also derives from its clear and harsh depiction of the settler-colonial violence against Palestinians’ decolonizing camera. The settler attempts to colonize the street by claiming it for herself and her fellow Jewish settlers. The Abu ‘Eishahs resist, signifying their resistance with words (“I’m not closing the door!” and “I’ll leave the house as I please!”) and with continued and unwanted documentation by the camera’s gaze. Moreover the Sharmuta video shows harsh intrusions on the Palestinian home from outside it. The danger it depicts is “out there,” in the space of appearance controlled by Jewish Israelis. In the Sharmuta video the Jewish Israeli is the alien intruder of a nonviolent Palestinian sphere. This portrayal radically reverses the dominant narrative of the Israeli occupation in which Palestinians are depicted as alien and violent intruders into Jewish Israeli space—a narrative that justifies the erection of an eight-meter-tall separation wall to keep them in their place, not to mention networks of checkpoints and roadblocks to restrict movement of what Israel considers a threatening Palestinian population. Finally Alkobi’s insulting word, “whore,” further speaks to the gendered distinction between private and public spheres. A whore is a woman of the street, a woman who acts in the public realm and offers her body publicly for payment. A whore does not stay in her home like a pure and virginal woman might, guarding her sexuality in the safety of her domestic sphere. By calling the Abu ‘Eishah women whores, Alkobi not only insulted their value as women but also aimed to imprison them within their domestic sphere. Alkobi thus capitalizes on Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah’s identity as a woman to bully her sexually into receding from the public. In doing so Alkobi continues a long tradition of sexually shaming women for behaviors that violate patriarchal or colonial social norms having nothing to do with sexuality.35 Rajaa resists the thrust to keep her shut inside her private sphere by publicizing the attack with her B’Tselem video camera, in a direct opposition to imposed settler-colonial constrictions. Palestinian women who film for B’Tselem continue to be harassed because of their gender. On August 24, 2017, Jewish Israelis from the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba drove through Hebron while broadcasting verbal assaults against Palestinians through a loudspeaker.36 These assaults included swearing at Palestinians (“You sons of bitches”), claims that Palestinians were squatting (“The Jews built your house”), claims of intellectual and technical superiority (“The Jews made all the new cars you have. The Jews made your M-16 [rifle]”), and even insults to Islam (“Muhammad is a dog” and “I fuck Muhammad every night!”).37 The settlers then noticed that a B’Tselem volunteer named Mai Da’na was filming their verbal slurs from the window of her home. They threatened her with property damage (“Do you want stones at your house again?” and “Broken windows weren’t enough?”) before turning their language to extreme sexual violence (Figure 4.3).38 They said, You can take your camera and stick it straight up your big ass, and through the hole you have in your cunt, which was probably opened by three quarters of the

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Figure 4.3  Settlers from Kiryat Arba verbally harass B’Tselem volunteer Mai Da’na, who films out her window. They threaten her with property damage and sexual violence. August 24, 2017, Hebron. © B’Tselem.

village, the men with the biggest dicks, opened your filthy cunt …. The biggest dick will screw you. Come, come, come, come. We’re waiting for you, you whore. You shitbag, yalla, come, come. All the Jews are waiting for you here.39

These settlers harassed the B’Tselem volunteer with sexually charged language. Their words threatened to lure her out of the relative safety of her home (“Come, come come come”) into the public sphere, where they could assault her sexually (“The biggest dick will screw you.”). They insulted her sexual propriety by suggesting that she had slept with many men in the village, making her sexuality “dirty.” Though the Israeli settlers didn’t call her a “Sharmuta” (“whore”) like Yifat Alkobi did to the Abu ‘Eishahs, they insinuated the slur in not so many words, sexually shaming and threatening her because she was recording. Even though she was taunted to do so, Mai Da’na never left the private sphere of her home during the incident—she never took to the streets. Instead she chose to confront settlercolonial violence by offering her footage—not her body—to the public sphere as an act of resistance. As women grow in number in the B’Tselem ranks, and as they continue to carry out radical anti-colonial acts with their cameras, they are still stereotyped because of their gender by those who support them. When I asked the director of B’Tselem’s video department, Ehab Tarabieh, about the growing number of women who volunteer, he said, “Recently we want this,” explaining that he believed these women to be “more calm [sic]” because they do not feel the (implied masculine) urge to get involved in the altercations they record, therefore producing what he deemed to be superior footage.40 Tarabieh said that most of B’Tselem’s recently

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published footage has been recorded by women. B’Tselem celebrates women’s participation in the Camera Project by featuring them in “campaigns, in articles and broadcasts that appear in the media, on the organization’s blog, and in film festivals” as Ginsburg has noted.41 Tarabieh concluded his remarks on women videographers by saying, “Our dream [with the B’Tselem Camera Project] is to have only women,” as they film much “better” than their male counterparts.42 Conflict, it is often said, is a man’s fault (“Men start wars”). Scholars have long researched the ways in which women and men are treated differently in war. R.  Charli Carpenter’s research shows that women are more likely to be deemed civilians than men.43 Moreover women in conflict are more likely to be portrayed as victims than their male counterparts. Wendy Hesford has noted that the Palestinian sufferer is visibilized as a feminized victim with whom a viewer should sympathize, confining her (often non-Western) body to a partialized set of comprehensions.44 Indeed B’Tselem’s portrayal of women as innocent parties who avoid altercations and must be shielded from violence further problematizes the gendered portrayal of Palestinian women in conflict. I’d like to suggest that it is because of the gendered portrayal of civilians in times of conflict that women who film for B’Tselem use the language of defense. Palestinian women have already been relegated to a role of fearful, innocent civilians (“I used to be scared”). It is because Palestinian women have already been deemed weak that video cameras give them strength (B’Tselem Field Researcher Manal al-Ja’bri said of her camera work, “I feel stronger”) (Figure 4.4).45 And it is because Palestinian women have already been categorized as victims that their camera work is described as courageous (al-Ja’bri said, “We have introduced a new culture into our conservative society … where women stand bravely, gripping their cameras

Figure  4.4  B’Tselem field Researcher for Hebron, Manal al-Jabri, describes that video cameras have made women volunteers in Hebron “stronger.” © B’Tselem.

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tightly as they face soldiers and checkpoints”).46 Certainly conservative social norms add to the gendering of women as weak and in need of defense. But the gendered portrayals of war further solidify women’s role, provoking the language of defense. Such gendered conceptions of feminized victims are not merely cast as portrayals, they are also taken up by spectators of images produced by women photographers or images of women subjects. This is not to say that the B’Tselem camera cannot shield—the B’Tselem cameras may indeed prevent violence. It is instead to say that women bearing these cameras are predisposed to need protection by the gendering of social norms that results from war. The representation of a Palestinian woman as a victim in need of defense augments the notion that women generally lack political agency within the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It is this representation that has led to Palestinian women’s characterization of their cameras as shields.

Cameras as Emotional Shields Thus far I have discussed how cameras act—or are spoken of—as physical shields in conflict in their deterrence of violence. Physically the camera occupies the space between a photographer’s body and the event at hand. It necessarily acts as an intermediary that is literally “situated between two things” from the Latin inter (between) and medius (in the middle). A photographer holds a camera in front of the face in a way that almost allows the face to hide (if the face is shy or if the face desires anonymization). In this position the camera might calm the nerves: in the Mel Brooks film High Anxiety (1977), an anxious driver named Brophy compulsively takes pictures to alleviate his jitters. The camera offers the illusion of recapturing control, as if by scaling down the largeness of a multifaceted world to one’s own, small point of view. Cameras can also function as a kind of emotional or psychic shield, protecting photographers not only from bodily harm but also from emotional barriers and social prohibitions. The camera can operate as an excuse to look, as a reason that justifies a person’s presence. The camera can act as a liberating force from social norms that ask one not to stare, or those that ask women to stay in their homes. The camera is a shield that broadcasts the words, “I have a reason to be here.” Likewise the camera has been described as a shield from difficult emotions. In a recent study psychologist Patrice Keats found that photojournalists repeatedly employ metaphors of protection and defense to describe their cameras, saying, “It’s like I’m standing behind glass” and “The camera is a comfort blanket, like a security blanket.”47 Famous photojournalist Steve McCurry said that his camera acts as a shield when he photographs horrific scenes, as “it’s easier to look at distressing sights through a viewfinder.”48 Likewise, writing of a photograph of the horrific damage done by the Germans during the bombing of the London Blitz, Sharon Sliwinski theorized, “The photograph registers the terrible bomb damage and at the same time provides a delicate, visual shield against it.”49 The camera contains the trauma, thereby protecting the photographer. The camera registers

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and shields at once. Through the camera an event reaches the photographer’s eye as already mediated, in medias res.50 I asked B’Tselem volunteers whether the act of filming makes it easier to witness violence or atrocities. “Does filming ever make you feel detached, or psychologically shielded, from what you are filming?” I  asked them. They answered me with a collective and resounding “No.” “It feels the same as seeing it with my own eyes,” said B’Tselem volunteer Suzan Zraqo.51 Zraqo told me that last Ramadan she filmed the killing of a Palestinian man named Rami Sabarneh, a construction worker who was driving a small tractor down her street in Hebron when an Israeli settler began screaming that the tractor was going to run him over. Israeli soldiers stationed nearby shot at the tractor and killed Sabarneh with a bullet to his chest.52 Suzan Zraqo said that it was as difficult for her to see this with her own eyes as it was to film it. Back at the B’Tselem headquarters I  looked up this footage, which has not been published. In clip after clip of the shooting and its aftermath, Zraqo wept loudly behind the frame of the camera. She filmed from her roof in an attempt to secure clear sightline of the incident, but her camera kept shaking as she sobbed (Figure 4.5). Her camera did not make her detached, nor did it shield her from the horror of witnessing death firsthand. B’Tselem volunteers express a marked absence in emotional shielding described by photojournalists because they do not have the luxury of mental or physical separation from their photographic subjects. Unlike typical photojournalists, who travel away from their homes on assignment, B’Tselem volunteers live in the same

Figure 4.5  An Israeli soldier approaches a small tractor after shooting at it and killing its driver, Rami Wahid Hassan Sabarneh. The tractor rolls backward down the street, directly below the house of B’Tselem volunteer Suzan Zraqo. According to the military Sabarneh tried to run over soldiers and civilians. June 2, 2018, Hebron. © B’Tselem.

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place they document. For them, the site of photographic exposure of atrocity is the site of home, which leaves no room for escape or for momentary shielding by a camera. The spatial constriction becomes a psychic one, too, as B’Tselem volunteers reexperience the loci of trauma in their daily lives. Suzan Zraqo must reencounter the street below her home, where she filmed the shooting of Rami Sabarneh, on a daily basis. Moreover, unlike typical photojournalists, B’Tselem videographers frequently know the subjects of their own footage, who are their Palestinian neighbors, their community members, and even their own family members. If they do not personally know their photographic subjects, they are ethnonationally aligned with the fellow Palestinians they videotape. The act of recording is thus a personal and intimate act of resistance, rather than work. Likewise, their video cameras are not merely professional tools but also personal ones. B’Tselem volunteers film their own personal lives with their cameras, and B’Tselem gives its volunteers more than one memory card to encourage the filming of private events—such as weddings, birthdays, or everyday domestic life—on a separate card.53 Therefore, even the camera as a tool lacks any semblance of separation from the intimate parts of personal life. Finally, before any B’Tselem volunteer becomes a volunteer, they were first a victim of Israeli settler-colonial violence.54 Unlike most photojournalists, Palestinian citizen videographers take up the camera after their sense of safety has already been eroded by acts of violence. Moreover, because of this violence, B’Tselem volunteers are frequently the subjects of their own footage. A photojournalist like Steve McCurry documents acts against others, whereas Palestinian videographers like Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah document attacks against themselves. It is no wonder, then, that B’Tselem volunteers do not feel emotional shielding from their cameras. Without a sense of safety, and without spatial and psychic separation from their photographic subjects, no level of remove is possible. As B’Tselem’s field researcher Manal al-Jab’ri put it, “When they [B’Tselem volunteers] are filming some incident, they can’t focus on the camera. They see the two things,” meaning that the camera and the incidence of violence are always simultaneously present.55 The camera fails to emotionally shield its photographer, who lives alongside the violence recorded, films violence against those she knows, and is subjected to violence, herself.

“Watch out, they’re filming” In testimonies and interviews Palestinians have indicated their belief that cameras protect them and their communities. But in light of the observer effect, how can we know whether the camera actually functions as a shield? Even B’Tselem’s spokesman admitted that while he believes the organization’s cameras deter violence, it is impossible to know for sure. I posit one way to determine whether Palestinian cameras act as shields:  if perpetrators admitted to such with their utterances. “I would assault you,” they might say, “but I won’t do that only because you’re filming. If your camera

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weren’t here I would harm you.” In all the hours of footage I have screened from the B’Tselem archives I have never heard such an admission. No such utterance indicates the camera’s causal function in shielding its beholder. However I  have repeatedly heard similar, if weaker, proclamations by Israelis:  “Watch out, the Palestinians are filming.” Such utterances are spoken from one Israeli settler or soldier to others, urging them to take caution because of the Palestinian camera. The caution warns a fellow Israeli to behave well lest a negative image be captured. “Very often, I hear Israeli soldiers warning each other to be careful when they see us with our cameras,” said Issa Amro, a prominent Palestinian human rights activist.56 Amro was awarded the One World media prize for his work with the B’Tselem Camera Project in 2009, in which he served as the Hebron field researcher and volunteer videographer. He is also well known for his nonviolent activism and for his founding of the Hebron-based grassroots organization, Youth Against Settlements. When Amro films, he hears the following from nearby soldiers: “ ‘Watch out,’ they say, ‘they’re filming.’ ”57 Likewise B’Tselem volunteer Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh told me that the Israeli soldiers stationed in her neighborhood, the Tel Rumeida district of Hebron, make each other aware of her video camera. Their awareness has increased since her husband, ‘Imad, filmed the incident in which Israeli soldier Elor Azaria shot and killed an incapacitated Palestinian suspect as he lay on the ground.58 Moreover when IDF battalions rotate out of service in Hebron, Fayzeh sees the departing soldiers give the incoming soldiers a tour of Tel Rumeida, saying, in her words, “ ‘This is where the Abu Shamsiyehs live and everyone in this home knows how to film. They are the ones who filmed Elor Azaria. Be careful.’ ”59 The caution is thus passed from one IDF brigade to the next. Earlier documents from the Israel Defense Forces echo the “watch out, they’re filming” mentality of the Israeli army. A 2002 symposium held between the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli Democracy Institute (IDI), a think tank promoting democracy within the State of Israel, focused on media portrayals of the IDF. The symposium opened with concrete suggestions from IDI to improve the IDF’s public image. IDI researchers stressed that all Israeli military actors must be made aware of the consequences of acting badly in front of the camera: The importance of the media must be drilled into the consciousness of every military figure, from chief of staff to the lowest ranking soldier, whether in the standing army or in the reserves. This degree of institutionalized media consciousness will ensure that a soldier is cognizant of the ramifications of shaking his fist at the camera.60

In place of stressing that soldiers generally behave ethically at all times, the report stresses they do so in front of cameras in particular. In other words it is the camera’s presence that prevents bad behavior. During the discussion that followed a senior IDF official named Moshe Ya’alon, who would later serve as the IDF’s chief of staff, interjected to remark that the Israeli army already attempts to avoid negative media portrayals:

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The media is indeed a strategic consideration both in preparing for battle and during and after battle …. If we understand that a photograph of a tank speaks against us on CNN, we can take this into account in our decision as to whether or not to send in the tank.61

Ya’alon suggests that the documentation of a military action might cause the Israeli army to stop that action. The photograph prevents the tank. However, Ya’alon continued his remarks by suggesting that Israeli military operations be carried out in an unphotographable manner. He said: We [the IDF] schedule helicopter operations for after dark so they cannot be photographed easily and make sure the operation is over within fifteen minutes so the photographers do not have a chance to begin filming. Such considerations are already second nature to us.62

Ya’alon proposes to make military operations unphotographable through the cover of night or by means of a rapidity that curtails photographic capture by mainstream media outlets. The military power becomes exercised in an invisible and unverifiable manner, akin to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, instead of visibly as with traditional models of sovereign power.63 The camera then becomes not a shield but instead a force that moves Israeli militarism into darkness. The month after he made these comments, Ya’alon would become the IDF’s chief of staff and later would rise to the position of minister of defense, bringing his conceptions of unverifiable and invisible power along with him. Israeli settlers likewise began to anonymize their violence: they masked their faces in response to B’Tselem cameras.64 One of B’Tselem’s field researchers, Manal al-Jab’ri from Hebron, stated this trend plainly: The [Israeli] settlers used to do whatever they pleased. They didn’t care about anyone. Now if they do attack and they see a camera, they make a point of covering their faces because they know there’s someone monitoring them, watching them.65

Masked Israeli settlers appear for the first time in B’Tselem’s published videos in September 2007, nine months after the Camera Project began. Settlers had descended from Ma’on, a settlement in the South Hebron Hills, and were throwing stones at the Jundiyeh family from the Palestinian village of a-Tuba when they spotted the family’s B’Tselem video camera. In response to the camera they covered their faces with white prayer shawls and retreated (Figure 4.6).66 Likewise a year later, Israeli settlers from Suseya—also in the South Hebron Hills—masked their faces with T-shirts and attacked a Palestinian shepherd and his family with clubs as the shepherd’s daughter filmed (Figure 4.7).67 This time the settlers did not retreat in response to the video camera; instead they continued their attack with their faces concealed. I asked a B’Tselem volunteer named Thawra ‘Eid from the Nablus district whether she feels safer when she films, and she immediately responded that she

Figure 4.6  A masked Israeli settler attacks the Jundiyeh family on August 11, 2007, in a village called a-Tuba in the South Hebron Hills. © B’Tselem.

Figure 4.7  Four masked Israeli settlers from Suseya in the South Hebron Hills attacked a Palestinian shepherd family from a nearby village with clubs. Filmed by Muna Nawaj’ah, June 8, 2008. © B’Tselem.

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feels more “believed.” Whereas she had previously pitched her word against that of Israeli settlers, now she had the footage to back up her testimony.68 This belief can make the difference in disputes over who started an altercation and therefore has the potential to exonerate a Palestinian videographer. But when I asked ‘Eid if she feels safer personally, she replied, “No. They attack us with the camera or without the camera. It makes no difference.” The camera may have lessened the prevalence of Israeli violence but does not ward it off entirely—especially if Israeli actors conceal and anonymize their violence in response to lenses.

Cameras as Incitement In contested areas of Israel–Palestine, cameras are not always defenses. They do not shield against emotional duress nor do they necessarily entail that Israeli soldiers or settlers will exercise restraint. “Sometimes, [the camera is] more like a red flag, and rather than calm them [Israeli settlers] down, the cameras make them very edgy,” said Guy Butavia, a Jewish Israeli volunteer with Ta’ayush, a grassroots organization of Jews and Arabs who work together to resist the occupation and its nationalist agenda.69 Butavia speaks of cameras as attracting attack. Many examples exist in the B’Tselem video archives in which Palestinian videographers are threatened or assaulted seemingly because they have a camera. In 2008 B’Tselem volunteer Issa Amro was recording an attempt by Jewish settlers to take over a Palestinian home in Hebron. Amro’s videotaping was legal, yet an IDF lieutenant colonel demanded that Amro stop. Amro did not comply and thereafter a group of female Jewish settlers surrounded Amro and attempted to seize his camera. In the footage we hear Amro shout, in English, “She’s taking my camera!” as a settler reaches for his lens (Figure 4.8).70 Amro utters this phrase as if to seek intervention from an independent referee. Yet in Amro’s situation, there was no referee. Instead of policing the seizure, IDF soldiers themselves beat Amro multiple times and arrested him on the grounds that he was suspected of attacking the soldiers, even though his footage shows otherwise. Thereafter B’Tselem released a press statement noting a “rise in assaults by [Israeli] soldiers on B’Tselem workers filming violent settlers in Hebron. The assaulting soldiers usually claim that the act of filming is a provocation in itself.”71 In another violent incident in Hebron, this time from 2016, a B’Tselem camera volunteer named Raed Abu a-Rmeileh had been attempting to videotape Israeli settlers as they harassed Palestinian girls with their dog. One of the settlers approached Abu a-Rmeileh and hit him in the head twice with his arm and once again with an unopened drink can.72 The blows knocked Abu a-Rmeileh to the ground, and he was subsequently hospitalized for a light head injury (Plates 11 and 12).73 As the settler assaulted Abu a-Rmeileh, he hissed, “What are you filming? Huh? What are you filming?” The settler asked this question to imply that there is nothing to film—or as the familiar refrain goes, “Nothing to see here.” But when a crowd is ushered along with the commanding words, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here,” there is most certainly something to see.74 The crowd knows it. They

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Figure  4.8  Young female Israeli settlers assault B’Tselem videographer Issa Amro and reach out with their hands in an attempt to grab his camera as Israeli soldiers stand nearby. Amro was ultimately beaten by Israeli soldiers multiple times and arrested on the claim that he was suspected of attacking the soldiers, while the footage shows otherwise. January 19, 2008, Hebron. © B’Tselem.

rubberneck, they look, and they want to see because they know that the “nothing” there is to see is very much a “something.” Indeed the right to see that “nothing”— that thing which those in power don’t want us to see—is what Mirzoeff calls “the right to look.”75 It is a right that claims political subjectivity in the face of authority. Mirzoeff argues that the authority who declares there to be “Nothing to see here” is an authority that establishes a “complex of visuality,” which self-authorizes by supplementing its force with visuality.76 That is, authority grounds itself in a specific historical perspective and a specific point of view. The “right to look” is thus the right to see that self-authorizing perspective for what it is: one perspective and one perspective alone. The right to look is thus, explains Mirzoeff, a “right to the real.”77 When the Jewish settler hits B’Tselem volunteer Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, knocking him and his camera to the ground, he attempts to enforce the authority of the settler complex of visuality. He enforces that there’s “nothing to see” and indeed nothing to film either. The settler’s blows temporarily restore his exclusive privilege of the right to look: his own powerful and total claim over the visual field in Israel– Palestine. Raed Abu a-Rmeileh is denied his own right to look: his video clip ends with his camera in the hands of a fellow Palestinian and the gaze of the camera turned back on a-Rmeileh, himself, who is curled on the pavement clutching his head in pain. At the end of the altercation Abu a-Rmeileh is not looking at all—he is instead looked at. Abu a-Rmeileh becomes the subject of the camera shot, not its director.

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Incitement’s Broad and Causal Terrain In recent years accusations of incitement apparently “caused” by B’Tselem cameras have grown in scope to accusations that B’Tselem, as an entire organization, is incendiary. In 2011 Israeli right-wing politician Avigdor Liberman called for a parliamentary investigation into B’Tselem on the grounds that the organization “incite[s]‌against the state of Israel and against Israeli soldiers.”78 Likewise a 2018 comment from member of Knesset Oded Forer said that B’Tselem’s workers “are mercenaries who incite against Israel for money,” accusing them of being hired soldiers who possess ulterior financial motives for their work.79 The B’Tselem headquarters in Jerusalem, itself, was set ablaze in 2016 in an act that gestures to the literal definition of incendiary, meaning “designed to cause fires.” Arson was initially suspected as the fire’s cause. An investigation ultimately deemed electrical failure as the fire’s likely source; however, the building’s windows were suspiciously smashed only along the side where B’Tselem’s offices were located, whereas all other windows sustained little damage.80 Did B’Tselem’s actions “incite” this fire?81 Did Raed Abu a-Rmeileh’s camera instigate the settler’s blows? Did Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah’s camera spur on sexual bullying (“Sharmuta!”) from the Jewish settler? If so, is it the mere gaze of Palestinian eyes that incites Jewish Israeli assault? As claims of incitement broaden, I’d like to take on this issue of causality—namely, the concept that cameras cause violence as they are accused.82 An argument in favor of causality might proceed thus: we can determine that cameras incite violence when the violence is directed against the camera itself. I do not agree with this argument but it is instructive to follow its logic in order to debunk it. This argument contends that when a Palestinian camera is attacked (as opposed to the Palestinian being or body), the attacker’s choice of target signifies that the camera itself is the incendiary force. In a 2012 example from the B’Tselem archives, an Israeli settler attacked and destroyed a B’Tselem camera. The camera belonged to Nasser Nawaj’ah, B’Tselem’s field researcher in the South Hebron Hills, who was accompanying a group of Palestinians to work their agricultural fields near Mitzpe Yair, a radical Israeli outpost.83 The fields had previously been declared a closed military zone but the closure order had expired. Nevertheless IDF soldiers arrived to the fields and ordered the Palestinians to stop farming, which they did, as they awaited word from the Israeli Civil Administration on the status of the land. Also present and videotaping was another citizen videographer from Ta’ayush, a grassroots organization of Arabs and Jews working against the occupation. As the Palestinians waited for word from the Civil Administration, Israeli settlers from Mitzpe Yair descended from their hilltop outpost and began harassing the Palestinian farmers. One settler took particular ire with the cameras present. He picked up a sickle from the field and waved it threateningly at the Ta’ayush activist, shouting, “If you film me, I will kill you.”84 The settler then managed to grab Nasser Nawaj’ah’s B’Tselem camera and smashed it repeatedly against a rock (Figure 4.9). The broken camera was later found in the field, without its memory card.

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Figure  4.9  A Jewish settler breaks a B’Tselem video camera by smashing it repeatedly against a rock in the South Hebron Hills on May 21, 2012, as an activist from Ta’ayush records. © B’Tselem.

Did the B’Tselem camera incite the attack? Can we say that the camera caused the attack? Certainly the camera was the target of the Israeli settler violence. However the camera served as a surrogate for violence, not its root cause. In Freudian terms the camera became a target of displaced aggression, where displacement is a tactic of moving an affective response from its attachment to one thing and placing it onto another, less threatening or less morally objectionable target.85 Put differently, the settler’s anger and aggression were subjected to what Sara Ahmed calls an affectual reorientation, meaning an attribution of feeling that moves from one thing to another (the settler is angry; therefore, the camera is angersome).86 Ahmed cites the classic psychological example of a child who sees a bear and is afraid. This might be the child’s first encounter with the bear, yet still she runs for it. Ahmed teaches that the child runs because she already has an image of the bear as something to be feared. In Ahmed’s words, “When we encounter the bear, we already have an impression of the risks of the encounter.”87 The bear is not fearsome on its own, but instead becomes fearsome to the child because she has already been taught to see it as such. Likewise, it is not that the Palestinian camera is angersome—or even incendiary—on its own; it is angersome or incendiary to someone. Anger is not contained in the Israeli settler nor is it located in the camera. Instead it is a relation that emerges when the settler and the camera come in contact. That contact is influenced by cultural histories and memories that have already caused Israeli actors to consider the Palestinian’s camera to be angersome. Affective responses are not manufactured by a single instance of a camera that is raised to record a dispute but by a broader set of relations including disputes over power, land, ideology, colonialism, violence, and ultimately over Palestinians’ right to look, which Jewish Israelis wish to—and work hard to—deny.

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Figure 4.10  Soldiers detain B’Tselem volunteer Ahmad Ziyadah and attempt to block and seize his camera. Madama, February 10, 2017. © B’Tselem.

The Israel Defense Forces, however, maintains that Palestinian cameras not only incite altercations but actually manufacture them. Never has this claim been clearer or more public than in the 2017 case of Ahmad Ziyadah, which was previously discussed in Chapter  1.88 Ziyadah, a B’Tselem volunteer filmmaker, was physically detained after IDF soldiers ordered him to leave the grounds near his village of Madama and he refused, claiming that the grounds were his home. Thereafter IDF soldiers moved to seize Ziyadah’s camera and arrest him. As the detainment became more and more violent, Ziyadah urged the soldiers not to take his camera, emphasized that his video will serve as evidence (“It’s all been recorded on the camera”) (Figure 4.10).89 The IDF did not explain the detainment or its use of force against Ziyadah. Instead IDF spokesman General Motti Almoz posted a statement claiming that the filming “manufactured an incident,” saying: There is a fundamental difference between photographing an event while it is happening and creating an event by arriving in the field with a camera … [and thus] caus[ing] friction that would not have been created otherwise.90

With Ahmed’s reading of affect we can see that Ziyadah’s camera could not have been the sole manufacturer of the altercation. Instead the camera is the receptacle to hold the displaced ire of the Israeli soldiers who became frustrated with Ziyadah’s noncompliance to their orders. Notably IDF spokesman Almoz wrote of friction that would not have been present otherwise, indicating the Israeli army’s belief that the occupation is a state of normalcy without violence and free of “tension” unless it is caused by a Palestinian act of aggression. This is key:  when the IDF claims that cameras create “events” where they never would have occurred, at the basis of this claim is the false assumption

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that the Israeli occupation does not itself produce altercations or moments of eruptive violence. This assumption denies the suspended, slow violence of the occupation: the everyday acts of force that control Palestinians’ movement, invade their private spheres, and subject them to a separate and unequal legal system—in short, violence that in and of itself is very much a “scene.”91 It is the presumption of the occupation’s normalcy that causes the Jewish Israeli actor to assign anger to the Palestinian camera, itself. If the occupation is normal, meaning without eruptive violence, then altercations only arise when they are prompted: if the Israeli soldiers arrested Ziyadah then it was because his camera prompted them to do so; or if the Israeli settler Yifat Alkobi shouted “Sharmuta” or “whore” at the Abu ‘Eishah women, it was because they had done something wrong. In this Israeli narrative, it is Palestinians who spark violence and who must be contained, regulated, and controlled. It is therefore no wonder that their cameras have been accused of sparking violence as well: the affective response to Palestinians moves from their bodies to their lenses, in an affectual reorientation of cause and effect, blame and faultlessness, anger and outrage. The Palestinian lens incites because Jewish Israelis consider Palestinians to be incendiary. The Palestinian lens sparks violence because, to Israelis, it is always the Palestinian who starts things. For its part B’Tselem noted that “Palestinians don’t ‘arrive at a place with a camera,’ but live there, on their land.”92 Palestinian subjects record as an act of resistance, because they see the occupation as an unsustainable, temporary status quo maintained only by means of tension, force, and regime-made violence that frequently boils over without the provocation of their lenses.

The Occupation’s Ugly Image The final words of this chapter will be given to former B’Tselem videographer and Palestinian human rights activist Issa Amro, who advocates for nonviolent Palestinian resistance. Amro states that the weakness of the First Intifada was that Palestinians “did not use photography to support our activism and the Palestinian cause.”93 Because he believes that “whoever owns the media, owns the battle,” he strategically mobilizes all forms of images, such as masks of celebrity politicians, images printed on T-shirts, and banners carried into protest, to increase media circulation of civil demonstrations.94 Amro plans for the camera’s presence as an integral part of Palestinian nonviolent resistance. In 2013 Amro organized a protest in Hebron during then president Barack Obama’s visit to Israel–Palestine. Palestinian demonstrators walked down the Shuhada street in Hebron, the main thoroughfare that has been closed to or “sterilized” from Palestinian traffic since 1994.95 Demonstrators waved Palestinian flags while wearing shirts that read “I have a dream” and—most stunningly— donning cardboard face masks of Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr. The demonstration’s underlying idea was to conjoin the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement with the American civil rights movement—a struggle that has been recognized as civil, just, legal, and essential for restoring rights to a disenfranchised population.

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When planning this civil action, Amro said that his intention was to have Israeli soldiers arrest the Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr. look-alikes. The arrests would be grounded in their crime of walking down a Hebronian street that was segregated: Shuhada street is closed to Palestinian foot and car traffic and open to Israelis and internationals only. Amro hoped that images of detained Palestinians dressed as US icons of justice would circulate widely in the international media, consolidating two nonviolent movements to finally show harsh Israeli crackdowns as unjust. The civil action was planned for the camera, inciting and urging on an altercation to produce stunning visual documentation of the Palestinian struggle. Amro said that a friend asked him whether the action would really work: how did Amro know that they’d be detained wearing their masks of Obama and King, Jr. and that the detainment would spur on visual documentation? At times the threat of images has deterred visible Israeli action: the IDF chooses not to send in the tank, its soldiers act in more “restrained” manners, or settlers curtail their violence. Other times the presence of cameras seems to attract attack, in what I  have argued is an affectual reorientation of Israeli cultural constructions of Palestinians and their cameras. But in the case of Amro’s civil demonstration, Israeli militarism produces images that portray the harsh realities of over fifty years of military control over a civilian population. Amro replied to his friend assuringly, “The occupation usually gives us the images we want.”96 In the end, demonstrators were indeed arrested, in a theatrically provoked altercation over the very image of the occupation itself (Figure 4.11).

Figure 4.11  A protester wearing a Martin Luther King mask is arrested by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration against the planned visit of US President Barack Obama to the West Bank on March 20, 2013. Oren Ziv/Activestills.

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Chapter 5 CAMERA AS EVIDENCE

Photographs may indeed be evidence—but evidence of what exactly? That is a question that cannot be answered by the photograph alone. —Jennifer Mnookin1

Toward a Jurisprudence of the Visual In 2007, the first year of B’Tselem’s Camera Project, the organization held training programs across the West Bank for its new volunteer videographers. One training session in the South Hebron Hills village of At-Tuwani was videotaped, likely for internal purposes, and shows a remarkable snapshot of the Camera Project’s then-optimistic attitude toward the camera as a liberatory technology.2 In the clip, former video director Oren Yakobovich sits in a Palestinian community hall, speaking in rough English, translated to Arabic, to male residents from four local villages. The men sit on mattresses and pillows in a big, open circle around a pile of new video cameras, still unopened in their boxes. Villages like At-Tuwani in the South Hebron Hills are subjected to frequent attacks by Israeli settlers, who live in both state-sanctioned Jewish settlements considered illegal by international law as well as in radical outposts on the rocky hilltops considered illegal even by Israeli law.3 Yakobovich opens the training session by acknowledging that Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians are “nothing new”: they are frequent, violent, and deeply troubling. But now, Yakobovich wants the Palestinian residents to film the attacks. Yakobovich explains that the purpose of filming is twofold. The first goal of filming is Israeli national accountability. Yakobovich says, “The settlers here, most of the [Jewish] Israeli public also [doesn’t] like them very much. But they need to see what’s happening. They need to see all this violence that’s happening here.” He explains that the purpose of the project is essentially to expose Israelis to the attacks carried out by their fellow citizens and to therefore put pressure on the public, and its government, to curtail settlement growth.4 The second purpose of filming is legal accountability: to send footage of settler attacks to the Israeli police so that the settlers will be charged and brought to justice. Yakobovich explains:

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A lawyer in B’Tselem is asking, “Bring us faces! People we can charge!” This is important. I cannot promise you that every film you are bringing, we can do something about … but we have to try.

Yakobovich positions the camera as an evidence-producer: its aim is not just to expose, not just to create visual traces of human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories, but instead to produce visual evidence. In 2007, the camera’s purpose was explicitly linked to the probative function of their documentation, meaning that one of the primary stated goals of the B’Tselem Camera Project was the production of valuable and substantive evidence for legal prosecution of Jewish Israelis. What legally constitutes evidence? In its celebrated 2016 guide to Video as Evidence, WITNESS defines evidence as “anything that can provide information about an incident being investigated.”5 Within legal contexts evidence is divided into multiple taxonomies depending on its function. To prosecute human rights violations as criminal acts, two kinds of evidence are most integral: crime-based evidence, meaning reliable and relevant information about the commission of a crime (Who did it? Against whom was the crime committed? When? Where?); and linkage evidence, meaning reliable and relevant information that indirectly links the circumstances of a criminal commission to a victim, a perpetrator, a time, or other important criminal details. Before video began to be used as evidence, photography—its precursor— entered the courtroom. Photography was widely recognized as a powerful juridical tool from its very inception, and by the 1870s photographs were frequently used in courts.6 Around this time, photographs were assigned similar juridical status as maps, diagrams, or other visual evidence:  they were treated merely as visual aids to a witness’s testimony. Courts did not consider photographs to “speak” for themselves; instead, photographs required that a knowledgeable person, such as an expert or an eyewitness, speak on their behalf. Photographs were considered to be merely illustrative and devoid of independent probative value. But by the early 1900s, courts began treating photographs differently. Their epistemic status of “merely illustrative” was elevated to the category of “evidence.” As a result, legal scholar and historian Jennifer Mnookin noted, photographs “hovered uncomfortably on the boundary between illustration and proof.”7 By the middle of the twentieth century, photographs were further elevated to the status of “silent witnesses,” which no longer required an expert to testify for them. Their presence, instead, constituted a silent, wordless, and visual testimony. The history and present condition of photographs within legal contexts lays the foundation for the legal treatment of videos as “silent witnesses” in and of themselves. WITNESS’s Video as Evidence field guide encourages citizen videography precisely due to its potential probative value, arguing that a video “can do more than expose injustice. It can also serve as evidence in the criminal and civil justice processes.”8 The guide urges citizens on the ground—which it dubs the “Frontline Defenders” of human rights—to videotape because, as citizens, they are often better positioned in time and space to record incidents as they unfold,

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in real time, than professional investigators. WITNESS thus positions the citizen videographer as the primary evidence gatherer and the court as the ultimate destination in appeals for justice (Figure 5.1). The approach of treating photographs and videos as silent witnesses—witnesses that can be “automatically understood” and “intuitively credible”—is not without its critics.9 Media theorists such as Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Gil Hochberg among others have long argued that images represent constructed realities and therefore cannot be approached with the naïve realism that holds them as neutral and objective representations of reality.10 Legal scholars are therefore working

Figure 5.1  Excerpt from WITNESS’s Video as Evidence field guide, 2016.

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toward “a critical and rigorous jurisprudence of the visual” as a theoretical stance that complicates the independently held probative value of visual material.11 This chapter details the collaboration between B’Tselem’s video department and Israeli legal investigations into human rights abuses and shows that Palestinian citizen videographers largely mobilize video as exculpation of their assumed criminal bodies rather than as evidence of Israeli perpetrations. Because citizen videography has rarely succeeded in prompting judicial action against Jewish Israelis, B’Tselem recently chose to end judicial prosecution, instead mobilizing videos within the mediascape. Such videos have increasingly been challenged by claims of digital suspicion—namely, by claims against video’s naïvely assumed realistic and indexical relationship to reality. Against the backdrop of such suspicion, digital markers and forensic analysis have risen as a means to elevate the epistemic status of citizen videography. This chapter argues that such analysis retains a complicated visual relationship to Palestinian bodies that mirrors that of the Israeli regime, but ultimately succeeds in making backdoor appeals to Palestinian humanity, Israeli injustice, and the morality of an extrajudicial public or forum it amasses as its viewership.

