To date, Palestine is the emblematic figure of the problem of her own imaging. (1) This predicament is a fact of Palestinian’s powerlessness to appear as a nation due to the dissolution of territorial frontiers and physical expulsion and extermination of Palestinians accompanied by the discursive and visual programming of their absence. Looking at the history of the modern figure of Palestine, it becomes evident that it was obliterated since the beginning by the figure of the ‘Holy Land.’ The origins of the Western image of Palestine and Palestinians coincided with the proliferation of travel accounts depicting romantically the trip to the Orient. The pilgrimage to the Holy Land was imbued by a colonial vision in the spirit of a ‘peaceful crusade.’ In such accounts and images, the land is made familiar by making it correspond to texts from the Old Scriptures. Consequently, Palestinians were captured in poses and gestures that reinforced Western perceptions of images and attitudes identical to those described in The Bible. Photographs of Palestine and Palestinians were distributed in the West accompanied with quotations from the Bible, as if the land had not changed in 1800 years. (2) In accordance with nineteenth century traditions of type casting and classifying, such images tended to obliterate its subjects. By being portrayed as stereotypes, their individuality was removed as they became representatives of ‘types’ of people living in the Holy Land. (3) As late as the early 1960s, the Italian filmmaker and belated crusader, Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled to the Holy Land searching for stereotypical figures in his notebook-film of 1963 Sopralluoghi in Palestina. Guided by a Catholic priest, he traveled throughout the land looking for locations for his film The New Testament According to Saint Matthew. (4) From the beginning he was in a quest for an ancestral, ‘pure’ and remote archaic biblical world. To his disappointment, however, he found a land that was less remote than he had imagined, and displaced by a modern industrialized Israel.

Elias Sanbar dated the programming of figurative and discursive disappearance of Palestine and Palestinians to have occurred between the years 1917 to 1922, an era pivotal in the narrative that contributed to the formation of the Palestinian figure of the absent. (5) The nineteenth century figure of the Holy Land coincided with the Zionist discourse of the ‘Promised Land,’ and in the 20^th, it became “A land without a people for a people without a land,” which was the formal basis of the creation of the state of Israel. According to Zionist writers, the Palestinians were never there, thus they were discursively disassociated and rendered absent from the territory. During the post-Nakba period, as Edward Said argues, the displaced and dispossessed, figure of ‘the Arab,’ had become in Palestine a non-person and the ‘Zionist’ had become the only person in the land because of their perceived prejudice of the ‘Arab’s’ negative personality as Oriental, decadent and inferior. (6) The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish illustrated the ordeal of the Palestinian absence in the following sentence: “Who am I, Without Exile?” (7) By raising the question in this manner, Darwish describes the geopolitical realities of the Palestinian disappearance from the geopolitical landscape at the representational level. The absence of Palestine is being advanced even today. For example, an article by Israeli journalist Amira Hass titled “You can drive along and never see an Arab,” (8) she describes the road system in the West Bank and Gaza which was designed in such a way that Israeli citizens and settlers can drive on the roads without ever seeing any ‘Arabs.’ (9)

Efforts to depict Palestinian presence and absence from the inside and from the outside have been conditioned by specific dynamics between appearance and recognition as a part of the global regime of the sensible. (10) These relationships reflect discursive and figurative exchanges between the polarities of a world divided into West and East and how they perceive one another. It is this imaginary imaging of ‘us’ and the ‘others’ that has produced exchanges of gazes conditioned by the global regime of the sensible. The challenges from within are, How to assert a historical presence based on historical absence and the potential for political self-determination while witnessing one’s own ethnic annihilation? From the point of view of an outsider, How does one conjure up the absent ‘others’ in order to speak on their behalf?

Jean-Luc Godard articulated this conundrum famously in his film Notre Musique (2004), in a scene where he juxtaposes two photographs, one of the Israeli population docking in Israel and one of Palestinians fleeing by sea in 1948, and states: “In 1948 Israelis encounter fiction. Palestinians fall into documentary.” He means that after the history of Zionism, Israelis were finally on the land of their fiction. (11) According to Gilles Deleuze the ‘Israeli fictions,’ are grounded on Israel’s ‘right’ to negate the existence of Palestine and Palestinians. By having evacuated them geographically, Israeli apologists argue that theirs is not a colonial enterprise since the Palestinians were not exploited but expelled from the land, (12) which Elias Sanbar has compared to the forced resettlement of the ‘Red Skins’ in North America. (13) Moreover, Israelis defend themselves from the charge of genocide because for them, the elimination of a Palestinian presence is not an end in itself like the genocide they suffered, but a means to ensure the Jewish identity of the Israeli State. The cost of the Jewish identity is the annihilation of others, and this physical extermination is contingent upon to geographical evacuation and obliteration. This dubious equation of nation and ethnic identity has not only transformed the Palestinians into the ‘others’ of Israelis, but it has also allowed criticism of both Israel’s exclusive origins and its enduring policies to be characterized as ‘anti-Semitism’. (14)

