Through the pain of the gaze: multiple publics and the broken grammar of testimony in the visual representation of political violence in Palestine

Abstract

Abstract The article aims to draw critical reflections on the production, circulation and reception of images in Palestine, given the recent rise of political violence in the context of the Israeli military occupation and settler colonialization of Gaza and the West Bank. Reflections move from the author’s personal relations built during fieldwork in the occupied West Bank, and from the exchange of pictures, messages and video calls as a sort of “protracted ethnography”. In the context of Israel’s control on images and the ban on international journalists to enter Gaza, the first part of the article questions Palestinian images as a mode of testifying to Israeli state violence. By contrast, in the second part, the representation of Palestinian suffering is considered through visual contents produced by Israelis, who made them circulating through social media. Ultimately, the article explores the performative character of images in creating multiple publics who differently relate to the visual grammar of testimony in the globally contested field of Palestinian memory. From this global perspective, “the pain of the gaze” is thought as a necessary although uncomfortable standpoint, from which to grasp traces of presence, life aspirations and the quest for justice.