Introduction: Visibility, images, Palestine/Israel

Abstract

This article aims to introduce the publication in English of Ruthie Ginsburg's ‘Citizens' Photography: A Comparative Analysis' (2018) and Regev Nathansohn's ‘Shooting Occupation: The Sociology of Visual Representation’ (2007), both of which deal in different ways with the visual representation of Palestine/Israel, and specially of the Israeli occupation. The article does this by discussing the subjects of visibility and images in relation to Palestine/Israel, with a focus on how the occupied territories are seen from within the Green Line.

This issue of Visual Studies sees the publication in English of Ruthie Ginsburg’s ‘Citizens’ Photography: A Comparative Analysis’ (2018) and Regev Nathansohn’s ‘Shooting Occupation: The Sociology of Visual Representation’ (2007). Both articles in different ways are part of a scholarly literature developed over the last 20 years about visual culture and Palestine/Israel.¹ During this period academics from various disciplines have examined different kinds of visual image – from photojournalism and human rights photography to social media images and art – as well as interrogating broader issues of vision, visibility, and politics in relation to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in particular. Some of these publications are anthropological studies of the conditions under which images have been produced and used (and as such are part of what Sa’ad Atshan calls ‘the anthropological rise of Palestine’ (Atshan 2021)). For example, Amahl A. Bishara’s Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (2013) and Rebecca L. Stein’s Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021). While other studies fall within Photography Theory or Visual Culture Studies, taking a more theoretical approach to how visual practices might have political effects within Palestine/Israel. For example, Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) and Gil Z. Hochberg’s Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (2015).

This growth in scholarship on the visual and Palestine/Israel has in part responded to the increase and diversification of lens-based images of the Israeli occupation enabled by the proliferation of digital visual technologies as well as to a contemporaneous expansion in local and international art about the occupation. These developments have been accompanied by an intensification of the political ‘hopes and dreams’ (Stein 2021, 4) projected onto visual practices, driven in some instances by the affordances of digital media and in others by the idea that the circulation of evidentially or affectively powerful images of Israeli state oppression can make up for the increasing absence of political processes and forms of organisation aimed at alleviating or ending the occupation (Allen 2008; Stein 2021). Though as Rebecca L. Stein argues, Palestinians and their advocates were not the only ones who have had high hopes for visual communication; Israeli settlers and the Israeli military have also developed forms of image making as political practices (Stein 2021). The more theoretical examples of recent scholarship have themselves contributed to the elevation of images in terms of their claimed emancipatory potential, with Azoulay (2008), for example, focusing on photography in isolation, while others have articulated negative/positive contrasts between stereotypical images of the occupation understood to reinforce its existing realities and various unconventional or artistic alternatives to this stereotypical mainstream (Demos 2009; Hochberg 2015). Nathansohn’s article can be understood as an example of the latter tendency in that it criticises the ‘banality’ of photojournalism as something that ‘contributes to the normalization of the occupation’, while suggesting that amateur photography produced by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank can challenge the compact between the representation of ‘photogenic binary kind[s] of reality’ and the structure of existing relations between occupier and occupied.

Ginsburg’s article does not overtly partake in the evaluation of the critical merits of images of the occupation but nonetheless examines the growth of what she terms ‘citizens’ photography’ in Palestine/Israel through a discussion of the 1990 documentary Palestinian Diaries, filmed during the first Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) by amateur Palestinian participants in the project. As she observes, through the film’s close focus on Palestinian everyday experiences it largely avoids the binary scenarios between armed Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinian youth identified by one of the project’s initiators as standard of reportage of the uprising. Ginsburg’s discussion of Palestinian Diaries also contributes to understandings of the emergence of Palestinian photojournalism and news-media work in the occupied territories, from a situation during the first Intifada when Palestinian involvement with these practices was very limited to one of much stronger Palestinian participation during and after the second Intifada, as also discussed by Bishara (2013).

The article that follows presents reflections on the subjects of spectatorship, images, and politics in Palestine/Israel with the aim of providing some context for the publication of Ginsburg and Nathanson’s articles. This discussion is primarily focussed on Israeli spectatorship from within the Green Line (the 1949 ceasefire line that defines the internationally recognised borders of Israel) and its consequences for the political role of images in relation to the Israeli occupation. As both Ginsburg and Nathansohn emphasise in different ways, images are produced and used in specific discursive and institutional contexts. Hence Ginsburg’s discussion of human rights-oriented Citizen’s Photography projects where participants are given both cameras as ‘documenting tool[s]’ and introduced to an accompanying ‘human rights discourse’ at the same time. What is absent from the discussion in Ginsburg and Nathansohn’s articles (though present in other work by Ginsburg (see Ginsberg 2011)) are the ethno-national-collective contexts discussed in different ways by other commentators (Bishara 2013; Hochberg 2015; Stein 2021) that are of paramount importance for the discussion of spectatorship and the role of images in Palestine/Israel. The emphasis here on Israeli spectatorship comes out of a concern with what might be described as Israeli non-seeing of the occupation and the political importance of changing this limitation on Israeli vision.

