Tag Archives: Israel

Amahl Bishara discusses her book, Crossing a Line

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Interview by Sarah Ihmoud

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34196

Sarah Ihmoud: Crossing a Line offers a refreshing and indeed critical ethnographic approach to understanding Palestinian political expression across the fragmented social landscapes imposed by Israeli settler colonialism. How does bringing more than one distinct Palestinian geography into the analytical frame—in this context, Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and those subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank—reorient our understanding of the Palestinian present? What does this methodological approach enable us to grasp, both in terms of the performance of settler colonial violence and the performance of indigenous identities and sovereignties?

Amahl Bishara: First, Sarah, I want to say thank you for this chance to be in conversation! You’ve been a crucial interlocutor for so long. The long-dominant frame of “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” located the Palestinian national struggle primarily in the occupied territories and saw discrimination against Palestinians in Israel as a minor issue. This view serves both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel portrays the issue as being about security, confronting an external enemy. The Palestinian Authority, nominally in charge of the occupied territories, uses this frame to claim power and legitimacy there.

Reframing the boundaries of political discussion demonstrates how Israel’s settler colonial project is and has been unified across all historic Palestine. Looking at these two Palestinian geographies together exposes how Israel’s systems of separation multiply repression for all Palestinians. More generally, the approach moves us beyond state-centered definitions of politics, challenging methodological nationalism.

Given that Israel has controlled the West Bank since 1967, its crucial to ask: what sustains the conception, even among Palestinians, that the West Bank and Israel’s 1948 territories are separate from each other? We know that a vast system of checkpoints, walls, and other forms of closure suffocates Palestinian economies, but I show also that this system limits Palestinian politics—preventing joint protests, for example. Separation is also maintained through media, including in Palestinian news. I look at what constitutes “local” or “Palestinian” news for Palestinians in different locations.  Meanwhile, in ways both mundane and spectacular, the Palestinian Authority represses dissent and ossifies the fragmentation Israel instigated. An anthropology for liberation must be ready to both confront settler colonial violence and also take on cooptation of older paths toward liberation.

Sarah Ihmoud:Another important contribution of your book is the invitation to think with what you call Palestinians’ “political habitus”, or the embodied sense of how Palestinians perform political practice, as well as their “structures of feelings, affective orientations to the political world that are in the process of taking shape” (5) in distinct yet interrelated environments. Why is it imperative that we examine the conditions of political communication among Palestinians not only through the content of their expression, but also through the affective and intimate aspects of that expression?

Amahl Bishara: Activist Palestinians on two sides of the Green Line will agree on many foundational principles of Palestinian liberation, even as they are aware that living under Israeli sovereignty in each location presents them with different challenges. Yet, without ethnography it can be difficult to appreciate the ways in which those everyday dynamics shape political action. An Arabic-English language t-shirt that called for “one vote for each Palestinian everywhere” felt ordinary to wear in Bethlehem in the West Bank but made people uncomfortable in Jaffa near Tel Aviv during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. People had different reactions to stun grenades and the threat of tear gas. Also that summer I was amazed by the bravery of Palestinian protesters on two sides of the Green Line as they refused the violence of Israel’s war—but the forms the bravery took were quite different: protesters performed chants that speak to generations of Palestinian resistance inside Israel’s 1948 territories, whereas those in the occupied territories engaged in direct confrontation, throwing stones at the Israeli army in Palestinian cities and neighborhoods.

I start the book reflecting on a post-protest riff by the wonderful singer Walaa’ Sbeit, of the band 47Soul, in which he says, basically, “let’s be kind to those who left”—that is the refugees—”and kind to those who stayed”—the citizens of Israel. This addresses tensions that have existed among Palestinian communities. Israeli citizenship gives Palestinians mobility, and a level of social services. Being in the West Bank entails vulnerability to many forms of violence, but also places Palestinians there at the forefront of the Palestinian story on the world stage. It might be tempting to talk in terms of privileges, but here every privilege is also a restraint of a sort. I hope that bringing together these embodied ways of being also helps us to be as generous as possible toward people in all of these positions, as Walaa Sbeit summons us to do.

