Contesting the Visualization of Gaza

Abstract

During July-August 2014 it is estimated that Israel dropped 18-20,000 tons of explosives on Gaza. This led to the deaths of over 2,100 people with homes, hospitals, schools and whole districts obliterated to rubble. Photographs played a crucial role in mediating this devastation within corporate media, social media as well as in street protests and pickets. This paper will explore the dominant visual discourses that through both regulatory frameworks as well as political positioning supported Israeli PR agendas to normalise Israeli perspectives and reinscribe Palestinians as both political and social 'other'. It will consider the success with which citizens both within Gaza and outside-as protestors and journalistsacted to challenge the corporate media's control over the mediation of the bombing, considering the visual strategies they employed on social media and in street protests to influence the public's understanding of the Palestinian plight. In 2009 scholars argued that the entrenchment of pre-established discourses in the visual economy of Gaza constrained our understanding of images produced by Palestinians to counter the Israeli military perspective, leading to the absorption of pro-Palestinian images in a dominant visual field (Jones 2011). Employing Ariella Azoulay's concept of a citizenry of photography (2008) which suggests a space that challenges the force of government in the struggle to recover lost and marginal histories, I will consider how photographs by both Palestinians and their supporters during the 2014 bombing should be understood in the context of wider communication ecologies. Visual meanings are contingent on both the agency of the viewer and the context within which the images operate and as such I argue that images circulated by Palestinians and their supporters did intervene to (a) challenge and expose Israeli barbarity through the production, exposure and circulation of images of extreme suffering and (b) through the space of social media intervened to widen the visual discourse surrounding Gaza. The visuality of Gaza in 2009 Key strategies that operated in the mainstream media to constrain our understanding of the Palestinian situation in 2009 included the decision by Israel to prevent international journalists from entering Gaza, which situated international news agencies in Israeli spaces. The banning of international journalists was never fully intended to hide images of actuality as the Israeli army were well aware that there were plenty of Palestinian journalists and photographers who would circulate images from the strip. The

Unmasking Media Bias and Religious Zionism’s Impeding Political Influence on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“…Research has repeatedly shown that the sources mentioned are unbalanced, with a preponderance of Israeli authorities and perspectives (Curran et al, 1993;Lavie-Dinur et al, 2018). Context and humanization was also provided disproportionately for Israeli victims of violence versus Palestinian casualties, despite death toll discrepancies (Curran et al, 1993;Ramamurthy, 2016). https://journals.e-palli.com/home/index.php/ajahs Am.…”