Testifying the Occupation:
Breaking the Silence and Configurations of Space in Israel/Palestine
Sabrina Stallone Student ID: 11315830
Thesis rMA Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. Noa Roei
Second reader: Prof. Dr. Esther Peeren 13 June 2018
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ii
Introduction 2
i. Breaking the Silence in the public sphere 3
ii. Breaking the Silence in theory: Space, Militarism, Dissemination 6 1. Becoming Witness in the South Hebron Hills: Touring and Testimony as Spatial Acts 9 i. Witnessing a witness together: The relational performativity of a testimonial tour 12 ii. “When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail”:
Performing military spatial knowledge 14
iii. “What is possible to see”: Transparent space and embodied legitimacy 19
iv. Mobility and access: Questioning the space of appearance 24
2. “Testifiers’ Media”: Landscape and the Digital Archive 29
i. Space in the image: Testimonies of military structures 33
ii. The image in space: Archival access and the serial way of seeing 38
iii. Discursive spaces of propaganda: Questioning circulation 42
3. April 4th, Kiryat Ono. Breaking the Silence in the Public Square 47
i. Veracity and Anonymity: On Testifying in Public 50
ii. Civilian Militarism and Protest in Public Space 52
iii. Perpetrator testimony as “commun-ication” 57
iv. “Jumping Scales” within Digital Militarism 59
v. Military Violence “Between Virality and Obfuscation” 64
Conclusion: Un-Making the Space to Break the Silence 68
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1 “At-Tuwani, Havat Ma’on.” Courtesy of the Author. 12 Mar. 2018. Fig. 2 “Susiya.” Courtesy of the Author. 12 Mar. 2018.
Fig. 3 “Testifiers’ Media.” Screenshot, Breaking the Silence. Accessed on 1 Apr. 2018. Fig. 4 “Testifiers’ Media.” Screenshot, Breaking the Silence. Accessed on 1 Apr. 2018. Fig. 5 “Testifiers’ Media.” Screenshot, Breaking the Silence. Accessed on 1 Apr. 2018. Fig. 6 “Testifiers’ Media.” Screenshot, Breaking the Silence. Accessed on 1 Apr. 2018. Fig. 7 “Visually Similar Images Search.” Screenshot, Google. Accessed on 8 Apr. 2018. Fig. 8 “Kiryat Ono, 4th April 2017.” Courtesy of Michal Rozin. 16 Mar. 2018.
Fig. 9 “Israeli Soldiers reject Breaking the Silence’s lies.” Reservists on Duty. 5 May 2017, Screenshot, YouTube. Accessed on 4 May 2018.
Fig. 10 “Hadashot.” Reshet 13. 21 Nov. 2017. Screenshot, Facebook. Accessed on 22 May 2018.
Fig. 11 “Old link ‘Testifiers’ Media’.”Screenshot, Breaking the Silence. Accessed on 19 May 2018.
Introduction
This thesis arises out of an interest in Israeli anti-occupation activism and its place within the social and political landscape of Israel/Palestine. In the past year, the Israeli government has made a concerted legislative and executive effort to keep anti-occupation and human rights activists out of Israel’s national borders, most recently with the expulsion of Human Rights Watch Director Omar Shakir.1 Metaphorically speaking, the space granted to anti-occupation discourse in the Israeli public is similarly precarious: resistance from within is marginalized in the media, and critical Israeli voices are repeatedly accused of slander and treason by fellow Israeli civilians as well as high-profile politicians. Thus, analyzing the situatedness of this form of activism comprises both a material and metaphorical interrogation of space as a concept, as critical activist interventions are often resisted on a territorial as well as a
discursive level in the Israeli social order.
Drawn by the persistence of some Israelis to address the injustice of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories from within, I decided to investigate the relation between space and resistance in the work of one of Israel’s anti-occupation activism’s most prominent
proponents, the NGO Breaking the Silence (BtS). In the following chapters, I will analyze three out of what I consider BtS’s interventions in space, both material/territorial and metaphorical/discursive. First, I will conduct a close analysis of one of their guided tours through the South Hebron Hills (SHH), in which I participated. I will interrogate the
potentials and pitfalls of testimonial touring as a spatial act of resistance. Next, I will look at the way territorial space is represented in BtS’ online visual archive of military occupation “Testifiers’ Media”. I will be concerned with how space is represented in the images, and at the way in which those images circulate in (virtual) space. Finally, I will analyze the widely
mediatized public testimony of Dean Issacharoff, performed at a BtS rally in April 2017, as well as its viral circulation that transcended its initial spatial boundaries.
Based on the close reading of these three cases, I will scrutinize the material spaces of the testimonial act/event, as well as its dissemination beyond its spaces of occurrence. I will trace the material and metaphorical trajectories of BtS’s interventions in politics, media and the digital realm, to illuminate some of the entanglements of testimonial activism with the territorial and discursive spaces it informs in the contentious arenas of Israel/Palestine. In order to engage with BtS’s spatial and testimonial interventions, as well as with their
circulation beyond their spatial boundaries, my analysis will be profoundly interdisciplinary, consisting of the mutually enriching methods of auto-ethnographic, visual and discursive analysis. These methods will allow me to self-reflexively examine my own situatedness and role as a witness to the witness. By staying close to my objects and cases while putting them in dialogue with theories of space and militarism, I hope to unearth the intricate ways in which testimony, as a form of activism, is situated and rooted in the territorial and discursive spaces in which it is performed and received.
i. Breaking the Silence in the public sphere
Founded in 2004, the Israeli organization BtS, or Shovrim Shtika in Hebrew, has become one of the most famous and contested anti-occupation activist groups in
Israel/Palestine. Originally constituted by a group of former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers who served in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron during the Second Intifada from 2000 on, over the years the NGO morphed into a highly polarizing movement that collects and presents first person testimonies on IDF’s misconduct in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The bulk of BtS activism consists in the collection and archiving of testimonies given by former IDF soldiers. The eye-witness accounts are published in booklets about specific military operations; archived in online databases
structured around thematic categories; and mediated in public events, lectures and guided tours of the OPT. In recent years, BtS also increased its activities abroad, with photography exhibitions as well as lectures in cultural centers and political hubs of Europe and the United States.
In her article on BtS, Erella Grassiani identifies some of the peculiarities of the organization and their discursive practice of witnessing. While witnessing and testimony is a widely used activist tool, it is most often deployed in the realm of victims or survivors of atrocities, violence and genocides (Grassiani 247). The perpetrator testimonies collected by BtS are in that sense quite unique. According to the organization’s self-presentation on their website, the former IDF soldiers who contribute to their testimony database “have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.”2 The testimonies collected use a sober rhetoric, and they are made to the point and in military-factual style (Grassiani 251), hardly divulging remorse or shame, and replete with military jargon (Givoni 147). The themes addressed range from humiliation of
Palestinians at checkpoints over violent routine practices in the OPT, to destructive rules of engagement during armed conflicts and attacks. Their revelatory rhetoric is alluded to in the organization’s name, centered around breaching the Israeli reticence to publicly engage in a critique of the state condoned violence towards the OPT. The testimonies thus aim at
disturbing what Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein called the “public secret” (14): the term signifies the “knowledge of what not to know” about the OPT, based on a social contract sculpted through the social significance of the IDF and the comradeship of its soldiers (15).