“They’re asking us to film” Today B’Tselem is widely viewed as an antagonist to the Israeli state and is decried as a radical left-wing organization that shames Israel’s public image. But back in 2007, when B’Tselem’s Camera Project had just launched, relations between the organization and Israeli officials were much warmer and more collaborative. B’Tselem’s former video director Oren Yakobovich said, in an interview with Democracy Now, The thing is that they’re asking us to film now. The army and the police are asking us to film. They’re telling us, “If you have things that [are] happening, please bring us the video,” because they need it.12

One of the earliest and most notable cases of successful prosecution against Israeli soldiers using B’Tselem footage is the Ashraf Abu-Rahma incident. On July 7, 2008, Abu-Rahma was demonstrating in the West Bank village of Ni’lin when he was detained by the IDF. He was then led to an area beside an Israeli military jeep, where he stood blindfolded and handcuffed. IDF battalion commander Omri Borberg then braced Abu-Rahma’s arm as fellow IDF soldier Leonardo Corea shot him in the leg from extremely close range with a rubber-coated steel bullet (Plate 13).13 The shooting was captured on video by a young Palestinian girl, who filmed it through the window of her family’s home.14 The video demonstrated that AbuRahma posed no threat at the time of his shooting. B’Tselem sent the footage to Israel’s Military Police Investigation Unit (MPIU) and demanded an investigation. However the IDF instead conducted an “operational debriefing” with no results or consequences for Lt. Col. Borberg

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or soldier Corea.15 B’Tselem then appealed to public pressure by circulating footage of the shooting widely among the press, seeking to pressure the IDF into accountability through publicity. An official Israeli investigation commenced only after an Israeli national news program broadcast the video, sparking a large public outcry among Jewish Israelis. Thereafter both IDF soldiers involved in the shooting were charged with “unbecoming conduct,” or what essentially amounted to a slap on the wrist. B’Tselem appealed this sentence to the Israeli High Court of Justice who ruled that the charges against each soldier must be made more severe “so that the offenses each of them is charged with will adequately reflect the facts and the nature of the acts described in the indictment.”16 Over the course of the appeal’s trial, lawyers called the credibility of the B’Tselem video into question. Apparently, the B’Tselem footage had been recorded not on a blank tape but over a personal home video of a Palestinian wedding.17 In other words, the tape wasn’t “clean”: it bore traces of prior recordings. B’Tselem helped facilitate the transfer of the original tape to the Israeli Police’s Forensics Department, who ultimately deemed the tape to be original, unedited, and unfalsified. As a result, the two IDF soldiers involved in the extrajudicial shooting were given slightly harsher sentences. B’Tselem decried these new sentences as still too weak.18 But nevertheless, B’Tselem as an organization continued to celebrate video as means of securing justice and accountability against Israeli actors. In December 2008, B’Tselem spoke of the legal power of its Camera Project on its website thus: B’Tselem also uses this [Camera Project] footage as a powerful tool for filing complaints with the army and the police, and as supporting evidence in court cases. In the West Bank, victims of abuse by settlers or soldiers are often discouraged from lodging complaints by weighty bureaucratic obstacles. B’Tselem now uses video as one way to promote accountability and seek legal redress for Palestinian complainants.19

B’Tselem also stated that video documentation was one of its “principal tools” in combating human rights violations in the Occupied Territories and a tool that had “no substitute.”20 During this period, B’Tselem publicly considered video to be powerful evidence not only in the court of public opinion but also in the judicial realm. Many of the B’Tselem volunteer videographers whom I interviewed expressed similar sentiments. Arij al-Jab’ri, a longtime volunteer living in Hebron, told me that a common act of Israeli settler violence in her neighborhood was car ramming:  Israeli settlers would drive their cars into Palestinian bodies, mostly children, in the street below her home. The Israeli justice system has generally failed to prosecute such incidents, pleading ignorance as to which settlers perpetrated the crimes. Al-Jab’ri told me that she regularly films these incidents and gives her footage to the families of the injured children for use in court. She said her videos speak for themselves, saying, in her words:  “Here’s the car. This is what it looks

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like. This is the license plate number.”21 What she implies is that her videos serve as linkage evidence to identify Israeli perpetrators. Another Hebron-based B’Tselem volunteer, Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, told me that she has often used her footage with Israeli police officers when she is pitting her own story against that of Israeli soldiers. She told me of an incident in which an Israeli soldier stationed on her roof cursed at her when she addressed him. She recorded the incident and played it back for an Israeli police officer, who would have not otherwise believed her without the footage. The police officer commanded the soldier to leave the premises, and Abu Shamsiyeh reported that she never again saw that soldier in her neighborhood.22 She did not need to take this video to court to achieve remediation:  she successfully used her video with the Israeli police force, itself, as the sovereign upholders of the law in her neighborhood of Hebron.

Visualizing Potential Criminality The use of video as evidence is situated in a deep history of making the criminal visible. Criminality has long been represented visually as fingerprints, radiographs, mug shots, and more currently as DNA sequences. Jonathan Finn has written extensively on the ways that “making the criminal visible is central to modern and contemporary law enforcement and criminal identification practices.”23 Finn does not take the visual representations of the criminal to be objective documents, because such an assumption would presuppose the existence of a criminal body. Instead he takes the idea of a criminal body to be a social construct and thus the visual representations of this construct as worthy of examination and critique, especially as these representations have changed in use and significance over time. Mug shots marked the first instance in which a criminal body was assumed to be objectively recorded, visually. Unlike today, a mug shot was historically a photograph of a body already judicially ruled to be criminal. Mug shots held power as objective representations to criminality due to their indexical relation to the world. Finn writes that known criminals often attempted to avoid the objectifying, identifying gaze of the camera: The mug shot was understood to be so accurate and objective that it would foil any later attempt by its subject to avoid identification by providing a false name or other fictitious information upon arrests. Thus, criminals subjected to the camera would often twist and turn and change their facial expressions to avoid being captured by the camera.24

Mug shots were historically put into circulation in books called “rogues’ galleries” and were distributed to police departments across wide geographic areas so that repeat offenders could be easily identified, guarded against, and captured.25 In rogues’ galleries, less was more. The fewer the mug shots, the more easily law enforcement agents could memorize criminal faces and leverage visuality for successful identification in the field. Put differently, the efficacy of these books as

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visual aggregates of criminality was directly tied to a smaller quantity of images. With too many mug shots, no police officer stood a chance of identifying a criminal in the field. Unlike mug shots, more recent visualization methods such as fingerprinting, DNA sequencing, and even surveillance camera recording are ways of capturing the potentially criminal body, rather than the already-defined criminal body. These visualization methods function by mass data capture—a “more is more” tactic— rather than selective capture. Data is captured about as many potentially criminal bodies as possible, so that the already-defined criminal body is represented among them. Mass data collection then enables sorting and selection, and ultimately crimes solved. Importantly, in visually capturing the potential criminal body, the notion of criminality is no longer tied to the body, itself, as it was with mug shots. Rather, criminality becomes an entity that has the potential to be located in all bodies and in the visual representations of those bodies. “The body in the digital archive,” notes Finn, “exists as a site of constant surveillance and is something that is always potentially criminal.”26 The potential for criminality resides in everyone. The Israeli regime treats all Palestinian bodies as potentially criminal. It monitors these bodies through networks of surveillance cameras installed in key sites, surveillance drones, and mass data gathering on Palestinians. Moreover, the Israeli military “makes its presence felt” with night raids on domestic homes, in which a family is woken and all its members—and especially its children— photographed as a proclaimed method of identifying the bodies of potential stone throwers (Figure 5.2).27 Palestinian children are marked as especially potentially criminal.

Figure 5.2  An Israeli soldier takes a picture of two Palestinian boys in their home during a night raid. Filmed by Nayef Da’na, February 24, 2015, Hebron. © B’Tselem.

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B’Tselem, too, has installed security cameras in key locations of frequent settler violence.28 And of course it has distributed hundreds of cameras to volunteer videographers in areas of high tension and frequent clashes. These cameras serve to visibilize the potentially criminal body of the Jewish Israeli. And Israelis know this:  that is why they frequently hold up their hands to cameras to block their visage from being captured or wear balaclavas to obscure the potential recognition of their faces. The Palestinian lens serves to gather as much data on Israeli bodies, capturing the potential criminal in each one and reversing the state narrative of Palestinians as exclusive holders of potentially criminal bodies.

Video as Exculpation Yet most B’Tselem videos are not leveraged as proof of Israeli criminality. Instead, they are mobilized as exculpatory evidence on behalf of Palestinians, themselves, who seek to prove their own assumed-criminal bodies to be innocent. “When you are a Palestinian living in a place like Hebron, you are considered by the Israelis to be guilty unless proven innocent,” said former B’Tselem volunteer Issa Amro. He continued by saying, “for us, the cameras are not only a way to document events but also to protect ourselves when false complaints are made against us by Israeli soldiers.”29 Amro summed up what I heard from many B’Tselem volunteers in the field: the Palestinian video camera serves as an alibi. One of the most notable cases of the exculpatory power of videography in the B’Tselem video archives is that of the Palestinian teenager ‘Abd al-’Aziz Fakhouri. In 2012, Fakhouri was arrested at a checkpoint in Hebron after two Israeli soldiers thought he called them “shit.” Fakhouri was not speaking to the soldiers but instead was discussing a prior event with his brother.30 Even though he attempted to explain this to the soldiers, he was violently arrested and held in Israeli detention for one month. Two videos of this incident surfaced after the fact. One video, which was circulated in Israeli media, did not show the entire event.31 The second video, which was filmed by a local Palestinian on a cell phone, did capture the totality of the incident.32 In this second video, Fakhouri is clearly heard asking about a different young Palestinian, who sought to cross the Hebronian checkpoint but was detained and taken into the entryway of a nearby home. Fakhouri says, “They took him inside? He ate shit!,” indicating that this other young Palestinian was likely beaten. In this second video, an Israeli soldier turns around and asks Fakhouri, “What did you say? I’m ‘shit’? Yallah, come over here! Come here!” Fakhouri, says over and over that he wasn’t talking to the soldier, but he is detained anyway. In the background of the video, we hear his brother shouting in Hebrew, “He’s not talking to you! He’s my brother! He’s not making any problems!” An Israeli military court judge released ‘Abd al-’Aziz Fakhouri after one month, stating: “As is clearly seen in the video, the respondent [Fakhouri, s.m.] was assaulted by a soldier ostensibly, … through no fault of his own, because he

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(the soldier) thought the respondent spoke ill of him.”33 In serving this ruling, the judge acknowledged the video as exculpatory evidence on behalf of ‘Abd al-’Aziz Fakhouri. B’Tselem volunteer videographers frequently referenced the exculpatory, defensive power of their cameras. Arij al-Jab’ri told me that the moment she sees a soldier beating a Palestinian, her first instinct is to grab her camera and film to prove who started the altercation and who beat whom, in order to help the Palestinian. She said, “If I’m walking without my camera, and the [IDF] soldiers suddenly attack me, then I  have no way of proving what happened.”34 Sitting alongside Arij during this interview was Manal al-Jab’ri, one of B’Tselem’s field researchers for Hebron and an active videographer herself. She reiterated Arij’s point by saying, “If you simply watch with your eyes, you lose the opportunity to be of use to the Palestinian who is being victimized. If you film, you have evidence— something that can be useful later, that can help the victim afterwards.”35 Both women felt their footage held the status of exculpatory evidence in a way that their own eyewitness testimonies did not. Even as exculpatory evidence, citizen videography can be turned around and used as evidence against an innocent defendant in the court of law. Nowhere is this clearer than in George Holliday’s 1991 video of four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers beating Rodney King, which was originally lauded as “objective” evidence against the police that was “beyond impartial.”36 However, in court, the video was co-opted by the police officers’ defense in an attempt to minimize police violence and even show Rodney King as an aggressor. Defense lawyers selected freeze-frames to support their own arguments against King, even though, as Greenfield and Kibbey have argued, just as a “single word cannot be interpreted out of the context of a sentence,” so too a “frame of a film or videotape cannot be interpreted out of its surrounding action.”37 The defense also screened portions of the video in slow motion, which made the LAPD’s blows appear less powerful than they really were. In this first trial, all four LAPD officers were acquitted of assault.38 The King case warns: videos do not speak for themselves, nor do they offer unequivocal evidence. They are constantly up for debate, interpretation, and interpellation as to their judicial significance. Almost twenty years after the videotaped Rodney King beating, citizen camera witnessing has become far more common, to the point that the absence of video documentation can spark suspicion. In Israel–Palestine, Israeli officials began to leverage the lack of video documentation against Palestinian civilians’ claims to human rights violations. On December 31, 2010, a Palestinian resident of Bil’in named Jawaher Abu Rahma was killed at a weekly demonstration against the separation wall. The cause of her death was immediately contested. Abu Rahma was taken to the Ramallah Hospital, where the medical report determined that she died from inhaling tear gas shot by the IDF.39 However, Israeli medical analysis claimed that she had instead succumbed to a cancer already latent in her body.40 A  public debate ensued over the question, as one Israeli journalist put it, “Did [Abu Rahma] die because of the occupation or was her death unconnected to it?”41

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In the videos of Palestinian demonstrations in Bil’in that day, Abu Rahma’s image was never captured. As a result, the IDF spokesperson immediately claimed that Abu Rahma was possibly not even present at the demonstration and therefore could not have died from tear gas inhalation.42 To the IDF, Abu Rahma’s absence from visual documentation implied her unconditional physical absence. As human rights lawyer Michal Sfarad said, Today it’s not only that the camera and the documentation of the events can help and provide more evidence, but the absence of—it’s almost a negative proof that nothing happened.43

Negative proof: this is a variant on the internet slogan, “pics or it didn’t happen.” Assumptions of negative proof expand the doubt of an event’s occurrence (the “it” that didn’t happen without pics) to a much broader, all-encompassing and existential doubt of a person’s presence. The “it” that did not happen becomes a “you” that were not there—a “you” that possibly do not even exist. Importantly, the use of video as negative evidence furthers the invisiblization of Palestinian bodies by critically claiming their absence as the default mode, unless visual material proves otherwise. The concept of negative proof thus expands the strategic absenting of Palestinians to Jewish Israelis, just as their cars are made absent from highways by separated roadways, their language is made absent from cities by the changing of Arabic names to Hebrew ones, and their bodies are made generally absent from view by the twenty-six-foot-tall opaque, concrete, and violent separation barrier. Video as “negative proof ” seeks to exculpate Israeli war crimes by offering evidence of their absence: if the glove doesn’t fit, the murderer walks free.

Cooperate No More By 2016 B’Tselem’s prior optimism surrounding the use of its videos as evidence in Israeli courts degraded so significantly that the organization took the unprecedented step of announcing it would no longer cooperate with Israeli military investigations into infractions perpetrated by its soldiers. The organization’s research on such infractions, its lodging of complaints to the MPIU, and its representation of Palestinians in court had been central to the organization’s operations since its founding in 1989. Partly, this was due to the sheer difficulty Palestinians from the Occupied Territories faced in lodging their own complaints. Scholar Erica Weiss has detailed the bureaucratic barriers: Palestinians theoretically can file complaints with military police directly; however, this is unlikely because there are no military police investigative units based in the West Bank, and Palestinians are not granted authorization to enter Israel for the purpose of filing a complaint against the military. Palestinians may also file complaints with military police officers in the West Bank; however, this

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also is often exceedingly difficult. The schedules of police officers are often either not publicly available or not adhered to. Often Palestinians are kept waiting for hours or are turned away because they have no one to translate from Arabic into Hebrew.44

B’Tselem became the central access point for Palestinians wishing to secure justice and accountability through the Israeli military system to whose rule they were subjected. As a result, for many years the Israeli military relied on B’Tselem to file reports, submit documents as evidence, and even coordinate the collection of eyewitness statements, as if the B’Tselem were a subcontractor of the MPIU.45 B’Tselem largely complied, seeing no other option for intervention on behalf of Palestinians. And for its part, the MPIU did open investigations into every case in which an Israeli soldier killed a Palestinian because, as the sovereign in the Occupied Territories, the military was also responsible for law enforcement.46 However, at the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, the MPIU’s investigation practices changed significantly due to what the Military Advocate General Corps characterized as a “substantial change [that] ensued in the characteristics of Palestinian terror.”47 From that point on, any killing of a Palestinian by IDF troops first triggered an internal operational inquiry and then, if and only if the Military advocate general deemed the case justified, an MPIU investigation would follow. The result, B’Tselem noted, was near impunity for Israeli troops.48 In 739 cases filed since the Second Intifada, charges were brought against Israeli soldiers in only twenty-five incidents, or roughly 3 percent. As a reference point, the Military Advocate General Corps has not even been able to locate forty-four, or roughly 6 percent, of the total number of cases filed.49 On May 25, 2016, B’Tselem announced its decision to cease cooperation with investigations and published a corresponding report substantiating its decision.50 The report, titled “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf,” explains the decision thus: B’Tselem has gradually come to the realization that the way in which the military law enforcement system functions precludes it from the very outset from achieving justice for the victims. Nonetheless, the very fact that the system exists serves to convey a semblance of law enforcement and justice. Now, after a long process of careful consideration, B’Tselem has reached the conclusion that continuing to file complaints to the military law enforcement system does more harm than good. Because B’Tselem has no desire to help the system create a mere semblance of doing justice, we have decided to stop applying to the military law enforcement system.51

B’Tselem felt that the outcomes of their participation in the Israeli military’s criminal justice system were serving as the occupation’s “fig leaf,” meaning they concealed a difficulty or embarrassment that Israeli society had with its own military occupation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. “The fight for human rights will be better served by denouncing this system and exposing it for what it is,” explained B’Tselem.52

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Within Jewish Israeli society, radical leftists have often argued that humanitarian activism bolsters Israeli militarism rather than weakening it. In 2015, Jewish Israeli activist Noam Rotem wrote a searing opinion piece accusing B’Tselem and similar organizations of “serv[ing] as the humanitarian arm of the IDF” by giving Palestinians “assurances, or hope, of a non-violent, bureaucratic resolution— in the name of the occupier.”53 He further argued that any gesture made by an occupier like Israel to “solve problems” for its occupied population strengthens its toxic systems of oppression and dependence. B’Tselem ultimately reached the same conclusion: that it must stop cooperating with the State of Israel and its “fake justice” system in order to further its anti-occupation and humanitarian goals.54 After B’Tselem’s decision was announced, the first major infraction committed by a soldier against a Palestinian was the Azaria incident, discussed previously, in which IDF combat medic Elor Azaria shot and killed the immobilized Palestinian stabbing suspect, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, from point-blank range.55 B’Tselem volunteer ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh captured this incident on video, and B’Tselem immediately mobilized the footage by circulating it nationally and internationally in a wide array of news outlets. While the organization did not demand an MPIU investigation as it would have in the past, public pressure from this extrajudicial killing mounted to the point that a criminal investigation against Azaria commenced, regardless. It might be tempting to read the criminal investigation as a mark of success for B’Tselem’s decision to cease cooperation. However, the case facts prove to be more nuanced. The Palestinian videographer, ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, faced intense settler harassment and death threats after his video went viral. When he tried to lodge a complaint with the police and request protection—a move that B’Tselem would have previously undertaken on his behalf—Shamsiyeh was repeatedly turned away and even threatened with arrest.56 Abu Shamsiyeh was left bare. Moreover, Elor Azaria was ultimately convicted of manslaughter rather than the stronger crime of murder and served only nine of his eighteen-month sentence before being released. While some B’Tselem volunteer camerapersons remain optimist about the juridical power of their footage, one volunteer—a woman named Wydian Zaban—painted a different picture. Zaban lives in the West Bank village of Burin, surrounded by Israeli settlements and outposts. She and her neighbors are subjected to frequent Israeli settler attacks. She often films the attacks targeting the village’s school, which her children attend, as she lives on a hillside slope with a direct view of the school below. I asked her if she felt her camera produces evidence, to which she replied, I feel strong in the sense that I  have evidence in my hands. But at the same time, no one is capable of punishing these people even with this incontrovertible evidence. So, I feel it is for nothing.57

To Zaban, the camera produces evidence, yet justice does not follow. She, like B’Tselem as a whole, painted a pessimistic yet realistic picture of the power of her images within Israeli courts of law.

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Talking to the Decision Makers In its search for justice and accountability from the State of Israel, B’Tselem has recently increased its focus on forums outside Israeli society. Much to the chagrin of the Israeli government, in 2018 B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad accepted an invitation to speak at the UN Security Council, which is filled with high-level and key decision makers from most nations. El-Ad spoke of the current conditions of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation and drew comparisons to Jim Crow-era America as well as to the South African apartheid. El-Ad’s address represented a push to sway Israeli national policy by appealing to supranational political actors. After El-Ad’s speech, Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon took the floor, calling the event a “circus.”58 But he also used El-Ad’s address as a means of normalization, stating that the very fact that El-Ad, himself an Israeli citizen, can publicly critique Israel without fearing for his life proves the “strength of Israel’s vibrant democracy.”59 In Danon’s comments are echoes of the sociological argument that any civilian oversight of a national government—and especially of a national military—generally improves the public image of that military. IDF Military advocate general, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, said in an interview that organizations like B’Tselem “are a pipeline for transmitting information about very important things, so that the IDF’s activity will be normative.”60 B’Tselem decided to cease cooperation with IDF investigations in order to avoid this normalization, this “whitewashing” that deliberately conceals the occupation’s violent and unjust consequences. However Ambassador Danon’s comments indicate that whitewashing will likely continue, even without B’Tselem spearheading judicial pressure. The mere existence of B’Tselem— its activities, its reports, it speeches—might be enough to constitute a whitewashing of the occupation, or at least legitimize Israel’s claim to a democracy status. Hagai El-Ad’s speech was criticized widely in Israel, as Jewish Israeli society has moved increasingly toward the right under the stewardship and coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu himself released a statement while the UN Security Council session was ongoing, decrying B’Tselem’s speech as an attempt to “help Israel’s enemies” and as “full of lies.”61 Lies, of course, are not evidence. Evidence is free from lies and instead full of credibility and reliability. We believe eyewitnesses when their testimonies are honest: we believe they didn’t lie. When Netanyahu accused B’Tselem’s director of lying, he sought to render his speech—his testimony in front of key decision makers—null and void. Like a testimony, visual materials can also be accused of “lying”—which is to say of being falsified. Accusations of falsification render photographs’ or videos’ judicial power moot. Taken together, these accusations have been termed “digital suspicion” by Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein and have a long history within the Israeli–Palestinian context.62

Digital Suspicion To consider the camera as evidence-producer is at once to hold images and videos as documents with independent probative value and at the same time to hold these

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documents to be “true” in a sense. To be true, if we can consider such a thing possible for a moment, means that this visual material retains its indexical relation to reality and has not been falsified. Yet many Jewish Israelis suspect that B’Tselem’s videos have been tampered with, cropped, miscaptioned, or otherwise falsified as representations of reality.63 Scholars Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein have labeled this “digital suspicion,” meaning “a mode of suspicion directed against the digital image and archive as such, articulated most prominently on social media, often in the language of amateur digital forensics (in charges of digital doctoring, Photoshop manipulation, and so on).”64 Kuntsman and Stein note that suspicion is at once a form of knowledge and at the same time an affective disposition. In other words, to suspect an image is to hold it in epistemic doubt; yet to suspect an image is also to hold the affective position of doubtfulness—of distrust—that Palestinians can create true, unfalsified visual documents. Among Jewish Israelis, digital suspicion has increasingly become a patriotic act of nationalism. Often this suspicion centers on the unreliability of the Palestinian eyewitness. Knowing this, Palestinians have armed themselves with cameras that are perceived more objective and trustworthy than their testimonies. Yet the Israeli right, as Kuntsman and Stein note, has “long mobilized suspicion as a means of refusing various Palestinian political and historical claims: indigeneity, land ownership, histories of Israeli violence.”65 A famous, early case is the video of Mohammed Al Dura (2000), the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was killed in Gazan crossfire during the first days of the Second Intifada. A freelance journalist caught his killing on film, and the Israeli military accepted responsibility for it. However right-wing Israelis claimed the video was a staged hoax whose sole purpose was the declaration of Al Dura as a shahid, a martyr. Thirteen years later, Israel publicly rescinded responsibility for Al Dura’s killing and formally accepting the “hoax” mentality. The Al Dura incident remains an unsettled history that can best be described as a “cultural prism, with viewers seeing what they want to see,” as one journalist wrote.66 Other notable cases of digital falsification have emboldened Israeli digital suspicion. In 2006, Reuters published an image of a building in central Beirut billowing with massive plumes of smoke after being hit by an Israeli air strike. Later, it was discovered that the Reuters journalist photoshopped the image to add more smoke (Figure 5.3).67 Reuters publicly admitted to the journalist’s digital manipulation and as a punitive measure removed all of his prior images from its inventory. Likewise, in 2012, Hamas’ Al Qassam Brigades tweeted a graphic photograph of a man holding his dead son’s body, claiming it to be evidence of Israeli military atrocity in Gaza. The image went viral but was later discovered to be an image from Syria, not Gaza.68 To Jewish Israelis, these images represented evidence of both Palestinian and international media’s dubious tactics to mobilize falsified visual media against the state. Today, complex visual falsification tactics like deepfakes have become easier for nonexperts to produce.69 At the same time, digital suspicion in general has become increasingly vernacularized. In 2006, it was leveraged largely against

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Figure 5.3  A comparison of the original image of the smoking building in Beirut and the version altered by photographer Adnan Hajj to add additional smoke, 2006.

photojournalists and required both authentication and technical evidence as justification. But by 2012, note Kuntsman and Stein, digital suspicion was performed by the Israeli general public and required no proof. Comments in online forums, message boards, and social media betray a generalized Jewish Israeli stance toward Palestinians as “liars by nature,” with statements such as “A good Arab always fakes it,” “This is no news they fake images; they are experts [in fakery],” and even a dismissal of Palestinians in general as a fake nation with comments such as “Of course the picture is fake, everything they have is fake, they are a fake People.”70 Suspicion, of course, works as force of dehumanization: it renders Palestinians as merely pixels. Injured, victimized, or dead Palestinians become merely but “dubious content” rather than grievable lives, to use Judith Butler’s terminology, who are suffering through Israeli atrocities.71 This suspicion also exculpates the Israeli perpetrator:  if a Palestinian has never died, then an Israeli has never killed. B’Tselem volunteer videographers—those who have picked up cameras most often because their testimony is not deemed trustworthy—report that their footage becomes the frequent target of Israeli digital suspicion. In a personal interview, Hebron-based volunteer Suzan Zraqo told me of the first incident she ever filmed with her B’Tselem camera: an Israeli settler honked his horn at a small Palestinian child, aged around 6, and maneuvered the vehicle as if to threaten him.72 The Palestinian child threw a small stone at the car as Zraqo filmed, but the car was not damaged. Later, the Israeli settler returned in the same car, this time

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with its glass broken as if the child had caused the damage. Israeli Border Police arrested the child. Zraqo took her footage to the police station to prove the child’s innocence. She recounted that the Israeli police intimidated her, screamed at her, accused her of lying and of editing the footage. Of her time in the police station, Zraqo said to me, “I stop being a witness, and I become a suspect.”73 In the end, Zraqo’s footage was deemed “unclear” and the child was eventually released. But Zraqo was left with the keen awareness that in the eyes of Israeli law enforcement, she was not a witness but a criminal: a person who deserves accusations of lying and digital falsification. Suzan Zraqo also told me of the one and only time she was asked to testify in Israeli courts about her footage. In 2014 she filmed Israeli settlers vandalizing Palestinian cars at the Wadi a-Nasara checkpoint in Hebron, as Israeli soldiers and police stood by without intervention.74 After B’Tselem published her footage, Zraqo was asked to give testimony to Israeli police, as well as appear in court. She complied. While she was on the stand, the lawyer representing the Israeli settlers accused her of unspecified crimes, attempted to intimidate her by declaring possession of incriminating videos of her children, and ultimately demanded that she answer the basic question, “Why were you even filming?”75 In the court of law, it was as if Zraqo’s very act of filming rendered her videos and her personal credibility suspect.76 The falsification of photography or videography carries significance due to these mediums’ unique, indexical relationship to reality. Sontag notes that while a fake painting—namely one whose authorship or attribution has been faked—falsifies the history of art, a fake photograph—namely one that has been touched up or doctored—falsifies reality itself.77 Palestinians who seek to bolster the credibility of their own footage and to combat digital suspicion might thus appeal to a discipline intimately related to photographic evidence: forensics.

Red Circles, Red Arrows Forensics is, by definition, the use of technology or science in order to establish facts or bolster evidence within the court of law. Forensics appeals to science, which is to say, to the expertise of a discipline widely held to be objective and evidence based. The field of forensics produces evidence by mobilizing the objectivity presumed inherent in science and technology in order to make something evident. In video documentation, one of the simplest and most easily mobilized method of making something evident is through the use of graphic video annotations such as red circles or red arrows. Such annotations direct viewers’ attention to precise pixels of action. Annotations add a layer of actual or perceived expertise to an image. The image arrives to the viewer already processed through the hand of the expert, already technologized to highlight a detail that an ordinary person might miss. In B’Tselem’s hundreds upon hundreds of published videos, only a handful— nine, to be exact—have been annotated visually with video markers.78 The earliest

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published B’Tselem video with visual annotations was released in 2008, showing an IDF officer shooting a rubber-coated metal bullet at an unarmed protester from an extremely close range in the West Bank village of Bil’in.79 The shooting happens quickly in the video: a group of soldiers walk away from the camera along a dirt road, backlit by the brightness of the sun. Protesters and members of the press mill about, but the sun renders their bodies difficult to distinguish from the soldiers. Next, in the left of the frame, a protester is circled in red; a moment later, a soldier is also circled: the target and the perpetrator have been identified (Plate 14). Then, a loud burst: the bullet. The protester holds his wounded leg and screams in pain. From behind the camera, the videographer shouts a loud “HEY!” (in outrage, as if to demand, “What do you think you’re doing?”) and then drops the lens of her camera. In the footage published on YouTube, B’Tselem replays the shooting twice more. We see the unarmed demonstrator get shot once again, magnified, with the shooting slowed down. Finally he is shot once more, this time with the footage slowed to the point that the movements of the Israeli soldier are discernible. The soldier lifts his gun, takes aim, fires, and then hits his casualty. In this last replaying, all extraneous sounds have removed from the video except for the loud pop of the gun. The background noises, the sound of the wind, the protester’s yelp, the videographer’s shout—all these sounds have been rendered mute to funnel attention toward the violence of the bullet shot. For eight years, B’Tselem did not annotate any other footage it published online, instead seeking to remain true to the amateur and largely unedited public archive of citizen-recorded videos. In 2016—the same year B’Tselem ceased its cooperation with Israeli military investigations—video markers returned to its footage, with almost 90  percent of their occurrences situated from this year onward.80 Conceptually, these markers reiterate the organization’s newly stated focus away from the Israeli military courts and toward a broader public who need visual aids and explanations. B’Tselem video director Ehab Tarabieh explained that they add such markers when the footage is blurry or taken at a distance, or “when there is a need to explain more.”81 By this Tarabieh meant the need to explain more to a public when the footage otherwise resists the clarity of self-explanation, of “speaking for itself.” Tarabieh likened the red circles to textual explanations, saying that B’Tselem tries to “use as little text as possible” but finds that its audience needs a precision of language in order to understand how to interpret its footage. “We need to write ‘Israeli’ soldier and ‘Israeli’ settler” in the descriptions of the videos, Tarabieh said, so that viewers—presumably those outside of the conflict—can “understand who the players are.”82 In its more recent annotations, B’Tselem has again and again used red circles to highlight Israeli violence. Red circles highlight Israeli guns, stone-throwing Israeli settlers, the stakeouts of Israeli police, and the movements of the police as they beat Palestinians during violent arrests (Plates 15 and 16).83 Likewise, in B’Tselem’s published footage, Palestinian bodies are at times encircled, too, as if to highlight them as targets with the blood-red of the anterior violence they will experience. In a 2018 annotated video, a Palestinian named

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Mahmoud Nakhleh is circled in red as he runs away from Israeli soldiers (Plate 17).84 Nakhleh tragically does not succeed in fleeing. Israeli soldiers shoot him in the back and proceed to carry his felled body to the side of the street, where he died from the gunshots. The body of Nakhleh is then highlighted in the video not with a red circle as before, but with an oval—as if the circle that had previously bounced around him had been deflated of its very vitality, as well (Plates 18). In yet other annotated videos, such as the set of four synchronized surveillance videos in Plate 19, B’Tselem highlights Israeli perpetrators in blue while the Palestinian victim remains red.85 This chromatic distinguishment allows for an easier legibility of the surveillance footage. But it also serves to separate the recorded bodies, to sort them as if by color into their violently opposing ethnonational categories. Of course, such sorting is not always possible, especially where the violence is close, thick, and personal rather than at a distance enabled by modern weaponry. In violent arrests, such as the one that was so forcible it left a Palestinian with his arm broken in 2017, Israeli police press their bodies against the detained. As a result, both the Israeli police and the Palestinian detainee are united in one horrific circle, a circle that merges them together in violence offered and violence received.86 As part of its efforts to win the so-called social media war, the Israel Defense Forces launched its own YouTube channel in December 2008, during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The IDF’s first published video was a successful missile strike against an underground rocket launching facility that it labels as “purposely” concealed within a Gazan residential area.87 The video was taken from above, from the vantage point of the aerial weapon. As a result, all footage is captured with the crosshairs of the weapon visible, stamped in the center of the grainy frame (Plate 20). The video is heavily annotated, with the target rocket launching facility first marked by an arrow and then a yellow circle tracing the rocket that misfired after the strike. On its YouTube channel, the most popular footage published by the IDF retains these three key visual tropes: an aerial perspective; a weapon’s point of view; and targets circled in color. Visual markers are so common in IDF footage that nine out of its ten most viewed videos feature them.88 By contrast, no visual markers are present in B’Tselem’s top ten most-watched videos.89 This reliance on visual markers coincides with Israel’s stated push toward the vernacular legibility—which it labels as “accessibility”—of its visual media following its public image debacle in 2010. That year, the Freedom Flotilla—a naval convoy carrying activists and humanitarian aid—attempted to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israel seized the convoy, killing nine activists in total, and videos of the state’s violent aggressions rapidly went viral. Thereafter, a senior spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry emphasized the need for simple, “accessible” social media posts that would make Israel’s actions seem legitimate under international law. This spokesperson said,

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It is clear to us that messages that pass through the social media need to be simpler, to be based on elements with international authority. For instance, it isn’t enough to say that there’s a maritime blockade—we have to explain where it can be under international law. Since the explanation is a complex legal one, which contradicts the simplicity of messages by Twitter or Facebook, we have to distill the complex messages in a more accessible way.90

Of course, both B’Tselem and the IDF want their media to be legible to the public: this is why they annotate them with the kind of circles and arrows that premediate visual interpretation. But whereas B’Tselem generally relies upon the “apparent-ness” of human rights violations—the idea that humans will be seen as humans, and violations against them will be apparent to the normal viewer’s eye—the IDF instead relies heavily on circles, arrows, and other forensic-style visual annotations. One of the paradoxes of video annotations is that, like any form of editing, they make videos much more difficult to verify. To combat this, B’Tselem keeps copies of all its footage with its original formatting, folder structures, and metadata aspects to guard against accusations of falsification and prefers that all its volunteers transfer footage to its central office through memory storage devices (“No Dropbox!,” I  kept hearing them shout on the phone as I  sat researching in their headquarters; the online file-sharing service has notoriously suffered from bugs that corrupt metadata).91 B’Tselem has submitted its original footage to forensic experts in prior court cases. Yet, the video annotations’ appearance in B’Tselem footage—and its utter prevalence in the IDF’s—indicate that this footage is not merely intended for the forensic expert in court, but instead for the broader, wider court of public opinion. The rise in annotation makers thus mirrors B’Tselem’s recent decision to cease compliance with the Israeli legal system and signals a turn toward an audience that constitutes a broader, more public, and extrajudicial forum.

