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The Perpetrator's Archive: Israel's Occupation on YouTube
Abstract
In 2007, the Israeli NGO B’tselem launched a testimonial video project in the Palestinian West Bank as part of their efforts to generate visual documentation of Israeli human rights abuses in the territories – documentation aimed chiefly at Jewish Israeli audiences. In the years that followed, the organization would deliver hundreds of hand-held video cameras to Palestinian families in the West Bank so they could document their abuse by Israeli soldiers and neighboring settler populations -- this at a time when few families had photographic technologies, Internet access, or new media literacy. This paper will focus on the infrequent instances in which their footage from the occupied territories went viral in the Israeli media context, with attention to the question of how virality operates, and what it indexes, within the Israeli political landscape. For in the current Israeli ideological climate, the Palestinian experience of life under occupation is very difficult to see. The issue is not a shortage of visual documentation attesting to such violence. Rather, such abundant visual materials and traces are today effectively imperceivable as either evidence of Palestinian suffering or of Israeli abuse of power. Mainstream Israeli society currently lacks not only the will but also the means to see them in these terms – having been schooled to either overlook such images, or read them otherwise. Today’s paper, then, turns on the following question: given this field of partial vision, how can we explain the viral circulation of this B’tselem video and others like it within the Israeli media context – videos that are quite clear in allocating the roles of perpetrator and victim? To address these questions, I will study the archive of viral B’tselem videos, housed largely on YouTube, and the Jewish Israeli responses to their viral circuits. In the process, I will query the status of the social media archive itself as a political form – posing the question of whether the digital terms of this YouTube archive might help surmount the challenge of Palestinian political invisibility within the current Israeli political climate.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
Cultural Studies