The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Video, Politics, and the Visual in Israel-Palestine

The Weaponized Camera critically reflects on the deployment and weaponization of video cameras in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — an asymmetrical conflict in which filming is both highly legal and widely ubiquitous. The paper draws on Berdugo’s five years of research and unprecedented access to the video archives of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and gathers the footage. A camera is given to a Palestinian with the conviction that “seeing is believing,” or that visual recordings will cause change to the sociopolitical order. While much has been written about the counter-hegemonic potential of visual technologies in the wake of the Arab Spring, The Weaponized Camera complicates the notion that visual recordings alone can cause change. It argues that more is at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other conflicts like it, such as the face-offs between police officers and black and brown bodies in the US: often, believing precedes seeing, and therefore seeing fails to alter belief . The Weaponized Camera takes a visual studies approach to conflict, asking not only how to address the spectral, but also the resultant specter: the haunting that occurs when visual recordings of conflicts can be replayed, recirculated, relieved, and republished, haunting us as they search for a reckoning. If “the gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates,” as Foucault has written, then an uneven distribution of power in conflict also pervades the realm of visuality, itself.