Forensic Abstraction Almost fifteen years ago—long before the founding of forensic representation firms such as Forensic Architecture, the New  York Times Visual Investigations department, or Bellingcat, B’Tselem took the rare step of publishing its first video with 3D computer graphics (CG) rendering as a means to analyze and publicize Israeli state violence.92 The video, titled “B’Tselem investigation: The Killing of ‘Itaf Zalat,” documents the 2006 killing of a Palestinian woman named ‘Itaf Zalat who was inside her living room when an Israeli soldier, stationed inside the residential building opposite hers, opened fire.93 The shots wounded two of her daughters, and a bullet hit her in the head, killing her in what B’Tselem has deemed an unjustified use of open fire. B’Tselem’s video investigation renders her home, and the building opposite it, in CG to analyze the violence in an attempt to prove its illegality (Figure 5.4). At

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Figure  5.4  “B’Tselem investigation:  The Killing of ‘Itaf Zalat” (published October 18, 2006)  featuring a 3D CG model of an Israeli soldier fatally shooting a Palestinian in an adjacent building in Tukaram. This is the earliest and only example of B’Tselem’s use of visually abstracted, architectural aesthetics in video, yet it bears a striking resemblance to Forensic Architecture’s aesthetic tactics published twelve years later.

one point, the virtual video camera pans within the 3D recreated space, as if by machinima, and follows the rendered Israeli soldier as he takes aim at the Zalat family home.94 The machinima then cuts directly to real photographic imagery of the Zalat home—now pockmarked with bullet holes—in a move that fully and seamlessly blends the real with the forensically recreated.95 At the time that B’Tselem published this video investigation, it had not yet launched its Camera Distribution Project. Instead, it divided its produced videos into three categories:  “Testimony,” featuring direct interviews with victims and eyewitnesses; “Documentary,” featuring edited and professionally recorded video stories; and “B’Tselem Investigation,” of which this video is the sole representative.96 The B’Tselem’s video department quickly abandoned the scientific, forensic-style approach to visual evidence visible in this video, opting instead to promote the amateur visuality produced by its citizen videographers in the Camera Project as the primary means to gather visual evidence in the Occupied Territories. Indeed, the raw videos captured by B’Tselem’s volunteers show their humanity through their flaws:  they are framed jaggedly by the often shaky hand of the citizen experiencing her own life, rather than analyzing it after the fact. They are

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misframed, at times missing the crucial action of a photographic event; the camera passes back and forth between hands; or the sound of the videographer’s breathing dominates as he runs to a scene. In this way, the amateur videos show viewers the so-called direct experience of the Israeli occupation’s violence, in a manner that B’Tselem argues cannot be ignored.97 Yet when these videos move into advanced forensic or visual analysis, their visual texture is stripped. It is rendered bare as abstraction. Abstraction, indeed, has historically been the opposite of B’Tselem’s approach to its human rights work. Instead of generalizing—instead of abstracting a specific Palestinian’s experience into a generalized, ethnonational one—the organization fastidiously researches and publishes every possible detail:  dates, names, times, places, eyewitness testimonies, photographs, and unedited original video footage. B’Tselem’s ideological stance has been that these details provide the authenticity needed for veracity. In other words, these details pave the way toward epistemological truth. But beginning in 2010, frustrated by the repeated serious injuries to and deaths of unarmed Palestinians by Israeli tear gas canisters, B’Tselem began commissioning forensic recreations that utilized its citizen videography not as evidence in itself but as source material.98 B’Tselem partnered with Forensic Architecture, a research agency launched in 2010 by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman out of Goldsmiths in London. Forensic Architecture investigates human rights abuses and violations of international law through the production of spatial recreations, which it compiles by using citizen-recorded videos and photographs, surveillance camera footage, satellite imagery, and on-site surveying where possible. Forensic Architecture pairs these media together with other analysis modalities, such as ballistic analysis, physics modeling, and audio forensics. As a whole, the organization’s investigations “seek to provide new kinds of evidence for international prosecution teams, political organizations, NGOs, and the United Nations.”99 Forensic Architecture investigations are premised on the idea that the analysis of human rights violations in “media-rich environments” requires the creation of 3D models and interactive cartographies that sew together images, videos, maps, urban measurement, and architectural considerations. Like the IDF, Forensic Architecture aims to present its research in a self-proclaimed “accessible” format.100 However, Forensic Architecture openly operates as an antagonist to the Israeli military, frequently launching investigations in partnership with B’Tselem to argue against the legality of Israeli state violence against Palestinians. Forensic Architecture launched one such investigation into the 2009 death of a Palestinian man named Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma. Abu Rahma was demonstrating near the separation barrier in Bil’in when an Israeli soldier fired a high-velocity tear gas canister at him from an extremely short range. The canister hit his chest, causing massive internal bleeding and ultimately his death. Israeli Open Fire Regulations specify that such munitions be discharged with an arc of at least 60 degrees or above the horizontal plane, as horizontal shots can prove fatal.101 Yet Forensic Architecture’s investigation, which was conducted in partnership

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with B’Tselem, found that the only possible discharge angle for the lethal shot was near horizontal—in other words, a direct hit (Plate 21).102 As part of its investigation, Forensic Architecture used three separate citizenrecorded videos to reconstruct the scene of Abu Rahma’s death, one of which captured the precise moment the lethal tear gas canister was discharged. However, there remains a stark aesthetic different between B’Tselem’s citizen videography and the forensic video reports produced by agencies such as Forensic Architecture. B’Tselem’s citizen-recorded videos are representational, featuring bodies (Palestinians, soldiers, settlers, activists), streets, homes—in other words, the messy details of a lived experience. Forensic Architecture’s videos, are, on the contrary, aesthetically abstracted to the point that Palestinian bodies are all but absent. Does abstraction serve to sharpen evidence? Or, on the contrary, does abstraction obliterate evidence? The investigation into the 2009 killing of Abu Rahma by a tear gas canister heavily mobilizes 3D modeling to recreate the scene, yielding an aesthetics of abstraction. In one of its diagrams, soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators mill about, each with identically abstracted male bodies, distinguished from each other only by color. In a sense the abstraction is deeply optimistic in its mimetic depiction of Palestinian and Israeli bodies, each one stripped of the ethnonational markers that divide them. While the abstracted rendering is largely black and white, one unique color is reserved for a singular body: that of the target, Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma. He is the only human rendered in alien-like green. From his green body emanates a yellow ray of light—not as a symbol of divinity, as it might first appear, but instead a method of mapping which Israeli soldiers stationed across the fence had been capable of firing the fatal shot (Plate 22). What appears as an emanation from Abu Rahma is but a mark of the area from which he could plausibly have been shot—targeted, with munitions emanating toward him.103 Moreover, the abstract rendering absents the likeness of Abu Rahma, instead replacing him with an aestheticized abstraction rendered by software to reproduce his death, devoid of his human attributes. He is killed once by the Israeli munition and again by abstraction. Abu Rahma becomes a mere silhouette of the person he once was. The uncanniest use of abstracted Palestinian bodies within Forensic Architecture’s repertoire is the 2018 analysis of the killing of Luai Kahil and Amir al-Nimrah, two Palestinian teenagers who had been sitting on a rooftop’s edge in Gaza when they were killed by an Israeli missile engaged in the “roof knocking” procedure. “Roof knocking” is a procedure in which the Israeli military strikes a targeted building with one or more small missiles prior to launching the final, explosive missile that will reduce the structure to rubble. The “knocks on the roof ” are meant to warn any inhabitants to exit the building immediately. Israel maintains that this procedure is nonlethal. In the incident, the two Palestinian teenagers climbed up to the roof, sat on its edge, and took a selfie that became the last photograph of them alive. Forensic Architecture used this photograph, together with multiple other videos, to recreate the teenagers and the building in 3D CG. The resultant renderings transform the boys into shades of whites and grays, like ghosts. The daytime sky becomes an ominous black (Plate 23). But at minute 08:40 in the published video investigation,

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the boys’ selfie is reinscribed onto the rendering, aligning their visages with the preserved forms of their CG bodies (Plate 24).104 The resultant image vibrates between the uncanny valley of CG and the messy representations of the world of the living—a vibration that, if anything, highlights the disconnection between the two. The shadows of the rendered faces and the actual faces attempt to harmonize with each other, to align with each other, only to fail and remain stubbornly separate. The abstraction resists the precision of actual Palestinian bodies. When actual Palestinian bodies are present in Forensic Architecture’s videos, they are instrumentalized for the forensic task of synchronizing multiple videos. In the analysis of the killing of teenagers Kahil and al-Nimrah by the “roof knocking” procedure, the “movement of [Palestinian] figures on the ground” is used to synchronize IDF military footage with CCTV footage.105 Similarly, in order to prove which Israeli soldier shot and killed a Palestinian teenager named Nadeem Nawara in 2014, Forensic Architecture synchronized CNN and surveillance camera footage by using the so-called distinct movements of a Palestinian man in a white shirt.106 His body becomes something like a clap to synchronize audio and video recordings that should be edited out in postproduction. Later in the analysis, the sound of the bullet is likewise used to synchronize footage. Both this inanimate sound of the bullet and the very animated, live body of a Palestinian serve identical purposes in Forensic Architecture’s work. The Palestinian body is reduced to a utilitarian form. The real bodies of Palestinians appear, then, only in service to the forensic analysis that renders them away into abstraction. Yet we should remain deeply wary of this abstraction for two important reasons: it both homogenizes and erases Palestinian bodies from discourse. Homogenization and erasure are two key tactics utilized by the Israeli militarized occupation to discredit and dehumanize Palestinians and continue an oppressive regime of violence. Homogenization—the process of making Palestinian bodies appear the same, each as abstract male figures in forensic renderings—furthers the ongoing Israeli settlercolonial narrative that all Palestinians are “liars,” “troublemakers,” “rioters,” “instigators,” and violent enemies who must be controlled with ongoing military force.107 In her analysis of the presentation of the First Intifada in Jewish Israeli media, Tamar Liebes found that Israeli framing mechanisms included both “personalizing,” meaning the personalization of Jewish victims and IDF officials, as well as “sanitizing,” meaning the minimization of portrayals of Palestinian humanity or human suffering.108 The Israeli settler-colonial lens benefits from bringing its own side into focus, while generalizing or abstracting away Palestinians and their humanity. Moreover, the erasure and obliteration of Palestinian bodies from the Jewish Israeli eye is likewise a tool of the militarized Israeli occupation. In the same text, Liebes noted that Palestinians are subjected not only to a frame of “sanitizing” by Israeli media but also of “excising,” meaning a deliberate removal from the Jewish Israeli media framework.109 In her words, Israeli television news during the First Intifada “symbolically obliterated the Palestinians, showing them only in the role they play in the Arab-Israeli conflict …. Seen from our [Jewish Israeli] point of view the face of the Palestinian is hooded, both literally and metaphorically.”110 The Israeli regime has long sought to excise or invisibilize Palestinians from Jewish

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Israeli vision by, for example, strategically covering the ruins of Palestinian villages with KKL-JNF forests, creating segregated roadways for Palestinian drivers, and blocking Palestinian civilian life from sight with an eight-meter-tall separation wall. When Palestinians become “hooded” or invisible to Jewish Israeli vision, they become barely human—ungrievable even, to use Judith Butler’s framing.111 Abstractions mobilized by forensic analysis further this trend by draining human features out of Palestinian bodies, even as they seek to secure justice for Palestinians.

Metapolitical Injustice and the Pre-social Body Wariness of the similarities in visual tactics between forensic abstraction and the apparati of the Israeli occupation remains essential. However, forensic abstraction also yields notable benefits for human right discourse in three distinct ways:  it appeals to epistemology rather than morality; it appeals to a “pre-social body” deserving of human rights; and via abstraction it frames Israeli human rights abuses as higher order, metapolitical injustices. Forensic Architecture employs abstraction as a means toward the scientific, turning the abstracted forms of Palestinian bodies into empirical evidence to support a scientific hypothesis that can be subjected to the rigors of the scientific method. The move to abstraction is thus an appeal to the scientific epistemology, namely to what is “true” or “false” rather than what is “right” or “wrong.” Through obliterating the human details of Palestinian bodies, these abstractions aim to replace question of morality with those of epistemology. Thereafter, epistemology offers a back door into morality, once again: once you see that a killing is true— that it truly and undoubtedly occurred—you must agree that it is wrong. This back door into morality is essential in highly contested zones of conflict, where moral viewpoints have become calcified and stratified across ethnonational lines. The use of abstraction thus mimics the Palestinian appeal to the concept of a “pre-social body”—a body that exists before gender, nationality, ethnicity, race, class, age, or other social categories have had the chance to mark it—as a way or means of access to human rights. A pre-social body is of course an abstracted body, a generalized one. Although many academics have summarily rejected notions of a pre-social body, Lori Allen notes that “it is exactly this conception of the presocial body” that “show[s]‌that they [Palestinians] belong to the same sympathydeserving category of the human.”112 As stateless people, Palestinians are deprived of what Hannah Arendt has described as a “place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.”113 They lack civil rights, as these rights would require their recognition as part of civil society by having a state, or possessing citizenship.114 Human rights, however, operate outside of civil society. But notably Arendt argues that human beings do not simply possess human rights by virtue of their sheer humanity; instead, persons must first be judged as “human” in order to gain these rights. Or as Judith Butler has so eloquently put it, “humanity is divided between those for whom we feel urgent and unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all.”115 The appeal to

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a Palestinian pre-social body is thus an appeal to appear human—to be judged as human, with all the dignities and rights that accompany such a judgment. B’Tselem has historically sought to portray Palestinians as humans and to secure human rights for Palestinians through the amassment of details. The organization meticulously and assiduously documents names, dates, times, locations, eyewitness testimonies, photographs, and unedited original video footage of human rights violations. Yet the organization’s decision to cease cooperation with military investigation is a deliberate move away from the pursuit of details. This change marks the organization’s public recognition of generalized, systemic, and structural inequalities of the occupation as ones that details cannot remedy. Even details yielding successful prosecution of soldiers cannot fix the occupation; instead, they whitewash it. Low-level soldiers are prosecuted for violating orders, shielding their higher-up commanders and the structural violence they perpetuate. The legality of military orders, themselves, is rarely questioned. Therefore, in B’Tselem’s new policy on noncooperation with the Israeli judicial system, it has distanced itself from the gathering and mobilization of the level of detail inherent in probative evidence. Instead, the organization asks for a much larger, more general solution to the entirety of the Israeli occupation. That solution, of course, is to end it. Abstraction away from details has been the modus operandi of another Israeli anti-occupation organization, Breaking the Silence. The organization gathers testimony from former soldiers who served in the occupied West Bank and Gaza since the start of the Second Intifada and publishes these as collected books and a searchable online archive. The testimonies gathered are stripped of all identifying details, such as: the names of IDF soldiers, commanders, or battalions; the names of Palestinian civilians or Israeli settlers; and even locations of incidents at times. This stripping of details results in part from the review and approval process conducted by the Israeli Military Censor of each testimony.116 But more so, the draining of details is an ideological move to address “the broad picture of the policy of occupation, which is inherently immoral,” noted one of its cofounders, Yehuda Shaul, rather than the specific conduct of any one Israeli soldier.117 Likewise the recent turn to abstraction on the part of B’Tselem is thus a shift in its organizational understanding of the type of injustices it seeks to remedy, from what legal scholar Nancy Fraser defines as ordinary-political misrepresentation to the much more severe metapolitical injustice.118 Injustices of ordinary-political misrepresentation are injustices in which a civil society and its government deny persons who are generally agreed to be members of that society the opportunity to participate in decision-making, as peers or equals. As Fraser describes, these injustices occur within political societies “whose boundaries and membership are widely assumed to be settled.”119 For instance, ordinary-political misrepresentational injustice occurs when a citizen is denied a fair trial under law. Such injustices occur “when a polity’s rules for decision making deny some who are counted in principle as members the chance to participate fully.”120 The citizenship or membership of such a person into a political community has not been called into question; instead the injustice occurs from the mistreatment of that citizen by the polity.

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The second and more severe level of injustice is one in which civil society and its government wrongly draw the boundaries of citizenship. This kind of injustice, called metapolitical injustice, entails the denial of civil membership to a population, or the denial of its opportunity to participate in what Fraser calls “authorized contests over justice” such as elections.121 Metapolitical injustice arises “as a result of the division of political space into bounded polities” or when “a polity’s boundaries are drawn in such a way as to wrongly deny some people the chance to participate at all in its authorized contests over justice.”122 In such cases, a person is not simply denied the right to ordinary-political representation, but denied the very right of constituting a body that is entitled to political representation at all. The American civil rights movement sought to remedy the metapolitical injustice caused by the mischaracterization of African Americans as non-Americans who were not entitled to the right to vote. This kind of justice is a second-order injustice: it is meta political, of a higher order than the realm of the political itself. This injustice is perpetrated by an act of misframing persons outside of the edges of the political, as if pushing them outside the boundaries of a frame, a photograph. Throughout the course of B’Tselem twenty-five years of cooperating with judicial investigations, the organization has operated under the assumption that Palestinians were victims of ordinary-political misrepresentation. Palestinians were denied fair access to file their grievances and to seek judicial redress. B’Tselem sought to remedy this injustice within the Israeli polity through the use of videos as evidence in judicial litigation. But of course, this did not work. Palestinians have not merely been subjected to ordinary-political misrepresentation by the Israeli occupation but have been denied political citizenship altogether. They have been misframed as noncitizens. No amount of videos can make this evident: the evidence, instead, lies in the boundaries of the video frame. B’Tselem has therefore acknowledged this misframing by demanding an end to the occupation, itself, as the source of this metapolitical injustice that violently misframes Palestinians as noncitizens, not worthy of rights, considerations, distributions, or other legal affordances given due to political membership to society. By ceasing cooperation with the game of the Israeli legal system, B’Tselem has demanded to make the frame visible and to obliterate it.

Against Na ve Realism Throughout this chapter, we have seen that videos have come to be treated with naïve realism in courts, as if they were “silent witnesses” that can “speak for themselves.” Palestinian citizen videographers largely mobilize videos as exculpation of their assumed-criminal bodies. In the rare instances in which Palestinian citizen videography succeeds in prompting judicial action against Jewish Israelis, legal sentences lack commensuration with human rights infractions. Moreover, as evidence, Palestinian citizen videography is challenged by digital suspicion—namely, by claims against video’s naïvely assumed realistic

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and indexical relationship to reality. Claims of digital suspicion work to erode the elevated epistemic position that naïve realism imbues upon photography and videography. Thus suspected, videos have been folded into forensic investigations as material to produce more compelling, expert-status reports that might serve as evidence in their stead. In forensic or visual investigations, citizen-recorded videos are not treated as evidence in their own right. Instead, they become media in need of explanation, debate, expertise, and analyses, akin to their early treatments in courts of law. The videos do not “speak” for themselves; forensic analysis speaks for them. Take the work of the New York Times (NYT) Visual Investigations department, which launches similar investigations to—and often in partnership with—Forensic Architecture. Like Forensic Architecture, NYT Visual Investigations employs citizenrecorded footage to reconstruct the scene of an investigation and refers to such footage as a “clue,” as if it were a hint in need of a detective.123 When asked what he had learned through the process of building a NYT Visual Investigations story, a journalist named Malachy Browne described a feeling of awe at the sheer quantity of videos that exist ready for analysis, yet whose meaning remains latent. He said, I’ve learned that there is an incredible amount of documentary evidence hiding in plain sight. When you gather and analyze it, you can answer key journalistic questions like when and where did an event happen, who was involved, what happened and how. In an era of contentious “he said-she said” narratives, that evidence is valuable in supporting one side of a story, or explaining to our readers in a transparent way how an event happened. That is the common thread through most of our visual investigations.124

To Browne, the citizen-recorded videos are evidence, but concealed evidence (“hiding in plain sight”), which must be made overtly evident by amassment and analysis (the work of “gather[ing] and analyz[ing]”). Such work is then published as a visual investigation, rendering the evidence accessible (“transparent”) to the public, albeit shifted in form. Certainly, citizen-recorded video sources remain crucial—no, central—to forensic visual investigations. In the Abu Rahma incident, citizen videography attained in partnership with B’Tselem allowed Forensic Architecture to determine the distance between Abu Rahma and the Israeli soldier who shot him and to narrow the range of possible munitions discharge angles. Through consolidating citizen videography and layering it with ballistic analysis and scene modeling, Forensic Architecture produced a final report of the Abu Rahma incident and accompanying video that appears to be more precise, convincing, scientific, and expertly argued than the three citizen-recorded videos, alone. Crucially, agencies like Forensic Architecture, or departments like NYT’s Visual Investigations, stake their work on the idea that videos-as-evidence are not self-evident. They are concealed, hidden, or latent. Citizen videography needs

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analysis to be elevated, to be made accessible, and to be made expert. The analysis provides “forms of evidence that other methods cannot engage with” (Forensic Architecture) and demonstrates “next-generation truth-telling” (NYT).125 Ultimately, the move away from naïve realism is good:  it is essential to complicate the independently held probative value of visual material. Theorists such as Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Gil Hochberg among others have long argued that images represent constructed realities and therefore cannot be considered to be objective representations of reality.126 Videos are always up for debate: they must always be interpreted and “read” like all other evidence. Reading “is the only thing one can do with evidence since it does not speak for itself,” notes Thomas Keenan.127 Evidence does not close a case, it opens it. Evidence— whether in the form of video, document, testimony, or other sorts—is presented for consideration, dispute, and interpretation. When a video is called “evidence,” this naming delineates its audience as those who can pass judgment—namely, judges and jurors. The work of forensic analysis is to make an appeal to a public, as is clear from its very epistemology. The word forensics derives from the Latin adjective forensis, meaning “public” or “of the forum” from the Latin noun, forum, for which no translation into English is needed. Forensic Architecture has stated its practice is one of “establishing forums around evidence (rather than the more common procedure whereby evidence enters existing courts).”128 The actions of consideration, dispute, and interpretation are ones that can be taken by a wider public than that constituted by the judicial setting. As WITNESS’s Video as Evidence field guide says encouragingly, “videos captured by activists may never find their way into a courtroom … But this does not diminish the value of video to support the pursuit of accountability.”129 Accountability can arise within extrajudicial settings, as videos make appeals to a host of other audiences, ranging from those in quasi-judicial settings—such as the UN Human Rights Committee—to those in the general public.130 Thus conceived, videos can move toward a critical jurisprudence of the visual within courts and support the rallying of an extrajudicial public empowered to watch them, take them in, and interpret their frames of view.

Chapter 6 CAMERA AS WEAPON

The camera becomes like a weapon. You can’t possibly put a hand on a[n Israeli] soldier. You cannot put a hand on a[n Israeli] settler. If you pick up a rock and you throw it, something will happen to you—they’ll arrest you, [or] they’ll beat you. But when you pick up the camera, it’s a way of fighting. —Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, B’Tselem volunteer videographer1

“A More Effective Way of Resisting” One day before I visited the home of Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh in Hebron, Israeli soldiers restricted Palestinian movement through the city by inexplicably closing a checkpoint near her home. Hearing of the closure, Fayzeh picked up her B’Tselemissued camera and went to the site to film. Fayzeh told me, “The moment the [Israeli] soldiers saw my camera, they opened the checkpoint again,” restoring a semblance of free passage to her and her Palestinian community. Fayzeh knows that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is asymmetrical in force and asymmetrical in justice: Israelis enjoy the benefits of civilian law, while the mass of Palestinians live under Israeli military law. Fayzeh wants to fight the injustice of the ongoing Israeli occupation, and her tactic of choice is her video camera because it is, in her words, a “more effective way of resisting.” This chapter traces the joint mechanical histories of cameras and weapons and the ways that advanced modes of visual capture have become intricately enmeshed in modern warfare. It considers the positionality of the camera in relation to the gun—namely Gunshot point of view (POV), where the camera gaze is aligned with the sightlines of a gun; and its opposite, Barrel POV, where the camera gaze faces back at the barrel of a gun. Both cameras and guns “shoot,” one with symbolic power and the other with literal power. Even though B’Tselem citizen cameras lack literal power, as tools for gaining advantage over the opposing side they have taken on qualities of a weapon—or have become weaponized—in the Palestinian territories. As cameras have increasingly become weaponized and mobilized as tools of Palestinian countervisuality, they have also engaged in acts of what Rabih Mroué

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terms “double shooting,” meaning direct face-offs between cameras and guns.2 A key argument in this chapter is that these double shootings hold affective power by aligning the camera with the eye of the spectator in moments of perceived mortal threat, and as such they destabilize what Ariella Azoulay calls the “photographic object,” instead shaking viewers awake to the more potent event of photography.3 Finally, this chapter traces Israeli responses to Palestinian countervisuality, namely the tactic of arming its own soldiers and citizens with cameras in what amounts to “counter-countervisuality” or “media mimicry” of Palestinian citizen videography. Thus what had begun as a battle between guns and cameras has yielded a battle between cameras and cameras, as each side struggles to dominate the visual sphere and its circulating economy of images. Paradoxically, media mimicry has produced closed loops of images in which Israelis become both the subjects and objects of footage. With their infinite mirroring and degradation of a single, hegemonic framing, such closed loops offer up images that show what Žižek has termed the “objective” violence of the ongoing settler-colonial regime in Israel–Palestine, in which the very legalistic, operational, institutional, and economic mechanisms of the Israeli occupation become visible.4

Gunshot POV: The Weapon and the Eye From its very invention, the video camera has been linked to automatic weaponry. In 1861, while watching the wheel of a paddle steamer turn and propel a boat through the water, Richard Gatling ideated the design for a crank-driven, cylindrical machine gun.5 Twenty years later, the first prototype for the motion picture camera—Etienne-Jules Marey’s Fusil Photographique—was modeled on this revolving rifle design, creating what Paul Virilio has called a “chronophotographic rifle” (Figure  6.1).6 Like the machine gun, this motion picture camera fired sequential shots of film. The Fusil Photographique not only looked like a gun, it was held like one, too: with its handle braced on one shoulder, the shooter stared down a long barrel, took aim, and shot. The commonalities between guns and cameras predate Marey’s cinematic invention. Both rely on viewfinders to spot their targets, activating the relationship between aiming and framing. Guns and cameras are both agile mechanisms, shooting en plein air, outside the once darkened and static chamber of a camera obscura or the heavy, stationary localization of a cannonball launcher. A gun and a camera both “shoot” in what is a deeply aggressive act. For guns this aggression is obvious. In the case of the camera, Susan Sontag has noted that, while many fantasize the photographer to be a detached and “ideal observer” who documents his or her subjects without intervention, photography is an act of exploitation.7 In English one hawkishly “takes” a photograph. Photographers Henri CartierBresson and Richard Avedon have talked openly about the exploitative nature of their photography, often linking this exploitation to male sexual dominance over the female photographic subject.8 Other photographers wished to suppress this more aggressive interpretation of image making. Ansel Adams advocated for

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Figure 6.1  Etienne-Jules Marey’s Fusil Photographique, a motion picture camera that was modeled on the design of a revolving rifle.

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saying that one “makes” a picture rather than “takes” it to diminish the belligerence of photography’s verb.9 Yet we know from historical accounts that cameras are intricately tied to warfare, the pinnacle of aggressive acts. Since World War II, when Hitler deployed a cameraman with each and every battalion, wars have no longer been fought without cameras.10 From Virilio we learn that in tandem with the “war machine” there has always been a “watching machine” that produces visual representation of military action. As Virilio wrote, From the original watch-tower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eyes function being the function of a weapon.11

Virilio notes that sighting devices have been embedded into the inner tubes of artillery devices themselves, as experts became discontent with the imprecision barrel mounting.12 Inner-tube mounting gives the weapon’s viewfinder the precision framing akin to a Single Lens Reflex camera, not merely the almostexact sightline of the point-and-shoot camera. The broader mechanisms of war and cameras have become so thoroughly enmeshed that Virilio was moved to declare, “War is Cinema, Cinema is War,” in a total lamination of image capture to modern warfare.13 “For men at war,” Virilio concludes, “the function of the weapon is the function of the eye,” making violence and visuality concomitant.14 Moreover, cameras and weapons have often been conjoined, unified into singular seeing-killing machines. Many weapons are guided by or monitored through cameras, such as the Marvin ground surveillance vehicle, the Fetch It minesweeper, the Israeli-made Global Hawk and Predator drones, and other warheads fitted with video cameras or optical laser guidance systems.15 These lethal weapons “unite both seeing and killing” under a singular scopic regime, as Allen Feldman has noted.16 Indeed in industrialized warfare, the act of seeing has taken on an identical bodily habitus to the act of killing. Military pilots trip the shutter of their reconnaissance cameras with the same hand gesture used to trip the detonation of their aerial weapons.17 More recently the gesture of holding a camera has been confused with that of holding a gun, to lethal effect:  in the 2018 police killing of Stephon Clark in Sacramento, California, two officers pursued Clark into his grandmother’s backyard, and—after mistakenly believing he had a gun—killed him with twenty shots. When police finally approach Clark to offer him medical care, they found him dead with his cell phone lying under his body—suggesting that what Clark was holding in his hands was not a gun but his smartphone.18 Notably, while the police wear body cameras and shoot through the viewfinders of their guns, the near-total conjoinment of weapons and cameras is not mutually achieved by civilians. As Alisa Lebow notes, while weapons are equipped with cameras for target finding, marksmanship, and reconnaissance, most cameras are not fitted with lethal weapons.19 Cameras like Stephon Clark’s do not merge the visual with the lethal: they are merely scopic instruments. Or to generalize even

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further, in the mass protests that followed Clark’s death, demonstrators armed with cameras did not have the capacity to accidentally shoot the police because they mistook police body cameras for guns. This raises the question: What is the position of the camera to the gun? Is the camera positioned as an extension of the weapon, in Gunshot POV—namely, staring out of the sightlines of a gun? Or is the camera instead positioned in response to the weapon, in Barrel POV—namely, facing back at the barrel of a lethal weapon? In cinematic language, notes Lebow, this dichotomy parallels the “shot”/“reverse shot.”20 The “reverse shot” holds only symbolic power over the gaze, whereas the “shot” also holds literal power, namely the power to destroy, to eviscerate, to kill. In Gunshot POV, the very act of seeing can be equated to the act of destroying. To be caught in the “sightlines of the enemy’s camera,” notes Lebow, “is to foreshadow being caught in the crosshairs of the enemy’s gun.”21 In other words, to obliterate the other, one must merely keep him in constant sight. Or as Virilio has so aptly summed it up, in today’s warfare “what is perceived is already lost.”22 Sight foreshadows death by guaranteeing its possibility. When Palestinian bodies are captured in the sightlines of Israeli cameras, the capture functions as a mechanism of Israeli power, not merely an illusion of it. This power was exercised at the founding of the State of Israel with the production of images that aligned guns with the camera’s gaze in Gunshot POV. In a 1948 photograph of al-Nasirah/Nazareth, two Jewish snipers watch over a field below, where Palestinian residents from al-Nasirah and surrounding villages surrender their weapons to Israeli paramilitary forces and turn themselves in to be counted (Figure 6.2).23 The photograph is captured behind the sightlines of the Israeli sniper guns, with guns and cameras trained on the Palestinians in the distance in a lamination of the symbolic and literal power of shooting. Today, over seventy years later, this visual alignment of the camera and the weapon has become the aesthetic choice of the IDF’s YouTube channel (Figure 6.3).24 Nine of its ten most popular videos are taken from Gunshot POV, commonly recorded from military jets that frame Palestinian targets from the air and eliminate them.25 Nowhere is the power of Gunshot POV more clearly activated than in Israeli images photographed through guns themselves. In 2013, a scandal broke when an Israeli soldier named Mor Ostrovski published a photo of a young Palestinian boy in the crosshairs of his sniper gun to Instagram (Figure 6.4).26 The photograph was quickly picked up and publicized by a blogger, and international outcry followed that lamented the dehumanization of Palestinian children as targets. In response, the IDF predictably distanced itself from Ostrovski’s photograph, stating, “this is a severe incident which doesn’t accord with the IDF’s spirit and values. The issue was brought to the attention of the soldier’s commanding officers, will be examined and properly handled.”27 A criminal investigation against Ostrovski was opened and then promptly and predictably closed after absolving him of wrongdoing.28 Ostrovski deleted his Instagram account and continued his military service as before.

Figure 6.2  Two Jewish snipers are stationed above Palestinians in the field below, who turn themselves into the newly formed Jewish state of Israel to be counted. Photographer: Beno Rothenberg, Israel State Archive, 1948.

Figure 6.3  In one of the most popular videos on the IDF’s YouTube channel, a drone enters Israeli airspace, is caught in the sightlines of a weapon, and then eliminated in a spectacular midair explosion. The missile that ultimately eliminates the drone (circled) is visible on the lower left-hand quadrant of the video still.

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Figure 6.4  A Palestinian boy in the crosshairs of an IDF sniper, posted to Instagram by Israeli soldier Mor Ostrovski in 2013.

The photograph—clearly taken from Gunshot POV—depicts Ostrovski’s power over the unknowing Palestinian subject he catches in the sightlines of his weapon. The photograph is published as war spoil, as booty—and even colorized with the Instagram filters to take on a vintage and timeless air. The photograph dehumanizes its Palestinian subject by suggesting that the boy is merely target practice for the Israeli occupying force and by generalizing his position to that of the enemy. The photograph visually illustrates the crass Jewish Israeli phrase, “The only good Arab is a dead Arab.” Moreover the photograph aligns its viewer’s gaze with the vantage point of a killer. The spectator’s gaze becomes allied with the “high-tech precision aim” of the weapon, invoking a “vertiginous dawning realisation that one is being made to identify with a lethally destructive force,” as Lebow has written.29 The viewer’s gaze takes on the first-person perspective of shooting not just with the camera but also with the gun in what has become a militaristically aligned gaze. In looking at

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this photograph one recommits the violence of aiming. Put differently, in looking one momentarily embodies the threat of lethal violence inherent in Gunshot POV.

Barrel POV: B’Tselem’s “Shooting Back” When B’Tselem launched its Camera Distribution Project in 2007, the initiative was aptly titled “Shooting Back,” with the notion that the citizen cameras of Palestinians could shoot back at the regime-bestowed Israelis’ guns. In “shooting back,” cameras are positioned in Barrel POV. The Palestinian citizen camera is not aligned with the weapon’s gaze, but opposed to it and gazes back at it. If the “gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates,” as Foucault has written, then cameras in Barrel POV seek to exert symbolic power by disrupt the enframing of a visual field of conflict.30 Unlike a camera that is aligned with or embedded in a gun, a camera that opposes a gun lacks lethal force. Yet over and over I have heard Palestinians refer to their cameras as weapons. Arafat Kanaan, a Palestinian teenager who cofounded a media organization called the Nilin Media Group, said:  “The camera is like a weapon for us. It can show everyone in the world what the truth is.”31 Though the Nilin Media Group is now defunct, for years it produced weekly videos of nonviolent protests against the separation wall, as well as short documentaries about villagers’ lives under the Israeli occupation. Kanaan’s weaponized camera serves as a tool not to physically injure Israelis but to seek redress via exposure.32 Likewise, Nariman Tamimi, one of the Palestinian leaders of the struggle against the occupation in the West Bank village of a-Nabi Saleh, speaks of her camera as a weapon. She said: I think of the camera as a kind of weapon because with the camera and the photographs I take, I talk with the other, so that he/she will change his/her mind, because I see the vast majority of Israelis as victims of the occupation, just like the Palestinians are victims. With my weapon, the camera, I  show them the truth about the occupation that the Israeli government is trying to hide from them. I try to revive the humanity in the other.33

Tamimi’s weaponized camera is significantly a weapon not to harm the other but to influence the other. It is a weapon due to its revelatory potential, which is to say, it shows things to people that they have not previously seen.34 And as a weapon, Tamimi’s camera can injure her. While documenting a 2012 weekly protest in a-Nabi Saleh, she recorded the fatal shooting of her brother, Rushdi Tamimi. Nariman no longer uses that video camera, as she has associated it too painfully with her brother’s death. The camera hurts her to use, as if it were a weapon or a boomerang of sorts. While her camera is a weapon that she shoots for justice, the injustice she captured returns to her and wounds her. B’Tselem’s former Camera Project director, Oren Yakobovich, also acknowledges the weaponization of cameras. He left B’Tselem to found an international human

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Figure 6.5  Former B’Tselem video director Oren Yakobovich holds up a hidden camera, his tool of choice for securing human rights.

rights organization, Videre Est Credere, that extends B’Tselem’s countervisual tactics to wider geographic areas. In describing his new company, Yakobovich uses militaristic language, calling the camera a “new front” in the “fight” for human rights.35 Like most Jewish Israeli citizens, Yakobovich served a compulsory term in the IDF and is intimately familiar with militarization. He compares cameras to weapons, saying “I used to carry a big gun. Now, I am carrying this,” holding up a tiny camera (Figure 6.5). “This is a much more powerful and much, much more effective weapon.”36 The weaponized camera is the less damaging alternative for a Palestinian choosing between visuality and violence. Certainly the B’Tselem camera can be seen as provocation:  its gaze counters that which is tightly held and controlled by the Israeli regime. The Palestinian citizen camera challenges what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the “right to look,” meaning the right to counter a regime’s visual perspective with one’s own.37 These Palestinian cameras challenge the right to frame the conflict, exerting a form of control by setting the visual limits of the frame itself. Thus the camera’s provocation is perhaps even one that is “tantamount to a gun,” as Lebow has written.38 Indeed a B’Tselem volunteer named Wydian Zaban told me, “I feel targeted because of my camera, as if I had a weapon with me.”39 The weaponization of cameras in Israel–Palestine provokes an interrogation of the word “weapon” itself. A weapon is traditionally a tool used to inflict bodily harm upon another, as an instrument of violence. But a weapon can also be a means of gaining advantage of or exerting control over another in a conflict. Palestinian citizen videographers describe their cameras as weapons in service to the truth: Arafat Kanaan said his camera is a weapon that “show[s]‌everyone in the world what the truth is,” and likewise Nariman Tamimi said her camera

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is a weapon that “show[s] … the truth about the occupation that the Israeli government is trying to hide.” These citizen videographers link the weaponization of their cameras to video’s perceived indexical relationship to reality. As weapons, their cameras are not meant to inflict physical damage or bodily harm. The spirit of the citizen-camera-as-weapon is distinctly aphysical and nonviolent, and even explicitly humanistic rather than militaristic. As Tamimi said, the goal of weaponizing her camera is “to revive the humanity in the other,” meaning to shake awake the Israeli settler-colonial regime to the violence it commits as part of its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories. If the camera is a weapon, it is one that fights within the realm of the visual and the aesthetic. When I visited former B’Tselem volunteer ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh in Hebron, I asked to tell me why he founded the Palestinian-led citizen videography organization, Human Rights Defenders (HRD), in 2014.40 ‘Imad replied, “The camera is a weapon.” He then paused, winked at my translator, and added, “It’s a beautiful sentence! Translate it!”41 ‘Imad continued by saying that he sees his camera as a weapon that can face off with the guns that Israeli settlers and soldiers point at him. Inside ‘Imad’s delight and pride over his “beautiful” sentence—“The camera is a weapon”—is a glimpse into the way ‘Imad is drawn toward aesthetic considerations of visuality. When he was young, ‘Imad wanted to be a professional photographer, a goal for which his friends mocked him saying that his limp would result in crooked photographs.42 With his beautiful sentence, ‘Imad paradoxically reminds that the weapon and the camera are not one and the same. The path toward citizen videography as resistance differs significantly from that of violent resistance, and part of that difference resides in an appreciation for the beauty—and the power— of aesthetics. The aesthetic is of course political, and in that lies its power. As Ranciere teaches, politics is “a question of aesthetics and a matter of appearances,” meaning it concerns the social redistribution of what is sensible.43 When a Palestinian citizen chooses to pick up a camera and film back, they exert a symbolic power through the act of photography and the subsequent potential for the circulation of images in the visual economy. In a way these video cameras operate as weapons: they are a visual and aesthetic means to gain advantage over the Israeli occupying regime. However, they are considered weapons in part because any instrument used in warfare or combat is by definition a weapon. It is the circumstances of the Israeli ongoing settler-colonial regime that has produced the language of weaponization to describe citizen videography. These cameras do not mean to physically or materially harm, but to expose, to shame, to shield, to prove, to exonerate, to secure justice, and to spark change to the dominant sociopolitical order of the occupation.

