The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine

Book, 272pp., Bloomsbury / I.B. Tauris Imprint, 2021.
Hardback released in Jan 2021; Paperback released in Sep 2022 — available for order directly from Bloomsbury.

Description

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, The Weaponized Camera lays out an argument for a visual studies approach to videographic evidence in Israel and Palestine. Using video stills as core material, it discusses the politics of videographic evidence in Israel and 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.

Preview

Read the book’s introduction here>>

Availability

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**use these discount codes for 20% off: GLR T5TUS (Americas); GLR T5TCA (Canada); GLR T5TAU (Australia + New Zealand); GLR T5TUK (UK + anywhere else)

Events

Nov 29 - Dec 3, 2021 — Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Annual Conference, online. I presented on my new book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East, on a panel titled “Art Histories of Design and Visualization” on Dec 1 at 8:30am PST.

Feb 25, 2021 — OF CONSEQUENCE, a conversation between me and writer/scholar Linda Dittmar about the book hosted by Consequence Forum, an international literary journal focused on the experiences of conflict and geopolitical violence, is archived on YouTube here.

Apr 10, 2021 — Design Incubation Colloquium 7.3: My talk, titled “Forensic Abstraction in Israel/Palestine: the Graphic Representations of Bodies in Citizen Media,” is archived on YouTube here.

Nov 8, 2021 — Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) Commons Conversation: My talk, titled “Seeing is Not Enough,” is archived on YouTube here.

Nov 10, 2021 — “Active Art”, Graduate Theological Union. A conversation between me and artist Pantea Karimi about use art to make a statement about matters related to Jewish and Islamic traditions is archived on YouTube here.

Nov 16, 2021 — “The Visual is Political: Citizen Videography and Documentary Cinema in Israel/Palestine” (at University of San Francisco’s Jewish Studies and Social Justice lecture series), in which I speak alongside Shirly Bahar, is archived here.

Reviews

“After viewing thousands of hours of citizen-made video from the B'Tselem Camera Project archive, Liat Berdugo has written a complex and moving study of the Palestinian struggle for visibility and self-representation in the face of overwhelming Israeli military and media domination. Through a series of case studies, the book analyzes the different ways the video camera has been used by Palestinians and other media activists to counter the visual dominance of the Israeli regime. Meticulously researched and theoretically informed, it adds significantly to the study of grassroots activist media practices and the counter-tactics of visual representation when the camera has become weaponized." – Jeffrey Skoller, Film & Media Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA

“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.” – Daniel Mann, King's College London, UK

Press

Jun 21, 2021 — Interview in Protocols, Issue #9.

May 12, 2021 — Review in The New Arab.

Feb 22, 2021 — Featured on Unsettled podcast in a long form interview.

Credits

This book was born out of the B’Tselem Video archives, and made possible by B’Tselem video staff, field coordinators, and volunteer videographers whose lenses framed and captured the lived experiences described in this book.

This work was made possible by generous support from: Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM; Design Incubation Fellowship, New York, NY; and the Dorot Foundation, Providence, RI.

Thank you to the editors of Real Life and Quarterly West, who commissioned my early writing on this topic.