Project Cedar
Mediated Conflict
Investigating the Intersection of Technology, Identity, Conflict & Human Rights in the Israeli Occupied Territories of Palestine
May 6, 2022
Introduction
Technology, Identity, Conflict & Human Rights
Without a doubt, many would agree that the evolving Palestinian-Israeli conflict over the past 120 years has been complex and multifaceted. While at its core the conflict between the two nations is a struggle to draw borders, the globalized convergence of technologies and information has also created an entanglement of values, ideas, and cultures. Over the recent years, a lot of research has been focused on how camera and media technologies shaped the ways we perceive both Palestinians as a community of oppressed people and Israeli as an occupying military force (e.g. Drainville and Saeed 2013; Hagin and Wagner 2014). In addition, other studies have explored how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is represented on video-based media in the context of human rights practices (e.g. Allen 2009; Ginsburg 2019; Head 2015; Stein 2021). As media technologies have advanced along with the enduring conflict in this region, many scholars have explored several major themes surrounding the practices of media production in the Occupied Territories: the mediated construction of Palestinian life under conflict; the documentation of Palestinian cultural heritage; and the use of camera and video-based technologies to document violence and human rights violations of Palestinians by the Israeli military force.
This paper serves as both a meta analysis of the current academic literature and critical examination of the intersection between technology, identity, conflict, and human rights practices in the Israeli Occupied Territories of Palestine. The main thrust of this academic inquiry revolves around the questions of: how does technology shape the current lived experiences of Palestinians and Israeli people on the one hand, and the perspectives of those witnessing the conflict from the outside on the other? What is the nature of the relationship between this conflict and the practices of universal human rights? Is peaceful co-existence possible in Israel-Palestine? And what role does (or can) technology play in this pursuit? As this paper will show, the way Palestinian culture and identity is perceived is closely tied to the way they are depicted in traditional and newer participatory forms of media. Further, the depiction of Palestinian people are more often than not depicted in conflict with the Israeli military force. Additionally, we will explore how the mechanisms of narrative and filmmaking styles may contribute to the way Palestinians perceive themselves and how the outside world perceives them.
Background
Two Nations, One Land
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has culminated in the current Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Occupied Territories of Palestine) has been one of the world’s most complex and enduring struggles. Over the past 125 years, there have been many major historical events that have helped to shape the current state of affairs: the 1897 Basel Congress, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and British occupation of Palestine, the 1937 Peel partition plan and violence of the Arab revolt; the 1947 United Nations (UN) partition plan and the outbreak of the war for Palestine; the 1967 war; the First Intifada in 1987; and lastly the Second Intifada in 2000 (Bunton 2013). While cameras and the media were surely present during the First Intifada in the 1980’s, it was not until the Second Intifada in the early aughts that the world was witness to an explosion of imagery within the struggle between the two nations. Further, contemporary advancements in photographic technologies (i.e. smartphones and handheld cameras) and networked platforms (i.e. social media platforms such as Twitter and video sharing platforms such as YouTube) have helped to not only shape the life under occupation for the Palestinian and Israeli people, but have also conditioned the world’s perception of the conflict. Ultimately, the spread of visual media of the conflict has had a significant effect on the nature of society, politics, and practice of universal human rights in the Palestinian-Israeli struggle.
Furthermore, the proliferation of human rights NGOs (e.g. B’Tselem [One of the most prominent Israeli human rights NGO working in the Occupied Territories][Hebrew for “in the image of”]) within the Occupied Territories have also shaped the use of media technologies—which in turn has had profound effects on the way the Palestinian and Israeli identity and Palestinian-Israeli conflict is perceived by the rest of the world. This complex political landscape in the Occupied Territories calls into question the nature of power and power disparities even amongst allied institutions. Furthermore, it has brought forth questions of agency among the Palestinian people and whether the particular practices of media production and mediated forms of representation are a result of the will of the Palestinian people or whether it is a reflection of the moral agendas of Israeli human rights NGOs.