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Double Shooting The gun is pitted against the camera as a weapon of war and revolution, and this confrontation of weapons and aesthetics has resulted in ideological shifts. —Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real44

In 2013 a B’Tselem volunteer named Muhammad ‘Awad was documenting a protest in his village of Beit Ummar when he was hit squarely in the chest by an Israeli tear gas canister. The blow of tear gas canisters has mortally wounded many Palestinian civilians, but luckily ‘Awad survived and recuperated in a hospital.45 Muhammad ‘Awad captured the exact moment of his bodily injury with his B’Tselem video camera.46 In the seventeen-second clip, ‘Awad was positioned behind a mass of Palestinian demonstrators, opposite an IDF brigade sent to “contain” the protest. Then, an Israeli soldier took a few steps away from an army jeep, cocked his gun, and shot a tear gas canister directly at ‘Awad. The tear gas grows larger and larger in size as it nears the camera, its silver canister glowing hot white in the sun’s rays and blurring at the edges with speed (Plates 25 and 26). The canister then hit ‘Awad and he groaned in pain from behind the camera. The video ends with blurry pavement shots, and we understand that ‘Awad and his camera have both fallen to the ground. Rabih Mroué, a Lebanese artist and scholar, categorizes this kind of video as a “double shooting:” a moment in which two different kinds of shooting—one with a gun, the other with a camera—directly face-off against one another in Barrel POV.47 Mroué has researched the recurrent trope of Syrian civilians who recorded their own deaths at the hands of the Baathist regime during the first year of the Syrian uprising, with videos featuring direct eye contact between soldiers who use violence to uphold the regime and civilian victims who record as an act of resistance. Double shootings yield double meanings, notes theater scholar Carol Martin. The resultant images both “make the details of the resistance known … and they are evidence of the intent to kill.”48 Double shootings make visible not only the resistance but also the attempt to eliminate the resistance’s ability to see and be seen. Double shootings make their spectators’ witness to a regime’s attempt to erase the visual record in a violent, deadly erasure. As a result these videos leave a visual trace of an uprising that a regime wishes us not to see—a countervisuality countered with the violence of elimination. Indeed by pitting their guns against the civilian cameras, a ruling regime declares itself to be at war against images themselves. The double shooting is therefore a direct confrontation between weapons and aesthetics, where the image—and the camera that captures it—becomes the target that must be eliminated. While the Palestinians who record for B’Tselem might not get shot because of their activities, nearly all of the active B’Tselem volunteers who I interviewed reported feeling physically targeted as a result of their cameras. The number of B’Tselem volunteers who have been harmed while recording has been growing, as evidenced by B’Tselem’s press releases and written complaints to the IDF.49 B’Tselem submitted several such complaints to the IDF in 2010, in response to which the IDF took no disciplinary action, signaling its contradictory stance on citizen videography:  the

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IDF has declared B’Tselem citizen videography legal, but has refused to take action to prevent physical harm to civilian videographers or damage to their cameras. One video clip from the B’Tselem archives symbolizes the willingness of Israeli soldiers to transform Palestinian countervisuality into double shootings. Suzan Zraqo, a longtime Palestinian videographer and B’Tselem volunteer from Hebron, was filming from her roof at night when two IDF soldiers pointed their guns at her and shot her—not with bullets but with light. One soldier aimed at Zraqo with the flashlight attached to his gun and the other with the laser marker on his gun, which assists in target finding before firing live ammunition (Plate 27). With these light markers the soldiers indicate to Zraqo that she is their target and that they could wound her if they chose. Zraqo said that she is frequently targeted with lasers from Israeli guns and that she understands the targeting as a fear tactic: “They are trying to scare me but I do not leave. I am not scared.”50 Zraqo continues filming, even though she is marked as a target with laser precision. The lasers not only point at her, they mark her body as if with the haunting shadow of future, anterior death.51 Double shootings uniquely implicate spectators. When a gun aims at a camera, it makes eye contact not only with the camera lens but also with the viewers of the image. When the gun shoots it therefore shoots the image’s spectators as well. Viewers are not harmed by this shot, as the bullet cannot “make a hole in the screen and hit any of the spectators,” Mroué explains.52 Yet double shootings remind of the dramatic audience reaction to the Lumiére Brothers’ early film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), which captures a continuous, real-time shot of a steam-powered locomotive pulling into a station, almost directly at the camera recording it. At the film’s first screening the audience shrieked with fear and stampeded away from the cinema screen, thinking that the train would otherwise barrel into their own fleshy bodies. This early audience did not separate between the cinematic world of the train and the actual world of their spectatorship. The camera positioning broke the cinematic fourth wall such that the audience perceived the approaching train as a genuine threat to their mortality. While scholar Kari Andén-Papadopoulos argues that citizen camera-witnessing moves spectators with “ ‘raw’ sound and hyper-mobilized camera-work” that “heightens the effect of ‘realness’ ” of an event, Arrival of a Train demonstrates that the camera’s position can be the key affective motivator.53 In double shootings, recordings capture events that happen to the cameraperson from the first-person perspective of that same cameraperson. Such a first-person camera position is used in professional cinema as well to simulate the act of looking through that character’s own eyes. Termed a POV shot, such cinematography is commonly employed to increase audience’s emotional identification with a character. In other words, POV shots engender empathic relations between the persons within the frame and those outside it by laminating together the spectator’s gaze and that of the character. While amateur citizen videography is always taken from a subjective perspective that allows spectators to gaze out as if through another’s eyes, only a small subset of citizen-recorded videos qualify as POV shots. In most cases the citizen filming does not act as a “character” or main subject of action in his or her own film.54 Instead he

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acts as a bystander—as the lay-version of a cinematographer—who captures events as they unfold before him. Only in rare cases, when the action of the video does indeed involve the citizen videographer, does his shot becomes a POV shot. In Israel–Palestine, Palestinian citizen videographers become part of the action when subjected to verbal or physical assault. We see the high-velocity tear gas canister speed not only toward Muhammad ‘Awad but also towards us, the viewers. We see the gun’s laser as it not only marks the body of Suzan Zraqo but also marks us as spectators. The eye of the camera aligns with the eye of the spectator in an elision that quite literally promotes the spectator’s identification with the citizen cameraperson. It is this identification that promotes a startling affective response—a fear that is at once for ourselves and for the videographer, or an outrage that is about our own injury, as well as that of the videographer. The conjoining of our gazes heightens the affective potential of double shootings. Or to theorize double shootings in terms of ethics and politics rather than affect: Ariella Azoulay has argued that, for spectators, the photographic act and the photographic event remain asynchronous, each carrying on in separate ontological spaces.55 Spectators often consider the photographic object as a singularly important document that bears testimony to its real-world referent rather than using the image as a means to understand the event of photography in its completeness. The event of photography is a set of relations between a photographer, a subject, and a spectator that can be constantly reimagined and reinterpreted and can make civil demands of its spectator; the photograph is merely a static and partially complete document of the event. However, if in rare cases a photograph bears traces of an act to kill the image, spectators are shaken awake to the event of photography. Such traces appear when an Israeli soldier holds up his hand to block the Palestinian lens, for instance: we see the intent to block the camera and reanimate the event that the camera has created. Such traces appear even more boldly in double shootings, where a regime seeks to eliminate the mechanism of image capture itself. When cameras face off against guns, spectators are forced to “perceive the presence of the camera within the photographed event,” as Azoulay describes.56 Our perception of the event is heightened because of the photographer’s fatal lamination of the photograph to the photographic event. The result for spectators is that we can no longer think of the photograph— or the video—as singularly important. We can no longer forget the event of photography that produced the photograph, nor can we suppress the event or make it yield to an unnecessarily singular hegemonic conception of the real. The photograph loses its hegemonic, “illegitimate” sovereignty as a mere testimony to an event that has concluded and instead points to an event that continues to unfold.57 “The event of photography is never over,” explains Azoulay.58 Instead it is merely suspended momentarily by the photograph, by the video. As spectators we possess the potential to constantly renew it. Therefore in double shootings the spectators come close to encountering the cameraperson, as the cameraperson comes close to death. We hear the cameraperson shout from behind the camera and we know there is more to the photographic event than the photograph itself.

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Such seeing breaks the closed “frame” of the photograph, instead demanding viewers to consider the violence captured in the event of photography at the moment that a regime attempts to eliminate the photograph.

Israeli Counter-CounterVisuality Palestinians originally videotaped to “shoot back” at Israelis, using cameras as a counterhegemonic force against the Israeli occupying regime. The Palestinian camera has countervisuality as its aim: the production of images that oppose the dominant scopic regime of the occupation and as such seek to overthrow its reign over the very frame of the visual.59 Cameras had long been instrumentalized for Israeli nationalist agenda to produce a scopic regime that sought to portray the state as a humanitarian democracy in the middle of authoritarian enemy states, rogue terrorist cells, or inept Palestinian inhabitants who lacked self-sufficiency. In 1948, at the founding of the State of Israel, photography solidified the wide-scale Palestinian dispossession by Israeli forces while at the same time portraying Jewish soldiers as generous providers of basic human necessities. Photograph after photograph depicted Jewish soldiers offering water to Palestinians as they exiled them from their villages.60 This solidified a humanitarian understanding of Israeli militarism while masking the deeper violence of Palestinian deterritorialization. In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israeli soldiers carried cameras into the newly conquered West Bank, documenting the land in a euphoric manner more often associated with tourists than soldiers.61 The 1970s saw the founding of an IDF film unit that created high-level video propaganda, and by the early 2000s—with the explosion of low-cost digital cameras—Israeli soldiers carried their own personal, non-networked digital cameras to capture what Rebecca Stein has called “private pictures” of combat.62 When the IDF did first distribute cameras to soldiers, its aim was to gather intelligence and bolster counterterrorism efforts. Later the IDF’s goal transformed into one of public relations, seeking to influence the media economy with a flood of images recorded by soldiers in the field. In 2011, four years after B’Tselem’s Camera Project launched, the Israel Defense Forces began its first wide-scale initiative to distribute its own cameras, effectively promoting an Israeli “shooting back” at Palestinian “shooting back.” The IDF initiative, titled the “Documenting Warrior Project,” distributed thirty networked, high-resolution video cameras to combat soldiers serving in the West Bank. The Israeli company Elsight engineered “special camera units for IDF soldiers who confront the various cameras held by the enemy,” as it wrote on its website.63 Elsight furthered its militarized language against “enemy” cameras by announcing: The IDF long understood that the war in the media arena is no less than that conducted in the field …. The IDF is looking for a comprehensive offering, combining small tactical hardware and advanced state of the art software, which

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Figure 6.6  An IDF Combat Cameraman, armed with both a gun and a video camera. Shai Levy/Mako.

will provide the operational tools to create fast video broadcasting clips from raw video feeds, arriving from the different units, spread across the field.64

One year later, in 2012, the IDF officially established a special unit of “Combat Cameramen” (Lochamim-Tzalmim) who served in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and were trained with both elite combat skills and camera skills (Figure 6.6). In an “IDF Operational Documentation Course,” Combat Cameramen were taught how to record at a distance, how to set the frame during intense altercations, and how to videotape in low-light conditions, among other skills.65 Journalist Yuval Azoulai wrote that these combat cameramen “know when to place the enemy in the crosshairs of their rifles, and when to point their cameras at them,” building parallel structure between weapons and cameras.66 One of the first graduating IDF Combat cameramen spoke of pitting his military-issued camera as a weapon against Palestinian lenses, saying: There are a lot of cameras on the other side. They show us apparently acting in an unfair way to civilians, to our enemies. We are here to show that’s not accurate …. My main mission is to film. As far as I’m concerned, the footage is much more important than the bullets fired from any gun that kills.67

The 2014 military incursion into Gaza was notable, visually, as being the first time that the IDF Combat Camera project was mobilized on a large scale. This

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Figure  6.7  An Israeli soldier wears a helmet-mounted GoPro camera as he and fellow soldiers arm themselves to confront a Palestinian demonstration. Filmed by Bilal a-Tamimi in a-Nabi Saleh on December 19, 2014. © B’Tselem.

incursion was sparked by the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank and weeks of IDF searches for them before their bodies were discovered in a field outside Hebron.68 During the first week of the search, the IDF’s YouTube channel featured almost daily video footage of IDF activities videotaped from Israeli soldiers’ perspectives, and even recorded from helmet-mounted cameras and GoPros (Figure 6.7).69 Of course, Israeli visual surveillance structures extend much further, employing watchtowers, aerial photography, surveillance drones, unmanned surveillance vehicles, and a network of over 1,700 live security cameras patrolled by brigades of exclusively female soldiers who serve as Tazpitaniot (“watchers”) from remote viewing stations on military bases.70 However, the year 2014 marked the first time that footage taken from a soldier’s POV was consistently shot and published by the Israeli army. As time progressed, the IDF institutionalized its use of cameras as tools for intimidation of its occupied Palestinian population, in direct response to the perceived threat of Palestinian lenses. Nowhere is this clearer than in the IDF practice known as “mapping,” a tactic of raiding Palestinian homes—often at night—in order to gather “visible evidence about the lives and living environments of families in dense urban spaces.”71 In a mapping procedure, IDF troops randomly choose a Palestinian house to search without prior military intelligence on its inhabitants. As one former Israeli soldier put it, in mapping procedures “there’s no wanted [person] (for interrogation), nothing to do with any hostile terrorist activity or danger. You enter a house just to check, and you map the house—how many rooms there are—and move on to the next house.”72 This intrusion into the most private and domestic arena of the Palestinian sphere is meant to intimidate

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against future political action by “making the presence felt” of the occupying Israeli army. Back in 2001, at the earliest reported testimonies of mapping procedures, IDF soldiers created hand-drawn sketches to record what they saw inside Palestinian homes.73 Soldiers would draw the house on paper, making the layout of its domestic insides visible to the outside Israeli state eye in what might almost be called a creative act of spatial visualization. But by 2011, soldiers were instructed to visually capture the Palestinians in mapped homes with photographs, shifting their focus from spatialization to personal identification. Israeli soldiers would enter Palestinian houses, wake and gather all residents into one room, and take pictures of each and every resident (Plates 28 and 29).74 The images were frontal photographs, akin to mug shots. Yet they differed from mug shots in one critical way:  the images did not capture already-criminal bodies, but ones deemed potentially criminal.75 These photographs, moreover, were not the goal of the operation. “Often,” one former IDF soldier recalls, “we erase the [image] files by the end of the day.”76 The purpose of the mapping procedure was to use the act of photography to instill fear of punishment in Palestinian bodies. Another Israeli soldier described his realization that the images held no operational utility when, after a month, no army official had requested the images from his camera. “I realized it was all for nothing …. It was like a game, I can’t describe it. At one point I deleted the pictures. I  realized it was all a joke.” This soldier said that mapping procedures “were designed to make the Palestinians feel that we [Israeli soldiers] are there all the time,” ready to act against their potentially criminal bodies.77 The goal of mappings is not to produce photographs but to use photography as an apparatus of power. The power in Israeli photography of Palestinian subjects is irreducible to the photographic document.78 Indeed the apparatus of power entailed in photography is at its most transparent when, as with IDF mappings, the photographic document is so clearly disposed, yielding instead to the event of photography that has produced it. The purpose of the Israeli photographic document, then, becomes merely an excuse to exert ongoing control over the Palestinian subjects whose homes are invaded at night, who are awakened from sleep, and who are made to pose for the lens of the regime. The use of photography as an apparatus of Israeli power was likewise captured in a remarkable incident filmed by a B’Tselem volunteer named Mahmoud Abu Haya.79 In May of 2015, an entire battalion of forty IDF soldiers climbed to the roof of Abu Haya’s home in Hebron, dressed in full combat gear. Thinking the soldiers were subjugating his household to yet another army raid, Abu Haya began recording with his B’Tselem camera. In the video, soldiers ascend Abu Haya’s stairs single file as he asks them, “What do you want?” Then, the power grabs over the event of photography commence. As the IDF soldiers ascend Abu Haya’s stairs toward his roof, two of them pause to take pictures of him with their own smartphones and digital cameras. Others shout at Abu Haya to stop filming (“Turn off the cameras!”). Abu Haya responds with an assertion of dominance over the photographic space of his domestic sphere: “Why should I turn off the camera?

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Figure 6.8  Israeli soldiers take over the roof of B’Tselem volunteer Mahmoud Abu Haya to pose for their own snapshot. Hebron, April 7, 2015. © B’Tselem.

Why? What’s the problem? You come into my home and want me to turn off the camera?” With this statement he attempts to control the power of setting the visual frame within his own domestic sphere. It is this power that the soldiers ultimately take from him. While this incident originally appeared to be an ordinary raid, it wasn’t: the soldiers’ sole purpose was to pose for a group snapshot on Abu Haya’s rooftop (Figure 6.8). The soldiers amass on his roof and commence a debate over which of them will take the picture. The chosen soldier-photographer scrambles to get a good angle, and then the soldiers pose: a front line of soldiers kneel and brace their guns in a manner so natural that it becomes clear they have prepared for this moment. The soldier-photographer takes a single picture—one lone snapshot—and the event is over. The soldiers stand up from their kneeling positions, mill about for a few more moments, then descend the stairs of Abu Haya’s roof. The soldiers’ posed snapshot lacks instrumental or utilitarian value to the Israeli army. Like images from mapping procedures, the IDF would not use this piece of media for any strategic goals or intelligence efforts. The photographic document is not the point, and the snapshot is not a typical trophy photograph that brags of visible power over a subjugated population. Here the trophy is not the photograph itself, but dominance over the event of photography. The soldiers position themselves on the rooftop—a site of spatial and vertical superiority over Abu Haya’s domestic sphere—in order to reclaim their dominance over the capacity to frame and capture the visual landscape. Frustrated by the countervisual tactics of Abu Haya and his B’Tselem camera, the soldiers displayed their complete control over the mediascape by conquering his roof for the mere act of producing their own images.

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Like B’Tselem recordings of IDF mapping procedures, Abu Haya’s clip of these IDF soldiers is taken from the POV of a Palestinian civilian lens. The Palestinian camera attempts to reverse what Eyal Weizman has called the typical “one-way hierarchy of vision,” in which the Israeli is empowered with the ability to see, penetrate, and document while the Palestinian must avert his gaze.80 Whereas it was once an act of bold countervisuality for Palestinian camera to look back— to face off with Israeli guns in the merely symbolic power imbued to Barrel POV—official Israeli acts of counter-countervisuality seek to restore the regime’s dominance over the visual frame and dominate the economy of images with those taken from its own hegemonic point of view.

Shooting Back at Shooting Back: A Battle between Civilian Cameras In the years after the IDF launched the Combat Cameramen project, it has come to realize the potential of soldiers’ personal cell phones in on-the-ground work in the West Bank. Rather than banning personal devices, the IDF instead embraced private cameras and smartphones as a tool of embedded militarization. This move departed sharply with the IDF’s earlier contract with Elsight to produce a small number of advanced, highly specialized, army-issued cameras distributed to only a handful of Israeli soldiers. In “using their own mobile phone as army-issued cameras,” writes Daniel Mann, “soldiers incorporate what initially posed a risk to the authority they enforce.”81 For Israeli combat soldiers on patrol who engage in the militarized vigilance of enforcing the Israeli occupation, personal smartphones have become an informal weapon against the Palestinian lens. In one B’Tselem clip from 2013, Palestinians were herding sheep outside the South Hebron Hills village of Umm al-’Amad alongside Jewish Israeli activists from Ta’ayush, an Arab-Jewish grassroots organization that frequently accompanies Palestinians to protect their agrarian rights. The IDF routinely dispossess Palestinian farmers and shepherds in the West Bank by denying them access to plow their fields or herd their sheep, citing that the land has been unexpectedly declared a “closed military zone” or simply denying access without justification.82 Ta’ayush activists accompany Palestinians to challenge and document illegal closures, as well as to protect Palestinians from Israeli settler attacks. On April 27, 2013, Israeli soldiers declared that Palestinian shepherds could not graze their sheep in a wadi where they had been allowed to graze in previous months. A B’Tselem videographer named Ahmad Hreni and a longtime Ta’ayush activist named David Shulman were both filming. Israeli soldiers immediately rushed at the cameras and blocked them with their own cell phones and personal cameras, in a tactic that was new to Shulman. He dubbed this treatment of his lens the “cell phone procedure”: I get the cell phone procedure over and over, as minutes become an hour, then maybe two hours. It becomes a kind of game. He [the Israeli soldier] blocks me,

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I wave the camera up, down, to the side, looping, looking for a crack or a window where I can film. I manage quite a few short shots, enough, I hope, for the lawyers to use. But he’s at me, pushing at me, taking joy, I think, in blocking and parrying, without words, … and after a while it becomes a dance …. I take the camera up to the far right, he brings his cell phone down on the lens, I weave circles in the air and he follows me, loop for loop, I hold it down to my waist, switch hands, wave it left or right, over my head, behind my back, and he follows every move.83

In B’Tselem footage of the incident, Shulman and the soldier each held their camera mere inches from the other’s face, fighting to record their visual field. In the end, each camera recorded nothing but the other cameraperson’s nose (Plate 30). Such camera battles remind of the Gandhian maxim, “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.” Each camera blinds the other in its attempt to see clearly. Both sides are recording, but no one is seeing. Yet was each side not blinded already? In Israel–Palestine, as Rebecca Stein has written, “the multiplication of cameras, technological literacy, and technoprecision has been contemporaneous with, and inversely proportional to, the popular Israeli tolerance to see images of Palestinian injury at state hands.”84 What is clear from these face-offs is this: in zones of conflict, the very site of visual capture—the camera itself—has become a surrogate fight between opposing factions. Cameras duel in a weaponization of image capture. Even the bodies that carry cameras battle each other not “to the death” but to the image. As the camera’s temporary, embodied tripod, each body struggles to secure a clear camera shot; each body struggles to block the other lens’s clarity and its power. The resultant warring images each capture the same visual reality, framed differently, in order to blind the lens of the other. These images have come to comprise what I call “shooting back at shooting back,” namely a conflict that has spread to a surrogate battle between citizen video cameras. This is a conflict over looking, seeing, being seen, and the obstruction of visual recordings. In shooting back at shooting back, Israelis flaunt the technical capacities of their smartphone cameras. Take the 2018 arrest of two Palestinian brothers in Hebron’s al-Hareqa neighborhood, for instance.85 The boys, aged 12 and 13, were accused of throwing stones at the fence of the nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba. Israeli soldiers detained the boys and walked them down a dirt path at night as a B’Tselem volunteer videographer followed from behind. “They’re filming us!,” shouted an IDF soldier to his commander, thrice—clearly aggravated by the Palestinian lens. They continued walking together—an uncommon parade of Israeli soldiers, detained Palestinian boys, their Palestinian relatives, and a B’Tselem videographer—until the soldiers forbade the relatives and the videographer from proceeding any further. The soldiers then transported the two boys to an Israeli police station as the boys’ uncle shouted that the boys were tending to the family’s flock of sheep, not throwing stones. The soldiers responded that the police would deliver the final ruling and demanded that the boy’s Palestinian relatives lower their voices. As the soldiers and the Palestinians attempted to talk to each other, the soldiers grew increasingly annoyed by the presence of the B’Tselem camera. They decided

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to film back. One Israeli soldier said, “Film this. Get a camera, film them [the Palestinians].” Another soldier replied, “I’ll film it. It’s fine. I’ve got an iPhone 8 Plus,” as if to insinuate that his footage would be of excellent quality (Figure 6.9). His statement betrays an optimistic belief in his smartphone, celebrating its advanced technological capabilities—it’s an iPhone 8 Plus, after all!—as a means of cementing, memorializing, and validating his visual perspective of the altercation. This Israeli soldier’s belief in his camera mirrors the very foundational belief embedded in the B’Tselem Camera Project: that visual recordings of daily life can offer objective glimpses into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and cause change.

Figures 6.9 and 6.10  One Israeli soldier asks another to film an altercation over an arrest. The second soldier brags about his phone (“I’ve got an iPhone 8 Plus”) and holds it in front of the B’Tselem camera lens, as filmed by Mai Da’na. January 31, 2018, Hebron. © B’Tselem.

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As the argument between the Israeli soldiers and the boy’s Palestinian relatives continued, an Israeli commanding soldier again demanded that his fellow soldiers record: “Film it, film it,” he shouted. The soldier with the iPhone 8 Plus videotaped and replies, “It’s fine. I’ve got 64G”—plenty of gigabytes of storage to record the altercation, and yet another technology-laden statement meant to assuage with its techno-optimism, its techno-superiority. The soldier then held his iPhone up close to the B’Tselem camera, obstructing its view (Figure 6.10). The B’Tselem camera attempted to move away and get a clear shot, but another Israeli soldier pulled out his smartphone and recorded as well to block it. As the boys’ uncle adamantly asserts their innocence, three cameras circle and record from all angles. In this video, we see the soldiers engage in a behavioral mirroring that Daniel Mann has called “media mimicry,” meaning activities taken by the ruling power “to imitate the ways in which dissidents employ filmmaking to document and distribute what the state desires to keep obscured.”86 The soldiers parroted the countervisual tactics of B’Tselem volunteers. They pulled out their own recording devices, gradually taking on these practices for themselves, engaging in countercountervisuality. But unlike the B’Tselem cameras that are tightly organized, institutionally issued, and whose footage will be archived for future use, the soldiers’ cameras are private, rogue, and disunified attempts to stake claim over the visual field. It is a rogueness, though, that the army has sanctioned. It is a rogueness that has come to be adopted by Israeli actors of all kind. At the same time that the IDF began engaging in media mimicry of Palestinian citizen videography, so too did ordinary Jewish Israeli civilians, especially those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Figure 6.11). Israeli settlers have long countered Palestinian cameras with wet substances like spit and Coke, as well blinded camera sensors with too much light through mirrors and the sun.87 But in 2011, Jewish organizations began providing cameras to Israeli settlers to film back at their Palestinian counterparts in direct response to B’Tselem’s initiative.88 Tazpit News Agency (TPS) offered a camera-training program to Jewish settlers living in Hebron, though the organization has since pivoted to offer summer “journalism” courses in Israel–Palestine to international Jewish college students. Other, more renegade groups have also been known to arm themselves with cameras—notably Esh Kodesh, the Israeli outpost near Shilo that is known for its “price tag” (tag mechir) revenge attacks against surrounding Palestinian villages.89 In the B’Tselem archives are hundreds of instances where cameras faced off against other cameras, where Palestinians and Jewish Israelis face off with personal, civilian cameras, each seeing and recording the other in a direct tension of visioning. In one example, a Palestinian cameraperson named Zidan Sharbati and an Israeli settler face off in a darkened street in H2, the Israeli-controlled portion of Hebron. Behind the Israeli camera is a religious Jewish woman in her 30s or 40s, with three teenagers next to her who are presumably her children. She and Sharbati appear to be standing only two or three meters apart, each with their lens fixed on the other. The settler’s camera covers her eyes, like a black bar

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Figure 6.11  A Jewish settler films back at the Palestinian lens of Raed Abu a-Rmeileh in Hebron, May 1, 2012. © B’Tselem.

to preserve her anonymity (Figure 6.12). The tension between them is palpable. These two camerapersons stand in the street, locked in a recorded stalemate for what feels like hours, even though the clip lasts only forty-four seconds. Many times, Israeli filming is performed in a simple attempt to obstruct the vision of the Palestinian lens, as when an Israeli settler’s smartphone isn’t even switched on as he holds it up to block the Palestinian lens.90 B’Tselem predicted that Jewish Israelis would engage in media mimicry. In a 2007 B’Tselem “Shooting Back” training session, then director Oren Yakobovich warned Palestinian volunteers: In Hebron, [Israelis] will come with a camera, and put it in your face. Don’t lower your camera. Don’t assault them …. It’s like in basketball: [You] can stand, [and] if someone comes to attack you, it’s a foul …. The matter is: who will make the mistake first?91

Yakobovich instills a message of nonviolence as he foreshadows the use of Israeli cameras to counter B’Tselem’s. In his appeal to a sports metaphor, he gives Palestinian volunteers confidence that they won’t be at fault. Of course, the Israeli occupation has produced divergent legal systems in the West Bank, where Palestinians are subjected to strict military law while Israelis benefit from relatively lax civil law. No single judicial referee assigns the fouls in the face-off between Israeli and Palestinian lenses. In interviews, B’Tselem volunteer videographers mentioned that they were frequently filmed by one Jewish settler in Hebron: Ofer Ohana. Ohana has been known to harass Palestinian residents as well as any leftist organizations that tour

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Figure 6.12  A camera face-off between B’Tselem volunteer Zidan Sharbati and a Jewish settler in Hebron, date missing though likely early 2012. © B’Tselem.

through the city.92 He contributed to intense harassment of ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh after his B’Tselem footage of the Azaria incident went viral, shouting death threats at ‘Imad and declaring, “I’m not worried. God in the sky will come down and take you …. Your time will come, you bastard.”93 While both Ohana and B’Tselem volunteers can freely carry cameras in Hebron under Israeli law, only Ohana has the privilege of also carrying a gun (Figure 6.13). Ohana’s tactics are public and decidedly incendiary. He taunts Palestinians to attack him, knowing full well that they will suffer punishment under Israeli military rule while he will enjoy relative impunity. His activities are so common that staff in B’Tselem’s video department can identify him in a heartbeat, and even recognize the sight of his car traveling through video clips. Ohana likewise makes a point to identify all B’Tselem volunteers, whom he points out to each new battalion of IDF soldiers that rotates through Hebron, encouraging militarized harassment—such as detainments or night searches—to Palestinians who film. Ohana works diligently to recruit soldiers into alignment with his pro-settlement cause, most notably through hospitality. He founded a canteen, called “A Warm Home for Soldiers” (Pinah Hamah L’Hayalim), that offers free coffee, soup, sandwiches, and other amenities to Israeli soldiers in order to ingratiate the Jewish settler population of Hebron with military officials.94 Ofer Ohana’s Facebook page boasts videos in which he shoots back at large crowds of Palestinian civilian videographers, taking them on solo in what he interprets as David’s fight against Goliath. His battle against Palestinians is clearest when he sticks his camera directly in their faces (Figure 6.14).95 These direct faceoffs are a surrogate and hyperpersonal “you-film-me, so I-film-you” fight for visual rights, a battle over dominance of the visual field.

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Figure 6.13  With a gun casually draped over his shoulder, Israeli settler Ofer Ohana aims his video camera back at a B’Tselem volunteer Bassam Ja’bri in Hebron, June 4, 2012. © B’Tselem.

Ofer Ohana shows the manner in which Israeli civilians have taken up their own, personal cameras in an attempt to restore the visual dominance of the Israeli regime. Israeli cameras oppose Palestinian countervisuality in what has become an act of media mimicry—of shooting back at shooting back. Many times the goal of Israeli filming is to intimidate Palestinian camerapersons from filming, or to block their lenses entirely in a denial of the Palestinian right to look. When Ohana cannot blind B’Tselem cameras with intimidation or counterfilming, he encourages Palestinians to film their city of Hebron as visually Judaizes it. He holds up a flag of Israel with the nationalist slogan Am Yisyael Chai, “The Nation of Israel Lives,” in both Hebrew and Arabic to their cameras’ field of view (Figure 6.15).96 This phrase is chanted on Israeli Independence day and Israeli Memorial Day, referencing the narrative that the Jewish people have faced extermination from enemies in each generation but have survived and thrived. The phrase, “The Nation of Israel Lives,” identifies Palestinians as this generation’s enemy whom Jewish Israelis will likewise surmount and control. Ohana taunts his Palestinian neighbors to film his exclusively Jewish view of Hebron as a city in which only the Jewish nation lives, not the Palestinian one. Ohana’s visual taunts cement a “partitioned vision” of Hebron, to use Gil Hochberg’s phrase, as a place in which only the Jewish Israeli scopic regime may exist.97 Indeed when the Palestinian lens attempts to challenge this regime, the power of its right to look is taunted, denied, or countered with opposing cameras that produce their own counter-countervisual representations of reality.

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Figure  6.14  Ofer Ohana confronts Palestinian and international activists marching in Hebron in a campaign to lift restrictions on movement, October 29, 2017, © Human Rights Defenders.

Figure  6.15  Ofer Ohana holds up a flag of Israel with the right-wing, ultranationalist slogan “The Nation of Israel Lives” to Palestinian videographers, consuming their video frames and their neighborhood with his propaganda.

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A Closed Loop of Images As citizen image production has multiplied in Israel–Palestine, it has become clear that the resultant photographic documents are neither the sole goals nor the sole end-products of battles between cameras. Indeed as Ariella Azoulay theorizes, photography as an event is catalyzed by the camera but does not necessarily lead to the existence of a photograph.98 While the presence of a camera necessarily influences a situation, the camera does not always need to produce a visual result. Or, photographic results might be made visible to some but not to others. How often are we not made witnesses to photographs of ourselves, even after they have been taken? Therefore, Azoulay teaches that we still experience the event of photography, even if we never see the resultant photograph and indeed even if a camera takes no pictures. But what happens when the event of photography does produce an image, and the spectator of an image is also its photographic subject? What happens when the very persons filmed become the viewers of their own image, not online or in the news, but out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories themselves, in the very cities in which the images have been produced? Such an event occurred during the 1982 Lebanon War. When Israeli troops reached Beirut, they were instructed to seize the contents of the various Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) institutions that had set up offices there in the 1960s.99 Visual historian Rona Sela describes that Israeli troops seized two main Palestinian archives: first, the primarily text-based documents from the Palestine Research Center, an organization that documented, researched, and published on Palestinian history. This archive was duplicated by the State of Israel before being returned to the PLO one year later.100 The second archive seized was the primarily visual materials of the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section, whose contents comprised films and photographs.101 A former IDF soldier who was assigned to plunder the Cultural Arts Section described seeing images of himself within the archive: When we had cleared [the Cultural Arts Section] of its contents, we saw photographs of ourselves and it froze our blood. Some of us identified ourselves and people we knew. We understood they had tracked us. Singled us out. War, a foreign country, everything vulnerable. You don’t quite understand the codes of the place or what you’re doing there. Suddenly, in Beirut, you see old photographs of yourself or your friends, photographed at checkpoints or in the occupied territories. It was frightening.102

The soldier conveys his shock at seeing his own image. While theorists like Allan Sekula and John Tagg describe the ways in which cameras can be instrumentalized to solidify state colonial power, here the Palestinian camera—and its resultant photographs— reverse colonial power relations.103 Instead, the results of the Palestinian camera surprise the soldier and cause fear within him. Notably, the visual archive materials seized from the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section have never been returned and are to this day tightly held as colonized material within the IDF Archive.104 The IDF Archive labels materials from the Cultural Arts Section as “Films seized from the ‘PLO Archive’ in Beirut,” even

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though no such archive existed.105 Moreover, the copyright of all materials from this section has been assigned to the IDF Spokesman Unit, solidifying the erasure of the materials’ origins by the official installment of a “new” owner. The multiplication of citizen cameras in Israel–Palestine has produced many more such “closed loops of images,” as I call them, in which the subject of footage that has been recorded to oppose that subject’s visual regime instead becomes its spectator. These closed loops are not formed intentionally:  they differ from instances in which a spectator sees a picture of himself that he asked to be taken, that he posed for, or that he took himself (as with the “selfie”). These closed loops of images instead show the photographic subject an image that has been taken of him as part of a countervisual effort. The photographic subject sees an image for which he is not the intended spectator and one whose goal is to dethrone the visual regime that he ethnonationally represents. B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Jab’ri told me of one such happening.106 One day, she had her smartphone out and was recording her passage through one of Hebron’s many Israeli checkpoints when an Israeli soldier stopped her and demanded to see her footage. The soldier browsed through her phone—a phone that by default had auto-saved media from her WhatsApp chats, including a recent video that B’Tselem volunteer had sent her of an IDF night raid.107 The Israeli soldier recognized himself as one of the soldiers in the raid and began laughing and shouting, “That’s ours! That’s ours!” The soldier saw himself as the star of the video, the cinema realite actor in the tiny smartphone screen, in a closed loop of images. The Israeli soldier became the viewer of an image depicting himself as its photographic subject, taken as a countervisual tactic to oppose the scopic regime of the Israeli state. At first delighted, the Israeli soldier then had a change of heart and deleted all the media files from Manal al-Jab’ri’s smartphone. Manal asked, “What [did] you do?” to which he replied, “We delete[d]‌our pictures.”108 The soldier recognized himself and erased himself from the very device that had been recording him. He was unwilling to allow his likeness to circulate in the visual economy of images, twice over: not as a soldier at the checkpoint, and not as a soldier during the night raid. The soldier erased his own image, in a move akin to the IDF Archive’s erasure of the origins of the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section and its tight control over the circulation of its material. Manal’s story and the IDF’s soldier’s recounting can only ever remain anecdotes: because of the deletion, no evidence or visual trace persists. However a different B’Tselem video captures a similarly dizzying visual echo of Israeli soldiers looking at pictures of themselves, seeing their own images in the field, this time while being filmed. In March 2015, IDF soldiers in Hebron raided the Abu Shamsiyeh household at night, as part of what seemed to be a mapping procedure.109 They woke all the residents of the household—including the young children—gathered them into one room, and photographed them. The mother of the household, Fayzeh, filmed the encounter with her B’Tselem camera, and they took a photograph of her, too, in a direct face-off between lenses (Plate 31). The soldiers then proceeded to search the house in a routine manner. The tenor of the search changed when they found a hard disk—the kind of external hard

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drive that can hold large quantities of data. “What’s on here?” the soldiers asked. The father in the home, ‘Imad, booted up his Toshiba laptop so that the soldiers could browse the hard disk themselves. The Israeli soldiers gathered round the laptop in the Abu Shamsiyeh living room and viewed its contents as Fayzeh continued to videotape them (Plate 32). What the Israeli soldiers found on this hard drive was all the material the Abu Shamsiyeh family had filmed for B’Tselem recently. One soldier recognized himself in the footage, Fayzeh told me: she remembers this clearly, because all the other soldiers had worn balaclavas as face coverings but he had not.110 Fayzeh recorded these soldiers sitting in her living room, watching photographs and videos of themselves. This incident is briefly discussed in Chapter 3 for the ways in which it mirrors Israeli soldiers back to themselves. Here it is raised once again for its dueling cameras and its productive complications of individuals’ roles away from the static ones—the photographer, the photographed, and the spectator—in the event of photography. The roles of each party are thoroughly confused in this video, with each taking on multiple positions through the proliferation of camera lenses. When the IDF soldier photographs Fayzeh, the Palestinian camerawoman, as part of his mapping procedure, he transforms her into the momentary photographic subject of his lens; but Fayzeh is also the photographer of her own lens, setting the frame with her B’Tselem camera as its author-cinematographer. Likewise the Israeli soldiers become not merely the photographic subjects of the Palestinian camera but also its spectators—its viewers: they sit and watch prior footage, gazing at video images even as they are simultaneously videotaped. As current subjects of the Palestinian camera, they watch themselves perform as its prior subjects as well—in a kind of hall-of-mirrors sandwich, where subject–viewer–subject are compressed, laminated, and glued together in a conflation of photographic roles. The normal triangulation of photographer, photographic subject, and viewer is therefore collapsed by this incident. Moreover, we—as spectators of Fayzeh’s footage—see pictures-withinpictures: the Israeli soldier photographs Fayzeh, and in doing so points his lens back to us; and the Israeli soldiers see images of themselves, as we watch them watch their own likenesses. In a near-total confusion of roles, perhaps our gaze is confounded the most, relegated to an infinite loop of a camera watching a camera, and then a camera watching viewers watching the camera’s footage of those viewers. If this infinite loop does anything at all, it misaligns our gaze as the metaspectators of the videographic image. Indeed our gaze is not the aligned gaze of an embedded reporter sent out into a war zone, who can only capture the prevailing army’s POV. It is not the aligned gaze of a camera embedded on a smart missile, demanding a prosthetic allyship with the precision aim of a lethal weapon. Nor is our gaze the purely oppositional gaze of B’Tselem activists who shoot back at gun barrels. Instead, our gaze bounces from Palestinian camera to Israeli camera, from Israeli subject-as-viewer to Palestinian photographer-as-subject. In this way our gaze has more in common with what is called the unaligned gaze—a gaze that can switch sides at will. The

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unaligned gaze is journalistically idealized as one that offers objectivity.111 But in the Abu Shamsiyeh video, the unaligned gaze does not solidify a single, objective reality; instead it confuses and provokes. We are left wondering, who should we be watching, anyway? Who is the subject of this recording, and what, if anything, is the point? A point, a subject:  both of these are the endpoints of a gaze that has been geometrized by the act of taking aim—either with a camera or with a weapon. Yet this video confounds linear geometrization, offering not a line but instead a closed-loop system. The line that typifies citizen videography, which extends from a citizen’s eye to its subject via a camera, has instead been curved into a circle. Closed loops of images direct a spectator’s attention away from what Žižek calls subjective violence as the most visible type of violence: a violence perpetrated by a clearly identifiable agent (a person with the gun) against a clearly definable victim (the person physically harmed). Instead, the circular gaze in closed-loop images highlights what Žižek calls objective violence, namely the violence inherent in the “smooth functioning” of a structurally racist or settler-colonialist system.112 Žižek maintains that subjective and objective violence “cannot be perceived from the same standpoint” because subjective violence is expressed against the background of normalcy, which is to say, a “non-violent zero level.”113 Subjective violence is seen as a disturbance to the “natural” peaceful state of things: it is the violence of an IDF night raid, an unwarranted arrest, a violent beating, or a regime-made killing. Objective violence, however, is what comprises and sustains the “normalcy” against which we perceive the subjective. Objective violence is the very mechanisms of the Israeli occupation over Palestinians—legalistic, operational, institutional, economic—that subjugate an entire population in service to another’s ends. It is precisely because subjective violence can only be seen against the background of the normalcy that comprises the objective violence of the Israeli occupation that the focus must be shifted. The subjective violence is a distraction from the objective one, namely the systematic violence of the settler-colonial Israeli militarism that creates, sustains, and governs in an indefinite occupation. Žižek’s request to shift focus resounds in other scholarship around violence, most notably in Judith Butler’s conception of the “frames of war.”114 Butler ascribes the loss of life caused by war or settler-colonial violence to a frame-setting of reality that has failed to apprehend certain lives as human lives at all, writing that “specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living.”115 Butler therefore interrogates the notion of the frame itself, as a main circumscriber of affective response to injury, injustice, and death. Frame-setting is an act of power oft exercised by regimes to dominate a conflict. Seeing the frame is not simple, however: Butler writes that “our inability to see what we see is also of critical concern. To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter.”116 Put differently, Butler makes an ethical demand that a spectator see the objective violence of the frames of war instead of the subjective violence depicted inside the contents it frames. This demand is an ethical one, and one that asserts that the power of frame-setting should not merely be exercised by a regime but may

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instead be exercised by any civilians, just as the power to set a photograph’s frame is not merely chosen by a photographer but instead may be exercised, crucially, by the viewer. This is the power that the Azoulaian “event of photography” bestows upon all individuals who participate in the act of photography: it is a power that resides not merely in the photographer-author, or the photographic subject, but also in the spectator.117 Azoulay reminds that viewers, too, have the power—no, the contractual and civil responsibility—to transform photography “from a simple, convenient, efficient, (relatively) inexpensive and easily operable tool for the production of pictures into a social, cultural, and political instrument of immense power.”118 This conception of photography points to the viewer’s opportunity and responsibility to act as a political agent in civil matters of visuality. Crucially, these civil demands ask for a visual frame that deems all lives grievable, no matter the civil relations of nation-states.119 It is perhaps a frayed visual frame, made hazy by its divorce from the regime. To return to Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh’s videos of Israeli soldiers looking at images of themselves in her living room:  in the hall of mirrors of these videos, the spectator’s focus is radically shifted and blurred at the edges. No single subject comes into view. Both Palestinian citizens and Israeli soldiers are cast as viewer and viewed, recorder and recorded, documenter and documented. The confusion of roles serves to highlight the mechanism of capture itself as it operates in a closed loop that brings the entire system into focus for its metaspectator. From this confounded vantage point, we are offered an opening to reread the video and to reframe it. The opening is underdetermined, as Azoulay reminds:  “the photographic act … is in fact a new beginning that lacks any predictable end. … The photo acts, thus making others act. The ways in which its action yields others’ action, however, is unpredictable.”120 The opening seeks to destabilize the entire systematic oppression of the Israeli occupation, not merely a single night raid on a Palestinian home. It is therefore no wonder that the Israeli regime seeks to eliminate these closed loops of images—by erasing origination of the visual materials in PLO Cultural Arts Section or by deleting Palestinian-shot footage when encountering it on Manal al-Ja’bri’s phone at a checkpoint. Indeed, at the end of the night search of the Abu Shamsiyeh household, the Israeli soldiers confiscated the hard drive containing the family’s B’Tselem footage.121 The Israeli soldiers responded to the self-confrontation of their own images with erasure meant to restore the visual order. B’Tselem pursued legal action in the Judea Military Court to secure the return of the hard disk to the Abu Shamsiyeh family, but in response the legal advisor for Judea and Samaria informed the court that a hard disk had never been taken, effectively erasing the very existence of the hard drive.122 The erasure solidifies a visual order of structured Palestinian invisibility and the removal of Palestinian’s right to look, instead cementing Israeli dominance over the visual frame.123 In the echoing reverberations of cameras, Abu Shamsiyeh’s videos present on the one hand an infinity mirror that traps images, forever reproducing them by endless reflections; and on the other, they present an invitation to participate

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in an insurgent way of looking at the very system of endlessly mirrored images, themselves, as a closed-loop system. It is a system in which no one wins until the entire loop is itself razed, remediated, and rebuilt by a viewership that resists the dominant regimes of perception, insisting upon a right to look at the very boundaries of the frame itself.