BtS’ extended goal is to affect public opinion in order to pressure the Israeli
government to change the policies that allow the testified-to military misconduct to happen in the first place. The organization’s political stance has become increasingly explicit through the years; currently calling for an end to the military occupation of the OPT, and adopting the
stance that they will only stop testifying once the occupation of the Palestinian Territories ends.3 These positions have become highly inflammatory in the Israeli public sphere, with the government in multiple occasions attempting a legislative obstruction of their work.4
Some of the controversies and critiques surrounding the NGO have centered on the anonymity of the vast majority of their testimonies.5 While to this day over 1200 former soldiers gave their testimony to BtS, the main activities are carried out by a “small specified group of core members” (Grassiani 250). The organization’s committee, consisting of roughly a dozen identifiable activists taking up the roles of spokespersons, foreign relations and educational activities coordinators, serves to build a core that maintains the identities of the large majority of testifying ex-combatants undisclosed.
The testifying veteran soldiers’ anonymity is largely implemented to protect the identities of those who decide to testify, in line with the policy-oriented feature of the activist NGO. While the embodied knowledge of former soldiers and the dissemination thereof is central to their activism, BtS’s actions are proclaimed to be policy-oriented, pointing at the misconduct currently condoned by the Israeli occupying forces with the IDF as their operative vehicle.6 Nonetheless, some of the most incendiary and widely mediated reactions to BtS have happened when activists decided to defer from anonymity. This tactic has become more
3 In 2009, Grassiani contended that BtS activism does not have a clear anti-war agenda (247), and that it is not
“directed at any immediate change on the ground” (251). In recent years, the organization’s political stance has become much more explicit, with statements like “We will continue to break our silence, here at home and in any platform that will help us bring an end to to the occupation.”
4 see Elhanan Miller in +61J: “A bill dubbed the ‘Breaking the Silence Law’ passed its first parliamentary
reading in February. The bill threatens to bar organizations “acting against the IDF” from Israeli educational institutions.” 21 May 2018.
5 In 2012, BtS faced public criticism from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry for the anonymity of their
testimonies, claiming that they were unverifiable and as such only used for their “propaganda effect”. In 2016, in the light of their testimonial reports on the Gaza War of 2014, an Israeli court debated whether BtS should be forced to make their testimonial sources public – a motion that was later retracted in February 2017. While BtS has contended that their testifiers are not only fully cross-checked, but also in any case not anonymous, as
„testimonies are given in face to face interviews, and testifiers’ identities are known and verified by the interviewers“ (BtS, FAQ), more recently they have published and performed testimonies with revealed, recognizable testifiers. This shift has opened up new issues, as their witness accounts of dissent become
prosecutable. The organization’s tactic, defiantly encouraging the legal prosecution of their incriminatory acts of military misconduct, will be dealt with in more detail in chapter three.
6 In their FAQ they contend: “We continue to believe in the importance of focusing on the big picture of Israel’s
occupation policies rather than on any specific deed carried out by an individual soldier.” see “Who is trying to silence us and why.” Breaking the Silence. <http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about/qa?qa=1>.
and more frequent after the organization was repeatedly vilified for protecting those who supposedly wanted to defame the state. In those cases especially, testimony is used as a tool of resistance where the accountability and responsibility of the testifiers’ actions are at center stage and, as Givoni asserts, the tool works “as a powerful reminder of horrible crimes for some, and an ominous sign of dissension for others” (147). This element of disclosure becomes particularly powerful when BtS testimonies are performed in public; which is why, as I will elaborate in the following, the current government repeatedly tries to keep the NGO out of Israel’s public sphere with a number of political motions drafted and aimed at silencing the organization by obstructing its interventions in schools, libraries, galleries. In turn, as I will discuss throughout this thesis, BtS uses the spaces it manages to enter precisely as spaces of resistance. This mobilization and seizing of space, in both its material and metaphorical sense, make an analysis of BtS and its public interventions crucial to the understanding of Israeli anti-occupation activism.
ii. Breaking the Silence in theory: Space, Militarism, Dissemination
A number of studies have been conducted on BtS and their forms of testimonial activism, which will be significant points of reference to this study (Grassiani 2009; Givoni 2011; Katriel & Shavit 2011). While Grassiani gave an overview of the early testimonial strategies deployed by BtS, Givoni used the NGO’s work to discuss the politicization of testimony once it becomes public, hence giving attention to the role of the audience and relationality. Katriel & Shavit have contributed to the scholarship on the topic by focusing on the archival and memory-preserving practices of BtS. My aim is to build on their work and add a layer to it by looking at the organization’s work with regard to a number of spatial theories, critically examining the NGO’s appropriation of territorial and discursive space. In so doing, this thesis attempts to add to the existing literature a focus on the way in which testimony as a tool of resistance shapes and in turn is shaped by its presence in a certain locus.
To do so, I will use Katherine McKittrick’s definition of spatial acts as real discursive responses to real spatial inequalities (xxiii), aimed at mobilizing existing geographies in a discourse of resistance and social struggle (xix). Departing from McKittrick’s concept, I will construct an analysis of how testimony and public space are inextricably entangled. By looking at the guided tour of the SHH, a digital visual archive of perpetrator violence situated in military landscapes, and a BtS protest in Kiryat Ono, three very distinct engagements with space that dialectically enrich each other, the aim of this thesis is to analyze the way in which BtS shapes, shifts and reestablishes the public-ness of Israeli dissent.
With respect to testimonies as political acts in public, it is imperative to delineate a working definition of public and political spaces. Departing from Hannah Arendt’s definition of the public space as a relational space of appearance, which arises when “men are together in action and speech” (199), the public will be understood in this study as a performed site whose true space lies between the people who enact it; practicing a place is not necessarily tied to its location, and brings about its own relational space (197). As Neil Smith & Cindi Katz have argued on a related note, space is to be understood both in its metaphorical and material implications, given that “the relationality of social location is inextricably imbricated with the relationality of geographical location” (75). In the course of this study, these
definitions and arguments will be put in critical dialogue with the specific contexts and cases analyzed.
