Description
This presentation will critically examine practices of witnessing that have developed in relation to the genocide carried out by Israel in Gaza. It will explore the ways in which the world’s first “live-streamed genocide,” as the unrelenting and brutal assault on Gaza has been referred to, calls into question the utility of a politics of solidarity grounded in and focused primarily on witnessing.
This presentation will explore the potentialities and limitations of the politics of witnessing from a number of angles. Firstly, it will critically engage with that which is turned away from, exploring the fixation on women and children as victims imbued with innocence, as juxtaposed with men who are constructed as always suspect, and whose death is therefore framed as unworthy of witnessing.
Secondly, I will explore the debilitating effects of witnessing in a conjuncture where the Israeli state and military has repeatedly called attention to its own atrocities, deploying the politics of witnessing in the service of its genocidal project. This has paradoxically occurred alongside more noticed attempts to deny documented atrocities, or to redirect the witness towards alternative, fabricated readings of what their eyes have shown them. I think through the implications of this for how we understand the politics of narration and truth assertion today.
Thirdly, this paper will explore the deflating affective consequences of bearing witness when one has little power to effect change. What does it mean to bear witness and to descend upon the streets in order to provoke others into witnessing and so protesting, when Western governments refuse to acknowledge – to see – that which is there so clearly before all of our eyes? I will discuss the disconcerting and unsettling effects of bearing witness to an atrocity that is being actively denied despite its glaring presence.
