Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony and the Gaza War

Abstract

This article studies Israeli news coverage (chiefly via newspapers and television) of the Gaza war of 2008–2009, with a focus on what the national media withheld from its consuming publics – namely, depiction of the extent of Israeli-inflicted violence upon Gazan people and infrastructure. At the core of this article is a study of an anomalous instance of Palestinian testimonial which was broadcast live on Israeli national television – this in an Israeli media context in which Palestinian eyewitness accounts were largely occluded from public view. How, the article asks, are we to make sense of this scene of televised Palestinian trauma and the enormous attention it garnered among Israeli publics? The author’s reading detours through the work of Israeli cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay with her insistence that the study of images and visuality in the Israeli context be attentive to the inextricable interplay between ways of seeing and national ideologies. In conclusion, the author proffers a reading which folds this scene of televised testimonial back into the hegemonic Israeli field of perception.

Notes

1. For a review of Israeli and Palestinian media, including demographics of consumption by source, see Keshev (2009a, 2009b and 2009c).

2. This argument was frequently made by the media (see, for example, Shavit 2009). This linkage between Israeli assaults in its occupied territories and the global ‘War on Terror’ has been articulated since the beginning of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000 (see Beinin & Stein 2006).

3. The Israeli non-governmental organization Keshev: The Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, a civic organization that researches Israeli media conduct, argued that the Israeli media largely supported the state-sponsored narrative in support of the war effort, save at the campaign’s ill-fated end. It also points to the difficulties that journalists faced when they endeavored to part ways from this narrative (see Keshev 2008).

4. Amira Hass and Shlomi Eldar were among those journalists penalized on these grounds. Journalists were only able to enter through Egypt on 15 January 2009. Indeed, the Israeli Government Press Office went so far as to suggest that ‘any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a Fig. leaf and front for the Hamas’ (Bronner 2009). Human rights organizations argued that press freedom was being grossly violated – particularly when coupled with the strict reporting guidelines imposed on Israeli publications by the Israeli military censor (see, for example, Simon 2009).

5. On the history of this mode of capturing war images, which many critics have traced to the US attacks on Iraq in 1991, see Azoulay (2008, pp. 187–188) and Sontag (2003).

6. The popularity of this footage was either despite or because of the fierce criticism launched against it by human rights organizations.

7. The first vlog was uploaded to YouTube on 3 January 2009 (see Israel Defense Forces 2009).

8. Such enthusiasm was a measure of the widespread public support for the incursion.

9. As Keshev (2009a) notes, a headline for an article describing Israeli air strikes which killed at least 225 Palestinians read: ‘Shock Therapy: The Surprise Was Perfect’. It was only within the newspaper’s back pages that a journalist noted that civilians were the majority of those killed.

10. On 5 January 2009, following the IDF shelling of a Gaza school, Israeli daily newspapers featured fallen Israeli soldiers on their front pages. For discussion of the media’s wartime ‘cheerleaders’, see Alhaleem (2009) and HaCohen (2008). On representations of the Israeli left within the media, see Ophir (2009).

11. Gideon Levy, one of the few Israeli journalists who consistently criticized the IDF assault, made the following observation in the early days of Cast Lead: ‘Because that’s how it is in Israel … [W]e get a unified chorus throughout the television studios, calling on Israel to keep pounding and expanding and obliterating, waxing enthusiastically over every bombardment and gaping in admiration over every shelling, a war that is never enough’ (Levy, 2009).

12. In the word of Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (2010, p.): ‘when countries close themselves to international media, there’s a tendency to report stories relying heavily on social media’.

13. Scholars disagree on the characterization of the Israeli media’s reporting on Gaza during the incursion. While most on the left (for example, Keshev 2009a, 2009b and 2009c) stressed the relative absence of such reporting, Blondheim and Shifman (2009) disagreed.

14. This assessment was widespread. Israeli scholar Yosefa Loshitzy (2009) wrote: ‘The designation of the Gaza Strip and south Israel as a “closed military zone,” and the ban on media coverage … contributes to the sanitized view of the Gaza story as manufactured by Israel. The real horror and gore is reserved for Al Jazeera’s spectators, particularly the Arab ones. Ghetto-under-siege Gaza remains almost silent and partly invisible to the rest of us. We hardly hear or see in mainstream media, testimonies from the ground’ (my emphasis).