The Palestinian arrival to the domain of documentary in 1948 is predicated upon their efforts to constitute political autonomy by representing themselves as a distinct community. Through documentary and documentation, they presented themselves as a people with a history and as victims of Israeli expulsion and occupation. They put forth their cause as a liberation of the territory where their history was written. Documentary form here is inextricable from memory, which functions as the tool against forgetting, documenting means getting politicized for the sake of restitution, documentation is the beginning of national history. Thus, Palestinians’ relationship to documentary is a type of politicized memory documenting their collective lives before the Nakba. This history is reconstructed by means of recollection through oral history and storytelling, which attempts to create a logical order to the obliterated identity of a Palestinian heritage. Such attempts act and serve to transmit and preserve ‘what was,’ inseparable from the fact that Palestinians had been regrouped in refugee camps according to their clans and villages when forced into exile. As Rosemarie Saygh argues, recreating Palestine through memory was not only a natural reaction to expulsion, but became the only way of passing onto the displaced children their inheritance. (15) Such documentary remembrance, beyond storytelling, was embodied for example in the creation of village memorial books by Palestinian refugees. These books, published for a local readership served the purpose of collecting information about their villages and preserved a visual perception that illustrated lost villages and origins. (16) In addition, remembering the stolen land became a form of resistance for politicized refugee ex-peasant Palestinians, for witnessing what they went through and what they lost. They utilized this remembrance to be heard in forums from the inside and abroad. (17) The large number of testimonials recording the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, found in documents, documentation, and documentaries have circulated globally with the aim to bring subaltern views to the surface. Access to this information was encouraged in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness in the eighties and nineties advocating tendencies such as post-colonial studies and the multiculturalist utopianism. These tendencies promoted the re-instatement of pre-colonial local identity and the restitution of speech of those formerly deprived of their own narratives. Regarding Palestinian self-representation, however, the struggle is still one for the ‘right to narrate.’ Following Said, Hamid Dabashi, argues that there is a ‘mimetic crisis,’ operative in Palestinian self-representation as in Palestine everything has become too fictive to be fictionalized and too unreal to accommodate any metaphor, thereby creating a ‘traumatic realism’ (18) producing visual and literary documentaries in a frenzy to create records of silenced crimes and victimization. Such documentaries are characterized by oral testimonies that show people bearing witness to and denouncing the injustices.” (19) These accounts recall the refugees’ own documentations of loss and wrongdoing I described above. 

From the outside, the past forty years have seen a shift in the figuring of the Palestinians. Images from the late sixties and early seventies were prompted by political sympathy positioning Palestinians as revolutionaries fighting for political self-determination. These images were encouraged through the PLO’s astute manipulation of the empathy of Third Worldists creating an exchange of gazes in which the fedayeen posed for foreign cameras as patriotic heroes who were dedicated to recover stolen land. On the one hand, recent imagery and writings on the Palestinian struggle, have appealed to moral disposition of man as the potential ground to cast off shame, presupposing a viewer that could respond to what is intolerable elsewhere. On the other hand, accounts of the Palestinian ordeal condemn the ‘fanatic terrorists’ incapable of democratic self-rule. These formulations are inevitably framed and branded with the label of ‘Islam’ which today has become the West’s constitutive other and thereby a threat. Evidently, the figuration of Palestinian absence as refugees, feddai, terrorists or victims reflects the shifts in the modes in which the world has related to the Middle East, politically, ethically and intellectually in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba. This movement reflects a passage from a sympathetic attitude towards Palestinian revolutionary struggle for self-determination, resistance and claims for restitution framed by Leftist ideology, towards a perceived ethics of rights, memory and witnessing, to Islamophobia. The former is framed by the universal moralizing politics of human rights. (20) This change coincides with the media’s propagation and promotion of fear of specifically ‘Islamic terrorism’ which shields the viewer’s ability to function by creating an obsessive excess of the Real, presenting terrorist attacks as a true and looming threat to Western public space and civilization and therefore, as unlawful and condemnable forms of violence. 