Sarah Ihmoud: You describe movement between and across borders as an important epistemic experience. In one section of the book, you note that geopolitical fragmentation and immobility are a means of eliminating Indigenous collectives. Yet, Palestinians diagnose and contest settler colonialism in and through transit. Moving us back and forth across the Green Line, your ethnography itself performs a sort of mobility that defies the geopolitical fragmentation of Israeli settler colonialism. In reading your book, I was struck by the ethnographic “passages” between chapters that give us a sense of the embodied and affective experience of crossing militarized borders and geographies as a Palestinian researcher.  Can you talk about your decision to include these passages? How might writing from the embodied space of crossing borders enable a more ethical anthropological engagement in Palestine? 

Amahl Bishara: To be on the road is to be in direct contact with the state: a road may be smooth or bumpy, safe or unsafe, direct or indirect. We encounter soldiers and police officers. To be on the road is to be in a social relationship with other passengers and even with those in other cars. To be on the road is also an affectively rich experience. The road tunes the senses, ripe with possibilities of danger, frustration, and pleasure—sometimes all at once.

If I’m interested in the kinds of fleeting collectives that might be seeds for liberation, that challenge today’s political order, what better places to explore than a bus ride for a rare children’s trip to the beach, the first time most of these young refugees have crossed the Green Line into Israel’s 1948 territories and the first time they have passed through the villages from which their families were dispossessed? Or a bus ride during which strangers have to decide how to handle soldiers’ exercise of their petty sovereignty over who will be allowed to stay on the bus?

Writing about my own mobility is a also way of recognizing the advantage with which I approach this project as a person with US and Israeli passports that give me the ability to move across the Green Line. I could go places some of my dearest friends and family members could not. Honestly, this made it very important for me to make my trips worthwhile. Likewise, in one of the passages I write about some travel that broke Israel’s apartheid laws. Maybe this is essential too.

Sarah Ihmoud: In exploring various practices on both sides of the Green Line—among them protest, commemoration, mourning and care work—you bring to the fore the paradoxical ways in which Palestinians subject to the most extreme forms of constraint are able to create space for intimacy, kinship and socialities to emerge. For example, the space of the colonial prison, while a profound site of violence, is simultaneously a space of profound connection among Palestinians across the green line. What possibilities do these emergent intimacies offer in reimagining Palestine and Palestinian liberation beyond the nation state?

Amahl Bishara: Nationalism often legitimizes state violence in the name of horizontal kinship. It can be an abstract kind of “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson wrote those many years ago. But when people focus on concrete acts of care and nurturing, this can open them up to new dimensions of experience and help us imagine new forms of relationality. Prison confines and violates thousands today and threatens many thousands more. Yet, Palestinians have also shown that caring acts in prison and caring for prisoners can draw people together. For example, it can train attention to intrepid activists, like those on hunger strikes against administrative detention, which is Israel’s policy of imprisonment without charge, and it can create relations that challenge settler colonial policies of fragmentation.

When Palestinians make an effort to nurture creative and curious connections with each other that challenge settler colonial lines of division—not only across the walls of prison, and not only between Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the West Bank, but also among Palestinians in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Detroit, and Chile—new visions of liberation can emerge. These visions will recognize the toll of the ongoing Nakba; they will stand against violence against women, like the Tal’at movement; they will treasure the village home as well as urban spaces. At a time when the official Palestinian nationalist movement is so hollow and repressive, this is urgently needed.

