Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent

Abstract

The collection and dissemination of testimonies that document routine acts of violence, harassment and intimidation against civilian populations under occupation are part of the agenda of anti-occupation groups in Israel and elsewhere. Indeed, as Givoni (2008) has argued in her study of the French organization “Physicians Without Borders,” witnessing has become an intrinsic technique and a shared code of contemporary humanitarian action. As a transnational yet locally embedded cultural configuration, witnessing has become a way of responding to states of emergency, crises and ongoing conditions of human suffering around the globe. It is conceptualized as involving three basic components, which are differently and delicately balanced in every given case: (1) presence in a socially distant scene of suffering, while siding with victimized “others”; (2) documentation and reporting grounded in an empirical epistemology associated with the seeking of evidence; (3) the use of fearless speech, that is, speech that involves risk-taking as it challenges hegemonic positions and power relations by voicing critique, condemnation, or demands for intervention (Foucault, 2001).