In order to fully understand the significance of BtS’s reliance on testimonies of ex-soldiers, as well as on military jargon and credentials, it will be crucial to explore how militarism informs and shapes Israeli culture and civilian society, as well as its (public) spaces. As one of its most salient collectivizing institutions, militarism has been a central element in the solidification of Israeli identity (Kimmerling, Israeliness 6; Omer-Sherman 3). With the foundation of the state of Israel, militarism, as consolidated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), became a principal organizational logic through which not only Defense, but
also Israel was made sense of. The army was of great significance in safeguarding the existence and protection of the state, as well as in institutionalizing the new Jewish man and woman. Seventy years into the foundation of Israel, militarism still informs the civilian life before, during and after the mandatory military service as well as what people consider Jewish, Zionist and Israeli. This phenomenon is what Baruch Kimmerling has termed civilian
militarism, or militarism of the mind, as a militaristic rationale that structures Israeli everyday
life beyond its visible spaces and situations of conflict and contention (Israeliness 2;
“Patterns” 206). This singularity of Israeli culture is perpetually contrasted by and entrenched in the pervasive spatial inequality and exclusion of the region’s Palestinian inhabitants. The ongoing severe disruption of Palestinian social spaces, resulting in a limitation of movement, the legal obstruction of their use of public spaces, and the constant military control of their everyday life by the occupying forces will factor into my analysis at various points.8
With these structures of inequality in mind, my analysis of material and metaphorical space will cast a critical look on BtS’s tactics to disturb the “public secret” in Israeli
hegemonic discourses, problematizing what I will term “critique-through-mimicry” and the phenomenon of obfuscation through dissemination. Seeking to interrogate my three cases through Michel de Certeau’s distinction between spatial strategies and tactics (36), and
referring to Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics and the “redistribution of the sensible” as a tactic of dissent (9), I will examine BtS’s perpetrator testimonies as spatial acts and their capacity to disturb Israel’s hegemonic social order.
8 For a concise and poignant treatise of the injustice faced by inhabitants of the OPT in their usage of public
1. Becoming Witness in the South Hebron Hills:
Touring and Testimony as Spatial Acts
In late February 2018, the IDF issued a Command Order barring BtS from entering the Jewish settlement of Tel Rumeida inside the occupied city of Hebron on its organized tours. Giving way to the request of settlers and “in order to protect public order”,9 the army denied activists and their tour participants entrance to the settlement. While Israeli authorities are normally aware of and even involved in planning and giving green light to the BtS tours in Hebron and the more rural area of the SHH,10 in February 2018 military forces suddenly halted the
collaboration. In the same week, efforts were made in the Knesset to blacklist BtS from Israeli schools, in which activists are known to give talks and testify about the realities of the
occupation; the policies attempting to exclude BtS from the public spaces of Israel/Palestine
9 see Yotam Berger’s Haaretz article “After Pressure From Settlers, Israeli Army Bars Anti-occupation Group
From Jewish Part of Hebron”, 26 Feb. 2018.
10 “The Israel Police is notified in advance of our tours.” <www.breakingthesilence.org.il/tours/4>. 21 Mar.
2018.
“One of the best ways to use ‘witnessing’ is to persuade the public to become witnesses themselves.“
Erella Grassiani, The Phenomenon of Breaking the Silence in Israel, 256 “Examined in the most literal sense, landscapes then become spaces for the performance of identities that are various, multiple, and complexly formulated. […] Citizenship, which is a specific form of identity, and the laws surrounding it are based in the territorial principle of jus soli, the notion that a person’s nationality at birth is determined by the place of birth - the literal Latin translation of this principle is “right of soil”.
were abounding. The organization did not comply with the barring from Hebron, and as of early March 2018, they still accepted registrations for the tour in Hebron at the end of the month, even opening registration on an additional tour mid-March. Spokespersons defiantly argued that “we recommend to Bennett and his youths that they come down from the hilltops and start internalizing that the only way to stop us is to end the occupation.”11 With this statement, BtS made a direct reference to pro-settlement politician Naftali Bennett and the loose grouping of right-wing Jewish extremists known as Hilltop Youth, which consists of ultra-nationalist, belligerent and religious settlers residing on the illegal outposts of the OPT.12
Public spaces such as schools, squares and the places visited in the OPT are used by BtS as spaces of resistance, awareness and leverage. The same geographies from which BtS are kept away are used to hint at their otherwise invisibilized structures of oppression, or what McKittrick calls “transparent forms” of subjugation (xix). The tour thus aims to perform what McKittrick calls a spatial act: the recognizing and reutilizing of traditional geographies in the struggle for social justice (xix). In her reading of black feminine spaces, McKittrick
productively links the material with the metaphorical, discourse with territory, by arguing for the importance of the “’sayability’ of geography” (xxiii), with which she refers to being able to express and “say” space in order to counteract and oppose spatial domination. Departing from McKittrick’s reflections, in order to scrutinize how BtS tours participate in this type of opposing spatial domination with their representation and reconfiguration of the visited spaces of contention, I participated in their tour to the SHH in March 2018.
11 see Jonathan Lis’s Haaretz article “Knesset Gives Initial Nod to Bill That Would Muzzle Breaking the
Silence.“. 27 Feb. 2018.
12 see also the definition given by Shimi Friedman in The Hilltop Youth (2017): “The ‘Hilltop Youth’ is the name
for the extremist-religious-nationalist youth movement in Israel, who, through their militant activities, push for establishing new illegal settlements in the West Bank, including preventing through civil disobedience the evacuations of illegal settlements that the government opposes” (ix). By addressing Hilltop Youth directly, BtS hints at an entanglement of space and political subjectivity, which will be relevant to the form of spatial engagement through testimony that I will deal with in this chapter.
The area is one of the most rural parts of the West Bank and home to some 4000 Palestinians living in 30 villages around the city of Yatta. It is located in Area C, a part of the OPT that according to the partition commanded by the Oslo Accords is under full Israeli control; the master plan issued in 1942 by the British Mandate for the area is still valid today, relegating the area to agricultural purposes.13 The tour organized by BtS takes international participants from Jerusalem to the SHH area in a bus, stopping on hilltops, at military outposts and in rural Palestinian villages. It is led by an ex-combatant IDF soldier, who alternates accounts of personal experience, factual military knowledge about the occupation of the SHH and dialogues with the group participants.
These public guided tours have been happening since the early days of BtS, mostly led by senior members of the organization in Hebrew or English. The opportunity to take an international audience to the spaces of contention that are the subject of their testimonial work is central to BtS’s activism; especially considered the above mentioned efforts to marginalize and obstruct BtS spatially and epistemologically in the Israeli political mainstream. Rather than an explicit performance of personal testimonial accounts such as the ones collected in the BtS publications, the tour makes use of embodied, situated knowledge in physical space to talk about the mechanisms of occupation more generally.14 When referring to personal experience, it is done in order to concretely hint at the normalizing rhetoric of occupation. Using a range of theories of space, that hint at the “imbrication of material and metaphorical space” as suggested by Smith & Katz (80), I will revisit a few key moments of the attended tour to scrutinize the role of the audience, the tour guide, and the interpellated Palestinian activists and how the subjects at stake articulate, repurpose and shape the spaces through which they move.
13 “South Hebron Hills”. B’Tselem. Web. 21 Mar. 2018. <www.btselem.org/south_hebron_hills>.