Sarah Ihmoud: While Crossing a Line is deeply situated in the Palestinian experience, your analysis names the interconnection between state violence against Black and Indigenous communities in Palestine, North America, Kashmir and beyond through the connective tissue of global racism and militarism that have taken shape through distinct settler colonial formations. Beyond the Palestinian context, what is the broader invitation of your ethnography? What does the space of Palestine offer us in thinking between and across colonial and racial projects that give rise to state violence across the globe? What does it offer us in thinking generatively about solidarities and possibilities for decolonial futures?

Amahl Bishara: Throughout the process of writing this book, I have been living and working in the Boston area. Of course there are important connections between the US and Israel as two militarized settler colonies. I’ve commemorated the ongoing Nakba of Indigenous dispossession here through the National Day of Mourning. I’ve thought about how the Black Lives Matter movement faces different threats in Baltimore, Maryland than it does in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because in the former, many more protesters are Black. We can’t be responsible participants in these movements without recognizing differences in privilege afforded by social location and geography.

Settler colonialisms and militarisms create certain subject positions, but they do not define people or movements. Whether one is studying Kashmir, Sioux territory, the Uyghur homeland, or Palestine, I hope this book is an invitation to think comparatively and connectively in a way that also rigorously attends to local practices, to embodied experiences and unfolding histories of protest. I hope it is an invitation to think in ways that challenge statist definitions of place and liberation and to bring places into relation in generative and even generous ways.

Rebecca Stein on her book, Screen Shots

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Interview by Areeg Faisal

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31376

Areeg Faisal: Screen Shots is an ethnography of photography, cameras as colonial barometers, in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including both Palestinians and Israelis. To get started, how would you describe the main argument of the Book?

Rebecca Stein: Screen Shots is the second in a two book project that studies the relationship between the Israeli military occupation and the changing media landscape in Israel and Palestine. The first book in this series was Digital Militarism, co-authored with Adi Kuntsman, which examined the Israeli occupation in the social media age. We started writing this book in 2010 at the time of Arab uprisings, amid considerable investment among activists, both in the region and beyond, in the capacity of new digital technologies to serve as tools of grassroots activism and mobilization. Then, there was a shared hope that the networked camera phones held aloft by activists would be decisive in their liberation from authoritarian regimes. There was a dream of liberation technology, as some scholars have dubbed this phenomena.

Digital Militarism began as an attempt to temper some of this period’s techno-utopianism through a study of how digital technologies also function as perpetrator tools in the Israel/Palestine contexts.  For example, we studied the phenomena of Israeli soldiers carrying their mobile technologies on patrol into the West Bank, and considered how these consumer technologies could function as repressive instruments.  We also investigated everyday acts of digital complicity, such as the ways that ordinary social media platforms and practices, like the selfie, could be pulled into the apparatus of military rule.

Screen Shots pivots to the question how this political playing field has changed in the era of proliferating camera technologies. This is an ethnographic study which focuses on camera usage among many different political constituencies, from Israeli soldiers and settlers to Palestinian activists and human rights workers.  Screen Shots is interested in how all were pulling these new camera technologies into their political toolboxes, all taking aim at the scene of state violence.

Across these radical political divides, I argue, all were invested in a version of the same digital dream: namely, that greater visual exposure of the scene of state violence – resulting in an ever more perfect image — would advance their respective political agendas.  Screen Shots is an ethnographic chronicle of the ways that these digital dreams break down, albeit in very different ways, for these varied communities and institutions.  

Areeg Faisal: Thank you so much for such an insightful overview of the book. In this regard, how would you describe the scholarly contributions of Screen Shots to the existing body of literature that focuses on the entanglement between state violence and digital technologies, especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and Israel? I am particularly interested in learning more about the methodological shift Screen Shots demonstrates by focusing on what precedes image-making rather than what comes after.