C L O SI N G   W O R D S

The Weaponized Camera opens with a face-off between the personal cameras of Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, characterizing a conflict that has spread to a surrogate fight over the realm of visuality. It considers the scopic regime of the Israeli occupation as one that has produced an inequality of visual rights, whereby Israelis are empowered with the unidirectional gaze while Palestinians are subjected to reduced state of what Gil Hochberg calls “visible invisibility” that mirrors the paradoxical, disempowered status of the “present absentee.”1 It is against this backdrop that B’Tselem’s launched its Camera Distribution Project, a communications initiative to “shoot back” at Israelis who are empowered not just with the literal power of the gun but also with the symbolic power of the gaze. But while much recent writing celebrates the emancipatory use of technology in the Middle East and North Africa, The Weaponized Camera systematically deconstructs the naïve view that visual recordings alone are enough to secure justice or cause change to a prevailing sociopolitical order.2 As one longtime B’Tselem videographer named Suzan Zraqo said of her recording “I know not to expect justice.”3 Her camera fails to legally incriminate Israeli perpetrators and systemic Israeli human rights violations. Instead the power of her camera is its exculpation against the presumption of her assumed Palestinian criminality. “It [the camera] is defense, not offense,” she said.4 In place of asking the simplistic question, “Do videos cause change?,” this book instead interrogates a series of more nuanced questions about the taxonomic qualities of civilian videography in Israel–Palestine, as it relates to visuality and politics. The first three chapters confront questions of visual exposure and its counterpart, concealment, including the affective and moralistic variations upon exposure—like shaming a perpetrator or mirroring a perpetrator’s actions back to him. The fourth chapter examines the protective qualities that video cameras offer to Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation. At times this videography literally buys the freedom of Palestinian bodies:  twice B’Tselem volunteers reported to me the occurrence of a footage-for-prisoner swap, whereby they secured the freedom of a fellow detained Palestinian by agreeing to delete visual recordings.5 The deletion of footage restores the one-way hierarchy of vision to the Israeli occupiers. No footage, no vision; no vision, no power.

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The fifth chapter of this book considers the status of video as evidence, the failure of the Israeli legal system to indict perpetrators when presented with such evidence, and appeals via forensics to a higher order or “metapolitical” injustice documented by visual recordings. Metapolitical justice is hard to see and difficult to make visible precisely because it is systemic rather than circumstantial, and structural rather than eruptive.6 Finally, the last chapter of this book presents the weaponization of cameras in Israel–Palestine as drawing from a joint history of vision and militarization, and categorizes the Israeli media mimicry that has developed in response to B’Tselem as a move to restore the hegemonic gaze of the Israeli scopic regime. Such actions of “shooting back at shooting back” are a mode to suppress the visibility of the legalistic, operational, institutional, and economic mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. In its argument against the hopeful if simplistic theory that videos cause change, this book may seem pessimistic. That pessimism arises because the sociopolitical order of the Israeli occupation is not merely maintained by a failure of vision: what is needed is not simply better cameras, nor more cameras. Likewise what is needed is not simply a better way to validate the “truth” of images, nor merely a wider distribution network for visual recordings. Of course, none of these things would hurt efforts to dismantle the Israeli occupation. But instead we must come to accept that images do not speak for themselves, in large part, because what one can see in an image is already a matter of a set of power relations that structure vision, visibility, and visuality. In other words, while images do have what Judith Butler calls a “transitive function,” meaning that they “act on viewers in ways that bear directly on the judgements that viewers formulate about the world,” the ways in which images act are constantly up for debate, interpretation, and interpellation.7 It is essential that images not be blocked from the sphere of appearances, which is also the sphere of the political. But “it would be a mistake to think that we only need to find the right and true images, and that a certain reality will then be conveyed,” as Butler put it.8 While perhaps pessimistic, this stance yields that the meaning of an image, as well as a spectator’s affective response to it, is not fixed in nor overdetermined by the image. Instead that meaning is determined by the framing of an image, which is iterative and volatile and which dominant regimes use their power to control. But a regime’s domination over the frame will change depending on who holds power. In the United States, images of black lynching used to circulate as souvenirs that celebrated white supremacy and denied black grievability.9 Today, the black lives violently ended by racial terror lynching have been formally memorialized as grievable by eight hundred steel monuments—one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place, and etched with victims’ names—in a move to acknowledge racial injustice, recognize abuse, and remember mass atrocities.10 But in Israel, the prevailing sociopolitical order does yet  allow for Palestinian grievability. In the summer of 2014, after Israeli incursions in Gaza resulted in the death of over 150 Palestinian children, Israel Broadcast Authority Radio refused to air a B’Tselem paid advertisement that read out the names of each child.11 The Israeli Supreme Court upheld the censorship of Palestinian death from

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Jewish Israeli ears.12 As Daniel Dor has noted in his study of Jewish Israeli media after Operation Defensive Shield (2002), the Israeli framing of events is one that obsessively suppresses guilt, resulting precisely in the evasion of any concept of responsibility and therefore in an inability to render justice.13 The Israeli regime is still flexing its power to control the frame of its now six-decade-long occupation. In the late spring of 2020, as this book goes into production, there is quite a good deal to be pessimistic about. The State of Israel has begun using the coronavirus pandemic to advance its settler-colonial regime:  it has blocked human rights work in the Occupied Territories, but not human rights abuses;14 it has forced Palestinians with pending permit requests to download a smartphone application that surveils them, granting the Israeli security services access to their location data, contacts, camera, notifications, and file downloads;15 and its settlers have waged campaigns of increased settler violence, including the forcible seizure of two B’Tselem cameras and the stealing of a B’Tselem security camera mounted in Hebron.16 Most disturbing of all, the Israeli government has signaled that plans for annexation of portions of the West Bank would begin imminently.17 Meanwhile, the Israeli left has all but collapsed, leaving behind a political vacuum in which “peace” has become a dirty word.18 Against this backdrop, it may seem that the only power remaining for those who oppose the occupation is the power of refusal. B’Tselem adopted this stance in 2016 when it began a policy of litigious refusal. It ceased its prior cooperation with Israeli military investigations after its own study found that indictments against Israeli perpetrators rarely occurred and that its participation in the Israeli legal institution was instead producing what it termed “fake justice.”19 Refusal may also come in the form of an Israeli citizen who chooses to conscientiously object to IDF service, thereby becoming a “refusenik.” Or refusal may look like a spectator’s decision, upon witnessing images of atrocity, to not recirculate those images. When writing about the Elor Azaria incident in this book, I  originally included a video still of the killed Palestinian man, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, lying on the streets of Hebron moments after his death.20 But I could not put this image to print, knowing that its recirculation might cause further harm and extend the dehumanization and ungrievability of Palestinian life.21 But there is more than pessimism and its correlated refusal. If I am able to locate a sense of optimism in one place, it is in the video archives of the B’Tselem Camera Project. When an archive lives on in digital form, noted Kunstman and Stein, it can become available for a critical reopening, a hearing, a future reckoning.22 It is in the archive that Mamie Till revisioned her son Emmett’s funeral, holding an open casket ceremony for him in the first public showing of a black lynching that was not intended for white supremacist scare tactics, but for black justice. The B’Tselem archives can become what Ariella Azoulay has termed a “civil archive,” meaning an archive that reconstructs this past while simultaneously resisting dominant narratives or the regime-made visual frame of an image.23 The archive can likewise become what Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum call an “archive of the present,” meaning it is operative rather than “contemplative” in its continual and astatic recirculation.24 The B’Tselem video archives do not sit still but circulate, in web

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browsers and theaters, in works of dance and on cell phones, in high-resolution videos and in pixelated bits of scenes streamed through poor internet connections. And just as it does not sit still, the B’Tselem video archives are not merely oriented to the past or the present but also toward the future. New media scholars teach us that, while digital preservation takes significant labor, digital materials often have afterlives that their creators did not envision.25 Just as there is always a politics to an archive’s method of preservation, the archive itself is oriented toward a future in which it may be civilly reactivated and politically reinterpreted. Jacques Derrida reminds that “the question of the archive is not … a question of the past …. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”26 The future potential of the archive is why B’Tselem volunteer Wydian Zaban films. “Today … there’s no justice,” she told me.27 She feels the things she films are “bigger” than herself and her present moment. Yet she gives her footage to B’Tselem though she does not personally experience any relief from the injustices she records, because, as she put it, “Maybe with time, in future generations, there can be justice.”28 To consider the futurity of justice means to consider the haunting that can come from the archive. Adi Kuntsman has argued that digital archives are “vessels of haunted futurities” because, while they are sites of preservation and memory, they are “also records of erasure and void.”29 In many ways the condition of “visible invisibility” to which Palestinians are reduced is a condition of erasure, of intentional absenting, of ghosting. Palestinians are made “ghosts while alive,” as Kuntsman terms them, by the ongoing threat of death and annihilation and by the partitioned visual field of the conflict that renders them invisible to civilian Jewish Israeli eyes while simultaneously hypervisible to the surveillance structures of the militarized Israeli regime. Indeed there is no ghostlier status than that of the Palestinian “present absentee,” whose presence is paradoxically recognized and withdrawn in one linguistic turn. This simultaneous presence and absence is what Kuntsman describes as an archival haunting that is not merely a “violent disappearing” but also “a form of presence,” which together demand justice with their lingering, dyadic specter.30 Haunting is of course something that happens to visibility. Specters, or ghosts, are things that blur lines between the invisible and the visible. A ghost haunts a person not with touch or smell but with its sudden appearance to the eyes. A ghost is often visible to the person it haunts but invisible to anyone else (“What ghost?”). And a ghost can appear to a collective as well in what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok term a “social haunting.” Such hauntings take place as long as a collective continues to fail to come to terms with “the lacunas imprinted on it by the secrets of others” or even by the “public secrets” the collective keeps from itself.31 It is in this haunting that the scopic regime of the Israeli occupation can be destabilized. The haunting derives from the reverberation of a multiplicity of countervisual scopic regimes that persist in the B’Tselem video archives—and which the singular, hegemonic, and militarized Israeli scopic regime cannot accommodate. In the B’Tselem archives, the other visualities refuse to disappear,

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and in their refusal they can come to visually “disturb” the future, as Kunstman puts it, in their call for “post-mortem justice which is denied to them in the present.”32 Indeed haunting is a common occurrence within media files, themselves. Analog media are subject to hysteresis, a condition that results from “errant microns located at the edge of a recorded track which have escaped full erasure and haunt subsequent recordings.”33 Such haunting likewise occurs in digital media with what is called “data remanence,” where “erased” data is flagged by a system as empty space available for reuse, but remains in place as an unmarked digital ghost until actually overwritten. In both cases, the haunting results from a physical persistence in the place of an attempt to make absent, to erase, or to cover over. The haunting that is possible in the B’Tselem archive is thus both physically and aphysically agentive, resulting from an ongoing presence that calls for recognition and demands visibility where it has been previously denied. And so, as Susan Sontag has proclaimed, “Let the atrocious images haunt us.”34 Let the banal images haunt us too—those images of the slow, suspended violence of the Israeli occupation. Indeed when I asked B’Tselem volunteer videographers which of their visual recordings were particularly memorable to them, one videographer looked at me and declared, “Everything is memorable.”35 And she is right: let all the images haunt us. And may these images live on, as a future archive of haunting that demands a political reckoning with its visual persistence.

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NOTES Introduction 1 “Kiryat Arba Settlers Throw Party on Privately Owned Palestinian Land,” International Solidarity Movement, August 17, 2007, http://palsolidarity.org/2007/08/kiryat-arbasettlers-throw-party-on-privately-owned-palestinian-land/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 2 Ibid. 3 “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt,” Deuteronomy 10:19; “Do not mistreat of oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt,” Exodus 22:21. 4 Liat Berdugo, “Shooting Back at Shooting Back,” Quarterly West, no. 90 (March 4, 2017). http://quarterlywest.press/?p=4190. Accessed July 22, 2020. 5 Asher Schechter, “The Social Intifada: How Millennials and Facebook Beat the Almighty Israeli Army,” Haaretz, May 5, 2014, www.haaretz.com/.premium-thesocial-intifada-1.5247277. Accessed July 22, 2020. 6 Judith Butler, “Photography, War, Outrage,” PMLA 120, no. 3 (May, 2005): 822–7 (823). Embedded photographers may only go where a regime allows them, and the frames of their images are likewise restricted by the regime. In such images, teaches Butler, the “gaze remain[s]‌restricted to the established parameters of designated action” (ibid., p. 822). 7 Israel Defense Forces, The First IDF Smartphone, 2017, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hhs_w94gMGw. Accessed July 22, 2020. 8 See Chapter 6. 9 Yehoshua Brenner, “Not just B’Tselem: Settlers Will Document Clashes with Palestinians ,” Walla! News, September 22, 2011, http://news.walla.co.il/item/1863012. Accessed July 22, 2020. 10 Akiva Novick, “Conflict’s New Weapons,” Ynet News, July 4, 2011; www.ynetnews. com/articles/0,7340,L-4090838,00.html; “Get to News Program,” Tazpit Summer Internship Program, 2013, http://sip.tazpit.org.il/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 11 Peter Cohn, Aron Katsof, Settler, Esh Kodesh, 2015, http://vimeo.com/118244979. Accessed July 22, 2020; Aron, Katsof, “Re: Press Inquiry about Esh Kodesh,” Personal email, August 20, 2017. International law considers all Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to be illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel disputes this, considering its settlements to be legal. However, the settlements known as “Outposts” are considered illegal land grabs by the Israeli government, itself, and often are settled by radical, extremist, or militant Israeli settlers. 12 Israel Defense Forces Central Command, “To Jessica Montell, B’Tselem Executive Director, Subject: Your Request Regarding Video Filmed by the Organization’s Volunteer workers,” November 30, 2009, www.btselem.org/download/20091130_ central_command_response_to_letter_on_soldiers_obstructing_photographers_heb. pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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13 Military checkpoints are a gray area: filmed too close, one could argue a videographer collects “classified information” pertaining to security screening methodology. Filming at police checkpoints, which differ from military checkpoints, is flat-out prohibited by Israeli police regulations. 14 Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012); Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain, Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Reza Jamali, Online Arab Spring: Social Media and Fundamental Change (Amsterdam: Chandos Publishing, 2015); Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); and Victoria Carty, Social Movements and New Technology (New York: Routledge, 2018). 15 B’Tselem, “About B’Tselem—The Wayback Machine,” March 8, 2005, http://web. archive.org/web/20050308111422/www.btselem.org/English/About_BTselem/Index. asp. Accessed July 22, 2020. 16 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem Staff—The Wayback Machine,” August 10, 2005, http://web. archive.org/web/20050810025108/www.btselem.org/english/About_BTselem/Staff_ Members.asp. Accessed July 22, 2020. 17 “B’Tselem Video—The Wayback Machine,” December 10, 2005, http://web.archive. org/web/20051210222750/www.btselem.org/English/Video/Index.asp. Accessed July 22, 2020. 18 See, for example, B’Tselem, Documentary: Separation Barrier’s Consequences for Farmers, 2006, www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4bC1hKucQA. Accessed July 22, 2020. 19 Ehab Tarabieh, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 20 B’Tselem, “Sharmuta Video”—Settler Harassment of Palestinians in Hebron, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXSFsJV084. Accessed July 22, 2020. 21 This video is discussed at length in Chapter 4. 22 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem’s Video Camera Distribution Project Wins British One World Media Award,” June 23, 2009. www.btselem.org/press_releases/20090623. Accessed July 22, 2020. 23 Larry Derfner, “Image Makers,” Jerusalem Post, October 2, 2008, www.jpost.com/ Magazine/Features/Image-makers-116199. Accessed July 22, 2020. 24 B’Tselem, “Shooting Back—the Wayback Machine,” April 14, 2008, http://web. archive.org/web/20080414161342/www.btselem.org/english/Video/Shooting_Back_ Background.asp. Accessed July 22, 2020. 25 Jim Hubbard, “Misguided ‘Shooting Back’ Puts Palestinian Kids in Danger,” Jerusalem Post, September 17, 2008, sec. Opinion, www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/ Misguided-Shooting-Back-puts-Palestinian-kids-in-danger. Accessed July 22, 2020. 26 B’Tselem, “Shooting Back—The Wayback Machine,” April 14, 2008, http://web. archive.org/web/20080414161342/www.btselem.org/english/Video/Shooting_Back_ Background.asp; B’Tselem, “B’Tselem’s Staff—The Wayback Machine.” May 24, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20080524075508/www.btselem.org/english/About_ BTselem/Staff_Members.asp. Accessed July 22, 2020. 27 Poor images have their merits, too. (See Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-Flux, no. 10 (November 2009): 1–9.) 28 Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 29 Ehab Tarabieh, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. B’Tselem does not list the minors in a household as volunteers. While they cannot prevent minors from filming, the organization does not encourage it.

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30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. As a policy the organization never recalls cameras from volunteers for lack of use. 33 Ruthie Ginsburg noted B’Tselem’s outstanding features in “Gendered visual activism: Documenting human rights abuse from the private sphere,” Current Sociology 66, no. 1 (2018): 38–55 (39). As of August 2019, B’Tselem had uploaded 631 videos to its YouTube channel, for an average of 1.01 videos per week in the twelve years since its founding. 34 Youth Against Settlements, a Palestinian organization based in Hebron, was founded by activist and former B’Tselem volunteer Issa Amro. The organization educates Palestinians as to what actions constitute human rights violations and on the importance of documenting them. It sporadically publishes videos on its YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/Human1Rights1Press/videos). Human Rights Defenders is a Hebron-based organization that launched a “Capturing Occupation Camera Project in Palestine project.” As of February 2019 its founder ‘Imad Abu Shamesiyeh—a former B’Tselem volunteer—reported that the organization has twenty cameras in the field (www.youtube.com/channel/ UCcp4VPvAxptCYutqEqf7SJA; ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019). Tamimi Press was founded by the Tamimi family of a-Nabi Saleh to record the village’s weekly demonstrations against the occupation (www.facebook.com/Tamimipresspage/; www.youtube.com/user/tamimi1966/ videos). Nilin Media Group, an initiative led by teen journalist Arafat Kanaan, documented the Palestinian resistance to the occupation in Ni’lin and was active only from 2009 to 2013 (http://nilin.wordpress.com/; www.youtube.com/user/ NilinMediaGroup/videos. Accessed July 22, 2020.). 35 “Shashat,” Shashat, www.shashat.org/en/article/554/Shashat. Accessed August 23, 2019. 36 B’Tselem, “Camera Savvy: Video-Training Seminar for Women Volunteers, Village of Burin, 8 Jan. 2014,” Eyes Wide Open | Photo Blog, March 2014, www.btselem.org/ photoblog/2014_international_womens_day. Accessed July 22, 2020. 37 Anti-normalization is the rejection of Israel as a “normal” state and a rejection of enterprises that bring together Palestinians and Israelis unless they explicitly seek to end the occupation. It is a stance that opposes the status quo of the occupation and perceives normal, apolitical relations between Israelis and Palestinians as contributing to “colonization of the mind.” See also http://972mag.com/what-isnormalization/31368/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 38 Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 39 ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 40 Ibid. 41 Jamais Cascio, “Rise of the Participatory Panopticon,” Open the Future, March 6, 2009. www.openthefuture.com/2009/03/rise_of_the_participatory_pano.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 42 Pini Pavel Miretski and Sascha-Dominik Vladimir Oliver Bachman, “The Panopticon of International Law: B’Tselem’s Camera Project and the Enforcement of International Law in a Transnational Society,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 52, no. 1 (December 15, 2014): 235–62, 243. 43 Ruthie Ginsburg, “Gendered Visual Activism: Documenting Human Rights Abuse from the Private Sphere,” Current Sociology 66, no. 1: (2018): 38–55 (48).

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44 Ibid.; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, “The Monster’s Tail,” in Against the Wall: Israel’s Barrier to Peace, edited by Michael Sorkin (New York: New Press, 2005), pp. 2–27. 45 Ginsburg, “Gendered Visual Activism,” pp. 48–9. 46 B’Tselem, Day of Demolitions in Masafer Yatta, South Hebron Hills, Leaves 9 Homeless, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0aEr8VF9vI; B’Tselem, Israeli Military Denies Ambulance Access to a Palestinian Patient’s Home, Hebron, 16 June 2019, 2019, www. youtube.com/watch?v=zDB3Qn5O62Q; B’Tselem, Civil Administration Cuts and Confiscates Water Pipe Servicing 12 Communities Masafer Yatta, 2019, www.youtube. com/watch?v=ockfusWRD7s; and B’Tselem, Israeli Soldiers Raid the Da’na Home at Night and Wake the Family, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=seQ5UdzT_Pw. Accessed July 22, 2020. 47 For more on the settler-colonial framework at play in Israel–Palestine, see: Lorenzo Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” Interventions 21, no. 4 (May 19, 2019): 568–81, and “What Can Settler Colonial Studies Offer to an Interpretation of the Conflict in Israel–Palestine?” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (July 3, 2015): 268–71; Anne de Jong, “Zionist Hegemony, the Settler Colonial Conquest of Palestine and the Problem with Conflict: A Critical Genealogy of the Notion of Binary Conflict,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (July 3, 2018): 364–83; and Rachel Busbridge, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 1 (January 2018): 91–115. 48 See, for example, B’Tselem, “13 December 2018: Settlers Supported by the Military Riot on West Bank Roads and Attack Palestinians,” January 14, 2019, www.btselem. org/video/20190113_settlers_supported_by_military_riot_on_13_december. Accessed July 22, 2020. 49 B’Tselem, “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism—Report Summary,” May 2016. www.btselem.org/ publications/summaries/201605_occupations_fig_leaf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 50 See Chapter 5 for an in-depth analysis of video markers in B’Tselem’s published footage. 51 Gen. 1:27. 52 UN General Assembly. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948. www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 53 B’Tselem, “About B’Tselem Video,” November 19, 2017. www.btselem.org/video/ about-btselem-video. Accessed July 22, 2020. 54 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 73. 55 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 473–96. 56 Ibid., 477. 57 Ibid. 58 Hochberg, Visual Occupations, p. 66. 59 Ruchama Marton and Dalit Baum, “Transparent Wall, Opaque Gates,” in Against the Wall: Israel’s Barrier to Peace, edited by Michael Sorkin (New York: New Press, 2005), p. 216. 60 Gadi Algazi, “Offshore Zionism,” New Left Review 40 (July–August 2006): 27–37 (30). 61 See Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations. I take the term “digital suspicion” from Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

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62 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 39. 63 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007). 64 Ibid., p. 132. 65 Ibid., p. 133. 66 Amos Harel, “Soldiers Can Shoot Gazans Spying on Netzarim,” Haaretz, November 5, 2003, www.haaretz.com/1.4752144. Accessed July 22, 2020. 67 Weizman, Hollow Land, p. 133. 68 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), and “Photography, War, Outrage,” PMLA 120, no. 3 (May 2005): 822–7; Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations; Simon Faulkner, “On Israel/Palestine and the Politics of Visibility,” in Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak and Imogen Tyler (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014); Ruthie Ginsburg, “Exposure: A Civil Politics of Photography,” Philosophy of Photography 5, no. 1 (April 2014): 47–64; Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 435–49; Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein, Digital Militarism; Alisa Lebow, “Shooting with Intent,” in Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence, edited by Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (London: Wallflower Press, 2012); Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” 2011; Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 69 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 36. 70 See Simon Faulkner, “On Israel/Palestine and the Politics of Visibility,” in Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent, edited by Tyler, Imogen, Marciniak, Katarzyna (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 150. 71 Weizman, Hollow Land, p. 181. 72 Liat Berdugo, “A Situation: A Tree in Palestine,” Places Journal, January 2020, http:// placesjournal.org/article/a-situation-a-tree-in-palestine/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 73 Israeli laws that dictate the status of Present Absentees include: The Absentees’ Property Law, 1950; The Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law, 1953; Absentees’ Property (Eviction) Law, 1958; Absentees’ Property (Amendment No. 3) (Release and Use of Endowment Property) Law, 1965; Absentees’ Property (Amendment No. 4) (Release and Use of Property of Evangelical Episcopal Church) Law, 1967; and Absentees’ Property (Compensation) Law, 1973. For more on language and terminology, see Julie Peteet, “Words as Interventions: Naming in the Palestine-Israel Conflict,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005): 153–72, http://doi. org/10.1080/0143659042000322964. 74 Hochberg, Visual Occupations. 75 Ariel Handel, “Notes on the Senses and their Role in the Occupied Territories,” Theoria ve-bikoret 28 (2006): 157–73 (160). 76 David Snow and Robert Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” in From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research Across Cultures, edited by Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney G. Tarrow (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1988), pp. 197–217. 77 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 78 Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51, http://doi.org/10.1080/07393180216559.

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79 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. 80 Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame”, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2/3 (2004): 435–49 (437). 81 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 8. 82 Jesse Allpress, Rupert Brown, Roger Giner-Sorolla, Julien A. Deonna, and Fabrice Teroni, “Two Faces of Group-Based Shame: Moral Shame and Image Shame Differentially Predict Positive and Negative Orientations to Ingroup Wrongdoing,” Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 40, no. 10 (2014): 1270–84 (1272). 83 See for instance Daniel Dor’s The Suppression of Guilt: The Israeli Media and the Reoccupation of the West Bank (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 84 See also Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 85 Nancy Fraser, “Abnormal Justice,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2008): 393–422. 86 Rabih Mroué, Ziad Nawfal, and Carol Martin, “The Pixelated Revolution,” TDR 56, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 18–35. http://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00186. 87 Ariella Azoulay, “Photography: The Ontological Question,” Mafte’akh 2e (2011): 65–80 (78). 88 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008). 89 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, “Citizen Camera-Witnessing: Embodied Political Dissent in the Age of ‘Mediated Mass Self-Communication,’ ” New Media & Society 16, no. 5 (August 2014): 753–69. 90 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971), p. 19. 91 Amos Harel, “Israel Speeds Up Camera Placements in West Bank in Effort to Deter Terrorism,” Haaretz, June 22, 2017. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-idfspeeds-up-camera-placements-in-w-bank-in-effort-to-deter-terrorism-1.5485764. Accessed July 22, 2020. 92 Judah Ari Gross, “The Gaza Border Fence Won’t Protect You, but the IDF Will,” Times of Israel, October 22, 2015, www.timesofisrael.com/the-gaza-border-fence-wontprotect-you-but-the-idf-will/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 93 Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism, p. 15. 94 Ibid. 95 Edward Said, “Preface,” in Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, edited by Hamid Dabashi (London: Verso, 2006), p. 2. 96 Ann L. Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 121–56. 97 Judith Butler, Frames of War, p. 85.

Chapter 1 1 B’Tselem, Soldiers Assault and Detain B’Tselem Volunteer, Madama, February 2017, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rab3496DauE. Accessed July 22, 2020. This published video is an edited and abridged version of the incident, and B’Tselem maintains the complete footage in its archive. 2 Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 97.

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3 Ruthie Ginsburg, And You Will Serve as Eyes for Us: Israeli Human Rights Organizations as Seen through the Camera’s Eye (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014), p. 78, emphasis added. Quoted in Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum, eds., Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine and Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2016). 4 B’Tselem, “About B’Tselem,” www.btselem.org/about_btselem. Emphasis added. Accessed June 5, 2019. 5 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem and Al-Haq Receive 2018 Human Rights Award of the French Republic,” December 10, 2018, www.btselem.org/press_releases/20181210_french_ republic_human_rights_award. Accessed July 22, 2020. 6 Hochberg, Visual Occupations, p. 41. 7 For more on exposure in Israel–Palestine, see Ruthie Ginsburg, “Exposure: A Civil Politics of Photography,” Philosophy of Photography 5, no. 1 (April 2014): 47–64. 8 Ginsburg, “Exposure.” 9 Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 10 Quoted in Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 4. 11 Emphasis added. 12 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 4 (Panopticon, Constitution, Colonies, Codification), edited by John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838), oll. libertyfund.org/titles/bentham-the-works-of-jeremy-bentham-vol-4#lf0872-04_ head_004. Accessed July 22, 2020. 13 Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51, doi.org/10.1080/07393180216559. 14 Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News Foreign Policy and Intervention (London: Routledge, 2002). Robinson argues that news coverage of foreign crises sways Western governments’ reactions. 15 T. F. Hoad, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology [Electronic Resource] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 16 Ginsburg, “Exposure,” p. 50. 17 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. xxxvii. 18 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem to Stop Referring Complaints to the Military Law Enforcement System,” May 25, 2016, www.btselem.org/press_releases/20160525_occupations_fig_ leaf. Accessed July 22, 2020. For a detailed discussion on this decision and its impact on citizen videography in Israel–Palestine, see Chapter 5 of this book. 19 Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, edited by Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), pp. 9–32. 20 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 7. 21 Ibid., p. 116. 22 Ibid., p. 7. 23 Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera, p. xi. 24 Ibid., p. 5. 25 Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–56; Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera, p. 5.

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26 Thawra ‘Eid, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019. 27 Wydian Zaban, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019. 28 Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 29 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 30 Ibid. 31 Arij al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 32 B’Tselem volunteers transfer their footage to the video department for cataloguing and archiving through a network of paid field researchers. B’Tselem then edits and publishes only a small percentage of footage in its archive. 33 For more on the protective capacities of Palestinian countervisual tactics, see Chapter 4. 34 Meg McLagan, “Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (March 2006): 191–5, 193. 35 This view count was conducted on June 5, 2019. 36 The anteriority of exposure connects to the Palestinian resistance concept of sumud, or steadfastness. Sumud is oriented toward the future by indicating that steadfastness through the present will yield a positive outcome in the future. The symbol of sumud is the olive tree with its roots deep in the land, without fruit. Indeed it bears only a future crop: the olive tree, like the Palestinian resistance, has not yet bloomed. 37 Ginsburg argues similarly in “Exposure.” 38 Ariella Azoulay, “Photography: The Ontological Question,” Mafte’akh 2e (2011): 65–80, 73. 39 Ibid., p. 74. 40 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 41 Ibid., p. 75. 42 These are qualities that Hito Steyerl write about in her seminal essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” arguing against the necessity of “rich” images in favor of “poor” ones that are rapidly transmissible, uncopyrighted, and widely circulated or circulateable (in e-Flux, no. 10 (November 2009): 1–9, www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/ in-defense-of-the-poor-image/. Accessed July 22, 2020.). 43 B’Tselem Tape 2893, filmed on October 11, 12, and 15, 2009. 44 Daniel Mann, “ ‘I Am Spartacus’: Individualising Visual Media and Warfare,” Media, Culture & Society 41, no. 1 (January 2019): 38–53. 45 Ibid., p. 40. 46 Avid photographers also note that white and backlit backgrounds, such as the one in this image, are notorious for producing chromatic aberration—even with advanced lenses. In such a case, a photographer would seek to reframe the photograph, which is a luxury that this Palestinian photographer cannot afford. 47 Weizman, Eyal. “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability,” e-Flux 64 (April 2015). www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60861/violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 48 Ginsburg, “Exposure,” p. 52. 49 An edited version of this video is publicly viewable at www.youtube/szW6pUjX4o0. Accessed July 22, 2020. 50 Roy Greenslade, “Israel Must Halt Law That Could Criminalise Media,” Guardian, June 3, 2018, www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2018/jun/03/israel-must-haltlaw-that-could-criminalise-media. Accessed April 10, 2019.

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51 David Israel, “Bill Punishing Taking Pics of IDF Soldiers Passes Knesset Preliminary Reading,” Jewish Press, June 21, 2018, www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/theknesset/bill-punishing-taking-pics-of-idf-soldiers-passes-knesset-preliminaryreading/2018/06/21/. Accessed April 9, 2019. 52 Ynet Reporters, “Ministerial Committee Approves Bill Seeking to Bar Filming of Soldiers,” Ynet News, June 17, 2018, www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5289721,00. html. Accessed April 9, 2019. 53 Michael Omer-Man, “Hiding the Occupation Doesn’t Make It Go Away,” +972 Magazine, June 16, 2018, http://972mag.com/hiding-the-occupation-doesnt-make-itgo-away/136220/. Accessed April 9, 2019. 54 If such a bill were passed, the very publication of this book would constitute a criminal act. 55 Channel 13 TV News—Israel. B’Tselem Director-General Hagai Elad, in a Conversation Today on the Bill to Ban the Photographing of Soldiers: “The Problem Is in Reality, Not in Its Documentation” (in Hebrew), 2018. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=L9tikP7rYBQ. Accessed July 22, 2020. 56 IMEMC News, “P.A. Files Appeal with IFG against Israeli Law Criminalizing Filming Israeli Soldiers,” International Middle East Media Center, June 22, 2018, http://imemc. org/article/p-a-files-appeal-with-ifg-against-israeli-law-criminalizing-filming-israelisoldiers/. Accessed April 10, 2019. 57 Israel, “Bill Punishing Taking Pics of IDF Soldiers Passes Knesset Preliminary Reading.” 58 Haviv Rettig Gur, “The Brief but Exciting Life of the Bill to Outlaw Filming IDF Soldiers,” Times of Israel, July 4, 2018, www.timesofisrael.com/the-brief-but-excitinglife-of-the-bill-to-outlaw-filming-idf-soldiers/. Accessed April 10, 2019. Gur speculates that the Knesset will not take up the concealment bill when it returns to session and that no one will even remember. Gur believes that the concealment bill’s main aim was to publicize the name of Robert Ilatov, the bill’s proposer, since he is a relatively new, up-and-coming Israeli politician. 59 Ehab Tarabieh, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 60 B’Tselem, “2017 Annual Report,” Jerusalem, 2018, www.btselem.org/sites/default/ files2/2017_activity_report.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 61 Ruthie Ginsburg, “Gendered Visual Activism: Documenting Human Rights Abuse from the Private Sphere,” Current Sociology 66, no. 1 (July 4, 2016): 38–55, http://doi. org/10.1177/0011392116651115. 62 Ibid., p. 49. 63 A handful of these testimonies are not anonymous, only in cases where soldiers have chosen to go public with their accounts. Such testimonies comprise only of the order of dozens out of the over one thousand testimonies gathered by Breaking the Silence since its founding in 2014. See Breaking the Silence, “FAQ,” www.breakingthesilence. org.il/about/qa. Accessed April 10, 2019. 64 Breaking the Silence, “FAQ.” 65 Breaking the Silence, “About the Organization,” www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about/ organization. Accessed April 10, 2019. 66 Breaking the Silence, Firing at a Suspicious Window, 2015, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NcXNnhq1Y8M. Accessed July 22, 2020. 67 Marc Maximov, “Israeli Filmmakers Push the Boundaries at Duke.” INDY Week, September 16, 2009. http://indyweek.com/api/content/3c1f6f76-88b9-55a68e50-d80657522551/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 68 Avi Mograbi sits on the board of Breaking the Silence.

