Un-learning to see Palestine

Abstract

Gil Z.Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Durham, Duke UP, 2015Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age, Stanford University Press, 2015Sometime during the summer of the First Lebanon War, my father, then a reserve soldier on a short leave, brought home three war souvenirs: a miniature radio-tape, a stray puppy and a huge machete-like knife. These were the only visual evidence of a combat taking place far from sight (at least for those who did not reside near Israel's northern border) and far from today's battlefield in which 'digital natives' post, rather than 'bring home', their military souvenirs, often in the form of a militarised 'selfie' (Kuntsman and Stein 2015, p77). Yet as Visual Occupation, by Gil Hochberg, and Digital Militarism, by Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein, demonstrate, seeing does not always already translate into knowing, and knowledge does not always already entail seeing. The question - how is it possible that in spite of the circulation of representations of Israeli military brutality and Palestinian suffering, the situation in fact is deteriorating - becomes even more poignant as one reads these books in tandem. That cameras carried by Israeli soldiers might serve as a conscience-cleansing device while maintaining the very condition that provokes a bad conscience, has been noted previously (Nathansohn 2010). Hochberg's and Kuntsman and Stein's books aim at a different project. The questions that inform their work explore the organisation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's visual field and the conditions of seeing and knowing that underlie it. Using different (and sometimes overlapping) theoretical trajectories, data and periodisation, they ask what it means when a people fails to appear from the perspective of the coloniser even when the colonisation is palpable and its images are viral.Visual Occupation and Digital Militarism, both published in 2015, offer a comprehensive and complementary study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its visual arrangements, from artistic (Hochberg) and digital (Kuntsman and Stein) perspectives. Coinciding with (and sometimes overlapping) the conflict's timeline, the books provide a fascinating discussion based on different visual archives, beginning with the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. They go on to cover the major milestones such as the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, the Second Intifada, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the colonial regime in the West Bank and the assaults on Gaza from 2008 through 2014.Focusing on the political importance of various artistic interventions, Hochberg explores literature, painting, photography, video and film while reworking the relationship between power and vision and engaging not only with the colonised's failure to appear but also with the coloniser's failure to erase. Through attentive reading of Jewish and Palestinian cultural work, Hochberg demonstrates how empowerment and transformation, which are commonly taken as dependent on seeing and being seen, may equally depend on opacity, blindness and the ability to disappear, thereby disrupting the logic of forensics and testimony. Kuntsman and Stein focus on Israeli archives of social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, unearthing the process by which the state as well as Israeli Jewish citizens develop digital literacy and adopt it as a strategic tool in the war over public opinion. Kuntsman and Stein also move beyond the prevailing dichotomous analysis of exposure of the military violence versus its concealment, and demonstrate how various normalising mechanisms such as public secrets and exceptionalism come into play in justifying militarism and colonialism.The books resonate with the same concern that the growing circulation of images of Palestinian suffering, which contributes to its visibility, does not necessarily translate into political change. …