These shifts underscore a tension between what we must distinguish as the ‘figure’ or the ‘figural’ of Palestine. According to Barthes, figure means ‘schema,’ in Greek a choreography of the body’s gesture caught in action and immobilized, “Figures take shape insofar as we can recognize, in passing discourse, something that has been read or felt, a memorable sign.” (21) If the condition of representing Palestine is absence then the figure of Palestine, is logically, unrrepresentable. Moreover, in as far the Palestinian lands, having been expropriated and its people expelled and exterminated, they have created a collective identity of a people as victims. Yet, by definition, the victim is such insofar as she is deprived of the means to prove the damage that has been done to her because, following Lyotard, the testimony of the victim belongs to a discursive regime which excludes cognitive verification, rendering the victim unable to produce reference. Thus, a victim is an impotent witness to the events either unable to bear testimony to the injustices suffered or powerless because no one believes her. (22) A paradox does not arise here regarding the frantic proliferation of visibilities and discursivities attesting to the Palestinian ordeal produced from the inside and the outside and their ineffectualness. Palestinian absence and extermination have come across the global regime of visibilities as witness-images and testimony-images; these kinds of images belong to the domain of the figural, a mode of visibility of discourse that restrains the visible because in order to appear, states of affairs must be subjected to certain conditions. These conditions are the textualization and the codification of images, (23) which means that images come to incarnate a discourse. 

Images that seek to testify (witness-images) are coded as ‘objective truths.’ ‘Objectivity’ is also the form of the communication of information, which in turn, is characterized by the creation of events as information. The problem is that referents send back to a discourse –in this case, ‘testimony of injustice’ and images cease to bear witness because the figural is inseparable from a suspicion cast on the referent on the part of the viewer. Moreover, the status of image as document can be overburdened by its rhetorical framing, so images can be deployed to support either the Palestine or Zionist narratives. It is not surprising then, that efforts from both, the inside and the outside to witness and to render the evil of occupation and annihilation transparent have proved to date ineffective. Sixty years after the Nakba, Palestine and Palestinians are still absent not only because of dispossession but because their experiences are irrepresentable and their images’ excess of migration in the mass media has disabled their power to provoke an ethical response from the viewer transforming them into shields that veil states of affairs. In other words, the capacity for images or for empirical reality to be self-evident is no longer viable. The proliferation of images in a global media has diminished their capacity to speak for themselves. The very moments when reality is deployed as most concrete, it becomes abstract because it is divorced from a meaningful context. Today, the image of Palestinians is propagated as a figural image that renders them present as either doubtful witnessing-victims and/or fanatics-terrorists-fighters resisting occupation unable to constitute themselves as autonomous political subjects. Their struggle to become visible is hindered today, once more, by the disbelief cast upon the figural image and by the horror and condemnation provoked in the Western reception of terrorist attacks. Palestine remains absent and Palestinians are reduced to what Agamben calls ‘bare life.’ (24)

As realized and noted, documentary form and language have predominated in the gazes that have been cast upon the Palestinian ordeal. Recognized as refugees, the UN and the UNRWA documented them in camps from 1948 on, along with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. (25) Forty years ago, Palestinians established themselves on the map from the outside of their territory as other than refugees by becoming a nation without a state embodied in a representative organization, the PLO. This organization not only gathered the diverse militant factions that were fighting for Palestinian self-determination, but it also provided education, healthcare and basic services to the refugees. The plight of displaced refugees was then transformed into a political force that won considerable visibility, especially after the battle of Karameh in 1968. This was a time in which the politics of revolutionary resistance united the Third World in a common cause against imperialism. This radical anti-colonialism was supported within the First World by artists, writers, filmmakers and journalists who produced accounts that spoke on behalf of revolutionary struggles. (26) These interventions mixed kinds of the documentary genre: travel diary, photojournalism and reportage, actively manipulating mechanisms of communication in order to present objective external observation. We could consider this body of works to be part of a reassessment on how the West interpreted and produced new discourses about the ‘other’ in the light of Europe’s post-colonial identity crisis and the ideological scission of the world during the Cold War. This kind of Third Worldism was a proto-global cartography characterized by the First/Third World division that was spawned by ideological alliances with Marxism as the common code. These interventions were thus prompted by ideological kinship ––by the Marxist-Leninist belief in the revolutionary potential of Third World peasantry, that was coded through theories a ‘global Western Marxism’ and translated into local specificities.