It is an obvious point that what is visible of the situation in Palestine/Israel and in what way depends on who the spectator is, where they are looking from, and in what way things become visible to them. The title of Hochberg’s book Visual Occupations emphasises that the Israeli occupation has been visually configured in more than one way. This is why she asks the question: ‘do the … [Palestinian and Israeli] collectives actually see the same reality?’ Answering herself with ‘an unequivocal “no.”’ (Hochberg 2015, 8–9) Consequently it is a basic condition of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict that different things are available to be viewed by members of these two collectives and that they generally see the political situation around them in very different ways. For Palestinians living under the system of Israeli military control in the occupied territories, the occupation is a directly lived reality, though they will also be media spectators of this reality (Allen 2008; Bishara 2013). The occupation is often manifested in highly visible forms such as walls, fences, checkpoints, watchtowers, settlements on hilltops, and armed soldiers that literally occupy Palestinian lived environments and fields of vision (Hochberg 2015, 26). In contrast to this, for most Israelis² the occupation is generally out of sight. Over 10 years of visiting Tel Aviv, starting in 2007, I was consistently struck by just how absent any signs of the occupation were from this urban environment.³ Israeli civil life within the Green Line is simply a separate reality to life for Palestinians living in the occupied territories. This separation of realities is largely by design, resulting as it has from the historical Zionist/Israeli state project to establish a Jewish settler-colony in Palestine through the forcible displacement of much of the Palestinian population from what became Israel in 1948. This process was premised on a founding principle of differentiating between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, firstly within the Green Line after 1948 and secondly in the occupied territories after 1967.⁴ This condition of separation has been exacerbated since the early 1990s with the increasing closure of the occupied territories in terms of Palestinian access to within the Green Line and epitomised by former Israeli Prime minister Ehud Barak’s slogan from the late 1990s of ‘Us here. Them there.’ Things might be more complex for Israeli Jews living in areas of Jerusalem and in settlements adjacent to areas of Palestinian residence, but even here, as Ochs has observed, ‘signs of security, such as fences and walls … [are] … more blatant components of Israeli Jews’ field of vision than the Palestinian population.’ (Ochs 2011, 34) This point aligns with Hochberg’s argument that the dominant visual regime defining Israeli Jewish experiences of the occupation is ‘concealment’ (Hochberg 2015, 7, 17–24) and with Marton and Baum’s suggestion that the Zionist/Israeli state project has involved an ‘active nonseeing mechanism’ (Marton and Baum 2005, 214) that has attempted to obscure Israeli vision of the Palestinians.

It is interesting to consider Israeli artist David Reeb’s painting Occupation from 2019 (Figure 1)⁵ as a representation of this general absence of the occupation from the Israeli visual field that also acknowledges the presence of the occupation as a structuring element of Israeli society. This painting presents a cartoon-like view of the artist’s studio containing abstract canvases and a painting of a butterfly as well as light bulbs hanging from the ceiling and pots of paint and paint brushes. In the studio, as in the Israeli environment in general, the occupation is nowhere to be seen. However, at the bottom of the image Reeb has written in English block capitals the word ‘OCCUPATION’. This word refers to Reeb’s occupation as an artist, but also to the Israeli occupation itself. Its insertion into the studio both affirms the visual absence of the occupation from this space  – by functioning as a verbal reminder of something that materially and visually exists elsewhere  – while also, in Reeb’s words, affirming that the occupation is paradoxically also ‘omnipresent here’ within the Green Line.⁶ Elaborating on his use of the word ‘omnipresent’, the artist states:

By “omnipresent” I meant that … [the occupation] is something everyone here [in Israel] is well aware of although most people don’t talk about it most of the time, and that it is the other part of what makes up Israeli society without which the part that is visible here would not exist.⁷

Here Reeb concurs with Azoulay and Ophir’s understanding in their book The One-State Condition that Israeli civil life within the Green Line and the occupation are co-constitutive of each other (Azoulay and Ophir 2013; see also Natanel 2016, 3–4) and that the exclusion of the occupation from sight and mind within Israel is a ‘precondition for an “Israeli normality” under one roof with “the occupation.”’ (Azoulay and Ophir 2013, 18) Reeb also defines the presence of the occupation within everyday Israel as something akin to Kuntsman and Stein’s description of it as an ‘public secret’ (Kuntsman and Stein 2015, 14–15). That is, as something that is ‘ever-present’ and known and at the same time visually absent and generally not talked about.