Technology, Identity & Culture
Mediated Construction of Palestinian & Israeli Identities
In a 2009 ethnographic study that took place in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, Lori A. Allen (2000-2003) explores how imagery of suffering and death had become a central component of the media’s representation of Palestinian life. Similarly, in a more recent study, Rebecca L. Stein (2021) examines the entanglements of consumer photographic technologies, networked platforms, and Israeli state violence towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. While the documentation of violence between Palestinians and the Israeli military force serves an important function as evidence of human rights violations, other scholars have employed Edward Said’s thesis of Orientalism (1979) to critically examine how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict takes place in the media (Drainville and Saeed 2013). According to the authors, the conflict is playing out on two fronts: the first being a military campaign waged in the Occupied Territories against the Palestinian people; and the second being a public relations (PR) campaign waged in the media. Furthermore, the claim that the vast majority of viewers—both educated and non-educated—have little or no historical background of the conflict, and Western media (e.g. US and UK) tend to be biased towards the Israeli occupation. One of the key takeaways here is that the world’s perception of the Palestinian people is not only shaped by media representation, but that representation is set almost exclusively in the context of conflict and violence. Such mediated representations are consistent—or are an extension of Said’s Orientalism framework (1979), which states that cultural representations of the Middle East, and in particular the Islamic world, is skewed by the ideas of Western superiority. Edward Said says,
In newsreels or news photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent rage and misery, or irrational gestures. Lurking behind this is the menace of jihad. (1979, 145).
Even today, the vast majority of the current media depictions of Palestinian people and culture is framed within the context of conflict and suffering. As Drainville and Saeed says,
"We (the West) see the Palestinians routinely as suicide bombers, angry stone-throwing youths, inconsolable mothers crying over the body of their dead child, or chanting crowds carrying a martyr’s corpse above the heads of packed, jostling throngs of fervent and crazed Arab men (833).
Aside from the critique on mainstream representations of Palestinians, in the same study, the authors examines original video footage of everyday lives of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. In addition, the authors note that the footage was captured by an all-woman crew of Western filmmakers and Palestinians. The footage of quotidian life captured away from conflict and in a more calm and rural setting challenges the prevalent depictions of conflict, violence, pain, and suffering that mainstream media—and even human rights NGOs tend to produce.
While the authors of the study emphasize the goals for such footage of everyday Palestinian life to give voice to the Palestinian people and to help the wider audience the common humanity of the Palestinian people, the nature of utilizing empathy as a agent of change is poorly understood. In a 2016 study, Naomi Head argues that while empathy is an inherent part of the social political life in the Occupied Territories, empathy itself as a phenomenon has not been sufficiently theorized in the study of International Relations (IR). Viewed from the perspective of technology [In a definition of technology proposed by Carrie Brezine (2011), technology can be seen as “a system of practices interrelating transformation of material resources, abstract and practical knowledge, social and political relationships, and cultural beliefs” (82)], the question becomes, how does technology shape the way empathy is manifest as a social phenomenon in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle? It is clear that these questions are poorly understood in the current academic research.
Mediated Preservation of Cultural Heritage
Apart from the use of photographic technologies to document the human rights violations and everyday lives of Palestinians, those same technologies have also played a major role in efforts to conserve and reconstruct the destroyed artifacts of Palestinian cultural heritage including the built architectural landscape and historical objects. While it is not specifically an analysis of technology, in one study, Bleibleh and Awad (2019) investigates the efforts of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Palestine (e.g. Riwaq) to conserve Palestinian architectural heritage in several locations, such as Jerusalem and Hebron. This study highlights the importance of conservation among a community of people who are living in a state of oppression, conflict, violence, and war. With that said, there is a lack of understanding on how exactly technology shapes (or is shaped by) the practices of conservation of Palestinian culture (i.e. documentation and reconstruction of architectural heritage, foodways, rituals, visual arts, etc.).
Along those same lines, Eyal Weizman explores the effects of occupation, conflict, and war on the architecture and landscape of the Occupied Territories (2017). Such studies reinforce the fact that both the Palestinian lived experience and their cultural and material identity is vastly overshadowed by the occupation and conflict with the Israeli military force. As Drainville and Saeed has shown in the feminist depictions of mundane everyday Palestinian life—even in the context of life under intense occupation and conflict—the Palestinian people still manage to maintain their family, domestic, health, and cultural existence (Drainville and Saeed 2013, 837). In other words, a strong tendency in academic research and in popular culture to cover the violent aspects of Palestinian existence fails to illustrate a more holistic and human picture of Palestinian life and culture. To that end, more research is needed to understand why that tends to be the case and what role technology plays in shaping those preferences.
Technology, Narrative & Conflict
Imagined Communities & Clash of Civilizations
According to a theory of imagined communities by Benedict Anderson (1983), the idea of nationalism or national identity is a socially constructed concept, and national identity itself lies in the imagination of those who perceive themselves as a part of the group. Furthermore, in Anderson’s understanding, as is the case with ethnic groups, nationalism is constructed through identity and ascription—where identity involves the perception of the self to a particular group and ascription involves the acknowledgement of those outside the group to confirm such perceptions. As a result, within this framework, ethnicity and nationalism always requires two groups—an in-group and an out-group. Moreover, Anderson’s analysis focuses on the use of media—in particular, print media in his analysis of the societies during the Industrial Revolution—as a catalyst to birth a form of identity that transcends time and space which helped construct the concept of national unity in the minds of those within the community. While his theory was not originally applied to the internet and video-based media, it may be helpful to extend his ideas as a framework to understand how new media technologies has helped to construct the identities of contemporary nations—and in our case in particular, the identities of the Palestinian people.