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69 Daniel Mann, “ ‘I Am Spartacus’: Individualising Visual Media and Warfare,” Media, Culture & Society 41, no. 1 (January 2019): 38–53. http://doi. org/10.1177/0163443718764805. 70 Coolness is advertised to reduce the fatigue caused by heat or overheating. See Agilite, “SF Balaclava,” http://agilitegear.com/products/sf-balaclava-black. Accessed July 22, 2020; and eBay, “Agilite Israel Army IDF SF Flexible Full Face Mask Balaclava Black Biker/Ski,” www.ebay.com/itm/AGILITE-ISRAEL-ARMY-IDF-SF-Flexible-FULLFACE-MASK-BALACLAVA-BLACK-BIKER-SKI-/263340678599. Accessed April 10, 2019. 71 For more on the ways Israeli-produced military products are marketed using the occupation as a selling point, see Ali H. Musleh, “Designing in RealTime: An Introduction to Weapons Design in the Settler-Colonial Present of Palestine,” Design and Culture 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 33–54, http://doi. org/10.1080/17547075.2018.1430992. 72 Agilite, “SF Balaclava.” 73 Southern Poverty Law Center, “Unmasking the Klan,” Intelligence Report, Summer issue (September 15, 1999), www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1999/ unmasking-klan. Accessed July 22, 2020. 74 Emmanuel Levinas, De l’évasion (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982). 75 Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, Albany: SUNY Press, 1986, pp. 23–4. 76 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 131. 77 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 24. 78 Hochberg, Visual Occupations. 79 B’Tselem, “Six Days of Unjustified Detention, with Full Backing by the Military and the Courts: As Usual, No One Will Have to Answer for It,” March 15, 2017, www. btselem.org/video/20170314/btselem_volunteer_assaulted_and_arrested. Accessed July 22, 2020. 80 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008), pp. 128, 169. 81 Sontag, On Photography; Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl, “What Is a Document? An Exchange between Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl,” Aperture, no. 214 (2014): 58–64. 82 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 83 Ariella Azoulay, “On Her Book the Civil Contract of Photography,” Rorotoko, January 22, 2009, http://rorotoko.com/interview/20090123_azoulay_ariella_book_civil_ contract_photography. Accessed July 22, 2020. 84 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, pp. 23, 25–6. 85 Ibid., p. 14. 86 Ibid. 87 Sontag, On Photography; Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 14. 88 Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999); Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 11. 89 Carolyn Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 7. 90 Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera, p. 87. 91 Ibid., p. 136.

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92 Teju Cole, “What Does It Mean to Look at This?” New York Times, May 24, 2018, sec. Magazine, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/magazine/what-does-it-mean-to-look-atthis.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 93 Maimon and Grinbaum, eds., Activestills, p. 31. 94 Ibid., p. 300. 95 Ibid. 96 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 146.

Chapter 2 1 “Gaza Crisis: Toll of Operations in Gaza,” BBC News, September 1, 2014, sec. Middle East, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28439404. Accessed April 10, 2019. 2 Allan Sørensen, Twitter Post, July 9, 2014, http://twitter.com/allansorensen72/ status/486954506517639170/photo/1. Accessed July 22, 2020. I thank Lisa Cartwright for drawing my attention to this incident. 3 Nikolaj Krak, “When Bombs Receive Applause,” Kristeligt Dagblad, July 11, 2014, www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/2014-07-11/when-bombs-receive-applause. Accessed April 10, 2019. 4 Notably the Sderot hill had already been nicknamed the “hill of shame,” but for different reasons. In 2008 Israel barred international journalists from entering Gaza to see the havoc wreaked by its incursion there. Instead journalists gathered on the Sderot hilltop to monitor the war from afar, from the closest viewpoint available to them. One reporter dubbed their viewing point “the hill of shame” due to the shameful reporting restrictions that limited their access to Gaza, producing a homogenization of the reportage about the violence. Ariella Azoulay noted that these media restrictions shaped not only the distance but the very substance of reporting: “From [the press’s] observation point [on the ‘hill of shame’], what they see is exactly the picture that Israel wishes to show: a war fought on equal footing by two sides. Missiles launched in Gaza hit Israel, and Israel retaliates.“ (Ariella Azoulay, “When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square,” in Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 194–224 (196)). Journalists cast the shamefulness of the hill against the Israeli government and its heavy-handed censorship. Six years later, in 2014’s “Sderot cinema,” the shame of the hill was attached to the Israeli spectators themselves, who disregarded human lives in Gaza as less-than-human, or nonhuman altogether, as they cheered on Israeli militarism. The loss of human life warrants grief in place of celebration, and the denial of grievability, one could argue, is shameful. See Robert Mackey, “Israelis Watch Bombs Drop on Gaza From Front-Row Seats,” New York Times, December 20, 2017, sec. World, www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/ israelis-watch-bombs-drop-on-gaza-from-front-row-seats.html. Accessed April 10, 2019; David Campbell, “Constructed Visibility: Photographing The Catastrophe of Gaza,” presented at the “The Aesthetics of Catastrophe,” Northwestern University, June 5, 2009, www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/documents/Constructed_Visibility.pdf, p. 3. Accessed April 10, 2019. See also Yonit Farago and Martin Fletcher, “Hill of Shame Where Gaza Bombing Is Spectator Sport,” Miftah.org, January 15, 2019, www.miftah. org/display.cfm?DocId=18589&CategoryId=5. Accessed July 22, 2020. 5 Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos 2/3 (2004): 435–49 (437).

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6 Ibid., p. 439. 7 The Oxford Modern English Dictionary defines shame as “a feeling of distress or humiliation caused by the consciousness of the guilt or folly of oneself or an associate … a state of disgrace, discredit or intense regret … a person or thing that brings regret … a thing or action that is wrong or regrettable.” Delia Thompson, ed., The Oxford Modern English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 940. 8 The shame of Israeli soldiers plays out a common script of “perpetrators trauma,” or the psychological and moral injury that those who’ve committed violent acts incur as a result of their commission. In their sociopolitically confined roles, Israeli soldiers are relegated to the affective states of shame and remorse, and Palestinians are relegated to possessing suffering bodies, deserving of human rights but not afforded them by Israeli soldiers. These roles do not leave much room for sea change. For further research on perpetrator’s trauma, see Saira Mohamed, “Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity,” Columbia Law Review 115, no. 5 (June 2015): 1157–216; Hochberg, Visual Occupations. 9 Breaking the Silence, Women Soldiers’ Testimonies, Jerusalem, 2009. www. breakingthesilence.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Women_Soldiers_ Testimonies_2009_Eng.pdf, p. 40. Accessed July 22, 2020; Anonymous testimony 173368, Breaking the Silence, “I’m Ashamed of What I Did There,” 2004–5, www. breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database/173368. Accessed July 22, 2019. Testimony given by a member of the Engineering Corps unit stationed in the Tulkarm area; Breaking the Silence, Soldiers Speak Out about Their Service in Hebron, Jerusalem, 2004. www.breakingthesilence.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Soldiers_ Testimonies_from_Hebron_2001_2004_Eng.pdf, p. 12. Accessed July 22, 2020. 10 Breaking the Silence, Soldiers Speak Out: Why I Broke the Silence, Jerusalem, 2018. www.breakingthesilence.org.il/inside/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Why_I_Broke_ The_Silence_English.pdf, p. 3. Accessed July 22, 2020. 11 Krista Thomason, “Shame, Violence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XCI, no. 1 (July 2015): 1–24 (13). 12 Anonymous testimony 32812, Breaking the Silence, “Real Psychological Damage,” 2004, www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database/32812. Accessed July 22, 2020. Testimony given by a First Sergeant of the Nahal Brigade stationed in Hebron. 13 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 8. 14 Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” p. 435. 15 Ibid., p. 446. 16 Ibid. 17 Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, “Update on The Hub and WITNESS’ New Online Strategy,” WITNESS Blog, August 2010, http://blog.witness.org/2010/08/update-on-the-huband-witness-new-online-strategy/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 18 Sam Gregory, “Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent,” Journal of Human Rights Practice 2, no. 2 (2010): 191–207. 19 In a more graphic video, also filmed by the Egyptian police themselves, police sodomize a civilian with a nightstick. These videos are variants of the so-called “happy-slapping” videos, in which a perpetrator assaults an unsuspecting victim while recording and circulates the footage as entertainment. See Gregory, “Cameras Everywhere.” 20 Gregory, “Cameras Everywhere,” p. 197.

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21 Anonymous testimony 84695, Breaking the Silence, “It’s a Game,” www. breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database/84695. Accessed April 10, 2019. Undated testimony given by a First Sergeant in a Paratroopers unit stationed in Hebron. 22 UN General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948, www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 23 Ginat, Gitit. “Shock, Awe—and Denial,” Haaretz, September 3, 2010, www.haaretz. com/1.5109134. Accessed July 22, 2020. The phrase is part of a larger song that goes, in Arabic, “Wahad hummus, wahad ful / Ana behibak mishmar hagvul” (“One order of hummus, one order of ful [fava beans] / I love the Border Police”). 24 Uri Blau, “Israeli Troops Humiliate Palestinians—and Put It on YouTube,” Haaretz, June 19, 2009, www.haaretz.com/1.5067525. Accessed April 10, 2019. The video was previously available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFPB-vtjPLQ. 25 Anonymous testimony 339911, Breaking the Silence, “We Got an Order, Some Team Went to the Sherutrom (IDF Fundraiser),” 2002, www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ testimonies/database/339911. Accessed July 22, 2020. Testimony given by a First Sergeant in the Nahal Brigade stationed in Hebron. 26 Alex Levac, “The Two-State Solution Is Not an Option for Israel and the Palestinians,” Haaretz, June 30, 2014, www.haaretz.com/where-we-are-headed-1.5253510. Accessed July 22, 2020. 27 For further on the relationship between pride and shame, see Thomas Scheff, “Socialization of Emotions: Pride and Shame as Causal Agents,” in Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, edited by Theodore D. Kemper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 281–304. 28 “Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families,” 1997, http://humanrights.gov.au/ourwork/bringing-them-home-report-1997. Accessed July 22, 2020. 29 B’Tselem, “Video: Soldier Executes Palestinian Lying Injured on Ground after the Latter Stabbed a Soldier in Hebron,” March 24, 2016, www.btselem.org/ video/20160324_soldier_executes_palestinian_attacker_in_hebron. Accessed April 10, 2019. 30 Channel 13 TV News—Israel, Twitter post (in Hebrew), translated by author, March 12, 2017, http://twitter.com/newsisrael13/status/840918735682711553. Accessed July 22, 2020. Ben-Gvir is a member of Otzma Yehudit, a far-right Israeli political party that has been dubbed the Israeli Alt-Right. 31 MEE and agencies, “Hebron Parade Features Tributes to Israeli Soldier Convicted of Killing,” Middle East Eye, March 12, 2017, www.middleeasteye.net/news/ hebron-parade-features-tributes-israeli-soldier-convicted-killing. Accessed July 22, 2020. Gopstein is a follower of ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane whose work has motivated most strains of violent nationalism in Israel; founder and director of Lehava, an Israeli Jewish anti-assimilation organization that is considered Alt-Right; and former council member of Kiryat Arba, the main settlement in Hebron. 32 “Israeli Children Are Dressing up as Elor Azaria, Who Shot Prisoner in the Head as He Lay on the Ground,” If Americans Knew Blog (blog), March 8, 2017, http:// israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-children-dressing-elor-azaria-shot-prisoner-head-layground/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 33 i24NEWS English, Elor Azaria Released After Nine Months in Jail, 2018, www.youtube. com/watch?v=2CXcSccGixE. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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34 Yaniv Kubovich and Noa Landau, “Elor Azaria, Israeli Soldier Convicted of Killing a Wounded Palestinian Terrorist, Set Free After Nine Months,” Haaretz, May 8, 2018, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-hebron-shooter-elor-azaria-released-fromprison-after-nine-months-1.6070371. Accessed July 22, 2020. 35 Sarah Levi, “Hebron Shooter Elor Azaria Visits City for First Time since Release,” Jerusalem Post, July 3, 2018, www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Hebron-shooterElor-Azaria-visits-city-for-first-time-since-release-561442. Accessed April 10, 2019. 36 See B’Tselem, “Hebron City Center,” www.btselem.org/topic/hebron. Accessed July 12, 2019. 37 Maya Asheri and Nati Tucker. “Israeli Radio Host Posted ‘Ashamed to Be Israeli’ after Gaza Deaths. Now He May Lose His Job,” Haaretz, April 2, 2018, www.haaretz. com/israel-news/radio-host-faces-ax-for-ashamed-to-be-israeli-post-after-gazadeaths-1.5969387. Accessed July 22, 2020. 38 Itay Stern, “Apology Saves Job of Israeli Radio Host Who Said He’s ‘Ashamed to Be Israeli’ Over Gaza Deaths,” Haaretz, April 3, 2018, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/ apology-saves-job-of-radio-host-who-said-he-s-ashamed-to-be-israeli-1.5975444. Accessed July 22, 2020. 39 Dima Khatib, Twitter Post, July 11, 2014, http://twitter.com/Dima_Khatib/ status/487522633139761153. Accessed July 22, 2020. 40 John M. Coyote, Twitter Post, July 10, 2014, http://twitter.com/MacJuanma/ status/487253434710904832 Accessed July 22, 2020. 41 Andrés Dueñas, Twitter Post, July 11, 2014, http://twitter.com/andresduenias/ status/487756157109690368, emphasis added. Accessed July 22, 2020. 42 B’Tselem, Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Territories 1992/1993, Jerusalem, 1994, www.btselem.org/sites/default/files2/human_rights_violations_in_the_ occupied_territories_1992_1993.pdf, p. 106. Accessed July 22, 2020. 43 Testimony of Bashir a-Tamimi, B’Tselem, “IDF Soldiers Gather, Fingerprint Residents of a-Nabi Salah in Middle of the Night, January 2004,” January 25, 2004, www.btselem. org/testimonies/20040125_soldiers_take_finger_prints_from_a_nebi_salah_residents. Accessed July 22, 2020. 44 B’Tselem, Settler Breaks B’Tselem Camera, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ FC76SQ7SM. Accessed July 22, 2020. 45 B’Tselem, “Soldiers Arresting Beit Rima Resident Violently Attack Him and His Family, Leave His Brother Unconscious in Street,” April 16, 2015, www.btselem.org/ beating_and_abuse/20150416_beit_rima. Accessed July 22, 2020. 46 B’Tselem, “Police Officers Assault Girl Aged 15 in Her Home and Take Her for Interrogation,” November 23, 2017. www.btselem.org/jerusalem/20171107_police_ officers_assault_girl_in_silwan. Accessed July 22, 2020. 47 David Shulman, “Umm Al-’Amad,” Ta’ayush, June 29, 2013. www.taayush. org/?p=3428. Accessed July 22, 2020. 48 Ibid. 49 “Adam and his wife were both naked, but unashamed” (Gen. 2:25). 50 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 104. 51 Ibid. 52 B’Tselem, “Reprehensible Actions by Israeli Troops against Palestinians Following Killing of Rabbi Raziel Shevach: Demolishing a Home with Inhabitants Still inside, Strip Searching 3 Women, Setting Dogs on 3 Residents,” February 18, 2018, www. btselem.org/press_releases/20180215_reprehensible_actions_in_jenin. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Quoted in Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 103. 56 One may also feel shame in private but in that case the feeling of shame derives from a projection of others’ affective responses. The other need not be present to expose; with shame it is enough to imagine it. 57 Even user-posted comments on YouTube to B’Tselem videos frequently cast shame, such as “Shame on ‘the only democracy in the region’ ” posted under B’Tselem’s Documentary: West Bank Road for Israelis Only, 2008, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=m6dbknPHvwY. Accessed July 22, 2020. 58 Yael F., Nurit W. and Dina A., “Eyal Crossing, Tue 8.9.09, Morning,” translated by Charles K, Machsom Watch, September 8, 2009, http://machsomwatch.org/en/ node/11887. Accessed July 22, 2020; Noa and Hagit B., “Hebron, South Hebron Hills, Mon 27.5.13, Morning,” Machsom Watch, May 27, 2013, http://machsomwatch.org/ en/node/21551. Accessed July 22, 2019. Mira B. and Muhammad, “A Visit with the Founder of the School in Zenuta,” translated by Natanya, Machsom Watch, May 9, 2019. http://machsomwatch.org/en/reports/checkpoints/09052019/morning/65861. Accessed July 22, 2020; Nurit Popper and Dafna Banai, “The Israeli Army Destroys and Harasses – the Local Population Is Helpless,” Machsom Watch, October 27, 2016, http://machsomwatch.org/en/reports/checkpoints/27102016/morning/54138. Accessed July 22, 2020. Shame has also been cast at the Israeli military by the rightwing Jewish Israelis. Israeli settlers shame their country’s own soldiers for failing to act in the extremist ways they deem necessary or for being on the supposed “wrong side” of a black-and-white battle by protecting Palestinians. (Notably Palestinians do often require protection from extremist settlers, whose retaliatory Tag Mechir or Price Tag attacks harm Palestinians and vandalize their property as a “price” for anti-settlement activity.) One IDF veteran described a 2006 incident in which an Israeli Settlement Security Coordinator in the South Hebron Hills summoned IDF assistance, claiming that Palestinians were charging the settlement. When the IDF arrived they found quite the opposite scene: Palestinians were working the land with farm hoes as belligerent Israeli settlers threatened them. One settler said to the soldier, “Shame on you, coming here to protect the Arabs” (Breaking the Silence, Soldiers’ Testimonies from the South Hebron Hills, Jerusalem, 2011, www.breakingthesilence. org.il/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Soldiers_Testimonies_from_the_South_Hebron_ Hills_2000_2008_Eng.pdf, p. 54. Accessed July 22, 2020). The soldier described that the settlers were “yelling and swearing at the Palestinians and at us for not chasing them away: “What kind of soldiers are you?!? You should be ashamed” (Ibid., p. 55). In this case and others like it, Israeli soldiers are shamed for their apparent failure to uphold ultranationalist ideologies and exercise them with force over the land. To add yet another layer to the shame flying around from all directions, Israeli soldiers have been known to cast shame back on left-wing activists such as those that comprise Ta’ayush, an Arab–Jewish grassroots organization that frequently conducts antiracist and anti-occupation fieldwork in the West Bank. Israeli soldiers have shamed these activists especially when they film, saying, “Why are you filming me? Aren’t you ashamed?” (David Shulman, “January 7, 2017 Asael, Susya, Twaneh, Umm Al-Khair « Taayush,” Ta’ayush, January 8, 2017, www.taayush.org/?p=4302. Accessed July 22, 2020) and more generally by appealing to the notion that the army’s work is inherently and benevolently antiterrorist, saying “Aren’t you ashamed? We’re trying

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to prevent a terrorist attack and you’re getting in the way” (“Al-Rakiz,” Ta’ayush, January 7, 2012, www.taayush.org/?p=2377. Accessed July 22, 2020). In the Ta’ayush field report, the activist notes that the soldier himself should feel shame—and that his shame would be “a great human achievement” if only the soldier had it in him to feel it (ibid.). 59 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 92–3. 60 Quoted in Anita Kasabova, “From Shame to Shaming: Towards an Analysis of Shame Narratives,” Open Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 99–112, http://doi.org/10.1515/ culture-2017-0010, p. 107. 61 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 62 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 63 Dimi Reider, “IDF Officer Poses with Blindfolded Palestinians, Posts Pics on Facebook,” +972 Magazine, August 16, 2010, http://972mag.com/idf-officer-postsimages-of-blindfolded-palestinians-on-facebook-it-was-the-best-time-of-mylife/899/. Accessed July 22, 2020. Translated from the Hebrew by the author. 64 Ibid. 65 Haaretz Service, “ ‘I Don’t See Anything Wrong With Facebook Images of Palestinian Detainees,’ ” Haaretz, August 17, 2010, www.haaretz.com/1.5101287. Accessed July 22, 2020. 66 See for instance Hochberg’s Visual Occupations. 67 Edna Canetti, “The Banality of Occupation,” Ynet News, August 18, 2010, www. ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3939100,00.html. Accessed April 10, 2019. Emphasis added. 68 “Uproar over Ex-Soldier’s Facebook Photos,” RTE, August 17, 2010, www.rte.ie/ news/2010/0817/134566-israel/. Accessed April 10, 2019. Recall the idea that a shameless criminal is considered to be the most dangerous kind. 69 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 70 Hochberg, Visual Occupations, p. 16. 71 Uri Cohen and Nissim Leon, “The New Mizrahi Middle Class: Ethnic Mobility and Class Integration in Israel,” Journal of Israeli History 27, no. 1 (March 2008): 51–64 (58). 72 For more on the racialized treatment of Abergil, see Rabab Abdulhadi, “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence,” Feminist Studies 45, nos. 2–3 (2019): 541–73. 73 Max Blumenthal, “For Israeli Soldiers, Social Media Has Become a Showcase of Horrors,” Salon, October 13, 2013, www.salon.com/2013/10/13/for_israeli_soldiers_ social_media_has_become_a_gallery_of_horrors/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 74 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 444. 75 Jesse Allpress, Rupert Brown, Roger Giner-Sorolla, Julien A. Deonna, and Fabrice Teroni, “Two Faces of Group-Based Shame: Moral Shame and Image Shame Differentially Predict Positive and Negative Orientations to Ingroup Wrongdoing,” Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 40, no. 10 (2014): 1270–84 (1272). 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., p. 1273. 78 Haviv Rettig Gur, “The Brief but Exciting Life of the Bill to Outlaw Filming IDF Soldiers,” Times of Israel, July 4, 2018, www.timesofisrael.com/

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80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

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the-brief-but-exciting-life-of-the-bill-to-outlaw-filming-idf-soldiers/. Accessed July 22, 2020. Anonymous testimony 72140, Breaking the Silence, “These Children with Their Plastic Bags,” 2002, www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database/72140, emphasis added. Accessed July 22, 2020. Testimony given by a member of the Border Police stationed in Umm al-Fahm. Simon Faulkner, “On Israel/Palestine and the Politics of Visibility,” in Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak and Imogen Tyler (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), p. 163. For more on this incident, see Simon Faulkner, “ ‘Now You Get a Picture, You Can Put It in Your Facebook,’ ” University of Manchester, 2013, http://simonsteachingblog. wordpress.com/2013/07/18/now-you-get-a-picture-you-can-put-it-in-your-facebook/. Accessed July 22, 2020. Breaking the Silence, Everything Was Filmed, 2011, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tJlePYCMtOU. Accessed July 22, 2020. Emmanuel Levinas, De l’évasion (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982), p. 87. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Breaking the Silence, Why I Break the Silence, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?time_ continue=11&v=BTqy3200BNM. Accessed July 22, 2020. “Operative, adj. and n.” in Oxford English Dictionary Online (Cambridge: Oxford University Press). Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 117–39 (119). Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” pp. 442–3. For more on shame as an indication of a perpetrator’s good intentions, see Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, pp. 109–10. Jennifer Manion, “The Moral Relevance of Shame,” American Philosophical Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2002): 73–90 (82). Kasabova, “From Shame to Shaming,” p. 100. Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Wydian Zaban, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019. Anonymous testimony 72140, Breaking the Silence, “These Children with Their Plastic Bags,” 2002, www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database/72140, emphasis added. Accessed July 22, 2020. Testimony given by a member of the Border Police stationed in Umm al-Fahm. Allpress, “Two Faces of Group-Based Shame,” p. 1273.

Chapter 3 1 Amos Oz wrote these words in a letter that introduced B’Tselem’s 2015 activity report. B’Tselem “2015 Annual Report,” www.btselem.org/download/2015_activity_report. pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 2 Obama said this to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg during his campaign for the presidency. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Obama on Zionism and Hamas,” The Atlantic, May 12, 2008, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/05/obama-on-zionism-andhamas/8318/. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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3 B’Tselem, “2016 Annual Report,” www.btselem.org/sites/default/files2/2016_activity_ report.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 4 Breaking the Silence, Facebook, January 23, 2018, www.facebook.com/ BreakingTheSilenceIsrael/photos/a.228765083812409/1726259784062924/?type=3&t heater. Accessed July 22, 2020. 5 Avi Mograbi. “Avi Mograbi Making Sure We Don’t See Something That Isn’t There.” Interview by Michael Goldin. Open Democracy, June 20, 2014. www.opendemocracy. net/en/avi-mograbi-making-sure-we-dont-see-something-that-isn/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 6 Ibid. 7 See, for instance, Daniel Dor’s The Suppression of Guilt: The Israeli Media and the Reoccupation of the West Bank (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 8 For more on framing in this sense, see Judith Butler’s Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009). 9 Tzafrira Zamir and Netta Golan, “ ‘Anin,” translated by Louise Levi, Machsom Watch, September 11, 2014, http://machsomwatch.org/en/node/24483. Accessed July 22, 2020. 10 Joshua Cohen, “Uri,” Granta 139, Spring 2017, http://granta.com/uri/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 11 This choreographic charade was delineated by the 1991 Oslo Accords. For extensive details on this, see Eyal Weizman. “Seeing through Walls: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror.” Grey Room, no. 24 (2006): 88–99. 12 D. Orit and T. Ofra, “Awarta, Beit Furik, Huwwara, Za’tara (Tapuah), Fri 9.11.07, Morning,” translated by O. Suzanne, Machsom Watch, November 9, 2007, http:// machsomwatch.org/en/node/3412. Accessed July 22, 2020. 13 Liat Berdugo, “Shooting Back at Shooting Back,” Quarterly West, no. 90 (March 4, 2017), http://quarterlywest.press/?p=4190. Accessed July 22, 2020. 14 Oren Ziv, “Israel-Gaza Fence, 6.4.2018,” Activestills, April 6, 2018. www.activestills. org/image/19560/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 15 David Brennan, “Another Palestinian Protester Dead after Israel ‘Land Day’ Gaza Border Killings,” Newsweek, April 6, 2018, www.newsweek.com/another-palestinianprotester-has-died-after-being-shot-israeli-snipers-gaza-874594; Gideon Levy, “Gaza: The Lesser Child of Israel’s Occupation,” New York Times, April 20, 2018, sec. Opinion, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/opinion/gaza-israel-occupation-friday.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 16 Mickie Mueller, The Witch’s Mirror: The Craft, Lore & Magick of the Looking Glass (Woodbury: Llewellyn Worldwide, 2016). 17 Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 106. 18 Ibid. 19 Yotem Ronen “Protest against the Separation Wall, Bil’in, West Bank, 23.9.2005,” Activestills, September 23, 2005, www.activestills.org/image/1444/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 20 Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum, Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine and Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2016), p. 49. 21 Oren Ziv, “Protest against House Evictions, Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, 1.1.2010,” Activestills, January 1, 2010, www.activestills.org/image/5299/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 22 Donna Haraway, Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium. FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 24. Italics added.

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23 Joseph Schneider, Donna Haraway: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 91; Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, p. 155. 24 Dan Flesher, “Kafka, Rabbi Hillel and the Beit Furik Checkpoint,” Realistic Dog (republished on Machsom Watch), January 11, 2008, http://machsomwatch.org/en/ node/50328. Accessed July 22, 2020. 25 Rachel O. and Hannah Y., “AM,” Machsom Watch, June 29, 2004. http:// machsomwatch.org/en/node/39951. Accessed July 22, 2020. 26 An edited version and abridged version of this incident is available publicly at www. youtube.com/watch?v=JecEG13MjY0. Accessed July 22, 2020. 27 Certain things are off-limits to the Palestinian camera’s eye, such as court proceedings, army facilities, any persons working for Israel’s internal security services, and checkpoints—though this last category remains a gray area of sorts. 28 Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 29 B’Tselem, “Soldiers Enter Home of B’Tselem Volunteers in Hebron, Awake Children, Photograph Them, and Confiscate Footage Filmed by the Volunteers,” April 19, 2015, www. btselem.org/hebron/20150419_night_search_and_confiscation. Accessed July 22, 2020. 30 Ibid. Note that “Judea and Samaria” means the West Bank and is language typically used by right-wing groups. 31 Translation by the author. All incorrect grammar is preserved from the original conversation and reflects the way in which the Israeli soldier and Muhammad Atalah a-Tamimi were speaking in languages not native to them. 32 For an example of this in Israel–Palestine, see Forensic Architecture’s “Killing in Umm Al-Hiran,” 2017, www.forensic-architecture.org/case/umm-al-hiran/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 33 Hochberg, Visual Occupations, p. 9. 34 Frédéric Pouillaude, “Dance as Documentary: Conflictual Images in the Choreographic Mirror (On Archive by Arkadi Zaides),” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 2 (August 2016): 80–94. 35 For an in-depth analysis of Archive’s structure and of its relation to the field of “documentary dance,” see Pouillaude’s “Dance as Documentary.” 36 Pouillaude, “Dance as Documentary,” p. 89. 37 Arkadi Zaides, “Archive: Interview with Arkadi Zaides,” interview by Renan Benyamina, 2014, www.festival-avignon.com/lib_php/download. php?fileID=1707&type=File&round=148500147. Accessed April 10, 2020. 38 Yonatan Amir and Ronen Eidelman, “Right-Wing Protesters Attack Art Talk in Jerusalem,” Hyperallergic, November 17, 2014, http://hyperallergic.com/162495/rightwing-protesters-attack-art-talk-in-jerusalem/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 39 Ruthie Abeliovich, “Choreographing Violence: Arkadi Zaides’s ‘Archive,’ ” TDR 60, no. 1 (2016): 165–70 (165). 40 Arkadi Zaides, Personal Interview, January 31, 2014. 41 Zaides, “Archive: Interview with Arkadi Zaides.” 42 Ibid. 43 See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). 44 Dino Franco Felluga, Critical Theory: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 180. 45 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 115. 46 This connection between the politics of deniability and Bill Clinton was made in Eyal Weizman’s “Seeing through Walls,” 88–99.

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47 Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos 2–3 (April 1, 2004): 297–310 (304). 48 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 74. 49 Jacques Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” translated by Steve Corcoran. Angelaki 9, no. 3 (December 2004): 3–9 (6). 50 Meg McLagan, “Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (March 2006): 191–5 (192). 51 Samuel Butler, Erewhon: Or, Over the Range (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917), p. 19. 52 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 53 Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, p. 106. 54 Ibid. 55 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 56 Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 61. 57 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 14. 58 See my analysis on this in Chapter 1. 59 Oren Ziv, “Protest against the Wall, Bil’in, West Bank, 9.6.2006,” Activestills, June 9, 2006, www.activestills.org/image/33784/. Accessed August 21, 2020. 60 Interestingly, criminologists once believed that the image of a murderer would be imprinted and recorded as the last sight on the retinas of the murder victim— and, thus, recovering the retinas would solve the case. This pseudoscience was called optography, and while it was invalidated as a forensic tool it made for many compelling plots for novels. 61 After a 2016 fire, B’Tselem moved its office location and has not yet, as of February 2019, replaced these tapes for display. 62 Avi Asher-Schapiro, “YouTube and Facebook Are Removing Evidence of Atrocities, Jeopardizing Cases against War Criminals,” The Intercept, November 2, 2017. http:// theintercept.com/2017/11/02/war-crimes-youtube-facebook-syria-rohingya/. Accessed July 22, 2020.

Chapter 4 1 Sam Gregory, Gillian Caldwell, Ronit Avni, and Thomas Harding, eds., Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 39. 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 3 Valerie Hamilton, “L.A. Teen Brings Home Souvenir of a Lifetime from the Summer of Love,” KQED, June 19, 2016, www.kqed.org/news/10991301/l-a-teen-brings-homesouvenir-of-a-lifetime-from-the-summer-of-love. Accessed July 22, 2020. 4 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem’s Camera Project,” October 3, 2013, http://web.archive.org/ web/20131003175447/www.btselem.org/video/cdp_background. Accessed July 22, 2020. 5 When talking of shields in Israel–Palestine it must be noted that the IDF has repeatedly used Palestinian bodies as shields in their military operations. In a procedure called “human shielding,” Palestinian civilians have been forced to perform a dangerous

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military operations such as move suspicious objects, notify fellow Palestinians to submit to Israeli detention, and even physically cover soldiers when they shoot (B’Tselem, “Human Shields,” November 11, 2017, www.btselem.org/human_shields. Accessed July 22, 2020.). This practice was ruled illegal in 2005 by the Israeli High Court of Justice, but variants of it continue to this day. One common variant is the “neighbor procedure” in which a Palestinian is ordered to knock on a wanted Palestinian’s door (a “neighbor”) and ask him to surrender to the IDF. The Palestinian shields the Israeli soldier from possible danger at the door, such as an attack or booby trapping of the home. Palestinians ordered to perform the neighbor procedure have been mistakenly killed by their fellow Palestinians, and although Israeli courts have ordered the IDF to end this illegal use of Palestinian civilians, it continues. Israel, though, accuses Palestinians (and Hamas especially) of using its own civilians as “human shields,” which it says explains the large numbers of civilian deaths during military operations. 6 Gregory, Caldwell, Avni, and Harding, Video for Change, p. 39. 7 Judy Maltz, “Cameras Are Changing the Fight against the Israeli Occupation: This Is How,” Haaretz, March 31, 2017, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/how-cameras-arechanging-the-fight-against-the-occupation-1.5454872. Accessed July 22, 2020. 8 Ibid. 9 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 74. 10 Ibid., p. 75. 11 Ariella Azoulay, “Photography—the Ontological Question,” Mafte’akh 2e (2011): 65– 80. http://monoskop.org/images/8/82/Azoulay_Ariella_2011_Photography_The_ ontological_question.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 12 Hebron is the only major Palestinian city with Jewish settlement inside of it (as opposed to on the outskirts of it). In 1997, the Hebron agreement was reached to divide the city into two sections. H1 encompasses 80 percent of Hebron, with the majority of the city’s Palestinian residents, and is controlled by the Palestinian Authority. H2 encompasses 20 percent of Hebron, and eight hundred Israeli settlers and forty-three thousand Palestinians live under near total Israeli security governance (see Helen Yanovsky, The Boy from H2, 2017). 13 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 B’Tselem and Yael Stein, Illusions of Restraint: Human Rights Violations during the Events in the Occupied Territories 29 September—2 December 2000, Jerusalem, 2000, www.btselem.org/download/200012_illusions_of_restraint.pdf, p. 51. Emphasis added. Accessed July 22, 2020. 17 B’Tselem, “2017 Annual Report,” Jerusalem, 2018, www.btselem.org/sites/default/ files2/2017_activity_report.pdf, p. 3. Accessed July 22, 2020; Ehab Tarabieh, B’Tselem Video Department Director, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 18 Ruthie Ginsburg, “Armed with a Camera: Gendering Visual Documentation in the Case of Israel/Palestine,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, in press. 19 Diane Baxter, “Honor Thy Sister: Selfhood, Gender, and Agency in Palestinian Culture,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2007): 737–75. http://doi.org/10.1353/ anq.2007.0037. The women videographers who film for B’Tselem told me that these traditional gender roles vary from city to city and region to region. For instance, the videographers in Hebron feel these roles limit them more strongly than their counterparts in the Nablus area do.