14 The non-anonymity of the recognizable testifier, performing first-person eyewitness accounts, will be dealt
i. Witnessing a witness together: The relational performativity of a testimonial tour
On March 12th 2018, roughly 35 people join the daylong tour to the SHH. The meeting point in Jerusalem, located on a parking lot between the Convention Center and the Central Bus Station, is not discernible from the many other excursions departing to pilgrim and touristic sites from Jerusalem on a daily basis, the large tour bus and the waiting crowds as their most readable symbols. The crowds moving along pedestrian and motorized traffic do not seem to notice or mind the gathering of waiting tourists. The group consists mostly of young European and US American travelers. Some arrived directly at the Central Bus Station from Ben Gurion airport, carrying large luggage; some, as will turn out in conversations in the course of the day, have personal ties to the region through their Palestinian or Jewish heritage, their studies or work. Except for our somewhat similar demographics, what binds us together in the initial moments before the tour is our upcoming role as audience, as witness to the witness. It is the shared tacit understanding that our tour will qualitatively differ from other tours departing from here, or anywhere else in Jerusalem that day. In a reminder email received two days before, the organization states that the tour “highlights the difficult situation in the region and the complex relationship between Palestinians, settlers, and the IDF which results in, among other things, dispossession and the annexation of land.”15
Participation is not recommended for people younger than sixteen, and at the end of the list of places we will visit, which includes military outposts and Palestinian villages, the
organization mentions that our means of transport will not be armored. The information shared by the organization prior to the tour indicates that our tour will tell a different story than those going to Masada or the Via Dolorosa. The group’s readiness to see a harsh reality with their own eyes and listen to the stories that are often not listened to, is our common denominator. We thus become a crucial part of the relational performativity of the testimonial
15 “South Hebron Hills Tour”. Breaking the Silence. Web. 21 Mar. 2018.
tour, in our role as hearers and witness to the witness; an element just as essential as the ex-combatant testifier. Indeed, the tour guide encourages us to document the tour, take pictures, videos and notes; and as such eternalize and transpose the act of becoming witnesses together.
Our shared role is performed in the iteration of common gestures: our being, moving and listening together creates a type of alliance that “brings about its own location, highly transposable”, as Judith Butler, echoing Arendt’s space of appearance, suggests (“Alliance” 73). The interplay between the personal and the geographical becomes thus pivotal to the political potential of the tour. While Butler reads the Arendtian public as a predominantly performative construct, Arendt herself, although obliquely, asserts the crucial relevance of the material, territorial context around a space of appearance, too: “Action and speech need the surrounding presence of others no less than fabrication needs the surrounding presence of nature for its material, and of a world in which to place the finished product” (188). These considerations suggest that speech or action alone do not form the political; the space’s material manifestation, the embodied identity of the speaker and agent, as well as its receptive audience play a definitive role in the emergence of a space of appearance.
As stated by Grassiani in this chapter’s epigraph, the collective act of witnessing a testifier turns the tour participants into witnesses themselves. Givoni suggests that “testimony crosses the threshold of politicization when it is not just an act that realizes a singular instance of witnessing but rather, and primarily, a vehicle for creating witnesses, in the plural” (149). In contrast to the numerous BtS publications, which create a readerly experience of plural witnessing, the tours situate the audience in a tangible, material space that changes the effect of witnessing; the group itself becomes the vehicle for creating witnesses. Both the
publication and the tour relate to plural witnessing as a political vehicle, but the seemingly simple difference in form lead to a different position of the audience: from standing at the receiving end of a political act to taking an active and performative part in its shaping.
key element to a political space. The illocutionary act of testimony is complemented and politicized by the relational performativity of shared, reiterated bodily presence in a space. The tour turns what Mitchell has called “the innocent nomad” of tourism (199), into a witness of a harsh reality, “recuperating [the tourist] for progressive ends” (Kanouse 46). Part of the tour’s purpose and strategy is letting tourists, travelers as well as locals permeate a space to which they would usually have little access, document it and experience it together.
ii. “When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail”: Performing military spatial knowledge
At the beginning of the tour, while on our bus drive from Jerusalem to our first pit stop at the gas station of the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, tour guide Ido talks about his own position in the organization and his Israeli identity. He explains that he grew up in a center-left, well-situated town in Israel. All of his male relatives had been combatants; Ido recounts that his great-grandfather had served in the British army during the Mandate, evoking his multi-generational Israeliness. Ido situates himself as a deeply rooted member of Israeli society, in order to enhance his credibility and strengthen the effect of his truth and testimony
in spite of being like every other Israeli. “When you enter the military at age 18, you take it
for granted; you don’t ask questions; you want to become a combatant”, he explains.
Essentially, this self-positioning serves the double purpose of situating the former combatant within the structures of the military, but also within the jus soli of the land of Israel. Ido discursively and physically locates himself as a citizen rooted and legitimized by his native landscape. As suggested by Harris in the epigraph to this chapter, spatial expression of citizenship is done through ownership, occupation and manipulation of space (192); in the case of the tour guide, his citizenship is expressed through the transmission of knowledge about his native, supposedly lawful spaces.
Ido’s performed belongingness can be read as a peculiar double exertion of spatial pertinence and political resistance. In “The Practice of Everyday Life”, de Certeau forges a distinction between strategies and tactics when discussing acts of everyday resistance: he defines strategies as hegemonic and governmental impositions of power and tactics as the actions of those who are bound to operate within the fields of those who make the
impositions, but without any ability to influence them (36). With a clear reference to space, both materially and metaphorically, de Certeau asserts that a tactic is “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (37). In absence of an actual space within governmentally accepted institutions for the mediation of dissenting knowledge about the Israel/Palestine conflict, the space of appearance created between the Israeli ex-soldier and its international interlocutors can be seen as a way to critique this institutional absence.
Confirming Givoni’s argument of plural witnessing as politicization of testimony, as well as Grassiani’s recognition of the collectivity of witnessing in BtS’s work, the encounter created by the triangulation of audience, testifier and the visited space of contention has the potential of becoming a tool of dissent and resistance in itself. In de Certeau’s understanding, the space created by this relational performativity can be seen as the practice of critiquing a strategy – imposition of power – through a tactic, as in “the actions determined by the lack of this power” (XIX). De Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics suggests a
classification of its agents: strategies are deployed by those who superimpose them as governmental social orders, and tactics by those who dwell in the spaces of superimposition (30). BtS, with its unavoidable identity ties to the hegemonic force of the IDF, complicates this classificatory distinction.
When talking about resisting military geographies by appearing in them, Rachel Woodward discusses a number of feminist peace interventions in the UK of the 1980s.16 In
16 She identifies the disruptive characteristics of their protest in their position as anarchic Other: “This strategy
her lengthy discussion of this form of non-violent protest, the “tactics” of intervention consist of seizing a military space for radically anti-militaristic purposes. Not only were the protests mentioned non-violent, their main constituents embodied a political movement that rejected militarism a priori. Their expertise on militarism came from without, their rejection of it was a result of the incongruences of military power and their collective political and moral values, corroborated by their eye-witness experience as seasoned anti-military activists (Woodward,
Military Geographies 140). These moralized tactics, often found in the toolboxes of
humanitarian activism, have been criticized for their tendencies towards simplification and victimization and unproductive in their morally denunciatory nature (Givoni 163).