FIGURE 1. David Reeb, Occupation, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 70 × 100cm. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Even when media images relating to the occupation enter the Israeli everyday environment via television and other media, these images are often framed in such a way that the occupation is not seen as an occupation, that is, as something done by the Israeli state to the occupied Palestinian population. Rather the violence of the occupation is seen as a set of necessary measures taken to protect Israeli ‘security’ (Azoulay and Ophir 2009, 123; Kuntsman and Stein 2015, 10). As Ochs notes, Israelis often call the occupation ‘the security situation’ (Ochs 2011, 2), framing a colonial relationship of domination between Israel and the Palestinians as a situation where Israelis are essentially subject to and ‘victims’ of external Palestinian threats. This sense of victimisation is itself informed and reinforced by more general understandings of Jewish victimhood that relate to the Holocaust (Ochs 2011, 68–69; Rose 2005, 141–142; Zertal 2005) and to historical conceptions of the gentile persecution of Jews from time immemorial. If for Palestinians, the concrete sections of the West Bank Barrier, encountered directly or through images, are a manifestation of Israeli power over them and their land, then for many Israelis this wall is simply a manifestation of ‘security’ policies that secure their safety (Faulkner 2012).

When Israeli spectatorship is informed by such notions of ‘security’ and victimhood, images that show Palestinian experiences of the occupation are often perceived by Israelis as affronts and as threats in themselves. For example, in 2007, I visited the Tel Aviv studio of the Israeli photographer Eldad Rafaeli, who had been photographing in the occupied territories since the 1990s. During this visit he translated into English some of the Hebrew comments from the visitor’s book for his solo-exhibition at the Israeli Museum of Photography in Tel-Hai in 2003 (Rafaeli 2003). One of these comments declared: ‘This is a Jew Land. We are not allowed to see such things because our children are getting hurt by your pictures.’⁸ From the viewpoint articulated in these terms, photographs construed as involving sympathy for the Palestinians should not be seen by Jewish eyes because they confuse the inviolable distinction between Israeli Jews and Palestinians that is necessary to preserve the safety of the former, who must steel themselves against any sympathy for the other who is out to destroy them. Other comments read out by Rafaeli emphasised what was understood as his obligation as a Jew to only photograph Jewish suffering and implied that to photograph Palestinian suffering was tantamount to a crime (hence one comment stated that all Rafaeli’s photographs show ‘is the suffering of the Palestinian people’ and consequently that he should either ‘be in jail or dead’⁹). Similarly, right-wing student responses to a display of photographic images of political struggles in Palestine/Israel mounted in 2014 by the photography collective Activestills as a contribution to the conference ‘Visual Culture Between Obedience and Resistance’ at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, implied that the images of Palestinian resistance in the display were a potential danger to Israeli Jews (Faulkner 2016).

Such responses come out of a conceptual world of ethno-nationalist absolutes, where members of an ethnic/national group should only ever think about the well-being of their own collective, even when this is to the detriment of others. They remind me of Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan’s eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg, a member of the kibbutz of Nahal Oz on the Israel-Gaza border slain by Palestinians in 1956, in which he impressed upon Israelis that they should remain armed and vigilant against the ‘Arabs’ in Gaza who want to get back what Israel took from them in 1948, stating: ‘Let us not lower our gaze lest our arm be weakened.’ (quoted in Zertal 2005, 180) Dayan demanded that Israelis see their context in a particular way: as a place of constant threat in which they should only care about the safety of their own community. It is no coincidence that in 2002 at the height of the second Intifada when Israelis were being killed in Palestinian suicide attacks, that the then Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz quoted Dayan’s eulogy in a live television address to the Israeli public (Zertal 2005, 180). Dayan’s eulogy continues to resonate with Israeli political culture today. In fact, Nahal Oz was one of the places near Gaza where multiple civilians were killed in the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.