Rebecca Stein: In the last 15 years, we’ve seen a growth in anti-colonial visual studies, including a wave of important Israel and Palestine studies scholarship.  While most of these works have focused on the politics of representations, Screen Shots is interested in the politics of image production, curation, and brokerage.  I am particularly interested in what precedes and enables the image-making practices of Israelis and Palestinians – the infrastructure, the labor, and the multiple constraints generated by a repressive and often violent military occupation.  Rather than merely attending to what comes after images arrive into the world – which tends to be the propensity of scholarship on the politics of representation —  this book considers what precedes and sometimes frustrates them.

In the process, I pay a lot of attention to images that fail at their point of origin. For example, I chronicle the story of Palestinian videographers working with the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem in a period well before the onset of social media and smartphone proliferation in the West Bank.  They were documenting, with video cameras, instances of military and settler violence against Palestinian communities living under occupation, using the rather rudimentary technologies of their day.  I focus on instances in which they failed to move their VHS cassettes or memory-cards, and associated footage of state violence, out of the West Bank.  For example, I tell the story of footage filmed during a military closure of the West Bank.  By the time the closure was lifted, and videographers were able to travel, the footage was no longer considered relevant to the Israeli media – one of the outlets of choice, employed by the Israeli NGO.  I conclude this chapter with an image of a pile of VHS tapes, filmed by a veteran Palestinian human rights videographer, gathering dust in his Ramallah home office.  This is a chronicle of state violence on camera.  But it’s equally a chronicle of how Israeli state violence has, historically, also made that footage impossible as a circulatory form.

Areeg Faisal: The term state violence is central to Screen Shots and has been utilized widely by scholars to different ends. That said, I’m interested in learning more about your definition of the term and what does count as state violence in Screen Shots?

Rebecca Stein:  Here, the history of terminology is interesting, and particularly where Israeli discourses are concerned.  When I started this project, settler assaults were not officially categorized as state violence within the Israeli human rights community – at least, not within much official human rights discourse.  While these organizations were very concerned with modes of state-abetted violence by settlers – with an emphasis on soldiers “standing idly by” in the midst of settler assaults — the language of state violence was not yet employed.  It was only a decade later that the state violence framing would be adopted, as we can see in recent reports from the Israeli NGO B’Tselem.  This shift is very interesting, as it suggests a substantial realignment in human rights paradigms. 

Digital Militarism, my previous book, focused on an allied issue: namely, the ways that Israeli civilians support and abet state violence through their ordinary social media practices.  As we propose, even as something as a banal as a selfie can be its vehicle.  And when one shifts one’s lens to ordinary cultural practices, the very notion of state violence is redefined.

Areeg Faisal: As I read your book, I can’t help but think of some methodological, political, and/or ethical challenges that might have arisen throughout the fieldwork. Would you mind speaking about that?

Rebecca Stein:  The most challenging work happened with the official branches of the military – in particular, in the military spokespersons’ unit, where I conducted research.  I was given very limited access to their offices, but always on the basis of an ethnonational presumption that I — as an American Jew who spoke Hebrew – would be an ally, bent on supporting the state story.  After one interview that I conducted with a senior military spokesperson about the 2008-9 war on Gaza, and the military’s emerging social media work, I was asked: “you’re going to blog about this, right?”  It wasn’t a question, but an invitation.  At that time, the military’s social media unit was actively courting bloggers.  That was part of the bargain that enabled me to enter their offices.  As I published more, my ability to get into those offices broke down.  But the terms of my original access were very clear.  I presume that Palestinian ethnographers wouldn’t have been granted the same access.

Areeg Faisal: Thanks for sharing all of this honestly. Finally, last year witnessed a surge of the Israeli state violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza, greatly captured by Palestinian activists on various social media platforms. This digital uprising and activism provoked a unified flow of solidarity and support for Palestinian liberation and influenced some of the Israeli supreme court decisions regarding the forced removal of Sheikh Jarrah families. Given that Screen Shots is concerned with moments of breakdown and failure, how would you situate those recent moments within this analytical framework of failure? Is the camera letting Palestinian activists down again?

