Abstract
The post-1967 Israeli Occupation has been heavily documented since its inception. Viewing the thousands of news reports, documentaries and online videos about this subject, one might wonder: What has all this documentation achieved? What has been the documentation’s role in this tragic piece of history? What has been the relationship between the audiovisual documentation of the Israeli Occupation and the reality it claims to portray? This chapter chooses one place in the terrain of the Occupation, the city of Hebron/Al-Khalil, and embarks on a journey over time, evoking archive footage of different media formats which were all shot in the occupied city over the last half a century. This journey allows for both reflections on the transformation of the city as well as a wider inquiry about the role that documentation practices play in shaping historical, political, and social issues.
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Notes
- 1.
Currently, B’tzelem is demonized in Israel. It is being framed as a treacherous organization by the head of the state, and its offices need a 24-hour security system. A recent legislative motion in the Israeli Knesset aims to make the publishing of images, such as those captured by B’tselem, punishable by up to 5 years of imprisonment.
- 2.
B’tselem’s website (https://www.btselem.org/) offers elaborate facts and context along with the videos it publishes. Nevertheless, not all parties sharing B’tselem content uphold the organization’s standards.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the dozens of filmmakers, journalists and citizen journalists whose work is the foundation of this chapter. I would like to thank the IBA Archives, Herzelia Archives, B’tzelem Archives, Anat Even and Micha X. Peled for allowing me access to their work. I also wish to thank the Center for Curiosity and the School for Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania for their support of this research. I wish to thank Orit Fooks for her assistance with the research and to my friend Michael Zupraner, to whom this work is dedicated, for his inspiration.
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Alexandrowicz, R. (2018). 50 Years of Documentation: A Brief History of the Audiovisual Documentation of the Israeli Occupation. In: Ristovska, S., Price, M. (eds) Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75987-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75987-6_2
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