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Using video stills from over 5,000 hours of footage from the private archive of B'Tselem as core material, this book explores the politics of videographic practice in Israel/Palestine. The book analyses citizen surveillance: how Palestinians originally filmed to "shoot back? at Israelis, and also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter surveillance. Complicating the notion that visual evidence alone can secure justice, the Weaponized Camera asks how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are visually recorded and thus offers a unique perspective on the strategies and battlegrounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Camera as a Revelatory Tool of Exposure
2. Camera as Shame-Producer
3. Camera as Mirror
4. Camera as Shield
5. Camera as Evidence
6. Camera as Weapon
ClosingWords
References
Note
Index
About the author
Liat Berdugo
Summary
Drawing on unprecedented access to the video archives of B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Liat Berdugo lays out an argument for a visual studies approach to videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine.
Using video stills as core material, it discusses the politics of videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine by demonstrating that the conflict is one that has produced an inequality of visual rights. The book highlights visual surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, how Palestinians originally filmed to “shoot back” at Israelis, who were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force. It also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter surveillance.
Complicating the notion that visual evidence alone can secure justice, the Weaponized Camera in The Middle East asks how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are visually recorded. Drawing on over 5,000 hours of footage, only a fraction of which is easily accessible to the public domain, this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies and battlegrounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Foreword
A visual studies approach to the politics of documentary video making in the context of the Israel/Palestine conflict
Additional text
Berdugo’s entrance into the B’Tselem audio-visual archive is a passage into a thick forest of gazes, lenses and bullets, where vision is often impaired, and darkness prevails. But from this obscure night, Berdugo brilliantly proposes a taxonomy of cameras that illuminates new ways out of the political impasse that renders the violence in Israel-Palestine both spectacularly visible and systematically concealed. Extracting moments and fragments from the B’Tselem archive, Berdugo exposes yet another ‘order of things’, wherein cameras emancipate and shield inasmuch as they are wielded as weapons.