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20 Arij al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019; Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019; Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 21 Yizhar is particularly known for its retaliatory Tag Mechir or Price Tag attacks, in which extremist Israeli settlers seek to harm and vandalize Palestinians and their property as a “price” for Palestinian violence or for anti-settlement activity more generally. 22 B’Tselem, Khadrah Tells What It’s like to Film Settler Attacks. Int’l Women’s Day 2014, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKQ9ihQtdb8. Accessed July 22, 2020. 23 B’Tselem, Filming to Protect Our Families. International Women's Day 2014, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY6aVYjWQ6s. Accessed July 22, 2020. 24 B’Tselem, “Camera Savvy: Video-Training Seminar for Women Volunteers, Village of Burin, 8 Jan. 2014,” Eyes Wide Open | Photo Blog, March 2014, www.btselem.org/ photoblog/2014_international_womens_day. Accessed July 22, 2020. 25 Arij al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 26 Ibid. 27 Ruthie Ginsburg, “Gendered Visual Activism: Documenting Human Rights Abuse from the Private Sphere,” Current Sociology 66, no. 1 (2018): 38–55. 28 See Breaking the Silence Anonymous testimony 678990, “It’s to Show That We Aren’t Going to Let This Pass quietly,” Breaking the Silence. www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ testimonies/database/678990. Accessed July 26, 2019. 29 Ginsburg, “Gendered Visual Activism,” p. 49. 30 Aryeh Dayan, “Two Tales of One City,” Haaretz, January 18, 2007, www.haaretz. com/1.4951516. Accessed July 22, 2020. 31 Rajaa’s father, Taysir Abu ‘Eishah, gave this testimony of the daily settler attacks to B’Tselem: “We had to put up a metal-mesh fence around the house to protect against the attacks. Our house is like a cage. The settlers cut the mesh fence more than once. We replaced it with tin panels. We did that also because the windows had been shattered by settlers who threw stones and empty bottles.” B’Tselem, Testimony of Taysir Abu ‘Ayesha, “Daily Attacks by Settlers on the Abu ‘Ayesha Family, Tel Rumeida, Hebron,” January 4, 2007, www.btselem.org/testimonies/20070104_settlers_ attack_the_abu_ayesha_family_daily. Accessed July 22, 2020. 32 B’Tselem, “Sharmuta Video”—Settler Harassment of Palestinians in Hebron, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXSFsJV084. Accessed July 22, 2020. 33 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem’s Video Camera Distribution Project Wins British One World Media Award,” June 23, 2009, www.btselem.org/press_releases/20090623. Accessed July 22, 2020. 34 Larry Derfner, “Image Makers,” Jerusalem Post, October 2, 2008, www.jpost.com/ Magazine/Features/Image-makers-116199. Accessed July 22, 2020. 35 See Liv Strömquist, Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs. the Patriarchy, translated by Melissa Bowers (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2018); Mona Eltahawy, “Nothing Threatens the Patriarchy like Women Unafraid to Demand Attention,” NBC News, March 8, 2008. www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/nothing-threatens-patriarchymore-woman-unafraid-demand-attention-ncna854911. Accessed July 22, 2020. 36 B’Tselem, Settlers Harass Palestinians, Swear at Them and Insult Islam, Hebron, 24 Aug. 2017, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvPIg1zWfLY. Translation by B’Tselem. Accessed July 22, 2020. 37 Ibid. Note that in Islam dogs are considered to be filthy and ritually impure. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

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40 Ehab Tarabieh, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 41 Ginsburg, “Armed with a Camera,” p. 2. 42 Ehab Tarabieh, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. I argue that this celebration of the vision of and visual documentation produced by women is problematically gendered. While perhaps appearing feminist on the surface, this stance of celebration serves to gender the role of the witness even as she wields the powerful video camera as a tool and weapon, thus problematically encouraging normative representations of women in zones of conflict. See Liat Berdugo, “Insurgent Ways of Looking: Gendering the Witness and the Land in the Visuality of Israel-Palestine,” in Social Media and Social Order, edited by David Herbert and Stefan Fisher-Høyrem, Berlin: de Gruyter, in press. 43 R. Charli Carpenter, Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 44 Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 45 B’Tselem, Women’s Day 2013: Manal Speaks about Empowerment through Video, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGXj1-x871A. Accessed July 22, 2020. 46 Manal Ja’bri, “Women behind the Lens: Palestinians Filming the Occupation,” +972 Magazine, March 8, 2014. http://972mag.com/women-behind-the-lens-palestiniansfilming-the-occupation/88026/. Italics added. Accessed July 22, 2020; B’Tselem, Women’s Day 2013: Manal Speaks about Empowerment through Video. 47 Patrice Keats, “The Moment Is Frozen in Time: Photojournalists’ Metaphors in Describing Trauma Photography,” Journal of Constructivist Psychology 23, no. 3 (May 28, 2010): 231–55 (242). 48 Jake Wallis Simons, “The Story behind the World’s Best Photograph,” CNN Style, March 23, 2015, www.cnn.com/style/article/steve-mccurry-afghan-girl-photo/index. html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 49 Sharon Sliwinski, “Air War and Dream: Photographing the London Blitz,” American Imago 68 (September 1, 2011): 489–516 (513). 50 Susan Sontag also argued that photographers create an alternate world when they photograph that which is immune to the violence of the real world. In On Photography she argued that “while real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world” (in On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p. 8). 51 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 52 B’Tselem, “Palestinians Killed by Israeli Security Forces in the West Bank, since Operation Cast Lead.” www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/after-cast-lead/by-date-ofevent/westbank/palestinians-killed-by-israeli-security-forces. Accessed July 19, 2019. 53 Ehab Tarabieh, B’Tselem Video Director, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 54 Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 55 Ibid. 56 Maltz, “Cameras Are Changing the Fight against the Israeli Occupation,” Haaretz. 57 Ibid. 58 For more on this incident, see Chapter 2 of this book. 59 Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 60 Baruch Nevo and Yael Shur, The IDF and the Press during Hostilities: A Symposium Held on 4 June 2002 at the Israel Democracy Institute, edited by Uri Dromi, Army and Society Forum (Jerusalem: Old City Press, 2003), http://en.idi.org.il/media/6229/ idfpress.pdf, p. 18. Emphasis added. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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61 Ibid., pp. 84–5. Emphasis added. 62 Ibid. 63 Foucault has written extensively on the shift from visible to invisible power, which he writes does not require “arms, physical violence, [or] material constraints,” only “a gaze” that forces an individual to self-discipline (Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980)). 64 Face masks have also been worn by Palestinians, notably during the First and Second Intifadas. Israeli soldiers, too, have begun to wear balaclavas as a routine measure (see Chapter 1 of this book). For more on masks and individuation of Israelis in the conflict, see Daniel Mann, “ ‘I Am Spartacus’: Individualising Visual Media and Warfare,” Media, Culture & Society 41, no. 1 (January 2019): 38–53. 65 Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 66 B’Tselem, “Saturday Violence—A-Tuba, 2007,” September 23, 2007, www.btselem. org/video/2007/09/saturday-violence-tuba; B’Tselem, Visual: Settlers Throwing Stones at Palestinians, 2008 (filmed in 2007), www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAqmFpqSbg. Accessed July 22, 2020. 67 B’Tselem, Visual: Settlers Attack Palestinian Shepherds, 2008. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XHhECvN2kQI; B’Tselem, “Two Settlers Arrested on Suspicion of Attack on Palestinian Shepherds,” June 8, 2008. www.btselem.org/video/2008_06_settlers_ attack_shepherds_southern_hebron_hills. Accessed July 22, 2020. 68 Thawra ‘Eid, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019. 69 Maltz, “Cameras Are Changing the Fight against the Israeli Occupation,” Haaretz. 70 B’Tselem, Visual: B’Tselem Cameraman Attacked and Arrested for Filming, 2008, www. youtube.com/watch?v=NrFfHHZ-2lM. Accessed July 22, 2020. 71 B’Tselem, “Soldiers Assault and Arrest B’Tselem Worker in Hebron,” January 20, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20081225022718/www.btselem.org:80/english/press_ releases/20080120.asp. Emphasis added. Accessed July 22, 2020. 72 B’Tselem, “Settlers Assaulted a Palestinian Videographer in Hebron, Wounding Him in the Head, While Soldiers Looked On,” May 5, 2016, www.btselem.org/ press_releases/20160505_settlers_assault_palestinian_photographer. Accessed July 22, 2020. 73 B’Tselem, Settlers Assault a Palestinian Videographer, Hebron, May 2016, 2016, www. youtube.com/watch?v=hWmLsQbodMY. Accessed July 22, 2020. 74 For more on this statement and its relation to the police and visuality, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 473–96. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., p. 476. 77 Ibid., p. 473. 78 Arik Bender, Arik. Parliamentary committee to investigate B’Tselem, Adallah and New Profile,” NRG (Maariv), January 10, 2011, www.makorrishon.co.il/nrg/online/1/ ART2/198/881.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 79 Hezki Baruch, “ ‘The Radical Left Is Breaking All Records,’ ” Arutz Sheva, April 4, 2018, www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/244044, Accessed July 22, 2020. 80 Nir Hasson, “B’Tselem Office Fire Likely Caused by Electrical Failure, Fire Department Says,” Haaretz, January 11, 2016, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/. premium-b-tselem-fire-likely-caused-by-electrical-failure-1.5388825; Agence FrancePresse and Reuters, “Fire Breaks Out at Jerusalem Offices of Human Rights Group B’Tselem,” Guardian, January 11, 2016, sec. World News, www.theguardian.com/

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world/2016/jan/11/fire-breaks-out-at-jerusalem-offices-of-human-rights-groupbtselem. Accessed July 22, 2020. 81 In a sense, to say that B’Tselem’s actions “incited” this fire is to ascribe to a kind of victim-blaming and ascribes a “you had it coming” attitude toward human rights organizations. 82 The 2018 proposed Israeli Penal Bill to prohibit photographing, recording, and disseminating documentation of IDF soldiers also makes claims to incitement, alleging that documentation is filmed while “hurling accusations and insults” at IDF soldiers (David Israel, “Bill Punishing Taking Pics of IDF Soldiers Passes Knesset Preliminary Reading,” Jewish Press, June 21, 2018, www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/ the-knesset/bill-punishing-taking-pics-of-idf-soldiers-passes-knesset-preliminaryreading/2018/06/21/. Accessed July 22, 2020). This penal bill is discussed at length in Chapter 1 of this book. 83 “Ta’ayush Video: A Settler Attacked a B’Tselem Field Researcher and Broke His Camera in the South Hebron Hills. Soldiers Present Did Not Intervene,” B’Tselem, May 24, 2012, www.btselem.org/video/20120522_south_hebron_assault. Accessed July 22, 2020. 84 B’Tselem, Settler Breaks B’Tselem Camera, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ FC76SQ7SM. Accessed July 22, 2020. 85 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). A classic example of displacement is when a parent who has been frustrated at work lashes out at their child. 86 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 8. 87 Ibid., p. 7. 88 B’Tselem, Soldiers Assault and Detain B’Tselem Volunteer, Madama, February 2017, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rab3496DauE. Accessed July 22, 2020. This example is discussed in depth in Chapter 1 of this book for its verbal declarations of visual exposure. 89 B’Tselem, “Six Days of Unjustified Detention, with Full Backing by the Military and the Courts: As Usual, No One Will Have to Answer for It,” March 15, 2017, www.btselem. org/video/20170314/btselem_volunteer_assaulted_and_arrested. Accessed July 22, 2020. 90 Gili Cohen, “Israeli Army Says B’Tselem Created Incident for Video Posted on Haaretz,” Haaretz, May 11, 2017, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/idf-b-tselem-createdincident-for-video-posted-on-haaretz-1.5470753. Accessed July 22, 2020. 91 See Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, “The Order of Violence,” in The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, edited by Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi (New York: Zone Books, 2009), pp. 99–140. 92 B’Tselem’s full response to Almoz’s post continued: Unfortunately, the IDF spokesman’s post clarifies again that the state’s objective is to promote the expropriation of land and the illegal settlement project, while treading Palestinian human rights by the army. The use of the army for the promotion of a political agenda—expropriation and settlements—is what pulls the army into a political discussion. The ending of the occupation will end this too. (See Cohen, “Israeli Army Says B’Tselem Created Incident for Video Posted on Haaretz.”) 93 Oren Ziv, “Conversation with Issa Amaro,” in Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine and Israel, edited by Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum (London: Pluto Press, 2016), p. 110.

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94 Ibid. 95 B’Tselem, “17 Years after Goldstein Massacre, Hebron City Center Paralyzed,” March 3, 2011, www.btselem.org/hebron/20110303_hebron_17_years_after_goldstein_ massacre. Accessed July 22, 2020. 96 Ziv, “Conversation with Issa Amaro”, p. 111.

Chapter 5 1 Jennifer Mnookin, “The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy,” in Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence, edited by Diane Dufour (Paris: LE BAL / Éditions Xavier Barral, 2015), p. 15. 2 B’Tselem tape 1641, 30 July 2007, At-Tuwani, videographer unknown, © B’Tselem. This video remains privately held in the B’Tselem video archives in West Jerusalem, where I viewed it in February 2019. Unlike other privately held footage, B’Tselem did not feel comfortable releasing the video file, itself, to me as it was “internal.” 3 Though these outposts are considered illegal by Israeli law, they still receive state services such as paved roads, water, utilities, and security protection. 4 See Chapter 1 for more on exposure as a tactic of citizen videography in Israel–Palestine. 5 Kelly Matheson, Video as Evidence Field Guide, Version 1.0 (WITNESS, 2016), p. 42. 6 Mnookin, “The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy.” 7 Ibid., p. 14. 8 Matheson, Video as Evidence Field Guide, p. 5. 9 Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel, Law on Display: The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 10. 10 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); John Berger, Understanding a Photograph (New York: Aperture, 2013); and Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 11 Katherine Biber, Captive Images: Race, Crime, Photography (London: RoutledgeCavendish, 2007), p. xi. 12 “Shooting Back: The Israeli Human Rights Group B’Tselem Gives Palestinians Video Cameras to Document Life Under Occupation,” Democracy Now!, December 26, 2007, www.democracynow.org/2007/12/26/shooting_back_the_israeli_human_rights. Accessed July 22, 2020. 13 B’Tselem, “The Army Must Internalize the Gravity of the Ni’lin Shooting Incident,” January 27, 2011, www.btselem.org/firearms/20110127_nilin_shooting_sentence. Accessed July 22, 2020. 14 B’Tselem, Visual: Blindfolded Palestinian Shot by Soldier with Rubber Bullet, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qY92YOlvS4&feature=youtu.be. Accessed July 22, 2020. 15 B’Tselem, “The Army Must Internalize the Gravity of the Ni’lin Shooting Incident.” 16 Ibid. 17 Ehab Tarabieh, head of B’Tselem Video Department, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 18 B’Tselem, “The Army Must Internalize the Gravity of the Ni’lin Shooting Incident.” 19 B’Tselem. “Footage from the Field,” 2008, http://web.archive.org/ web/20081227153201/www.btselem.org:80/english/video/cdp_background.asp. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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20 B’Tselem, “Soldiers Disturb and Assault B’Tselem’s Video Photographers in the West Bank despite Army’s Declaration That Filming Is Permitted,” February 28, 2010, www. btselem.org/topic-page/soldiers-disturb-and-assault-btselem-s-video-photographerswest-bank-despite-armys-declar. Accessed July 22, 2020. 21 Arij al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 22 Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 23 Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. viii. Italics drawn from the original text. 24 Ibid., p. 2. 25 Ibid., p. 6. 26 Ibid., p. 82. 27 For more on the IDF’s tactic on “making its presence felt,” see former soldiers’ testimonies such as Breaking the Silence’s Anonymous testimony 616930, “They Pissed Their Pants with Fright, of Course,” 2006, www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ testimonies/database/616930. Accessed July 22, 2020. 28 The organization does not publicly disclose these locations. In an interview, Ehab Tarabieh, director of B’Tselem’s Video Department, told me that there were “at least four” sets of security cameras in the field (Personal Interview, February 10, 2019). 29 Judy Maltz, “Cameras Are Changing the Fight against the Israeli Occupation. This Is How,” Haaretz, March 31, 2017, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/how-cameras-arechanging-the-fight-against-the-occupation-1.5454872. Accessed July 22, 2020. 30 B’Tselem, “After Viewing B’Tselem Video, Israeli Military Judge: Innocent Palestinian Man Was Assaulted by Soldier, Detained for Almost a Month,” September 12, 2012, www.btselem.org/press_releases/20120912_violent_arrest_in_hebron. Accessed July 22, 2020. 31 Palreports Khalil, Israeli Soldiers out of Uniform Violently Detaining a Palestinian at Checkpoint 56, Tel Rumeida, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkij4M8lqjk&. Accessed July 22, 2020. 32 B’Tselem, Soldiers in Civilian Clothing Detaining Palestinian Youth, 13.8.2012, Second Angle, Raw Footage, 2012, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lTlnOGTTwpM&feature=youtu.be. Accessed July 22, 2020. 33 B’Tselem, “After Viewing B’Tselem Video, Israeli Military Judge.” 34 Arij al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 35 Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 36 Seth Mydans, “Prosecution in Beating Urges Jury to Rely on Tape,” New York Times, April 21, 1993. 37 Patricia Greenfield and Paul Kibbey, “Picture Imperfect,” New York Times, April 1, 1993, sec. Op-Ed, http://greenfieldlab.psych.ucla.edu/General_Public_files/ greenfieldkibbey1993.pdf. Accessed May 7, 2019. 38 In a subsequent, federal trial, LAPD officers were indicted on charges. For an evaluation of the Rodney King video and its impact on the concept of video as evidence in courts of law, see Forrest Stuart, “Constructing Police Abuse after Rodney King: How Skid Row Residents and the Los Angeles Police Department Contest Video Evidence,” Law & Social Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2011): 327–53. 39 Avi Issacharoff and Anshel Pfeffer, “Protester Death Shows IDF May Be Using Most Dangerous Type of Tear Gas,” Haaretz, January 3, 2011, www.haaretz.com/1.5102690. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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40 Alon Idan, “Jawaher Abu Rahma, the Monument,” Haaretz, January 12, 2011, www. haaretz.com/1.5106981. Accessed July 22, 2020. 41 Ibid. 42 Lisa Goldman, “Evidence Discredits Army’s Version of Bil’in Woman’s Death,” +972 Magazine, January 4, 2011, http://972mag.com/physicians-family-challenge-armysnarrative-re-death-of-jawaher-abu-rahmah/7892/. Accessed on July 22, 2020. 43 Forensic Architecture, “The Killing of Bassem Abu Rahma,” 2014, http://forensicarchitecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-bassem-abu-rahma. Italics added. Accessed July 22, 2020. 44 Erica Weiss, “Struggling with Complicity: Anti-Militarist Activism in Israel,” Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (September 5, 2018): S173–82 (S178). http://doi. org/10.1086/699359. 45 B’Tselem, “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism—Report Summary,” May 2016, www.btselem.org/ publications/summaries/201605_occupations_fig_leaf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 46 B’Tselem, The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism, 2016, www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/ publications/201605_occupations_fig_leaf_eng.pdf, p. 10. Accessed July 22, 2020. 47 Ibid. 48 B’Tselem, “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism—Report Summary.” 49 Ibid. 50 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem to Stop Referring Complaints to the Military Law Enforcement System,” May 25, 2016. www.btselem.org/press_releases/20160525_occupations_fig_ leaf. Accessed July 22, 2020; B’Tselem, “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism—Report Summary.” 51 B’Tselem, The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism, 2016, p. 5. 52 B’Tselem, “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism—Report Summary.” 53 Noam Rotem, “The Case for Dismantling Israel’s Human Rights Organizations,” +972 Magazine, July 18, 2015, http://972mag.com/the-case-for-dismantling-israels-humanrights-organizations/109019/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 54 B’Tselem and Yael Stein. Fake Justice: The Responsibility Israel’s High Court Justices Bear for the Demolition of Palestinian Homes and the Dispossession of Palestinians, translated by Shuli Wilkansky, Maya Johnston, and Michelle Bubis, 2019, www. btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/201902_fake_justice_eng.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 55 See Chapter 2. 56 B’Tselem, “Hebron Police Officers Prevent B’Tselem Volunteer from Lodging Complaint Regarding Death Threats, Themselves Threatening Him with Arrest,” September 1, 2016. www.btselem.org/press_releases/20160901_btselem_volunteer_ life_threatened. Accessed July 22, 2020. 57 Wydian Zaban, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019. 58 Raphael Ahren, “At UN, B’Tselem Chief Blasts Israel; Envoy Calls Him a ‘Collaborator,’ ” Times of Israel, October 18, 2018, www.timesofisrael.com/in-unbtselem-chief-blasts-israeli-policies-envoy-calls-him-a-collaborator/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 59 Ibid.

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60 Amos Harel, “With All Legal Guns Blazing,” Haaretz, September 17, 2009, www. haaretz.com/1.5490295. Italics added. Accessed July 22, 2020. 61 Netanyahu’s statement read, “While our soldiers are preparing to defend Israel’s security, the director-general of B’Tselem chooses to deliver a speech full of lies at the UN in an attempt to help Israel’s enemies. The conduct of B’Tselem is a disgrace that will be remembered as a brief and fleeting episode in the history of our people.” Ahren, “At UN, B’Tselem Chief Blasts Israel; Envoy Calls Him a ‘Collaborator.’ ” 62 Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). See also Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 63 For more on the kind of suspicion discussed here, see Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s film, The Viewing Booth, 2019. 64 Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism, p. 58. 65 Ibid., p. 57. 66 Doreen Carvajal, “Photo of Palestinian Boy Kindles Debate in France,” New York Times, February 7, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/business/worldbusiness/ photo-of-palestinian-boy-kindles-debate-in-france.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 67 Morris, Believing Is Seeing, p. 191. 68 Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism, pp. 55–6. 69 Deepfakes are videos that employ deep machine learning algorithms to falsify a person’s words or even presence in a video scene. They gained popularity as a method of adding celebrities to pornography videos and later as a means to make it appear as if important politicians like Barack Obama have said things they never once said. Deepfakes have even been used to attack the credibility of journalists. WITNESS’s Program Sam Gregory has recently written on the recommended actions that citizen videographers and human rights organizations can take to combat deepfakes: “Deepfakes Will Challenge Public Trust in What’s Real. Here’s How to Defuse Them,” Defusing Disinfo, February 19, 2019, http://defusingdis. info/2019/02/19/deepfakes-will-challenge-public-trust-in-whats-real-online-hereshow-to-defuse-them/. “Deepfakes and Synthetic Media: What Should We Fear? What Can We Do?” WITNESS Blog, July 30, 2018, http://blog.witness.org/2018/07/ deepfakes/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 70 Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism, p. 67. 71 Ibid., p. 70; Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 72 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. Israeli settlers have been known to ram Palestinian children with automobiles. See “Israeli Settler ‘Deliberately Rammed’ Car into Palestinian Children,” Middle East Monitor, August 11, 2017, www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170811-israeli-settler-deliberatelyrammed-car-into-palestinian-children/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 73 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 74 B’Tselem, “Video: Settlers Vandalize Property as Revenge for Stone Throwing—Police Do Not Detain Them,” December 8, 2014, www.btselem.org/press_releases/20141208_ settlers_throwing_stones_in_hebron. Accessed July 22, 2020. 75 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 76 The Israeli settlers who Zraqo filmed vandalizing Palestinian vehicles were ultimately released without penalty. 77 Sontag, On Photography, p. 86.

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78 This data was current to B’Tselem’s YouTube channel as of May 7, 2019. See www. youtube.com/user/btselem/videos for a current count. 79 B’Tselem, Soldier Fires at Unarmed Demonstrator in Bilin with Rubber Bullet. Filmed by Li Lorian., 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8FlhYriEbc. Accessed July 22, 2020. 80 B’Tselem’s YouTube channel contained 614 published videos as of May 7, 2019, and the data published here is current as of this date. See www.youtube.com/user/btselem/ videos for a current count. 81 Ehab Tarabieh, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 82 Ibid. 83 B’Tselem, Military’s Law Enforcement System as Whitewash: Killing of Mustafa Tamimi, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrPgBo3paYE. Accessed July 22, 2020; B’Tselem, Israeli Soldiers Guard Settlers as They Attack Palestinian Cars, Nablus District, December 13, 2018, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcV0Bt3WwrE. Accessed July 22, 2020. 84 B’Tselem, Israeli Soldiers Fatally Shoot Mahmoud Nakhleh, 18, from behind, and Deny Him Medical Aid, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVEjD71ZPb8&feature=youtu. be. Accessed July 22, 2020. 85 B’Tselem, Israeli Soldiers Fatally Shoot Muhammad Habali in the Head, from behind, Tulkarm, 4 Dec. 2018, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FFdBe5RE8Q. Accessed July 22, 2020. 86 B’Tselem, Border Police Violently Arrest East Jerusalem Man, Breaking His Arm, June 2017, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri6mglyFVo0. Accessed July 22, 2020. 87 Israel Defense Forces, Israeli Air Force Strikes Rocket Launcher, 2008, www.youtube. com/watch?v=XAokqVFMvWU. Accessed July 22, 2020. 88 “Israel Defense Forces YouTube Uploads (Sorted by Popularity),” YouTube, www. youtube.com/channel/UCawNWlihdgaycQpO3zi-jYg. Accessed May 7, 2019. 89 “B’Tselem YouTube Uploads (Sorted by Popularity),” YouTube, www.youtube.com/ channel/UC1jcOywn7roFr3JcSaEVozg. Accessed May 7, 2019. 90 Quoted in Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism, p. 32. 91 “Metadata Bug with Photos,” Dropbox Forum, March 24, 2016, www.dropboxforum. com/t5/Error-messages/Metadata-Bug-with-Photos/m-p/169218#M8982. Accessed July 22, 2020. 92 For Forensic Architecture, see http://forensic-architecture.org/; for the New York Times Visual Investigations, see www.nytimes.com/video/investigations; and for Bellingcat, see www.bellingcat.com/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 93 B’Tselem, B’Tselem Investigation: The Killing of ‘Itaf Zalat, 2006, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NlfZlrSIui8. Accessed July 22, 2020. 94 Ibid., min. 03:48. 95 B’Tselem, “B’Tselem Investigation—‘Itaf Zalat Was Killed by Illegal Gunfire the Trigger-Happy Policy Continues,” May 31, 2016, www.btselem.org/press_ releases/20060531. Accessed July 22, 2020. 96 The first video published from the B’Tselem Camera Project, the Sharmuta video, did not fit into this categorization scheme and was therefore unlabeled. 97 B’Tselem, “About B’Tselem Video,” November 19, 2017, www.btselem.org/video/ about-btselem-video. Accessed July 22, 2020. 98 B’Tselem. “2011 Annual Report,” March 2012. www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/ sites/default/files2/2011_annual_report_eng.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 99 “Forensis,” Forensic Architecture, March 15, 2014, http://forensic-architecture.org/ programme/exhibitions/forensis. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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100 “Agency,” Forensic Architecture, http://forensic-architecture.org/about/agency. Accessed May 7, 2019. 101 Forensic Architecture, “Report: Summary of Findings on the April 17, 2009 Death of Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, Bil’in,” April 23, 2010, http://content.forensicarchitecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Report-The-Killing-of-Bassem-AbuRahma.pdf, p. 1. Accessed July 22, 2020. 102 Ibid., p. 2. 103 Ibid., p. 5. 104 Forensic Architecture, “Lethal Warning: The Killing of Luai Kahil and Amir Al-Nimrah,” http://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/lethal-warning-thekilling-of-luai-kahil-and-amir-a-nimrah. Accessed May 7, 2019. 105 Forensic Architecture, Lethal Warning: The Killing of Luai Kahil and Amir a-Nimrah, 2018, http://vimeo.com/306828292, min. 05:25. Accessed July 22, 2020. 106 Forensic Architecture, The Killing of Nadeem Nawara and Mohammed Abu Daher, 2014, http://vimeo.com/152264981, min. 03:10. Accessed July 22, 2020. 107 Daniel Bar-Tal and Yona Teichman, Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: Representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 146; Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism, p. 67. 108 Tamar Liebes, Reporting the Arab-Israeli Conflict: How Hegemony Works (London: Routledge, 1997). 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., p. 134. 111 Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? 112 Lori Allen, “Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada,” American Ethnologist 36, no. 1 (2009): 161–80 (172). 113 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1971), p. 296. 114 Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 25. 115 Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, p. 50. 116 The Israeli Military Censor’s impetus for redacting such details is to prevent criminal investigation in the ICC or other international public forums. Shaul described the censor as “the most liberal arm of the [Israeli] government” in a personal interview and reported that Breaking the Silence has had only two disputes with the Censor over its years of operation. Yehudah Shaul, Personal Interview, February 10, 2019. 117 Breaking the Silence, “FAQ,” www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about/qa. Accessed April 10, 2019. On its website, Breaking the Silence explains that it specifically targets the “general Israeli public”: “Israeli society and successive Israeli governments entrusted the IDF with the mission of enforcing the military occupation over Palestinians since June of 1967. Thus, the decision to end the occupation must also be taken by Israeli society. Therefore, the demand to end the occupation and the moral debate we hope to spark to this end, is aimed at the general Israeli public, and not necessarily at army commanders and soldiers.” 118 Nancy Fraser, “Abnormal Justice,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2008): 393–422. 119 Ibid., p. 407. 120 Ibid. 121 A citizen can be denied of the right to vote or denied the right to elect equal representation by, say, district gerrymandering. Ibid., p. 408.

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122 Ibid., p. 408. 123 The video reports published by NYT Visual Investigations are sloganized as “deliver[ing] a definitive account of today’s biggest stories by tracking down clues from videos, photos and satellite images,” as if by the sleuth work of a detective, emphasis added. “Visual Investigations™ at The New York Times,” New York Times, September 11, 2018, sec. World, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/world/visualinvestigations.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 124 “Ask Me Anything: Malachy Browne, a Video Journalist for The New York Times Working on Forensic Reporting,” reddit, January 2019, www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/ comments/9z4qcv/im_malachy_browne_a_video_journalist_for_the_new/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 125 “They Were, Those People, a Kind of Solution,” http://kindofsolution.org/activities/ forensic-architecture.html; “RightsCon Toronto 2018: Video Forensics at The New York Times,” http://rightscon2018.sched.com/event/EnmX/video-forensics-atthe-new-york-times. Accessed May 7, 2019. 126 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); John Berger, Understanding a Photograph (New York: Aperture, 2013); Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 127 Thomas Keenan, “Counter-Forensics and Photography,” Grey Room 55 (April 2014): 58–77 (67). 128 Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, edited by Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), p. 20. 129 Matheson, Video as Evidence Field Guide, p. 27. 130 Sam Gregory delineates five distinct audiences in his essay, “Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent,” Journal of Human Rights Practice 2, no. 2 (2010): pp. 191–207.

Chapter 6 1 Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 2 Rabih Mroué, Ziad Nawfal, and Carol Martin, “The Pixelated Revolution,” TDR 56, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 18–35. http://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00186. 3 Ariella Azoulay, “Photography: The Ontological Question,” Mafte’akh 2e(2011): 65–80 (78). 4 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), p. 2. 5 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, translated by Patrick Camiller (London: Verso Books, 2009), p. 15. 6 Ibid. 7 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 123. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 56. 11 Ibid., p. 4. 12 Ibid., p. 104. 13 Ibid., p. 26.

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14 Ibid. 15 Alphonso Lingis, “Ethics in the Globalized War,” Eurozone, November 29, 2008, www. eurozine.com/ethics-in-the-globalized-war/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 16 Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (October 1, 1997): 24–60 (30). 17 Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 26. 18 Jose Del Real, “No Charges in Sacramento Police Shooting of Stephon Clark,” New York Times, March 2, 2019, sec. U.S., www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/stephonclark-police-shooting-sacramento.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 19 Alisa Lebow, “Shooting with Intent,” in Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory andthe Performance of Violence, edited by Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (London: Wallflower Press, 2012), p. 59. 20 Lebow, “Shooting with Intent.” 21 Ibid., p. 46. 22 Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 5. 23 Ariella Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–50 (London: Pluto Press, 2011), p. 57. 24 Israel Defense Forces, IAF Interception of UAV in Israeli Airspace, 2012, www.youtube. com/watch?v=vpmTiO8OakA. Accessed July 22, 2020. 25 “Israel Defense Forces YouTube Uploads (Sorted by Popularity),” YouTube, www. youtube.com/channel/UCawNWlihdgaycQpO3zi-jYg. Accessed May 7, 2019. 26 Ali Abunimah, “Israeli Soldier Posts Disturbing Instagram Photo of Child in Crosshairs of His Rifle,” The Electronic Intifada, February 15, 2013, http:// electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-soldier-posts-disturbing-instagramphoto-child-crosshairs-his-rifle. Accessed July 22, 2020. 27 Yoav Zitun, “Soldiers Disciplined for Mistreating Palestinian Detainees,” Ynet News, February 17, 2013, www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4345833,00.html. Accessed July 22, 2020. 28 Ryan Broderick, “Israeli Soldier Instagrams a Child in the Crosshairs of a Rifle,” BuzzFeed News, February 18, 2013, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/ israeli-soldier-instagrams-a-child-in-the-crosshairs-of-his. Accessed July 22, 2020. 29 Lebow, “Shooting with Intent,” p. 46. 30 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 39. 31 Don Duncan, “Shooting Back, With Video,” New York Times, August 6, 2010, sec. Opinion, www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/opinion/07iht-edduncan.html. The Nilin Media Group has been inactive since 2009, but its work is archived at http://nilin. wordpress.com/video/. Accessed May 8, 2019. 32 For more on the camera as a tool of exposure, see Chapter 1. 33 Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum, eds. Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine and Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2016), pp. 96–8. 34 For more on the revelatory potential of cameras, see Chapter 1. 35 Oren Yakobovich “Hidden Cameras That Film Injustice in the World’s Most Dangerous Places,” TED, October 2014, www.ted.com/talks/oren_yakobovich_ hidden_cameras_that_film_injustice_in_the_world_s_most_dangerous_places/ transcript. Accessed July 22, 2020. 36 Ibid.

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37 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 473–96. 38 Lebow, “Shooting with Intent,” p. 49. 39 Wydian Zaban, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019. 40 Like B’Tselem, Human Rights Defenders (HRD) distributes cameras to Palestinians in a project it calls “Capturing Occupation Camera Project in Palestine.” HRD has thus far limited its work to the city of Hebron, with twenty cameras in the hands of citizen videographers. While HRD primarily publishes its footage in international and Palestinian newspapers, as well as on its own social media outlets, it partners with B’Tselem when its footage is particularly impactful and requires wider distribution channels to which B’Tselem has access. 41 ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 42 Naomi Zeveloff, “Meet the West Bank Cobbler Who Took Video of Israeli Soldier Shooting Palestinian in Head,” The Forward, April 13, 2016, http://forward.com/ news/338476/meet-the-west-bank-cobbler-who-took-video-of-israeli-soldier-shootingpales/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 43 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 74. 44 Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 171. 45 See B’Tselem, “Lethal Use of Crowd Control Weapons: Seven Palestinians Killed in Great March of Return from Direct Teargas Canister Hits,” August 9, 2019, www. btselem.org/press_releases/20190806_lethal_use_of_crowd_control_weapons_in_ gaza. Accessed July 22, 2020. 46 B’Tselem, Officer Fires Tear Gas Canister at B’Tselem Videographer—Moment of Shooting, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=14a6J1L79VM. Accessed July 22, 2020. 47 Rabih Mroué, Ziad Nawfal, and Carol Martin, “The Pixelated Revolution.” TDR 56, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 18–35 (29). 48 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 49 B’Tselem, “Settlers Assaulted a Palestinian Videographer in Hebron, Wounding Him in the Head, While Soldiers Looked On,” May 5, 2016, www.btselem.org/press_ releases/20160505_settlers_assault_palestinian_photographer. Accessed July 22, 2020; B’Tselem, “Soldiers Disturb and Assault B’Tselem’s Video Photographers in the West Bank despite Army’s Declaration That Filming Is Permitted,” February 28, 2010, www. btselem.org/topic-page/soldiers-disturb-and-assault-btselem-s-video-photographerswest-bank-despite-armys-declar. Accessed July 22, 2020; B’Tselem. “Soldiers Assault and Arrest B’Tselem Worker in Hebron,” January 20, 2008, http://web.archive.org/ web/20081225022718/www.btselem.org:80/english/press_releases/20080120.asp. Accessed July 22, 2020. 50 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 51 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 52 Mroué, Nawfal, and Martin, “The Pixelated Revolution,” p. 31. 53 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, “Citizen Camera-Witnessing: Embodied Political Dissent in the Age of ‘Mediated Mass Self-Communication,’ ” New Media & Society 16, no. 5 (August 2014): 753–69 (761). 54 I realize that in the description above, I use slippery language. I call the very real citizen videographer a “character” even though he is an actual person who suffers at the hands of an oppositional regime. Yet I think it crucial to understand the power of double shooting to compare it to something to which we know ourselves to be an

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audience: cinema. Thus the language of cinema can be applied to the codes and forms of the growing field of citizen videography. 55 Ariella Azoulay, “Photography: The Ontological Question,” Mafte’akh 2e (2011): 65–80. 56 Ibid., p. 74. 57 Ibid., p. 76. 58 Ibid., p. 77. 59 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 2 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 3–23. 60 Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, pp. 168–9. 61 Rebecca Stein, “Souvenirs of Conquest: Israeli Occupations as Tourist Events,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 4 (November 2008): 647–69. 62 Rebecca Stein, “GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise,” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S56–64. 63 “IDF’s ‘Documenting Warrior Project’,” Elsight, http://el-sight.com/project/ documenting-warrior-project/. Accessed June 28, 2018. 64 Daniel Mann, “Spectacle as Camouflage,” Worlds Records Journal 2, no. Art 7: 1–14 (8). 65 Shai Levi, “Filming and Shooting: A Glimpse into the Training of the ‘Combat Cameramen’,” Mako, November 13, 2011, www.mako.co.il/pzm-soldiers/Articlea8a8d81879c9331006.htm. Accessed June 28, 2018. 66 Yuval Azoulai, “Combat Cameramen Disprove Palestinian Propaganda,” Globes, April 6, 2014, http://en.globes.co.il/en/article-combat-cameramen-help-overcomepalestinian-propaganda-1000930279. Accessed June 28, 2018. 67 Matthew Kalman and Noah Smith, “Israeli Army Launches Camera Combat Unit— Video,” Guardian, January 23, 2014, sec. World News, www.theguardian.com/world/ video/2014/jan/23/israeli-army-combat-cameras-unit-video. Accessed July 22, 2020. 68 Yaakov Lappin, “Bodies of Three Kidnapped Israeli Teens Found in West Bank,” Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2014, www.jpost.com/operation-brothers-keeper/largenumber-of-idf-forces-gather-north-of-hebron-in-search-for-kidnapped-teens-361048. Accessed June 28, 2018. 69 Israel Defense Forces, IDF Nighttime Operation to Search For Three Kidnapped Israelis, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnSLUFhbejU; Israel Defense Forces, Exclusive: IDF Troops Continue Search for Kidnapped Teens, 2014, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yDTZ5_9gsfg; Israel Defense Forces, Searches for Three Kidnapped Israelis in Judea and Samaria, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwkbT6l6Ns; Israel Defense Forces, IDF Paratroopers Search for Kidnapped Teenagers, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szk7GtxwoHk; Israel Defense Forces, Operation Brother’s Keeper: IDF Confronts Terrorism in Judea and Samaria, 2014, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qQihFdS1SKM; and Israel Defense Forces, IDF Troops Continue to Search for Kidnapped Teens #EyalGiladNaftali, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4xxUoZcE0c. Accessed July 22, 2020. 70 Amos Harel, “Israel Speeds up Camera Placements in West Bank in Effort to Deter Terrorism,” Haaretz, June 22, 2017, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-idfspeeds-up-camera-placements-in-w-bank-in-effort-to-deter-terrorism-1.5485764. Accessed July 22, 2020. 71 Harriet Sherwood, “Palestinian Children Woken in Night to Be Photographed by Soldiers,” The Guardian, September 28, 2011, sec. World News, www.theguardian.

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com/world/view-from-jerusalem-with-harriet-sherwood/2011/sep/28/palestinianterritories-israel. Accessed July 22, 2020. 72 Breaking the Silence, Anonymous testimony 877251, “An Easy Way to Explain It to the Soldiers,” n.d., www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database/877251. Accessed July 22, 2020. 73 Breaking the Silence, Anonymous testimony 530467, “We Went out on a Patrol and We Had to Map Houses,” 2001–2, www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/ database/530467. Accessed July 22, 2020. 74 Mann, “Spectacle as Camouflage.” 75 For more on visualizing criminality, see Chapter 5 of this book, as well as Jonathan Finn’s Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 76 Mann, “Spectacle as Camouflage,” p. 8. 77 Breaking the Silence and Nadav Bigelman, Pictures at 3 AM, 2008–10, www.youtube. com/watch?v=FWVxgqOEASE&feature=youtu.be. Accessed July 22, 2020. 78 Ariella Azoulay writes that “Photography is an apparatus of power that cannot be reduced to any of its components: a camera, a photographer, a photographed environment, person, or spectator” (The Civil Contract of Photography, translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli, New York: Zone Books, 2008, p. 85). 79 B’Tselem, Hebron—Soldiers Use Abu Hayas’ Roof to Pose for Group Photo, 2015, www. youtube.com/watch?v=pqin78mUYco. Accessed July 22, 2020. 80 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), p. 113; Liat Berdugo, “Spectral Power,” Real Life Magazine, August 22, 2017, http:// reallifemag.com/spectral-power/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 81 Mann, “Spectacle as Camouflage,” p. 8. 82 Ofir Feuerstein, “Access Denied: Israeli Measures to Deny Palestinians Access to Land around Settlements.” Translated by Michelle Bubis and Zvi Shulman. B’Tselem, September 2008. www.btselem.org/download/200809_access_denied_eng.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020. 83 David Shulman, “Umm Al-’Amad,” Ta’ayush (blog), April 27, 2013 www.taayush. org/?p=3428. Accessed July 22, 2020. 84 Stein, “GoPro Occupation.” 85 B’Tselem, Life under Occupation in Hebron: Israeli Soldiers Arrest Two Young Brothers, 31 Jan. 2018, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bUhUKBbMXM. Accessed July 22, 2020. 86 Mann, “Spectacle as Camouflage,” p. 9. 87 Liat Berdugo, “Shooting Back at Shooting Back,” Quarterly West, no. 90 (March 4, 2017). http://quarterlywest.press/?p=4190. Accessed July 22, 2020. 88 Yehoshua Brenner, “Not just B’Tselem: Settlers Will Document Clashes with Palestinians,” Walla! News, September 22, 2011, http://news.walla.co.il/item/1863012. Accessed July 22, 2020. 89 Ahiya Raved, “Settler ‘Terror’: Price Tag in Kfar Qassem, Foiled Plot against Demolisher,” Ynetnews, January 10, 2014. www.ynetnews.com/ articles/0,7340,L-4475293,00.html; Yaakov Lappin, “ ‘Price Tag’ Attack in West Bank Following Prevented Lynch of Settlers,” Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2014, www.jpost. com/national-news/price-tag-attack-in-west-bank-following-prevented-lynchof-settlers-337443. Accessed July 22, 2020; and Elior Levy, “ ‘Price Tag’ Attack in Arab Village Caught on Tape,” Ynetnews, January 3, 2013, www.ynetnews.com/ articles/0,7340,L-4328374,00.html. Accessed July 22, 2020.