But if anything, the sentiments of threat and the consequential need for armed vigilance expressed in Dayan’s eulogy are even stronger in contemporary Israeli society. Since the second Intifada, the Israeli street has moved politically rightward and militarised discourses and identities have been strengthened (Pappe 2010, 42–57). Responses to the 7 October 2023 attack suggest that it has resulted in a nadir for the possibility of Israelis recognising, in Judith Butler’s terms, that Palestinians are fully alive and grievable (Butler 2009). Those who call for such recognition of Palestinians under bombardment in Gaza are again condemned for their perceived betrayal of the ethno-national collective. Thus, students from Sapir College called for Regev Nathansohn himself to be dismissed from his teaching post because he signed an ‘Academics4Peace’ petition calling on US President Joe Biden to stop supplying weapons to Israel that might be used to commit Genocide in Gaza (Limone 2024). But such responses to the events since 7 October 2023 have also been produced by the general absence from Israeli television screens of the grievous violence inflicted on civilians in Gaza (Lurie-Pardes 2024).

The issue of the visibility of the occupation has been fundamental to the way that scholars have discussed the political role of images in Palestine/Israel. Key here has been the idea, sustained especially by Palestinians and their Israeli and international advocates, that lens-based images can make the occupation visible to spectators elsewhere and through this affect their thinking about and actions in relation to this situation. Such aspirations for lens-based images have been given a theoretical aspect through Azoulay’s book The Civil Contract of Photography in which she argues that photographs of the occupation have the potential to produce civil effects in Palestine/Israel through the relationships they involve between photographed Palestinians, photographers, and distanced Israeli spectators. As she states, the consent of occupied Palestinians to be photographed ‘presumes the existence of a civil space in which photographers, photographed subjects, and spectators share a recognition that what they are witnessing is intolerable.’ (Azoulay 2008, 18) This ‘civil space’ is understood to transcend the fundamental division between Israeli citizens and Palestinian non-citizens maintained by the Israeli state and as such function as a schema for what a shared equal citizenship between Israeli Jews and Palestinians might be like in the future.

The challenge facing such high hopes for the role of photography as well as other types of lens-based image in changing the situation in Palestine/Israel is precisely the limitations on Israeli spectatorship discussed above. This point is affirmed by Stein’s trenchant analysis of the failure of video footage of human rights violations in the occupied territories to have a progressive impact on the Israeli public. As she suggests, this failure is not to be found in the medial form or visual content of the images themselves but rather in the failure of Israelis to recognise Palestinian humanity. Thus, she states: ‘What failed … was neither the persuasiveness of any given footage, nor the work of its Israeli broker. Rather, it was Palestinian humanity that had failed, and ontologically so.’ (Stein 2021, 121) Thus the problem is the fundamental incommensurability of the different views of the occupation developed by the two ethno-national collectives involved. The images are ineffective because Israelis in general, when they see them at all, do not see in these images what Palestinians and their advocates see. As Bishara has suggested, this inability of Israelis to see the occupation has resulted in Palestinians often having limited expectations for the circulation of such images in Israeli contexts (Bishara 2013, 167–168), despite their continuing commitment to the general idea of showing the occupation to others through images.

Other claims have been made during last two decades for the potential of artistic forms to challenge and intervene into the restrictive relationship between existing political realities in Palestine/Israel and its conventional forms of visual representation, such as news images and forms of lens-based documentation. A good example of this is the support given for the critical value of the Otolith Group’s 2008 essay film Nervus Rerum by the art historian T. J. Demos (2009) and Hochberg (2015, 121–127). The film depicts the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin in a way that challenges expectations of what documentary representations of such places should show. Instead of abject images of the camp, the film presents the spectator with floating Steadicam footage of its architecture and residents as well as fictional sequences of residents staring contemplatively out of windows, without a clear narrative or sense of why particular things are being shown. Even in sequences where camp residents are shown speaking to camera, we do not hear them. Thus, visually, and aurally, the film confounds not just the documentary genre, but also longstanding tropes of the representation of Palestinian refugees, on the basis that this establishes an ‘opacity’ resistant to the objectifying effects of documentary images. The problem here is that this is an opacity imposed from without that in a sense reproduces the kind of imposition of an external view of occupied Palestinian life that is meant to be characteristic of photojournalism and documentary practices. But more fundamental than this, the film raises the question of what it actually gives to spectators in terms of a way of seeing and understanding the occupation. Nervus Rerum is an interesting creative experiment, but it is only interesting when thought about in contrast to the myriad news and documentary images of occupied Palestinians that it is meant to problematise and critique. The film does not provide any kind of model for ongoing critical representational practice in relation to Palestine/Israel. In a sense, it does not necessarily need to provide such a model. But here is the bind, in being set up by the Otolith Group themselves (Emmelhainz and Otolith Group 2009) and by their academic supporters as a critique and alternative to news and documentary forms, the film comes with the expectation that it will provide not just a problematisation of these forms but some indication of what people wanting to visualise the occupation purposefully and effectively might do instead.