While BtS tours are not at all free of moralization, the powerful difference in their effect stems from the first-person, eyewitness narrative of war and occupation, and not as its “anarchic Other”; the testifiers make use of the spaces in the OPT to speak of their own problematic personal experience as former perpetrators. The BtS tours operate based on their testifiers’ identity and militaristic knowledge of the area. What we are told and led to believe on the tour through the SHH is that the testifiers are not what Givoni has called “expert-witnesses”, capable to guide us because they have been instructed to do so by the organization (164). They are presented as materially and physically implicated in the contested space of the OPT; usually the ones who enforce the strategies rather than perform the tactics.
Ido’s perhaps most testimonial, personal speech act is done on a hilltop outside the outpost of Nof Nesher, where he explains his function in the SHH as that of a former
gatekeeper. Between 2004 and 2006, Ido served precisely here, in the most southern tip of the SHH, where the border between the West Bank and Israel is heavily controlled by both Border Police and IDF soldier presence. The separation wall’s construction between Beit Yatir and the Dead Sea is in planning, but has so far not been built. Ido’s main job as a border
military. This was an anarchic (i.e. nonhierarchical) group challenging military power through its presence, its appearance and its carnivalesque tactics” (Woodward, Military Geographies 140).
patrol officer was to, he says, “chase shabachim.” Shabachim is the military term used in Hebrew for Palestinian laborers who enter Israel, often daily, without a permit.17 Due to the relative scarcity of physical obstacles in form of fences, walls and control towers, this area is often used by Palestinian workers to cross the border into Israel. The people crossing daily, often to make a living in precarious labour in Israel, “are considered terrorists by the army”, Ido explains.
Rhetorically, he uses his personal experience to allude to a larger issue of
dehumanization through a metaphorical innuendo mentioned in passing: “When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.” With this statement, Ido morphs his experience into a concatenation of non-human referents, which serves the purpose of verbally performing the codification of military knowledge and practice. This de-humanizing
metaphor used to talk about his tasks as a soldier, rhetorically operates within the BtS logic of using the individual’s experience and knowledge to be indicative of a larger issue, concerning the state policies that allow for such misconduct to happen. If we consider “the hammer” to be the power endowed to him by the military to be the gatekeeper, and “the nail” to be the
Palestinian body who may or may not be crossing a border illegally, by way of metaphor, the former soldier deploys an equation that according to Woodward is a typically military one: seeing landscape is knowing landscape (Military Geographies 108), and by extension seeing targets is knowing targets. Enhanced by the presence in his jus soli, the former soldier turned tour guide reiterates a “rationalistic, possibly even masculinist” way of seeing to make a point (Woodward, Military Geographies 108). Perhaps unknowingly, Ido’s most memorable
testimony is hence one in which he – even if only by way of staged performance – slips into the distinctively militaristic hegemonic logic and language of occupation.
17 “Shabachim” is the acronym that stands for “םייקוח יתלב םיהוש”: ‘those who stay illegally’. It is translated
Utilizing both the content and the form of embodied military spatial knowledge matters a great deal to the effect of BtS’s revelatory tactics. It doesn’t only expose, performatively, the military mind frame as argued above, but also helps to stage the BtS testifiers as trustful witnesses. Specifically referring to the entanglements of Israel’s citizens and militarism, Grassiani argues that their
“claim as Israelis who have fulfilled their duty to the state, gives them a great amount of legitimacy. The fact that the members of the organization all were combat soldiers and thus know what they talk about greatly strengthens their claims and gives them the right to speak out” (254).
Grassiani’s article on the work of BtS focuses on the trust given to the activists as credible and respected witnesses, an attitude that has changed profoundly since. As mentioned in the introduction, today BtS faces charges of defamation and the Israeli government actively tries to keep the organization outside of the nation’s public eye. The immediate presence of embodied testimonial knowledge within the contested space of the SHH conjures a
convincing performance of truth and makes a compelling case against the “public secret”: that which is generally known, but not talked about, not articulated (Taussig 5). As elaborated by Kuntsman & Stein in their discussion of the public secret in the context of Israeli civilian militarism, from the first Zionist settlements to the digital age, Israeli civilians have diligently kept the secret of occupation, living their public life in a perpetual “social contract that works to contain the effects of Israeli state violence on the civilian everyday” (Kuntsman & Stein 15).
Considering the pervasiveness of this public secrecy, an Israeli citizen and former perpetrator of state violence breaking precisely that social contract makes the performance on the tour particularly alluring for its audience, and particularly fastidious for those who have an interest in keeping it. If the Certeauian “strategy” is the pervasive and tacit militarization of public life and space, the “tactic” deployed by BtS activists on these tours is not the avoidance of such a space, but precisely its defiant use and its revelatory manipulation by those who are
supposed to keep the public secret. In addition to the concrete truth of territorial space mentioned above, the embodied performance and identity of the guide as a former soldier make the breaching of the public secret both more incendiary and more believable.
Fig. 1: The tour group led by BtS activist Ido Even-Paz gazes upon the village of At-Tuwani and the illegal settlements of Havat Ma’on and Ma’on.
iii. “What is possible to see”: Transparent space and embodied legitimacy
Mid-tour, our bus stops at the side of Route 80, right where it intersects with the Green Line, and Ido leads us by foot up the hill flanking the road. At its top, he gathers us around in a half-circle and starts explaining to us what we see below us. He points at the Palestinian village of At Tuwani and the illegal settlements of Havat Ma’on and Ma’on (see fig. 1). Ido repeatedly gestures towards spatial and architectural details, such as the building painted in pink in At-Tuwani, the only Palestinian school of the area, to which schoolchildren must be escorted by international activists in order to avoid the violence of Israeli extremists living
only two kilometers east of the school.18 While standing on this strategically chosen hilltop, he attests a narrative of struggle, conflict and settler violence to the assemblages of buildings and roads by pointing at them from afar, and sharing their readability with his unknowing audience. Our gaze, guided by his pointing finger and his accompanying information, is directed towards the injustices towards the Palestinian people that are inscribed in the land.
In Demonic Grounds, McKittrick warns us about the “ideological weight of
transparent space” (xv). She acknowledges the seductiveness of assumptions about space and geography as natural categories, this naturalization in turn making space that which “just is”: “That which ‘just is’ not only anchors our selfhood and feet to the ground, it seemingly calibrates and normalizes where, and therefore who, we are” (McKittrick xi). The situated knowledge performed by Ido, legitimated by his identity as a former combatant soldier, is transmitted within and through a specific selection of sites in the SHH, in an attempt to recalibrate that which “just is”. The SHH are a part of the West Bank in which the everyday hardships of the Israeli occupation may not be as clearly visible as in other readable sites of the conflict, such as the checkpoints of Qalandiya near Ramallah and Bethlehem’s
Checkpoint 300, or the notoriously violence-ridden city of Hebron. While some of the area’s political issues receive considerable coverage in the Israeli media and internationally, such as the case of Susiya that I will touch upon later, the traces of conflict and violence are not as visible to the untrained eye as they might be in other spaces of the OPT. The negligence of this area is part of a strategic tool and a consequence of the occupation: as suggested by Faulkner in his discussion of the politics of visibility in Israel/Palestine “[T]he conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinians is wrapped up with the question of what it is possible to see” (147). Using Rancière’s conceptualization of the “distribution of the
sensible”,19 Faulkner examines the political power of actions that result in heightened visibility. By sharing his embodied knowledge, the ex-combatant soldier has the potential of counteracting spatial invisibility, and rendering what is otherwise space made invisible political, by saying “I was there” and “I saw X”, hence putting the epistemological hegemony over what is known, seen and referred in a more tangible, perceptible context.