Rebecca Stein: It’s a great question.  Many activists and pundits have positioned the May 2021 war on Gaza as a landmark shift in global media ecosystems and positions regarding Palestine.  Israeli state violence was viral as never before. There was sudden flooding of social media and mainstream media spaces with Palestinian imagery from Gaza and Jerusalem, with Palestinian voices. 

I’m proposing a degree of skepticism about this formulation, based on a longer historical view.  Here, we hear a familiar dream rearticulated: if only the pictures of injustice and atrocity are crisper, clearer, and more abundant, then justice will follow. Alas, there is nothing new about this dream. We saw it rearticulated in the midst of the Syrian revolution, once dubbed the YouTube revolution.  And we saw it tragically fall short.  This drive for the perfect visual archive, or the total archive, is particularly pronounced in times of war and conflict, especially when there’s a concurrent shift in media regimes.  I’m proposing that our political investment can’t be in visibility or media alone.  That’s not adequate for the job. 

Tamar Katriel on her book, Defiant Discourse

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Interview by Irit Dekel

Irit Dekel: Your recent book Defiant Discourse helps readers understand the relations between speech and action, revisiting important questions concerning the performativity of language.  It does so in its critique of speech act theory by analyzing the vernacular content of activism in the case of soldierly dissent in Israel-Palestine and in reconsidering what counts as verbal action in a culture in which there is skepticism about language.

How do you problematize the notion of activism in the book?      

Tamar Katriel: I problematize activism by viewing it as a historically-situated discursive formation associated with grassroots struggles for political and social change. The term activist designates individuals or groups whose non-violent interventions in the public sphere draw on a globally recognized and ever-expanding activist repertoire. The soldierly dissent I discuss in the book is a form of discourse-centered activism that involves speaking out about morally objectionable military policies.

Irit Dekel: What are the unarticulated tensions within discourse-centered activism, which become a feature of activists’ engagement?    

Tamar Katriel: A major tension I address is between a trust in language and skepticism towards language as a social tool that is related to two contending language ideologies – a speech-as-action ideology is grounded in a performative view of speech as powerful and efficacious; and a speech vs action dualism (encapsulated in the suffragist slogan “deeds, not words”) that is language-skeptic.

Another tension has to do with competing conceptions of the notion of action that ground activist projects – between the pragmatic search for effective action in terms of tangible results, and a view of action that underscores its creative potential in challenging well-entrenched power arrangements and opening new possibilities for collective engagements. 

Participants in grassroots activism also navigate between the incremental nature of activist action and the sense that it is part of a long and sometimes globally dispersed chain of struggles, and the sense of urgency that attends their local activist engagements and the desire to see tangible results.

Finally, I also discuss the enormous tension attached to the position of the critic-from-within, which involves taking a critical stance towards hegemonic positions in the society of one’s belonging. Such activist struggles are fueled by a socially self-distancing sense of moral outrage coupled with a deep sense of commitment and caring for public life. This tension gives rise to the extremely difficult persuasive task of swaying audiences by giving voice to challenging positions they are reluctant to address.

Irit Dekel: How does the understanding of dissent, parrhesia and witnessing – developed from your works on dugri speech and Breaking the Silence – reflect the centrality of speech and action as two mutually implicated cultural categories?           

Tamar Katriel: My early work on dugri speech, Israeli straight talk, was dominated by an attempt to characterize its distinctive quality as an historically-situated cultural style. I described it as grounded in a language ideology that warrants the use of directness, even bluntness, which is taken to be the mark of courage and sincerity. This kind of directness has indeed become a major feature of Israeli identity (or mythology, as some would have it). Truth-telling in its dugri version is grounded in mutual trust. Truth-telling in dugri speech, as in the ancient Greek discursive idiom of parrhesia, as explored by Michel Foucault (2001), relates both to the dimension of factuality and to the cultural imperative to be true to oneself.