The prospects for the population of Palestine/Israel seem particularly bleak in the current period, obviously for the Palestinians (and especially for Palestinians in Gaza), but also for Israelis living within the Green Line in terms of them having a safer future and the possibility of a truly democratic society. Given that the Two-State Solution appears very much dead (Lustick 2019), the only long-term solution to the conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinians seems to be the future creation of a single state in all of Palestine/Israel on a secular democratic basis (Karmi 2023). There is no guarantee that this can be achieved and if it can be, the road to such a state will be a long and painful one that will probably involve further episodes of extreme violence and loss, and certainly a long hard organisational struggle to transform especially the society of the coloniser and occupier. What role will visual practices and images play in this process of transformation in terms of changing fields of vision and conditions of visibility? The honest answer to this question, from my perspective, despite the advocacy over the last two decades for the political potential of different kinds of images, would be to say that this cannot easily be predicted. Probably both witnessing and documentary lens-based practices and forms of art will have their different roles to play. What these roles will be depends on the kinds of contingencies and contexts for the use of images that have been discussed in the existing literature touched upon in this article. And because of the contingent nature of the impact that any images can have on entrenched political situations like that in Palestine/Israel it is also worth, in my view, damping down the sometimes-extravagant expectations people have had of particular kinds of visual forms. In the end, visual images are not panacea. They cannot do that much without the right context for their use and reception. But at the same time images are not nothing either. On their own they cannot transform political conditions, but they can potentially make minor contributions to progressive political processes under the right conditions. This suggests that a reasonable approach to thinking about and evaluating images of the Israeli occupation is to not overestimate or underestimate their potential but to try to understand their relationship to the contexts within which they have been and might be used.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Faulkner

Simon Faulkner is a Reader in Art History in the Department of Art and Performance at Manchester Metropolitan University. His main areas of research are art and other visual practices in Palestine/Israel and the study of social media images.

Notes

1 I use the term ‘Palestine/Israel’ to describe the territory that was Mandate Palestine rather than identifying separate territorial entities as ‘Palestine’ and ‘Israel’ simply because no such completely defined separate entities currently exist. Palestine and Israel are historically and spatially entwined. It should also be acknowledged, that although the current article focusses on relationships between the space of Israel within the Green Line and the occupied territories, I understand Israel itself was created through a process of colonisation and occupation, and that the distinction between Zionist/Israeli colonisation pre- and post-1967 is difficult to legitimately sustain.

2 When thinking about Israeli society one should bear in mind Noam Leshem and Jean Bagelman’s argument that the figure of the settler and thus settler societies are heterogeneous and only homogeneous in the ideologies generated by settler states themselves (Leshem and Bagelman 2023). Using the term ‘Israeli’ in a generic way elides such complexities. Nonetheless, I use it to make generic observations about Israeli spectatorship of the occupation and as such, my aim is like that of Juliana Ochs in her ethnography of Israeli experiences of ‘security’ during the second Intifada, where she states that her ‘aim is to discern … some larger patterns of seeing, experiencing, and speaking about political life.’ (Ochs 2011, 30) Hochberg makes a similar observation about generalisations when it comes to spectatorship (Hochberg 2015, 168, n. 10).

3 During this 10-year period, aside from the small annual demonstration of the Israeli anti-occupation left to mark the beginning of the occupation in June 1967, which I attended on one occasion, there were a number of street exhibitions of photographic images of the occupation put up by the photography collective Activestills and several exhibitions that related to the occupation in Tel Aviv galleries. There was also a piece of stencilled graffiti relating to the shooting by the IDF of a Palestinian youth in the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem that stayed untouched for a remarkably long time between 2014 and 2015 on a wall on Maze Street in central Tel Aviv. But that was it.

4 Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir state on this subject that the ‘ground principle’ of Israeli governance in Palestine/Israel is the ‘differential rule over populations of differing status’ (Azoulay and Ophir 2013, 13). Elsewhere Azoulay states that for Israeli governance ‘the dividing line between Jews and Arabs had to be constituted as essential, that is, as absolute.’ (Azoulay 2011, 8).

5 https://www.davidreeb.com/view.php?1&year=2019&dir=prev&page=883.

6 Email from David Reeb to Simon Faulkner, 20 July 2019.

7 Email from David Reeb to Simon Faulkner, 7 August 2019.

8 Conversation between Eldad Rafaeli and Simon Faulkner, Tel Aviv, 13 November 2007.

9 Conversation between Eldad Rafaeli and Simon Faulkner, Tel Aviv, 13 November 2007.