Israeli Human Rights Research Articles

Facsimileing the State: The Bureaucracy of Document Transmission in Israeli Human Rights NGOs

This article focuses on faxes as techno-social activity, and on the part they play in infrastructures of mediation. It anthropologically examines how document transmissions function as practices of power and its undoing, using the case of anti-occupation Israeli NGOs that document human rights violations in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. The article ethnographically traces the initial transmission of documents (mainly testimonies) to the office from the field, and the eventual transmission of legal documents (mainly complaints) from NGOs to the state of Israel, practices that constitute symmetries between state and NGO bureaucracies. This odd mirroring raises questions about what we take for granted about a shared infrastructure of communication.