In terms of the speech-action nexus, dugri speech can be seen as maximizing language’s action-potential through a gesture of defiance. In my 1986 book, I used the lens of dugri speech to analyze Colonel Eli Geva’s public refusal to lead his troops into Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War. In accounting for his dissent, he said that he could see children playing in the city streets when looking through his binoculars, thus linking his act of soldierly defiance to his position as a direct witness as well as to his inner sense of morality. Eli Geva’s defiant discourse threw a momentary light on the human reality of modern battlefields and made a powerful point about commanders’ personal responsibility. The act of witnessing in his case, as in the case of the contemporary Breaking the Silence veterans’ organization, involves insisting on the reality before one eyes and its moral implications, even when others cannot – or will not – see it. While Eli Geva’s was a spontaneous, individual act of defiance, Breaking the Silence is a full-fledged witnessing organization, whose founders have identified the social denial surrounding the reality of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as a central impediment to the their morally-driven politics of change. Collecting and disseminating soldiers’ personal narratives as a source of counter-knowledge, they speak truth to power by giving voice to authentic, personal witnessing accounts of their military experiences as occupiers.

Irit Dekel: By focusing on defiant discourse as solidarity-oriented dissent, the book makes an important contribution to understanding political and social implications. Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019) sheds light on implication-based activism and intervention in art. Your analysis deepens our understanding of implication and complicity on (at least) two important aspects: you discuss perpetrators’ witnessing, and the moral implications of being a bystander. Second, you show how knowledge, addressivity-structure, and multiple audiences inform our understanding of the mediated space of appearance and the roles of different subjects in it. How do you perceive the category of implication? Where would you recommend further elaboration and research?

Tamar Katriel: I find the ‘etic’ category of implication useful for thinking about issues of moral responsibility in contexts of violence. The term implication seems to me broader and less judgmental than the that of ‘complicity’ and invites a consideration of degrees and types of involvement (in both spatial and temporal terms). As Rothberg points out, the notion of implication opens up new avenues for thinking about political responsibility by allowing us to go beyond the victim/perpetrator binary and the rather vague category of bystander and consider additional categories of social actors such as beneficiaries and perpetuators of     violent action.  What I think we now need are more ethnography-based thick descriptions of various ’emic’ constructions that can fall into the overarching category of implication as they play themselves out in various empirical cases (particularly as they relate to non-artistic practices, so as to complement Rothberg’s focus on artistic expression). More studies of the various ways in which people see, refuse to see or fail to see themselves linked to the perpetuation of violent practices or injurious institutional arrangements can further flesh out the notion of implication, and my book is one step in this direction. The case of Breaking the Silence witnesses is clearly one of complex implication, in Rothberg’s terms. They see themselves as victimized-victimizers, as both perpetrators of human right abuses and, simultaneously, as victims of the military system in which they operate (and the society that sustains it). In fact, implication is a central theme of their witnessing project – they acknowledge their own implication as perpetrators and point to that of their target audiences as past or potential perpetrators, as direct or indirect beneficiaries of the occupation regime, and as its immediate or long-distance perpetuators. Rather than discarding the category of bystander, as Rothberg would have us do by suggesting the more specific categories of beneficiary or perpetuator, as a linguistic anthropologist, I would ask how the term bystander is used in both vernacular and academic discourses, not how it is to be defined. Indeed, a good deal of vernacular political talk touches in one way or another on the issue of implication both directly through the use of the notion of standing by, and indirectly through the assignment (or dodging) of responsibility for violent actions. Such talk would be a good place to start asking questions about the shifting forms of implications and their discursive articulations.

Irit Dekel: I’d like to ask about the comparative promise for future research that we can draw from you writing on Communication Culture on the one hand and dugri discourse on the other hand, for studying Defiant Discourse and protest culture more generally.      

