Rearticulating the ConflictB'TSELEM (HEBREW FOR IN THE IMAGE OF), the Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, is one of Israel's most prominent human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Founded in 1989, its goal is to document and educate about human rights violations in the occupied territories, to combat denial among the Israeli public about what goes on in the territories, and to ensure that Israel's government protects the human rights of residents there and complies with its obligations under international law (About B'Tselem).1In 2005, B'Tselem established a video department and added moving images to its human rights reports. In this article we look mainly at two groups of videos distributed by B'Tselem. One is the video reports by B'Tselem's researchers, which document Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories and which B'Tselem has been makinga since 2005. The second is videos that were made as part of B'Tselem's camera distribution project. Launched at the beginning of 2007, this project provides Palestinians with video cameras in order to document their lives under the occupation themselves (B'Tselem's Camera Project).2 B'Tselem's videos have been posted on its website (Video) and YouTube channel (B'Tselem: Video), and some of them have garnered considerable public interest, although they have received almost no attention within film studies. Some of the videos have been circulated by the Israeli and international media.3B'Tselem and the media frequently see these moving images as representations of facts that lie behind the images, coded in terms of human rights and national conflict. This is indeed the chief interest of NGOs such as B'Tselem as well as the police, the courts, and the media. In this article, we would like to put these issues in parentheses and argue that what the images show is not reducible to such an account.The media discourse surrounding these videos has frequently focused on facts and on issues of objectivity and relations between the people involved, such as the ethics of depicting the suffering of others, self-representation, and the degree to which filmmakers can and should intervene in the lives and deaths of those they depict. According to the videos' supporters, the media attention and public pressure have encouraged Israelis to raise questions about settlers in the occupied territories; impelled the Israeli police and military police to conduct investigations that might not have been opened based only on spoken or written testimony from Palestinians; and sometimes resulted in arrests and convictions. Moreover, according to B'Tselem and its advocates, the presence of cameras can be a powerful deterrent and has reduced settler and army violence while offering an empowering form of nonviolent resistance for Palestinians.4 Critics have asked whether B'Tselem gives a fair and impartial picture of events in the territories (and whether it is biased against Israel or even anti-Semitic); whether the making of the videos puts the Palestinian photographers, especially children, in danger; and whether the project has any long-term impact beyond the initial media interest.5Specifically, as other scholars have noted, the events on the ground and other moving images produced in the region are not easily reducible to accounts in which clear-cut subjects and collectives that maintain a coherent identity over time perform easily discernable actions. Such discursive categories can indeed shed light on violations of human rights and national struggle, and providing clear and reliable evidence about what happened is no doubt crucial for legal proceedings. But this kind of analysis can also miss the sometimes chaotic, unofficial, and looming forms of violence and suffering, as well as the forms of political action they call for. As Ariella Azoulay writes, the ruling power seeks to homogenize the heterogeneous scopic regime through the active reduction of objects seen within it to the logic of a national struggle (201). …
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Jan 1, 2015
Saba Batool Miyan + 1
Open Access