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90 Berdugo, “Shooting Back at Shooting Back.” 91 B’Tselem “Shooting Back” training session in South Hebron / a-Tuwani, July 30, 2007. Tape 1641, © B’Tselem. 92 Jerusalem in my soul, 1 Jew vs. Dozens of Terrorists ✌ Ofer Ohana Knows How to Speak Their Language 👊 Credit: Elad Mizrahi, www.facebook. com/watch/?v=1223794981086406; Ofer Ohana, So Much Hypocrisy in the Organization Breaking the Silence / Share, 2018, www.facebook.com/1397474774/ videos/10216680116380793/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 93 Yael Arava com, How Great—Video and Words of Ofer Ohana from Hebron against the Background of the Start of the Appeal Case of Elor Azaria, the Combat Medic, 2017, www.facebook.com/watch/?v=781310155365176. Accessed July 22, 2020. 94 Friends in Times of Need, Main, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rnB0CLYnMY; “A Warm Home for Soldiers—Kiryat Arba, Hebron,” Facebook. www.facebook. com/%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%94-%D7%97%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%9C%D7%97%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%9D%D7%A7%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%AA-%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%A2-%D7%97%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%9F-890407424408476/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 95 The Shadow, Ofer Ohana the Cannon Enters into a Demonstration of [L]‌eftists and Arabs in Hebron and Makes a Circus out of Them without Fear, 2017, www. facebook.com/watch/?v=10155565436180255. Accessed July 22, 2020; Human Rights Defenders, An Attack on the Activities of the National Campaign to Lift the Closures from the Heart of the City of Hebron, 2017, www.facebook.com/ watch/?v=1454844981258805. Accessed July 22, 2020. 96 Ofer Ohana, Worth Watching…,2018, www.facebook.com/1397474774/ videos/10217164454608946/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 97 Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 9. 98 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography; “What Is a Photograph? What Is Photography?” Philosophy of Photography 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 9–13; and “Photography: The Ontological Question.” 99 Rona Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure—Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives,” Social Semiotics 28, no. 2 (April 2018): 201–29. 100 Rona Sela, Leiyun Hatzibur, Tazlumi Falastinim Bearchiyonim Tzvai’im BeIsrael [Made Public—Palestinian Photographs in Military Archives in Israel] (Tel Aviv: Minshar Gallery, 2009). 101 Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure—Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives.” 102 Rona Sela, Looted & Hidden—Palestinian Archives in Israel, 2017, http://vimeo. com/213851191. Accessed July 22, 2020. 103 See Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–64; and John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). 104 Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure—Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives.” 105 Ibid., p. 210. 106 Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 107 One of Manal al-Ja’bri’s key tasks as a paid B’Tselem field researcher in Hebron is to collect footage from the organization’s network of unpaid volunteers. 108 Manal al-Ja'bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019.

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109 An edited and abridged version of this incident is available publicly at www.youtube. com/watch?v=JecEG13MjY0. Accessed July 22, 2020. 110 Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 111 Of course we know from theorists of photography such as John Berger, Susan Sontag, and Ariella Azoulay that images always construct a reality rather than objectively document it. See Berger, Understanding a Photograph (New York: Aperture, 2013); Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); and Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. 112 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), p. 2. 113 Ibid. 114 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 115 Ibid., p. 1. 116 Butler, “Photography, War, Outrage,” 822–7 (826). 117 Azoulay, “Photography: The Ontological Question.” 118 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 129. 119 Azoulay calls it the “civil contact of photography,” meaning that civil relations become a “framework of partnership and solidarity among those who are governed, a framework that is neither constituted nor circumscribed by the sovereign” (Civil Contract of Photography, p. 23). 120 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 137. 121 B’Tselem, “Soldiers Enter Home of B’Tselem Volunteers in Hebron, Awake Children, Photograph Them, and Confiscate Footage Filmed by the Volunteers,” April 19, 2015. www.btselem.org/hebron/20150419_night_search_and_confiscation. Accessed July 22, 2020. 122 Ibid. 123 The term “right to look” was coined by Nicholas Mirzoeff in “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 473–96.

Closing Words 1 Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 24. 2 Nahed Eltantawy and Julie B. Wiest, “The Arab Spring | Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilization Theory,” International Journal of Communication 5 (September 2, 2011): 1207–24; Christian Christensen, “Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation Technologies,” Irish Studies in International Affairs 23 (2012): 37–45; and Theodor Tudoroiu, “Social Media and Revolutionary Waves: The Case of the Arab Spring,” New Political Science 36, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 346–65. 3 Suzan Zraqo, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. 4 Ibid. 5 Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, Personal Interview, translated by Musa Abu Hashhash and Yuval Orr, March 18, 2014; Manal al-Ja’bri, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 4, 2019. The IDF does not authenticate claims of this sort, but one wouldn’t expect it to:  the whole point of the trade of visual recordings for detainees is to remove them from public record. 6 See also Sam Gregory, “Images of Horror: Whose Roles and What Responsibilities?” WITNESS Blog, September 18, 2014, http://blog.witness.org/2014/09/sharingimages-horror-roles-responsibilities/. Accessed July 22, 2020.

Notes

219

7 Judith Butler, “Photography, War, Outrage,” PMLA 120, no. 3 (May, 2005): 822–7 (823). 8 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 146. 9 James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000). 10 Equal Justice Initiative, “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice,” http:// museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial. Accessed May 14, 2020. 11 B’Tselem, “IBA Censors B’Tselem Radio Spot Listing Names of Gazan Children Killed; B’Tselem to Petition HCJ, Spot Gets Massive Exposure on Social Media,” July 24, 2014, www.btselem.org/press_releases/20140721_children_killed_in_gaza_have_ names. Accessed July 22, 2020. 12 Revital Hovel, “B’Tselem Loses Supreme Court Bid to Broadcast Names of Children Killed in Gaza,” Haaretz, August 14, 2014, www.haaretz.com/.premium-btselemloses-bid-to-broadcast-names-of-gazan-dead-1.5259348. Accessed July 22, 2020. 13 Daniel Dor, The Suppression of Guilt: The Israeli Media and the Reoccupation of the West Bank (London: Pluto Press, 2005). Dor notes that the suppression of guilt evades a “discourse of responsibility,” meaning one that acknowledges that “regardless of the historical causes, regardless of the different perceptions of ‘the origins of the conflict’, the Palestinians are under Israeli occupation and not the other way around” (p. 104). 14 Judith Sudilovsky, “Israel’s Coronavirus Lockdown Is Blocking Human Rights Work, but Not Abuses,” +972 Magazine, March 31, 2020, www.972mag.com/coronavirusisrael-human-rights-work/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 15 Nir Hasson, “Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Israel Tells Palestinians to Download App That Tracks Phones,” Haaretz, April 8, 2020, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/. premium-amid-coronavirus-crisis-israel-tells-palestinians-to-download-app-thattracks-phone-1.8751504; Robert Swift. “Coronavirus Gives Israel the Perfect Cover to Tighten Its Grip over Palestinians,” +972 Magazine, April 26, 2020. www.972mag. com/israel-coronavirus-cover-annexation/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 16 B’Tselem, “Spike in Settler Violence during Pandemic: Palestinians and Homes Repeatedly Attacked, March 2020,” April 12, 2020, www.btselem.org/ video/20200412_spike_in_settler_violence_during_pandemic. Accessed July 22, 2020; B’Tselem, “Settler Steals Security Camera from Palestinian Home, Tel Rumeidah Neighborhood, Hebron, 28 March 2020,” March 31, 2020, www.btselem. org/video/20200330_settler_steals_security_camera. Accessed July 22, 2020. 17 Reuters, “France Pushing for Tough EU Response to Any West Bank Annexation: Diplomats,” New York Times, May 11, 2020, sec. World, www.nytimes. com/reuters/2020/05/11/world/europe/11reuters-israel-palestinians-eu.html. Accessed May 14, 2020. 18 “Labour Pain: The Decline of the Israeli Left,” The Economist, February 21, 2019, www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2019/02/21/the-decline-of-the-israelileft. Accessed July 22, 2020. 19 See Chapter 5; B’Tselem and Yael Stein. Fake Justice: The Responsibility Israel’s High Court Justices Bear for the Demolition of Palestinian Homes and the Dispossession of Palestinians, translated by Shuli Wilkansky, Maya Johnston, and Michelle Bubis, 2019, www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/201902_fake_justice_eng.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2020.

220

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20 See Chapter 2. In its published video of the killing, B’Tselem blurred the face of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif after he is shot in an effort to preserve his dignity (B’Tselem, “Video: Soldier Executes Palestinian Lying Injured on Ground after the Latter Stabbed a Soldier in Hebron,” March 24, 2016, www.btselem.org/video/20160324_soldier_ executes_palestinian_attacker_in_hebron. Accessed July 22, 2020.). 21 For more on considerations of recirculation, see Gregory, “Images of Horror”; and Ismail Muhammad, “On Seeing Blackness,” Real Life, May 3, 2017, http://reallifemag. com/on-seeing-blackness/. Accessed July 22, 2020. 22 Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 23 Ariella Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–50 (London: Pluto Press, 2011), p. 7. 24 Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum, eds., Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine and Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2016), p. 35. 25 See Abigail De Kosnik, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016); Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading, eds., Save As … Digital Memories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), among others. 26 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 36. 27 Wydian Zaban, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019. 28 Ibid. 29 Adi Kuntsman, “Digital Archives of Feelings and Their Haunted Futures,” Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 1–22 (4–5). 30 Ibid., p. 6. 31 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, translated by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 427; Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 32 Adi Kuntsman, “Digital Archives of Feelings and Their Haunted Futures,” Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 1–22 (15). 33 Forensic Architecture, ed., Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), p. 747. 34 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 115. 35 Wydian Zaban, Personal Interview, translated by Yuval Orr, February 5, 2019.

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INDEX ‘Abd al-Karim, Khadrah 95–6 Abergil, Eden 61–5, 69 Abraham, Nicolas 178 Abu a-Rmeileh, Raed 107–9, 165 Abu ‘Eishah, Rajaa 7, 96–9, 103, 109 Abu Haya, Mahmoud 159–61 Abu-Rahma, Ashraf 118 Abu Rahma, Bassem Ibrahim 135, 136, 141 Abu Rahma, Jawaher 123, 124 Abu Shamsiyeh, Fayzeh 41, 78, 79, 104, 120, 143, 170, 171, 173 Abu Shamsiyeh, ‘Imad 11, 54, 78, 104, 106, 126, 152, 166, 171 accountability 125, 142 active spectator 17, 44, 72, 87 Activestills 19, 45 Adams, Ansel 144–5 aesthetics 12, 44, 84, 134, 136, 147, 152, 153 affective attunement 87 affectual reorientation 17, 52, 92, 110, 112–13 Ahmed, Sara 17, 52, 59, 60, 67, 92, 110, 111 Al Dura, Mohammed 128 al-Ja’bri, Arij 28, 96, 119, 123 al-Ja’bri, Ayat, 33, 35 al-Jab’ri, Manal 9–11, 28, 100, 103, 105, 123, 170, 173 Allenby Bridge 73 Allen, Lori 138 al-Nimrah, Amir 136, 137 al-Salaymeh, Abd al-’Alim 31–2 al-Sharif, Abdel Fattah 54–5, 126, 177 Amro, Issa 18, 104, 107, 108, 112, 113, 122 a-Nabi Saleh 9, 41, 58, 150 Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari 154 anti-occupation 126, 139 Arab Spring 6, 7 archive

CatDV 9 civil archive 177 digital suspicion 128 physically and aphysically agentive 179 in poor internet connections 177–8 as a “vessels of haunted futurities” 178 see also B’Tselem video archives Archive (dance performance) 81–3 Arendt, Hannah 19, 60, 86, 138 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (film) 154 a-Tamimi, Bilal 41, 158 a-Tamimi, Muhammad Atalah 79–81 At-Tuwani 115 Avedon, Richard 144 ‘Awad, Muhammad 153, 155 Ayalon, Ami 71–2 Azaria, Elor 54, 126, 177 Purim costumes 2017 54, 56–7 supporters 54, 55 Azoulai, Yuval 157 Azoulay, Ariella 11, 14, 16, 18, 29, 43, 75, 93, 144, 155, 169, 173, 177 balaclavas 40–2, 122, 171 barrel POV 143, 147, 150–3, 161 vs. gunshot POV 147 Ohana, Ofer 166–8 shooting back 147, 150–2 weaponized camera 151 Yakobovich, Oren 150–1 Baum, Dalit 13 Beirut 128, 129 Beit Ummar 153 Berger, John 117, 142 binoculars 1, 3 Blow-up (film) 32 body cameras 146–7 Border Police 53, 64 Ana behibak mishmar hagvul (“I love the Border Police”) 53 see also Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)

248

Index

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) 35 Breaking the Silence 19, 35, 37–9, 51, 53, 65–7, 72, 139 Browne, Malachy 141 B’Tselem Camera Project 6–12, 14, 19, 24, 28, 30, 37, 71, 73–5, 92–7, 100, 104, 105, 115, 116, 118, 119, 134, 150–1, 156, 157, 163, 175, 177 Field Researchers 8–10 headquarters in Jerusalem 87, 88 video archives 3, 6, 8, 18, 19, 21, 31, 43, 81, 83, 87, 107, 122 videos 5, 8, 17–19, 21, 24, 27, 31, 36, 54, 81, 83, 87, 98, 105, 107, 110, 112, 119, 122, 130–1, 151, 153, 170 B’Tselem volunteer videographers ‘Abd al-Karim, Khadrah 95–6 Abu a-Rmeileh, Raed 107–9, 165 Abu ‘Eishah, Rajaa 7, 96–9, 103, 109, 112 Abu Haya, Mahmoud 159–61 Abu Shamsiyeh, ‘Imad 11, 54, 78, 104, 106, 126, 152, 166, 171 Abu Shamsiyeh, Fayzeh 41, 78, 79, 104, 120, 143, 170, 171, 173 al-Ja’bri, Arij 28, 96, 119, 123 al-Ja’bri, Ayat, 33, 35 al-Ja’bri, Manla 9–11, 28, 100, 103, 105, 123, 170, 173 al-Salaymeh, Abd al-’Alim 31–2 Amro, Issa 18, 104, 107, 108, 112, 113, 122 a-Tamimi, Bilal 41, 158 a-Tamimi, Muhammad Atalah 79–81 ‘Awad, Muhammad 153, 155 Da’na, Mahmoud 91 Da’na, Mai 98, 99, 164 Da’na, Nayef 121 ‘Eid, Thawra 28, 105–6 Hadad, Iyad 30, 31, 69 Hreni, Ahmad 161 J’abri, Abd al-Karim 1–4, 16 Ja’bri, Bassam 167 Jundiyeh family 105, 106 Nawaj’ah, Muna 106 Nawaj’ah, Nasser 8, 58, 109 Saleh, Lubna 95

Sharbati, Zidan 164, 166 Zaban, Wydian 28, 68, 126, 151, 178 Ziyadah, Ahmad 23, 111 Zraqo, Suzan 28–30, 93, 102, 103, 129, 130, 154–5, 175 Butler, Judith 5, 12, 21, 42, 129, 138, 172, 176 Butler, Samuel 86 “cage” house 7, 96 cameras GoPro cameras 158 point-and-shoot cameras 2, 4, 10, 146 single lens reflexes (SLRs) 146 smartphone cameras 159, 162 surveillance cameras 29–30, 93, 121, 135, 137 video cameras, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 24, 28, 30, 42, 60, 65, 73, 78, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100, 103–5, 110, 115, 122, 133–4, 143, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 156, 157, 162, 167, 175 capture 73–5 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 144 Cartwright, Lisa 87 Chronicle of a Disappearance (film) 46 chronophotographic rifle 144 citizen camera-witnessing 18, 154 citizen videography 10–11, 17–19, 86, 116–18, 123, 134–6, 141, 152, 153, 175 The Civil Contract of Photography 43–7 civil rights 112, 138, 140 Clark, Stephon 146 “closed loop” of images 168–74, 170 CNN-effect 26 Cohen, Joshua 73 compliant images 5 concealment 33–40 concealed evidence 141 as denying exposure 33–7 as permitting exposure 37–40 counter-countervisuality 2, 18, 144, 156–61, 167 see also media mimicry countervisuality 2, 143–4, 153, 155–61, 163, 167 countersurveillance 2, 3, 18 courts

Index criminal and civil justice processes 116 Israeli courts 124–6 Israeli High Court of Justice 119 Judea Military Court 173 credibility 119, 127, 130 crime-based evidence 116 criminality 175 already-defined criminal body 121 Israeli regime 121 making the criminal visible 120 mug shots 120, 121 potentially criminal body 121 rogues’ galleries 120–1 Da’na, Mahmoud 91 Da’na, Mai 98, 99, 164 Da’na, Nayef 121 Danon, Danny 127 data remanence 179 deepfakes 128 dehumanization 129 Palestinian 147, 149, 177 Derrida, Jacques 178 Divine Intervention (film) 14–16 Dor, Daniel 177 double shooting 18, 143–4, 152–6 ‘Eid, Thawra 28, 105–6 El-Ad, Hagai 25, 26, 127 embarrassment 49, 61, 125 epistemology 135, 138, 142 Erikson, Erik H. 59 Esh Kodesh 6, 164 event of photography 29, 30, 93, 144, 155, 156, 159, 160, 169, 173 evidences see visual evidence exculpation 118, 122–4 exposure assumption 25 audience of 26–9 and human rights 24–6 and publicity 26 possible anterior exposure 29–30 see also concealment Fakhouri, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 122–3 falsification deepfakes 128 digital falsification 128, 130

249

of photography/videography 130 Feldman, Allen 146 fingerprints 120, 121 Finn, Jonathan 120, 121 First Intifada 112 in Jewish Israeli media 137 Five Broken Cameras (film) 10 Forensic Architecture 133–8, 141–2 forensics 130, 142 abstraction 133–8 Israeli Police’s Forensics Department 119 renderings 137 forum 18, 27, 118, 127, 129, 133, 142 Fraser, Nancy 18, 27, 139, 140 Freedom Flotilla 132 Fusil Photographique (Marey) 144, 145 Gatling, Richard 144 Gaza wars 176 Israel-Gaza fence 74–5 Meidan, Kobi 58 Operation Cast Lead (2008) 132 Operation Protective Edge (2014) 38, 49, 157–8, 176 gaze aligned gaze 171 camera’s gaze 147 exposure 33–5 spectator’s gaze 149 unaligned gaze 171–2 viewer’s gaze 149 weapon’s gaze 150 Ginsburg, Ruthie 14, 25, 33, 37, 96 Gregory, Sam 53 grievability black lynching 176 and dehumanization, Palestinian life 177 differential spread of 42 see also Butler, Judith Grinbaum, Shiraz 177 Gross, Yoav 7, 11, 97 gunshot POV vs. barrel POV 147 cameras and weapons 146 chronophotographic rifle 144 guns and cameras 144 IDF’s YouTube channel 147, 148

250

Index

Palestinian bodies 147 spectator’s gaze 149 viewer’s gaze 149 Habayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) party 36 Hadad, Iyad 30, 31, 69 Haraway, Donna “mutated” modest witness 76–7 haunting 23, 26, 47, 154, 178, 179 Hebron 115, 119, 120, 130, 143, 152, 154, 158, 164, 166, 177 Hebron Shooter see Azaria, Elor Hesford, Wendy 100 High Anxiety (film) 101 Hochberg, Gil 13, 14, 24, 81, 117, 142, 167, 175 homogenization 137 housing demolitions 11, 37, 96 Hreni, Ahmad 161 Human Rights Defenders (HRD) 9, 11, 152, 168 hysteresis 179 image event 16, 26 image shame 52, 61–5 Abergil, Eden 61 decrying and sharing photographs 63 definition 64 Palestinian detainees 61, 62 social distancing from victims 64 incitement 17, 38, 107–12 indigeneity 128 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) 5, 104, 111, 132 Ana behibak mishmar hagvul (“I love the Border Police”) 53 Combat Cameramen (Lochamim-Tzalmim) 157 Documenting Warrior Project 156 Military Police Investigation Unit 118 officers 53, 131, 147 Operational Documentation Course 157 refuseniks 177 snipers 149 soldiers 131, 136, 141, 143, 156, 159, 162, 170, 171 Tazpitaniot (“watchers”) 5, 13, 19, 20, 77, 158

“unbecoming conduct” 119 veterans 41, 51, 65, 66 YouTube channel 147, 148 see also Eden Abergil; Mor Ostrovski Israeli Democracy Institute (IDI) 104 Israelis, Jewish 7, 10–12, 14, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 61, 63, 64, 69, 72, 78, 80, 98, 110, 112, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124, 126–9, 137, 140, 149, 164, 165, 167 see also Israeli settlers Israeli judicial system 54, 119, 139, 140 Israeli media 18, 58, 122, 137, 176, 177 Israeli occupation 6, 7, 9, 11–14, 17–20, 36, 43, 52, 62, 63, 67, 73, 74, 81, 92, 98, 111–12, 127, 135, 137–40, 143, 144, 150, 161, 165, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179 Israeli security services 177 Israeli settlers 1–7, 28, 30, 55, 58–9, 68–9, 73–5, 80, 91, 92–3, 95, 96–9, 105–10, 115, 119, 129, 130, 131, 139, 143, 164–6 Alkobi, Yifat 97 Ohana, Ofer 166–8 see also outpost Israeli Supreme Court 176–7 J’abri, Abd al-Karim 1–4, 16 Ja’bri, Bassam 167 Judea and Samaria 6, 78, 173 see also West bank Jundiyeh family 105, 106 jurisprudence of the visual 115–18 justice “fake justice system” 126, 177 Israeli injustice 118 metapolitical injustice 18, 138–40, 176 ordinary-political misrepresentation 139, 140 post-mortem justice 179 whitewashing 12, 127 see also courts, Israeli judicial system; The Occupation’s Fig Leaf Kahil, Luai 136, 137 Kanaan, Arafat 150, 151 see also Nilin Media Group

Index Keenan, Thomas 14, 16, 43, 49, 51–3, 67–8, 142 mobilizing shame 49, 51–3 King Jr., Martin Luther 112–13 King, Rodney 123 Kiryat Arba 1, 7, 98, 99, 162 KKL-JNF forests 137–8 Knesset (Israeli parliament) Justice Committee 36 members 6 penal bill 35 Kuntsman, Adi 14, 68, 127, 128, 178 lasers (on weapons) 146, 154–5 LCD viewfinder 31 Lebanon War 169 lethal weapons 146, 147, 171 Levinas, Emmanuel ethical demands 41–2 Levinasian terminology 42 shame 66–7 “unmediated” face 42 Liebes, Tamar 137 linkage evidence 116, 119–20 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) 123 Machsom Watch 35, 72, 74, 77–8 Maimon, Vered 177 Mandelblit, Avichai 127 Mann, Daniel 31, 40, 161, 163 mapping procedure, 158–61, 170, 171 Marey, Etienne-Jules 144, 145 Martin, Carol 152, 153 Marton, Ruchama 13 McCurry, Steve 101, 103 McLagan, Meg 29, 86–7 media mimicry 18, 144, 163–5, 167, 176 see also counter-countervisuality Meidan, Kobi 58 metapolitical injustice 18, 138–40, 176 Military Advocate General Corps 125 Military Police Investigation Unit (MPIU) 118, 124–6 mirror to blind cameras 73–4 hypothesis 71–2 one-way 73 in protest 74–7

251

test 73 mirroring capture, reflection and self-alienation 17, 71–89 Haraway’s modest witness 77 on the Internet 88–9 and shame 72 (see also self-alienation; reflection) Mirror Image (film) 84–6 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 12, 14, 108, 151 Mnookin, Jennifer 115, 116 Mograbi, Avi 18–19, 38–40, 72 Mroué, Rabih 18, 143–4, 153, 154 mug shots 23, 120, 121, 159 naïve realism 117, 140–2 nakba 84 Nakhleh, Mahmoud 131–2 Nawaj’ah, Muna 106 Nawaj’ah, Nasser 8, 58, 109 Nawara, Nadeem 137 negative proof 124 Netanyahu, Benjamin 127 New York Times (NYT) Visual Investigations department 133, 141 Nilin Media Group 9, 150 +972 Magazine 36 Obama, Barack 71, 112–13 objective violence 18, 144, 172 observer effect 92–3, 103 The Occupation’s Fig Leaf 125 Ohana, Ofer 166–8 Omer-Man, Michael 36 “one-way hierarchy of vision” 14, 161, 175 Operation Cast Lead 132 Operation Defensive Shield 177 Operation Protective Edge 38, 49, 157–8, 176 ordinary-political misrepresentation 139, 140 Ostrovski, Mor 147, 149 outpost 6, 68, 109, 115, 126, 164, 181 see also Israeli settlers Oz, Amos 71, 74 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 169, 170, 173 Palestinians

252 bodies 18, 33, 42, 59, 65, 80, 118, 119, 121, 124, 131, 136–138, 147, 159, 175 cameras 151, 156, 161, 164, 167, 169, 171 citizen videography (see B’Tselem Camera Project) homes 51 in Gaza 58 Intifadas 53, 93, 112, 125, 128, 137, 139 lens 73, 74, 155, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 167 recorded footage 61 videographers (see B’Tselem videographers) participatory panopticon 11 photo opportunity 52, 54 Pinah Hamah L’Hayalim (“A Warm Home for Soldiers”) 166 “politics of deniability” 73, 84 post-mortem justice 179 presence-at-hand 91 present absentee 15, 175, 178 pre-social body 138–40 proximity 30–1 public invisibility 24–5, 42 public secret 20–1, 63, 178 Rawls, John 64 reflection “gestuatim” 81–3 hall of mirrors 78–81 see also self-reflection; Haraway’s modest witness refuseniks 177 rogues’ galleries 120–1 roof knocking procedure 136, 137 Rotem, Noam 126 Saleh, Lubna 95 satellite imagery 135, 146 Schwartz, Danielle 84–6 scopes 1–3, 9, 16 Sderot 49, 50, 68, 191 Sderot Cinema Tweet 49, 50 Second Intifada 53, 93, 125, 128, 139 security cameras 20, 29, 122, 158, 177 Sekula, Allan 169 Sela, Rona 169 self-alienation 17, 83–6

Index self-reflection 17, 52, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 75, 76, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87 separation wall 75, 76, 98, 102, 103, 123, 138, 150 settler colonialism constrictions 98 regime 13, 87, 144, 152, 177 societies 17, 72 Sfarad, Michal 124 shame delayed shaming 65–7 mobilization 16–17, 49, 51–3, 60 operativity 67–9 shaming hypothesis 49–52 army veterans 51 morality relationship 51 Sderot Cinema Tweet 49, 50 see also Keenan, Thomas Sharbati, Zidan 164–6 Shashat 9–10 Shaul, Yehuda 139 shields definition 92 emotional shields 101–3 observer effect 92–3 prophylactic against violence 4, 91–4 restraint 92–4 see also women, role as B’Tselem videographers shooting back 7–8, 10, 16, 25, 147 see also barrel POV “shooting back at shooting back” 3, 18, 161–8, 176 Shulman, David 161–2 silent witnesses 116, 117, 140 smartphones apps for Palestinian permit requests 177 “cell phone procedure” 161 digital cameras 159, 162 embedded militarization tool 161 vs. guns 146 IDF soldiers 5, 80, 159, 161–3 Jab’ri’s, Manal al- 170 social haunting 178 social media war 132 soft-racism 13 Sontag, Susan 16, 27, 43, 44, 117, 130, 142, 144, 179 Sørensen, Allan 49, 58

Index speech acts 43 Stein, Rebecca 14, 127, 128, 156, 162, 177 strip search 14, 59 subjective violence 172 sufganiyot, traditional Hanukkah doughnuts 53–4 Suleiman, Elia 14–15, 46–7 sumud 188 surveillance camera 93, 121, 135 and countersurveillance 2–3 drones 5, 121, 158 infinity mirror of images 18 Israeli visual surveillance structures 5, 158, 178 invisible 29–30 videos 132, 135, 137 visual recordings 4–5 Syria 89, 128, 153 Ta’ayush 59, 107, 109, 110, 161 Tagg, John 169 tag mechir (“price tag”) attacks 6, 164 Tamimi, Nariman 150–2 Tamimi Press 9 Tamimi, Rushdi 150 Tarabieh, Ehab 12, 16, 36, 94, 99–100, 131 Taussig, Michael 20, 63 Tazpitaniot (“watchers”) 5, 13, 19, 20, 77, 158 Tazpit Press Service (TPS) 6, 57, 164 tele-pathos 27 Thomason, Krista 51 threshold of detectability 32 Till, Mamie 177 Torok, Maria 178 “T-Rex” position 8 Umm al-’Amad 59, 161 UN Human Rights Committee 142 UN Security Council 127 video annotations 12, 130, 133 video documentation 35, 119, 123, 130 see also Knesset Penal Bill; citizen videography Videre Est Credere 150–1 violence 7, 10–13, 15, 17–21, 23, 25, 28, 32, 36, 40–6, 49, 53, 62, 63, 74, 78, 83,

253

84, 91–5, 98, 99–103, 105, 107, 109– 113, 115, 119, 122, 123, 128, 131–5, 137, 139, 144, 146, 149–53, 156, 165, 172, 177, 179 see also tag mechir (“price tag”); objective violence; subjective violence Virilio, Paul 144, 146, 147 visible invisibility 25, 42, 175, 178 visual evidence 16–18, 26, 28 criminality 120–2 digital suspicion 118, 127–30, 140–1 exculpation 122–4 film 111, 118–20 forensic abstraction 133–8 Israeli courts 124–6 jurisprudence of 115–18 metapolitical injustice and pre-social body 138–40 naïve realism 140–2 video annotations 130–3 visual investigations 18, 19, 133, 141 visual testimony 19, 116 volunteer videographers see B’Tselem volunteer videographers War of 1948 (Independence War) 84 “watchers” (Tazpitaniot) 5, 13, 19, 20, 77, 158 watchtowers 5, 14, 146, 158 weaponization 6, 13, 18 Abu Shamsiyeh, Fayzeh 143 barrel POV (see barrel POV) citizen-camera-as-weapon 152 “closed loop” of images 168–74 counter-countervisuality or media mimicry 144 gunshot POV (see gunshot POV) weaponized camera 6, 13, 146, 149, 150–2, 162, 175, 176 Weiss, Erica 124 Weizman, Eyal 13–15, 27, 32, 135, 161 West Bank 1, 6, 7, 13–15, 18, 20, 23, 27, 35, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 73, 75, 76, 78, 81, 113, 115, 118, 119, 124–6, 131, 139, 150, 156–8, 161, 165, 175, 177 whitewashing 12, 127, 139 Williams, Bernard 60 WITNESS

254

Index

The Hub 53 Video as Evidence field guide 116, 117, 142 women, role as B’Tselem videographers ‘Abd al-Karim, Khadrah 95–6 Abu ‘Eishah, Rajaa Abu 96 al-Ja’bri, Arij 96 anti-colonial activism 96 camera obscura 96 Camera Project’s training sessions 94 conservative gender conventions 96 filming 95 Occupation’s human rights violations 95 Palestinian culture 94–5 Saleh, Lubna 95 “Sharmuta” or “whore” video 96 see also B’Tselem volunteer videographers

World War II 146 Yakobovich, Oren 7, 11, 30, 115, 116, 118, 150–1, 165 Youth Against Settlements 9, 104 YouTube 5, 7, 9, 19, 29, 53, 88, 89, 131, 132, 147, 148, 158 Z32 (film) 39–40 Zaban, Wydian 28, 68, 126, 151, 178 Zaides, Arkadi 81–3, 86 Zalat, Itaf 133, 134 Ziyadah, Ahmad 23, 111 Žižek, Slavoj 18, 144, 172 zoom 30–2 Zraqo, Suzan 28–30, 93, 102, 103, 129, 130, 154–5, 175

Plate 1  A Ta’ayush activist named Li Lorian films as IDF soldiers surround another female activist with their cameras, attempting to obstruct the view of her eyes, her lens. Lorian’s camera is itself partially obstructed by the personal smartphone of another soldier, encased in textured blue plastic. Umm el-’Amad (South Hebron Hills), April 20, 2013, © B’Tselem.

Plate 2  Jewish settlers march toward Hebron bearing Israeli flags and blasting loud music. B’Tselem volunteer Abd al-’Alim al-Salaymeh films, and an IDF soldier and two Israeli settlers film back at him. Hebron, January 14, 2014, © B’Tselem.

Plates 3 and 4  B’Tselem camera volunteer zooms in on an Israeli soldier stationed above him. Location:  Hebron; Date:  March 14, 2012. Filmed by Abd al-’Alim al-Salaymeh, © B’Tselem.

 

Plate 5  Video activist David Reeb painted a video still of a 2010 civil demonstration in Bil’in, in which activists restaged the Abergil photographs by acting as if they were detained prisoners.

Plate 6 Jewish settler children attempt to blind Palestinian videographer Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah with mirrors and the sun. Hebron, November 8, 2007. © B’Tselem.

Plates 7 and 8  Jewish settler children attempt to blind Palestinian videographer Rajaa Abu ‘Eishah with mirrors and the sun. Hebron, November 8, 2007. © B’Tselem.

Plate 9  B’Tselem volunteer Muhammad Atalah a-Tamimi films a night raid of his home in which an Israeli soldier shows him footage of himself being attacked by a settler, as if to remind him that he is unwelcome. A-Nabi Saleh, February 25, 2012. © B’Tselem.

Plate 10  Activists make a banner for a Bil’in protest, June 9, 2006. Image by Oren Ziv/ Activestills.

Plates 11 and 12  A Jewish settler assaults B’Tselem volunteer Raed Abu a-Rmeileh, who falls to the ground and clutches his head. One of his fellow Palestinians picks up his camera to continue filming. May 4, 2016, Hebron. © B’Tselem.

Plate 13  The shooting of the detained and blindfolded Palestinian demonstrator, Ashraf Abu-Rahma, in the village of Ni’lin. Filmed by a 14-year-old Palestinian girl from Ni’lin who later transferred the footage to B’Tselem. July 7, 2008. © B’Tselem.

Plate 14  The earliest published B’Tselem video that mobilized the technology of visual annotation—red circles—as a means of clarification and support. Filmed by Israeli activist and artist Li Lorian, March 14, 2008. © B’Tselem.

Plate 15  An Israeli gun peeks out of the back of a military jeep, circled in red, moments before it fired a high-velocity tear gas canister at Palestinian protester Mustafa Tamimi, killing him, 2016. © B’Tselem.

Plate 16  A masked Israeli settler, circled in red, throws a stone at a Palestinian truck driver Qassam Nazzal on the Huwarah-Jit road in the West Bank, December 13, 2018. © B’Tselem.

Plates 17 and 18  The fatal shooting of Palestinian teenager Mahmoud Nakhleh as he ran away from Israeli soldiers in the al-Jalazun Refugee Camp. With a video marker added by B’Tselem, Nakhleh is circled in red as he runs away from Israeli soldiers; the circle becomes an oval later once he lays supine and dies. December 14, 2018. © B’Tselem.

Plate 19  In a set of four synchronized security camera videos published by B’Tselem, Israeli soldiers (circled in blue) fatally shoot Muhammad Habali (circled in red) in Tulkarm on December 4, 2018. © B’Tselem.

Plate 20  “Air force footage,” reads the yellow text in Hebrew, over an aerial shot of a Palestinian target that was destroyed by a missile. The footage is from the weapon’s point of view, with the crosshairs of the weapon just visible in the center of the grainy footage. December 27, 2008. © Israel Defense Forces.

Plate 21  Forensic Architecture’s launch angle visualization of the possible angles of munition discharge from the Israeli soldier (1) toward Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma (2), indicating that the soldier must have fired the fatal shot at a nearly zero-degree angle, which is illegal.

Plate 22  A 3D rendered model from Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the killing of Abu Rahma (in green) by Israeli soldiers (in red).

Plates 23 and 24  Video stills from Forensic Architecture’s investigation, “Lethal Warning: The Killing of Luai Kahil and Amir Al-Nimrah.” In the second still, a photograph of the two killed Palestinian teenagers is momentarily superimposed upon their computergenerated bodies.

Plates 25 and 26  An IDF officer fires a high-velocity tear gas canister at B’Tselem videographer Muhammad ‘Awad in Beit Ummar, near Hebron. November 27, 2013. © B’Tselem.

Plate 27  Suzan Zraqo films from her roof in Hebron as two soldiers shine lights on her from below—one targeting her with the flashlight attached to his gun, the second with the laser marker on his gun. October 3, 2018. © B’Tselem.

Plate 28  An IDF soldier photographs a Palestinian boy during a night raid in Hebron. Filmed by ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh on March 9, 2015. © B’Tselem.

Plate 29  An IDF soldier photographs the B’Tselem volunteer, Bilal a-Tamimi, as he records inside his own home in a-Nabi Saleh, February 18, 2014. © B’Tselem.

Plate 30  A camera fight between David Shulman, a Jewish Israeli activist with the group Ta’ayush, and an Israeli soldier in Umm al-’Amad, South Hebron Hills, filmed by B’Tselem volunteer Ahmad Hreni, April 27, 2013. © B’Tselem.

Plate 31  Israeli soldiers search the Hebron home of Fayzeh and ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh and photograph all its residents, including Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, who is filming. March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem.

Plate 32  During a night raid of the Abu Shamsiyeh household in Hebron, Israeli soldiers find a hard disk full of the family’s B’Tselem recordings and gather around a laptop to view its contents before confiscating it. March 10, 2015. © B’Tselem.