Tamar Katriel: Before studying Israeli dugri speech, I co-authored a study on the term communication as used in American speech (with Gerry Philipsen), which was titled “What We Need is Communication.” In this study, we identified a prominent American way of speaking, popularly known as “communicating” (contrasted with “just talking”). We found that the term “communication” was invoked as a solution to personal and interpersonal problems, and that people often evaluated themselves and others in terms of the quality of their communication skills. Over the years, the prevalence of this Anglo-American cultural idiom, for which Deborah Cameron (2000) proposed the term “communication culture”, has been extensively explored by scholars in Communication, Cultural Sociology and Sociolinguistics. ‘Communication culture’, which is at least partly rooted in the Western therapeutic ethos, has filtered into middle-class Israeli society in the 1980s and is currently discussed in Israeli social science research in a variety of settings, most prominently in conjunction with personal and national experience of trauma. I believe it has by now come to challenge the primacy of dugri speech as an Israeli vernacular idiom in which the speech-action nexus is foregrounded. Notably, both dugri speech and communication culture are underwritten by a language ideology in which speech is viewed as powerful action. But speaking takes very different shape and matters in very different ways in each of them. I began to address the Israeli version of ‘communication culture’ in the early 2000s by studying night-time call-in therapeutic radio programs (Katriel 2004). In that book, I juxtaposed therapeutic talk radio and dugri speech as two distinctive and alternative cultural idioms. In Defiant Discourse I updated my study of the dugri ethos as articulated in the context of discourse-centered activism. I now see dugri speech and ‘communication culture’ as two distinctive cultural codes that are central to Israeli speech culture (and perhaps beyond). As Tamar Kaneh-Shalit (2017) has argued in her study of the therapeutic setting of Israeli life-coaching, they may intertwine to create a hybrid style that combines elements of both the dugri and the communication codes. In future work, I plan to further explore how these codes may rub against each other so as to get a better handle on both local and global questions of cultural change and the role of language in it.

References

Cameron, D. (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. London: Sage Publications.

Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Kaneh-Shalit, T. (2017). The goal is not to cheer you up: Empathetic care in Israeli life  

coaching. Ethos 45(1), 98–115.

Katriel, T. (2004). Dialogic moments: From soul talks to talk radio in Israeli culture.

Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Katriel, T. & G. Philipsen (1981) ‘What we need is communication’: ‘Communication’ as a cultural category in some American speech. Communication Monographs 48, 301-317.

Rothberg, M. (2019). The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Redwood City,

CA: Stanford University Press.

Omri Grinberg takes the p. 99 test

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Sarah Mitchell’s admirable avoidance of “gaming” the pg. 99 test (link) ironically inspired me to not avoid the temptation of doing so, mainly because despite “cheating”, the test’s results are two particularly unspectacular fragments of non-ethnographic, all-too-academic writing. The way I’m “rigging” the test is by presenting together a “fake” and a “real” pg. 99: the fake is pg. 99 of the PDF document, which is actually pg. 88 of the dissertation, and the real one is pg. 99 according to the page count of the dissertation text.

Both pages are part of the first chapter, which is essentially the second part of the Introduction. The chapter combines a historical survey of Israel’s occupation and its violence, the emergence of human rights NGOs and their characteristics, and literature reviews about human rights, NGO-state dynamics, and colonial intermediation. It culminates in the two sub-sections in which the two pages play a significant role: an attempt to think about agency and ethics in bureaucratic structures, while signaling the uniqueness of witnessing and testimony contexts. As I show, this uniqueness persists even as these core aspects of human rights are shaped and disciplined—as an experience (of witnessing) and text document (as testimony)–by the synthesized influence of different types of violence Israel uses (brute-direct, structural, symbolic) and the genres of human rights narration and documentation. These are what I define in the fake pg. 99 (below) as “contexts and considerations”.

The fake pg. 99 bridges between a review of anthropologies of agency and ethics in the Middle East, and the following sub-section, in which I focus on the role of testimony in Israeli NGOs and use the insights from the review to challenge some dominant anthropological perspectives about witnessing and testimony. The real pg. 99 is the final page of this sub-section, and of the whole introductory phase.

