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183 6 ISRAEL / PALESTINE AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up. —Judith Butler, Ha’aretz, 24 February 2010 The technologies of video and surveillance fundamental to “homeland security” and the “war on terror,” the pursuit of perpetual war on the domestic front, and the ensuing collapse of public and private space are all nowhere more deeply entrenched than Israel/Palestine. At the same time, the production of documentary photography and artistic interventions deployed against the logic of the Occupation of Palestine and the militarized homefront has produced among the most compelling uses of documentary practices. An example of the contest of images may be seen in the dueling videos that were aired on television and the Internet following the Israeli strike on the aid ship Mavi Marmara on 31 May 2010. The Mavi Marmara was the lead ship in the first flotilla attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which had begun in 2007. When the ship refused to divert its course to an Israeli port, Israeli naval commandos attacked it during the middle of the night while it was still in international waters. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) commandos threw stun grenades and fired a hail of rubber bullets from above before boarding the ship from helicopters and speedboats that surrounded the ship. Expecting the rubber bullets to disperse the crowd and to encounter only passive resistance from the 546 aid activists on board, the naval commandos instead were set upon as they invaded. One was stabbed and a total of seven Israeli commandos were injured. The soldiers who rappelled down the ropes after them fired live ammunition. Israeli commandos killed a total of nine aid activists and injured more than thirty. News of the killings evoked intense international condemnation. Like the Occupation of Palestine itself, this attack was seen as open defiance of international law, causing wanton death and injury, which is exactly the accusation Israel made against the activists. The Israeli government held the ship’s passengers in prison for several days and confiscated all film and video from passengers and some sixty reporters aboard the Mavi Marmara in order to control the visual narrative of what had occurred. Both sides nonetheless released videos in an effort to prove that the other side was the aggressor. Many observers asked how an unarmed group defending itself against armed invaders could be said to initiate violence under any circumstances. The Israeli video includes arrows, yellow circles, and captions describing the action and shows naval commandos sliding down ropes 184 THE LANDSCAPE OF WAR and apparently being beaten by activists. According to reports, however, the footage of passengers hitting IDF commandos “bore signs of heavy editing, including the obscuring or removal of time stamps.” It was also noted, “Much of the footage released by Israel (after heavy editing) was taken from journalists aboard the ship after their equipment had been confiscated. The move was strongly denounced by Israel’s Foreign Press Association (FPA), which stated on 4 June: ‘the use of this material without permission from the relevant media organizations is a clear violation of journalistic ethics and unacceptable.’”1 Although no commandos were shot and activists who took guns off them emptied them of bullets, or, in one case, were videotaped throwing a rifle overboard, Israeli news tried to claim this was evidence that the activists were armed. Some of those onboard, such as Cultures of Resistance filmmaker Iara Lee, successfully hid and retained some of their recordings despite Israeli efforts to confiscate all footage, and the flotilla’s organizers, from the Turkish group Insani Yardim Vakfi, the Free Gaza Movement, and other groups, webcasted live from the open seas as the confrontation started, using the services of Livestream, a New York–based company that hosts free webcasts. Iara Lee’s video shows hovering helicopters, speedboats, and gunships, activists using slingshots against IDF navy commandos rappelling from the helicopters, as well as efforts to treat both wounded and bleeding activists and two injured Israeli soldiers. At the end of a fifteenminute video, a woman is heard shouting, “We have no guns here, we are civilians taking care of injured people. Don’t use violence, we need help.”2 What is clear is that in Israel’s determination to stop the ship in this manner, and by killing nine unarmed Turkish civilians (one of whom was also an American citizen), Israel created for itself a...

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