As we have seen, over the last few decades, the Palestinian identity has been strongly tied to the conflict between the Israeli military force. While at its fundamental core, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is about the fight over land, the struggle between the two people are also about a clash of cultures. In one study, Ranta and Mendel (2014) investigates the role of food culture in the conflict between the Palestinian and Israeli people. The researchers conclude that, although Palestinian’s have made direct contributions to the food culture of Zionist settlers, in order to maintain an independent Israeli identity—and the idea of a separate Jewish state—the settlers expunged or overlooked the Palestinian contributions. As Samuel Huntington once hypothesized, in the Post-Cold War political landscape, the main source of conflict will be over the differences in people’s cultural and religious identities (1998). When applied to such studies, Huntington’s ideas help provide an analytical framework to understand the deeper, more nuanced details of the conflict between the two cultures. With that said, more studies are needed to understand the more subtle and culturally-oriented conflicts that happen away from the more obvious violent conflicts between the Palestinians and Israeli military force.
Spatial and Temporal Social Ordering, Narrative & Conflict
In Benedict Anderson’s understanding, the emergence of Western national identity as an imagined community was made possible by capitalism formed around the medium of printed books. As we had pointed out earlier, the national identities of the Palestinian and Israeli people are also heavily influenced by what is portrayed in both conventional media and in the newer, more participatory forms. Within the framework of imagined communities, the slices of Palestinian life are recorded, preserved, and distributed on video-based media, which in turn help define and reinforce the imagined borders of the Palestinian identity. As Anderson had hypothesized, technological media reinforce a shared identity within the minds of people by transcending spatial and temporal dimensions—what he refers to as “homogenous, empty time” (Anderson 1983, 26). As we have seen, within the imagined communities framework, national identity results in in and out groups—which ultimately presents conflict as deterministic. Paired with the clash of civilization hypothesis, conflict between cultures is not only inevitable but it is mediated by technological factors. Therefore within the context of the Palestinian-Israel relations, new media practices not only has the effect of shaping the Palestinian identity, but it also may amplify the divisions between the Palestinians and Israeli people. To put it another way, new media practices within the Occupied Territories not only reinforce a relationship based on hatred and violence, but it also helps perpetuate the cycle of violence.
Consequently, how cultures and people are depicted in any sort of media—conventional mass media or new participatory forms of media—are paramount. As we have seen, some scholars like Drainville and Saeed do indeed point out the importance of depicting the more mundane, everyday life of Palestinians (in particular of women and children) outside the context of violence. However, these types of studies are few and far between. While some have praised, perhaps prematurely, the emancipatory power of participatory media, its ability to provoke change is largely dependent on a multitude of factors, including the fact that media practices are entangled in relationships with international human rights NGOs and that distribution platforms reflect existing power structures [Many scholars have investigated the bias that can be built into algorithms and artificial intelligence on technology platforms and the harm that it can cause to marginalized communities (e.g. Benjamin 2019; Eubanks 2019; Noble 2018)].
To that end, an assessment of content on B’Tselem’s website and YouTube channel shows that nearly every video depicts Palestinians and Israeli in some sort of conflict with one another. As of April 25, 2022, there were over 73 thousand subscribers on the B’Tselem channel and all of their content had been cumulatively viewed over 38 million times. Furthermore, the content on the website and YouTube channel on one of the most prominent human rights NGOs working within the Occupied Territories are mostly short one to two minute clips of violence and human rights violations. This analysis confirms the fact that Palestinian life is most often depicted in the context of conflict and out of context of a more complex whole. The question we must ask is why this tends to be the case and what are the consequences of that. Ultimately, what are audiences (i.e. the global community) expected to do with these abbreviated clips? And perhaps more importantly, how are audiences processing this content? These are the sorts of questions that the current literature fails to investigate. Not only do we need to investigate the types of content and how if affects our collective perceptions of Palestinians, but in addition, we need to explore how narrative, storytelling, and filmmaking techniques also shape our perceptions of ourselves and others.
