Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony and the Gaza War
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2012-07-01
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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. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
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Stein, RL (2012). Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony and the Gaza War. Journal for Cultural Research, 16(2-3). pp. 135–153. 10.1080/14797585.2012.647749 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6688.
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Rebecca L. Stein
My research studies linkages between cultural and political processes in Israel in relation to the Gaza genocide, the military occupation (1967-present), and the history of Palestinian dispossession. I am the author and/or editor of 5 books on Israel/Palestine, including Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2021) on the politics of military occupation in the age of the global smartphone camera; Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age (with Adi Kuntsman), on the militarization of social media in Israel; Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (Duke University Press, 2008) on the relationship between tourism, mobility politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the co-editor of Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2005) with Ted Swedenburg and The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 with Joel Beinin (Stanford University Press, 2006).
My recent scholarship studies the Israeli relationship to the Gaza genocide through the lens of media and visual politics. I have authored 3 papers on this topic including: How to Unsee Gaza: Israel Visual Politics in a Time of Genocide (2026); Gaza and the rise of synthetic militarism: On genocide and generative AII (2026, with Adi Kuntsman); and Vanishing Acts: How the Israeli Media Manages Gaza (2024). I am a fellow at the National Humanities Center (AY 2026-2027) where I will be working on the book length version of this project.
My work on the Gaza genocide builds on previous scholarship about the ways that new communication technologies meditated the everyday Israeli relationship to its military occupation. My first book within this project --Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford University Press, 2015 with Adi Kuntsman) -- studied the place of social media within this equation. This was followed by Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2021) which considered the roles of digital photographic technologies, with a focus on the multiple communities and institutions, across political divides, who ntegrated networked image-making into their political toolbox in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, including Palestinian and Israeli human rights workers and activists, Palestinian civilians living under occupation, the Israeli military, and the Jewish settler population. These projects were supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Council, and the Trent Foundation.
Portions of this scholarship on Israeli media politics have appeared in journals such as Media, Culture and Society, Antipode, Current Anthropology, Critical Inquiry, Anthropological Quarterly, Middle East Report, and the London Review of Books. My older work on Israeli cultural politics has appeared in such journals as Public Culture, Social Text, The International Journal of Middle East Studies,Theory and Event, Journal of Palestine Studies, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
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