If apart and as stand-alone fragments, the two pg. 99s do not say much. Together, I think, they convey some of the main points of the dissertation. Other than place them in sequence and some clarifications [in square brackets], I made no significant changes in the two text fragments.

[FAKE PG. 99]

These contexts and considerations [see above] are fundamental to my effort of avoiding re-producing two common tendencies in studies of human rights (or humanitarianism) and NGOs: (i) overlooking (and hence denial) of the critical valences of the vernacular of human rights practices themselves by deterministically assuming the totalizing appropriation of human rights by colonial actors (cf. Perugini and Gordon 2015; Zigon 2013); (ii) The equally problematic assumption that the political subjectivities of those participating in these practices hinge on the benevolent option of practicing them, which is offered by visiting-experts from the Global North as agents constituting a new “global” ground of political morality (cf. Fassin 2008).

These foundations do not negate the relevance of insights from neither the harshly critical take, nor from the latter approach, that formulates a political philosophy of contemporary ethics based on anthropological studies of humanitarianism. What is at stake here is the important avoidance of assigning conscripting meaning to “testimony” while simultaneously maintaining clarity about what testimony is and does (Dean 2017). The careful framing of agency and ethics in relation to witnessing thus promotes studying and theorizing testimony as a multi-dimensional process and from different perspectives of scale.

 

[REAL PG. 99]

As I will show, Palestinian witnesses often demand the NGOs document their cases but refuse to let them use it for the NGOs’ own appeals to various state branches. Thus, the witnesses re-shape what the NGOs do and challenge organizations’ positioning vis-à-vis the state, even if the production of the text itself does not change.

For NGOs, testimony does indeed signify political change and an ethical obligation, but it is also—and perhaps, mainly—a system of archiving through disciplinary writing: codes of qualities and quantities, formalized categories and means of documentation, classification, determination, comparison, accounted for and transcribed in certain ways that constitute simultaneously both the power and authority of the documenting actor—NGOs—through the legal-bureaucratic apparatus of writing human rights testimony (cf. Cody 2009; Foucault 1995, 189–90; Messick 1993). These modes of documentation take part in affirming certain models and modes of political subjectivity while marginalizing others (Fassin 2012; Marshall 2014). NGO practices then have apparent and immediate repercussions on contemporary political realities, and in parallel, impose a historiographic authority – frames of in/validation[*] that perform what Michel de Certeau termed as “…a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility” (1988, 4).

 

[PG. 99 REFLECTION AND APPRECIATION]

* “Frames of in/validation” is a term I use to theorize NGOs’ procedures of incessant verification and adaptation of Palestinian experiences of violence into simplified narrative structures, that conform to legal-moral discourses and definitions of human rights. As I claim in the dissertation, NGOs rely on frames of in/validation to sustain the paradox of human rights, at least in its Israel/Palestine vernacular: a genre of anti-colonial historiography that is itself based on colonial reason, mainly genealogies of surveying and bureaucratic writing. Thanks to the pg. 99 test, I now realize what I have probably always known on some level: that I do the same, only displaced into the disciplinary confines of academic writing.

Cliched academic self-deprecation aside, this exercise re-highlighted for me one of the main tensions I had to constantly work-through in my research, yet did not truly acknowledge in writing and only rarely discussed otherwise. Namely, between my focus on the bureaucracy of Palestinians’ testimonies in Israeli NGOs, and taking Palestinian witnesses and their testimonies into analytical consideration. That is, making this a study (and an ethnography) of colonial violence, and not (just) an anthropological analysis of representations of violence (whether those representations are themselves colonialist or not).

Omri Grinberg. 2018. Writing Rights, Writing Violence:  The Bureaucracy of Palestinian Testimonies in Israeli Human Rights NGOs – Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Anthropology and Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto.

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