Indeed, when Ido does address his personal implication in the oppression of the inhabitants of the SHH through harassment, mapping and control, he repeatedly makes use of reaffirming phrases to consolidate his narrations: “Believe me when I say it”, “you have to trust me on this”, “I know because I did it myself” are only some of the reinforcing narrative elements used by the ex-combatant turned testifier turned tour guide to engage his audience in a collective mediation of his truth. Hence, the testifiers’ perspective and expertise allows for a de-flattening of the tourist gaze, as argued by Sarah Kanouse in her reading of alternative tours. She argues that during these tours “information is read against the landscape, while the landscape is reread in a research process that may not end before presentation to an audience but continues as mutual discovery on the tour” (Kanouse 47), a conceptualization of the tour that echoes McKittrick’s definition of place-based critiques or “respatialization” through performance as spatial acts (xix). Directing the tourists’ gaze towards the details that articulate the Occupation in the SHH, but would go unnoticed otherwise, is a form of redistribution of the sensible; however, it is complicated by the fact that its performance works only if the identity performed by the knower replays existing divisions. While what Ido does on behalf of BtS can be considered a spatial act in McKittrick’s sense, as through the
19The distribution of the sensible (“le partage du sensible”) is a concept coined by Jacques Rancière that refers
to the forms in which we configure a sensible order, that which is seen, heard or perceived. In his Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière contends that there is an aesthetic to the political that precludes the aestheticization of politics; it being an a priori system of forms that “presents itself to sense experience” (13). In this study, I will keep coming back to Rancière’s concept through the reading of Simon Faulkner, who uses it to analyze the politics of visibility in Israel/Palestine. Illustrating his analysis with two examples of political interventions in Israel/Palestine, he looks at “how politics in this context involves a dissensual break with the order of partition, making something supplementary and new appear.“ (Faulkner 154). The ability of a “supplement” to rearrange the existing sensible order will be of importance to my following analysis.
information shared on the tour he reconfigures a certain spatial order of “what is possible to see”, and redistribute the sensible by performatively making something unseen appear, it is arguably still done from a position that “replays existing divisions” (Faulkner 149). All the while creating a sense of interaction and mutual discovery as suggested by Kanouse, the authoritative gaze of the ex-combatant guide makes for a somewhat problematic reproduction of knowing and dominating landscape through typically military mapping and control
procedures.
As argued by Barbara E. Mann in her discussion of space and landscape in Jewish culture, “[t]he physical return to the mythic homeland was enhanced by the cultural
productionof space that encouraged its new Jewish inhabitants to perceive themselvesas both resident and master, largely at the expense of the land’s immediate natives, the local
Palestinian population” (85). Indeed, ex-combatant Ido positions himself as a current resident of Israel, and, in his capacity of ex-combatant, as the OPT’s previous master. He represents the former glorified perpetrator of violence in the SHH, whose testimonial knowledge of it is performed in and through the perspectives and locations of occupation and violence. The landscape takes up an active role in the enactment of hegemony; the space of the OPT allows for a performance of testimony that is unique to the format of touring in BtS activism. The tour’s main visited sites are organized around tangible loci of conquest. The group, shielded by the physical containment and the symbolic significance of the tour bus, leaves this
sheltered position almost solely when taken to strategic hilltops near the Green Line, a fenced pump station that provide the nearby Israeli settlement of Nof Nesher with water, to the military outposts of Mitzpe Ya’ir overlooking the landscape. The double identity markers of resident and master resonate strongly in the case of the BtS tour guide, whose mediation of military spatial knowledge performatively reproduces notions of domination.
On the tour, the act of “complicating and denaturalizing the site” (Kanouse 52)
that, the Israeli “self-serving myth” (Mitchell 195), as in the ownership and entitlement that is so often connected to the narratives of desert-ness and abandonment that precede (and still are in place in) Israeli self-understanding and historicity, is disturbed. The BtS tour of the SHH thus constitutes a mobile performance that aims at complicating space and the self’s
implications within it. At the same time, it seems that this goal can only be achieved
effectively and credibly through the embodied relationship between the former soldier and the space. The credible knower who is allowed to disturb hegemonic Zionist ideology
discursively reinforces his spatial belongingness through his Israeli identity, his guiding role and his military spatial knowledge. Hence, still operating within a logic of hegemony, the disturbance of the self-serving myth is performed by those who would ideologically benefit from it.
iv. Mobility and access: Questioning the space of appearance
On one of the last stops of the tour, after using a number of militarized spaces as a backdrop to Ido’s knowledge transmission, the group is taken to the Palestinian village of Susiya. Although home to no more than 40 families, Palestinian Susiya has become the most widely known symbol of the Palestinian struggle in the area. Faced with the Israeli Civil
Administration’s repeated plans, threats and execution of demolition in the past 25 years, the inhabitants of Susiya have kept returning to their land, nowadays a precarious assemblage of residential tents and temporary buildings.20 Nasser Nawaj’a is a prominent activist based and
rooted in Susiya. His knowledge of Hebrew and his willingness to cooperate with Israeli and international peace organizations have made him a crucial figure of Susiya’s and, more generally, of the Palestinian resistance. Descending the tour bus on the paved street that separates Palestinian Susiya from the homonymous Israeli illegal outpost, the tour
participants are welcomed by Nasser and a small group of residents on the playground at the edge of the village (see fig. 2). Chairs have been set up for the audience, while the residents stand and rock on the colorful swings and seesaws. Ido introduces Nawaj’a and sets out to translate the Palestinian’s account from Hebrew to English. For the following 45 minutes, Ido’s perpetrator perspective is complemented by what should represent the accounts of the minoritized inhabitants of the OPT. In detailed yet spontaneous fashion, Nawaj’a unfolds his eyewitness accounts of Israeli military violence and injustice through the lens of his personal benchmark dates: the first demolition in his teenage years, his children seeing him arrested for standing up to one of the many destructions. All the while allowing for Nawaj’a’s narrative to take center stage, Ido maintains his authoritative embodiment by serving as the translator of his words. His hands tucked in his pockets, Nawaj’a faces the audience, but gazes at the dusty ground in Ido’s direction when explaining his position in Arabic. Ido remains the one
ultimately addressing his hearers. A sense of interdependence becomes palpable in this multi-
language back and forth: Nawaj’a’s presence and testimony enhances the effect of the BtS tour as a critical, anti-occupation intervention; this effect, however, is still spatially and linguistically dependent on our Israeli guide. From the vantage point of our plastic chair arena, we get to see and experience a form of verbal, non-violent resistance, of which our presence as hearers in the territorial space of contention is a central part. The genuine and hospitable attitude of Susiya’s spokesperson Nawaj’a, marked by the readiness to participate in a dialogue with a BtS activist and his group, manages to create a tangible political space.