Technology & Universal Human Rights
Human Rights, Visuality & Affect
Referring back to the aforementioned 2009 study, Lori A. Allen investigates how visuality of damaged Palestinian bodies and suffering during the Second Intifada (2000-2003) were leveraged as political tools to solicit empathy from the international community and thus shape the discourse around the topic of human rights—in a process the author refers to as immediation. The question Allen is asking is why visual media and “affective discourse” are assumed to have a special capacity to communicate the idea of an objective humanity (162)? By leveraging theories of aesthetics and the philosophy of vision, she concludes that vision is the sense that can most effectively incite an affective reaction in the viewer and that visceral images of the body are often seen as a “presocial phenomenon” that help define it as a aesthetic symbol that helps bracket the prejudices of the audience in order to define a common humanity (172). Simply put, vision and aesthetics are the most effective method to solicit empathy from people, and visual media technologies are the ultimate tool to create solidarity amongst people. To that end, studies that explores the intersection of visual media, political conflict, and human rights are rare, and ultimately more research is needed on how the aesthetics and techniques of video-based storytelling help shape the discourse around geopolitical conflict and how perception of nations are socially constructed.
Human Rights Video Advocacy
Most of the footage of human rights violations towards Palestinians are collected in large part because of the efforts by human rights NGOs. Two studies in particular have explored the role of NGOs in the documentation of human rights violations in the Israeli Occupied Territories of Palestine (e.g. Hagin and Wagner 2014; Ginsburg 2021). In particular, B’Tselem has been at the forefront of documenting human rights violations in the Occupied Territories (Hagin and Wagner 2014). The aforementioned studies describes two types of content that has been produced by B’Tselem—the first being professionally edited content from B’Tselem’s own researchers, which documents Israeli violations of humans rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and the second being raw footage of life under occupation captured from cameras supplied to Palestinians. The overall goal of both projects was to document violations and educate viewers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories. While both studies lauds the presence of cameras offered an empowering form of nonviolent resistance for Palestinians which in effect may have reduced violence towards the Palestinian people, the analysis by Ginsburg (2021) in particular notes that the collaborative practice of gathering evidence of human rights violations is not without negative consequences. Informed by Edward Said’s thesis of Orientalism (1979), the possibilities of emancipation and empowerment—which Ginsburg refers to as the human-technological network—are often limited by contradictory forces that is reflective of biases that are shaped by existing social structures and power inequities.
Discussion & Conclusion
Technology, Possibilities of a Peaceful Coexistence & the Future of Human Rights
The development of media and internet technologies have had a profound impact on the way communities and identities are constructed in the hearts and minds of people. The mainstream broadcast of conflict in the Israeli Occupied Territories of Palestine during the First Intifada in the 1980’s to the more recent crisis in 2021 exemplifies the fact that the world’s perception of Palestinian life is inextricably tied to media representations of conflict between the Palestinian people and the Israeli military force. The combination of Benedict Anderson’s framework for national identity and imagined communities and Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilization hypothesis helps us understand how—with the assistance of media technologies—identities are constructed in the minds of people, and why conflict occurs along cultural lines and not simply between nation states. A review of the studies that explore the intersection of technology, identity, conflict, and human rights in the Occupied Territories yields numerous insights on how media depiction of Palestinian life is nearly always in the context of violence, conflict, and human rights violations between the Israeli military force. Representing the Palestinian people and their culture—through short minutes long clips of violent conflict that is out of context of the rest of their human existence must have significant effects on how they are perceived themselves and to the rest of the outside world. An ethnographic study based on participant observation on the everyday phenomenological experience of the Palestinian people may shed light on the role technology plays in such arenas of ethnic and national conflict.
What is clear is that practices of media production are often entangled in relationships with international human rights organizations, with most of the media footage of Palestinian life has been captured through the work of NGOs such as B’Tselem. While such organizations help document human rights violations against the Palestinian people, the larger questions remain whether such media practices are helping to bring peace to this enduring conflict. Beyond the analysis of legal structures constructed between nations and international organizations (such as the United Nations and international court systems), the power for media technologies to shape the hearts and minds of people through narrative and emotional connection are apparent but are also underestimated and poorly understood. More rigorous research is needed on the nature of technology and media (i.e. how it develops and how it is used) and how our interactions with it are related to ideas of identity, conflict, and the practice of universal human rights. Ultimately, the question we must ask is: can the Palestinian and Israeli people peacefully coexist? And what role—if any—can technology and media play in accomplishing those goals? Gathering more research on how the current set of technologies is being deployed to capture depictions of life and conflict, and how the world consumes such content should help inform the development of future technologies and social structures that support the practice of universal human rights.
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