15. This is not to suggest total media access to the army. Rather, only certified spokesmen were made available for comment. Moreover, as reported by the Israeli left media, many IDF personnel were aware that their phones had been tapped by security services, lest illicit conversations were had with the press. For discussion of how the military controlled the news for Israeli audiences during Cast Lead, see Persico (2008, 2009).

16. Scholarship on the politics of visuality and visibility in the context of the Israeli occupation, particularly the built environment thereof, has grown tremendously in recent years (see Makdisi 2010; Weizman 2002, 2007).

17. Elsewhere, I have described this protocol in terms of ‘national intelligibility’ (see Stein 2008).

18. The bombing occurred during a period of heightened attacks on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, including, on 15 January, the shelling of several hospitals and a United Nations compound sheltering Palestinian families. Despite its relative invisibility within the Israeli mainstream media heretofore, the incursion had already claimed at least 1000 Palestinian lives, at least half of them civilians. Human Rights Watch put the number at 900; other media outlets, such as Democracy Now, cited figures of over 1000 (see ‘Israel Pounds Gaza’, 15 January 2009).

19. Within the left, Eldar is considered one of the serious reporters within the mainstream, traditional Israeli media context where coverage of the military occupation is concerned. His coverage of Cast Lead was praised in this regard (see HaCohen 2008).

20. On YouTube, as a measure of the footage’s popularity, it was subtitled in several languages.

21. The mother in question also called into question the doctor’s claim that he harbored no weapons. This incident was widely covered in the Israeli media, with many critical of her outburst (see D. Cohen 2009).

22. On 27 December 2008 – the first day of the Israeli assault – Eldar voiced criticism of the Israeli air strike on the police headquarters of Gaza City, which resulted in the death of 40 people, including several dozen police cadets at their graduation ceremony. He was later criticized in the Israeli mainstream media (Ma’ariv) for this dissident opinion: ‘Shlomi Eldar of Channel 10 is currently the only one broadcasting who thinks differently [i.e. did not endorse the IDF’s actions]. Eldar insists that the 155 [sic] persons killed in the bombings were entirely civil police, who direct traffic and write reports’ (Keshev 2009a).

23. Abu al-Aish implicitly objected to this rendering by his insistence on identifying himself as a Palestinian from the Jabiliya refugee camp (as per the transcript from his press conference).

24. This incident, in the words of former Israeli parliamentarian Sarid (2009), had the power to ‘brand itself on our consciousness and souls’.

25. Perhaps ironically, Abu al-Aish would subsequently enjoy hyper-audibility in the international context, becoming a coveted speaker about issues of peace and coexistence to worldwide crowds numbering in the thousands. Indeed, one could argue that he became the Palestinian witness par excellence – a fact again attributable, as in the Israeli instance, to his emphasis on biography rather than politics, and his history with Israeli institutions. As a measure of his global prominence and growing status as Palestine’s most popular civilian representative, the doctor’s story was referenced in Obama’s famous 2011 Middle East speech, marshaled as an illustration of the ability of Israel and Palestine to overcome mutual enmity: ‘We see it in the actions of a Palestinian who lost three daughters to Israeli shells in Gaza. “I have the right to feel angry”, he said. “So many people were expecting me to hate. My answer to them is I shall not hate. Let us hope”, he said, “for tomorrow” (US News 2011).

26. There were other Israeli witnesses of this period whose accounts did not resonate sympathetically – indeed, they were met by charges of treason. Most (in)famous were those of Israeli soldiers who provided testimonials about what they witnessed, and participated in, during the Gaza incursion. This testimony, provided in a closed session, would be leaked to the press and then met by widespread media attention in Israel and internationally (see Harel 2009b). An IDF inquiry followed, finding that ‘crucial components of their descriptions were based on hearsay’ and thus no disciplinary action would be taken (Kershner 2009). Other former Israeli soldiers – chiefly, members of the Israeli non-governmental organization Breaking the Silence, founded in 2004 – chose to publicize testimonials about the atrocities in which they participated during the 2008–2009 incursion. Their accounts were met with widespread incredulity and vitriol, including charges that their statements were both false and treasonous (see Breaking the Silence 2009; Haaretz Service 2009).