Both Ido’s and Nawaj’a’s testimonial knowledge and stories align in form, but the voices they represent are very distinct ones. Even if only briefly, during this section of the tour the situated knowledge and epistemic positions of the two men are given a shared
platform, and an Arendtian space of appearance is created; their joint performance gives each of them the chance “to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness” (Arendt 176). Together with the audience as a witness to the witnesses, the playground becomes an apparent site of political potential. Making the testimony truly public, as contended by Givoni, depends on giving it a space, or a staged platform, through which to expand its witnessing audience.
This perfectly staged space of appearance, however, requires some further
contextualization of the politically and spatially unequal ground on which it stands. In her decolonizing theory of geography, McKittrick has shown that the naturalization of geography often obfuscates its legacies of exploitation and conquest (xiv). She asserts that through a decolonizing analysis, “we can expose domination as a visible spatial project that organizes, names, and sees social differences […] and determines where social order happens” (xiv). In the case of the BtS tour, the domination the audience is primarily exposed to is one of military occupation; that which is concerned with the military control and spatial injustices of the OPT. However, this is not all that social order is in the SHH, as we are made to observe in the staged interaction in Susiya. If we see resistance and action in public space as part of this
social order, the BtS tour becomes the “visible spatial project” that arranges and dominates how and what we see. In the space of appearance created by the encounters on the tour, the sensation of an upended social order is evoked, a reminder of the expectations built up of this tour as presenting an alternative narrative of the conflict. Out of BtS’s testimonial work, which focuses almost exclusively on the ex-soldiers’ perspective, the format of the tour comes closest to a practice of inclusion of different viewpoints. It creates the opportunity for encounters with the Palestinian voices who usually remain not only structurally unheard in the Israeli mediation of the conflict, but are also simply not interpellated in the rest of BtS’s testimonial work. While this interaction is unique, its conditions of possibility call for a discussion of issues of mobility and access in order to unearth its unequal basis.
The staged, supposed natural belongingness to the practiced polis on the Susiya playground, staged through the relational sharing and receiving of testimonial knowledge, disregards issues of accessibility, the crossing of territorial borders and legal obstacles. As suggested by El-Ad in his considerations on the “shrinking civic space” of Israel/Palestine (1), while Israeli and Palestinian spaces are certainly interconnected, we need to account for their unjustly distributed rights to free speech (2). The performed practice of the guided tour as precisely a touristic act allows Ido and the participants move with relative freedom through the SHH; in contrast, there is an undeniable stasis to the embodied knowledge represented by Nawaj’a on the tour. This juxtaposition of movement and stillness between the visitors and the visited exposes a problematic power imbalance, which remains unaddressed and, with that, works towards the naturalization of both identity and place, “repetitively spatializing where nondominant groups ‘naturally’ belong” (Mc Kittrick xv).
The static space of Susiya, inhabited by a population that is required to “stay in place” (McKittrick 9), needs to be reached by a highly transposable space of appearance already created by the tour, which calls into question the notion of a space in which we “speak and act together” as a political space a priori. Indeed, when Arendt talks about the polis, she already
assumes mobility to be a surmounted challenge: “the polis […] gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness” (197). The staged discussion space on the playground in Susiya creates the illusion of a public square that is always ready to be practiced; however, its conditions of possibility as such are fully permeated by the physical and political borders set up by the occupation.
As elaborated by El-Ad, the ability to create such spaces in the OPT is legally
sanctioned: Ever since 1967, an Israeli Command Order mandates that “Palestinian residents have no inherent freedom of protest or freedom of expression, and that even non-violent resistance and civil protest involving peaceful assembly are forbidden“ (El-Ad 2). Indeed, the OC Central Command Order No. 101 contends that a group over ten people, whose gathering purposes are the discussion of something that “may be construed as a political subject”, constitutes a legal violation that can be sanctioned with imprisonment, monetary fines or whichever degree of force necessary.21 Not only are thus Susiya’s inhabitants and testifiers
confined to a certain locus, they are also put in a critically vulnerable position by participating in the public space created by BtS, Ido and his audience. The seeming banality of an assembly on a playground, regardless of the testimonial content’s gravity, creates the illusion of a public space where the Occupation has, in fact, made that impossible beyond, and even within, the limits of this tour.
Going back to de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactic, what is presented here as a tactic of the dissenting Israeli NGO to escape the silencing strategy of the
government, does not fully account for the legally oppressing premises onto which this tactic intervenes on the minoritized Palestinians. Tactics can “use, manipulate, and divert these spaces” (de Certeau 30), but what is at stake for the Israeli testifier cannot be compared to the implications of the Palestinian subject in the same space. It is thus crucial to acknowledge that while in this case BtS’s goal is to create a space of encounter in which Palestinians and
Israelis can appear and speak together, the configuration and gaze of the tour is still primarily one permeated by the imbalanced structures of occupation and domination.
By looking at three key players within the tour of the SHH – the witnessing audience, the tour guide’s military knowledge and the Palestinian activists – this chapter set out to question how embodied knowledge works towards re-inscribing territorial space on the BtS tour. It sheds light on some of the difficulties and problematic complicities of performance, identity and space in the attempt to expose military injustice. These considerations will continue to resonate in the following chapter and the subsequent object scrutinized, which is of different nature: namely, the medium of photography and its digital format as deployed by BtS to re-focalize the militarization of space. Focusing on a specific section of BtS’s online visual archive, the above-discussed issues of mobility, access and testimonial tactics of disruption will be returned to in order to address digital visual representations of space and landscape.
2. “Testifiers’ Media”: Landscape and the Digital Archive
When accessing the website of BtS, between the organization’s “about us” section and its main database of testimonies, there is a dropdown menu titled “protective edge”. Clicking on the different links in this section will reveal a meticulously catalogued corpus of information about the seven-week ground invasion that was the Gaza War 2014, dubbed by the army and largely in the Israeli media Operation Protective Edge. The database includes video and text testimonies as well as press articles. Some of the material used for this online database also appears in This is How We Fought in Gaza, the print publication of 2015, containing
introductory and contextualizing notes, soldiers’ testimonies and photographic material about Operation Protective Edge. Embedded in the online dropdown menu, below the text and video testimonies and above the links to updates and the press articles, one subpage is titled
“Testifiers’ Media”. Once opened, my browser window displays two rows of thumbnails, presenting photos of soldiers in front of a skyline, rubble, a single house riddled by bullets; some other pictures in these two rows show the soldiers standing inside houses, resting on armchairs, lying on mattresses on the floor (see fig. 5). One thumbnail pictures an explosion, a “play” icon propped up in its center. The rows of images are framed by the guiding features of an online site: a home button, links to the other sections, to social media, contact addresses and a green rectangle on the right end of the screen, with the encouraging invitation to “JOIN
“And suddenly I see the whole neighborhood in front of me, and then there’s stress, and confusion over the radio, and the commander was really improvising, and suddenly he tells me: ‘You see that house? Fire there’. Boom, I shoot.”
