Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Professor Rebecca L. Stein (Duke University).
Location: University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus (Room MG14).
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Details
From its outset, the Israeli assault on Gaza was understood by many Israeli Jews as a war of images. And one they risked losing. While Gazan Palestinians had long employed social media to document Israeli military assaults, the scale of this documentation, and the degree of its global virality, has been unprecedented. Within mainstream Jewish Israeli society, this Palestinian media ecosystem was deemed a considerable threat — even, some argued, an existential one. In response, Israeli state institutions, social media influencers, and private foundations would engage in a range of tactics to change the international view of Gaza and to keep Palestinian victims out of the Israeli frame: all were efforts to (as I argue) unsee Gaza.
This paper explores the range of visual strategies employed to do this unseeing work: including classic colonial erasure strategies, the visual coding of Palestinians as terrorists, and the denial of famine images. Surveying state documents, social media, and popular media discourse, this paper proposes that Israeli visual practices and discourses have played a key role in sustaining Jewish Israeli support for the genocide.
Biographies
Rebecca L. Stein is a cultural anthropologist researching linkages between culture and politics in Israel in the context of the Israeli military occupation and legacy of the Palestinian dispossession. She is the author and/or editor of five books in the field of anti-colonial Israel/Palestine studies. Her latest book, Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine, is the culmination of a multi-book project about the ways that new media and communication technologies are recalibrating the Israeli relationship to its military occupation. Herfirst book on this topic — Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (with Adi Kuntsman, 2015) — studied the place of social media within this equation. Her current project studies the changing status of wartime evidence in Israel/Palestine amidst the rise of artificial intelligence, open source intelligence (OSINT), and amateur digital forensics.
Find out more about Rebecca's work here.