US”. The thumbnail photos catch the eye with bright, warm colours, emphasized by a black and white backdrop that presents a fragmented military landscape, displaying parts of a tank and a soldier’s backpack. Rather than as a “witness to the witness” standing in the spaces of contention, I am confronted with a serial representation of these territories. I become a witness simply by looking at a screen, no longer by standing on a hilltop.
When scrolling down, the page gives way to over twenty rows, all neatly filled with more photos and videos. The rows of visuals – resulting in 75 photos and three short handheld camera videos – were taken by soldiers who served in combat during the invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, testified to BtS and whose identity is unspecified. The general
geopolitical context of “Testifiers’ Media” is thus the 2014 invasion of Gaza, a territory disengaged and yet repeatedly invaded by Israeli presence on the ground.22 The depiction of landscape and the military’s presence in it – either through the traces of military intervention or the soldiers’ bodies – brings up questions of intent: Were the photos and videos originally taken by the soldiers as evidence of violence or as a trophy of conquest? Was this evidence collected with the preemptive intention to build an archive that will expose the violent routine of the IDF, utilizing the military focalization of “embedded reporting” (Butler, Frames 64) on geographies in order to perform a spatial act of resistance and re-spatialization (McKittrick xix)? Or are the photos and videos merely repurposed, commonplace souvenirs of everyday life,23 taken from a vantage point of conquest (Roei 88)? Basing my argument precisely on the ambiguities that these questions of intent pose, my focus will lie on visual and discursive effects of and on space, echoing the approach used in my first chapter. Shifting my analysis from the embodiment of space and spatial knowledge to the representation thereof and its travelling, I am here going to focus on seriality and the concept of the archive in relation to
22 After the so-called Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, there have been a number of ground invasions,
of which the one in 2014 was the most destructive so far.
23 Yehuda Shaul, Foreign Relations Director at BtS, said about the selfies of Eden Abergil next to a detained and
blindfolded Palestinian on social media in 2010: “This is commonplace. Don’t you take pictures of your everyday life? For these soldiers serving in the occupied territories, this is what they see 24/7: handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinians.” (qtd. in Kuntsman & Stein 39)
“Testifiers’ Media”, in which spatial issues, albeit from a different angle, will be addressed again.
Looked at in its entirety, through this serial brick-style thumbnail layout, the repeated colour pallet creates a pattern: summer sky blue, earthy ocher and the grey of architectural debris fill the screen with their repetition. As the colour scheme suggests, this collection of photos can be perceived of as an assemblage of landscapes. Some photos, when enlarged, present a view over a mountain ridge and greenery in the background, a few sheep in the foreground. In between them, traces of war: in some photos they take the shape of hills of dirt dug up for protection; in others, dusty tanks merge into the picture’s colour scheme. In plain sight and yet hidden, the IDF’s traces are framed as part of the Gazan landscape. Out of all the images, about 25 have soldiers’ bodies as their main constituents; the soldiers punctuate, as the solitary witness only captured by the gaze of the camera, an otherwise unpunctuated and undefined pattern of sky blue, earth red and rubble grey space. Sometimes the soldiers are shown mid-action, during a routine operation; at other times in a moment of dullness and relaxation, and yet in other instances, they pose for the camera. Except for the two first photographs on row one, the faces of the soldiers are blurred. A circle of opacity secures their anonymity and obfuscates the expression on their face, exerting a double play on showing and hiding. The obfuscation of the face aligns with the anonymous nature of BtS’s textual
testimonies. Unrecognizable and uniformed male combat officers visually this time instead of textually, reiterate the performative assertions of testimony, “I was there” and “I did it”, by being portrayed in the spaces of war, or, when bodily outside the frame as picture takers, by being implied as the focalizers of war. The anonymity of the soldiers, as mentioned in the introduction, is a tactic used throughout BtS’s work to target the structure of occupation rather than the specific individuals.
Fig. 3:“Testifiers’ Media.” Breaking the Silence.
When clicked upon, the thumbnail with the “play” icon reveals a YouTube video file. A few seconds into the video, a building explodes. The explosion is accompanied by off-screen exclamations of incredulity, suppressed nervous laughter; surprised and amused voices are heard saying “Good morning, Gaza!”, “Take a picture, take a picture!”, “Fucking shit!”. The audio fragments in this and the other two videos on the page are the only verbal trace we receive in “Testifiers’ Media”; otherwise, the narrative remains visual, with captions or written background analysis fully missing. As an assemblage of visuals, “Testifiers’ Media” presents a collage of glimpses upon the landscape of Gaza as intruded by militaristic
intervention. While the single images allow insight into the space of the battlefield, in their seriality, they constitute yet another space: a space for storage and ready access, a digital archive.
Throughout this chapter, I will examine how and when BtS’s “Testifiers’ Media” constitutes a political attempt at a testimonial representation and reconfiguration of the spaces shown in the images. I will address these issues by using Rachel Woodward’s and Tal Ben Zvi’s work on landscape as an ideological tool. These reflections on the space shown in the
image will lead me to an analysis of the space granted to the image, considering the meaning-making of seriality as suggested by Jennifer Dyer. Especially if we consider reading and interpreting military landscape as a political act, as suggested by Woodward (Military
Geographies 124), and reflect on the cultural-historical meaning of the archival space in
Israel/Palestine as discussed by Ariella Azoulay and Rona Sela, the discursive and physical digital space in which a visual record of military landscape is embedded seems highly relevant in defining the purpose the images get to serve. Moving from the space depicted in the image towards the space occupied by the image, I will attempt to excavate the connections and fissures between the two spatially informed axes of space in the image and the image in space.
i. Space in the image: Testimonies of military structures
In her book Military Geographies, Rachel Woodward argues that the military gaze on landscape is a tool for domination of space (108). The domination comes from soldiers’ learned skills of control and terrain analysis, which allow for the reading of landscape as a tool of war (107). In the case of the images shown in “Testifiers’ Media”, we see the space of Gazan landscape as seized, utilized and known by the Israeli military. In her reading of British military landscape iconography, Woodward suggests that military representations of landscape legitimize and prioritize particular land uses over others (Military Geographies 108). In “Testifiers’ Media”, this argument resonates with some of the images of the
Palestinian pastoral disturbed by icons of militarism, such as that where a herd of sheep and a tank stand on the earthy brown land in front of a landscape background. In this image, the tank emerges out of the landscape as if it were its natural constituent (see fig. 4). The colours of the military vehicle merge with those of the Palestinian pastoral and idyll around it, and the location and direction of the tank fit seamlessly with the overall composition, paralleling the