Political Tourists (journalists, intellectuals and revolutionaries from elsewhere), flocked to the Palestinian resistance’s militia bases, refugee and training camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to document the Palestinian revolution. These Western sympathizers, including Bruno Barbey, Armand Deriaz, (27) Francis Reusser, Jean Genet –after Black September, Dario Fo, Manfred Vosz, Jean-Luc Godard, Gérard Chailand, and members of the Rote Armée Faktion amongst others –came to put themselves at the service of the Palestinian struggle, either on their own or as guests from the Information Services Bureau of the PLO. The invitees aligned themselves first with its different factions ideologically. Palestinians then were seen from the outside as the epitome of progressive political sophistication. (28) From the outside, the Palestinian resistance was perceived as ‘new’ and ‘beautiful.’ Ironically, the ‘new’ image from the Arab world which was the ‘Palestinian (Marxist-Leninist) Revolution’ was perceived as ‘new’ insofar as it presented a perspective that was something other than the Orientalist image produced by colonial Europe. Jean Genet for example, was invited as spectator to the refugee and training camps in Jordan by Fateh. He recalled noticing right away a dramatic shift from the traditional literary depictions of the Middle East framed by the French. Furthermore, the newness of the Palestinian struggle was tied for him with an idea of modernity, because for Genet, the Palestinians were the first people in the Arab world that produced a modern relationship with themselves, that of revolutionary self-affirmation. (29) For him, this air of modernity was an important break from the French mythologies that romanced Orientalism. The Palestinian revolution was characterized according to Genet, by ‘a new beauty,’ (30) transmitted by their determination to recuperate the freedom that the Palestinians had lost. This determination was made visible in a certain kind of casualness and insolence on the part of fedayeen vis a vis those who had humiliated them. (31) Along similar lines, a voice-over that accompanied images of Jordanian refugee and training camps in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1974 film about the Palestinian revolution, Here and Elsewhere, declared that, “This is what is new in the Middle East, five images and five sounds never seen and heard before on Arab Land.”  (32) Obviously there is always discrepancy between the seer and the seen and how gazes are framed depending on the potential target market that the photographer presupposes. As Godard states in Here and Elsewhere: “a photographic image is a gaze upon another gaze that is presented to a third gaze, already represented by the camera’s lens.” In other words, photographs are exchanges of gazes conditioned by the regime of visibility in which the image will circulate. Genet in his book Prisoner of Love adopts the point of view of a feddai and describes how the fedayeen saw themselves being seen by the political tourists and journalists: 

We were stars from Japan, Norway, Dusseldorf, the US, Holland… they were here to film, photograph, broadcast and interview us… We existed and we did really amazing things because they came to see us from far away places… The journalists would stay with us for almost two hours before they had to take an airplane in Amman to go back to London… Most of them thought that Abou Amar and Yasser Arafat were the names of two different men, perhaps adversaries. Those who knew the truth would get mixed up multiplying by three or by four the numbers of the PLO, thinking we were three or four times more. We were admired… When Europeans saw us, their gazes shone and now I know why: It was desire that they placed on our bodies; even if we turned our backs to them, their regards pierced our napes. Spontaneously we would pose for them taking heroic and seductive positions… such poses were provoked in us by their gazes, as we responded to them as they expected. They made of us stars and monsters. You called us ‘terrorists.’ We were star-terrorists. Which journalist wouldn’t have signed a big check to ‘Carlos’ to be invited to his table to drink one, two, three, ten whiskeys hearing being familiarly addressed by him? If not ‘Carlos,’ why not ‘Abu el Jaz?’ (33)

This passage is telling of the relationships that were created between those being seen and those observing. The former were heroes posing for foreigners with cameras that had only come for short visits to capture the image of the Palestinian Revolution moving on to the next reportage. To the exterior, the revolution was a theater. In Here and Elsewhere, Godard and Miéville engaged in a critique via self-critique of the failure of redemptive politics and revolutionary struggles here and elsewhere by seeking to pedagogically ‘de-ideologize’ the Palestinian images. This is evident in the last ten minutes of the film, which are dedicated exclusively to a shot of four fedayeen discussing a failed operation in the Occupied Territories. Elias Sanbar, the Dziga Vertov Group’s translator and native informant in the Middle East, has recalled filming the scene in Jordan of four fedayeen covered in sweat, displaying bodily tension, on the edge of breaking down. Two of the members of the Palestinian commando had fallen and the others were targeting their anger against the commander. After that, Sanbar recalled, the fedayeen sat down under the camera’s eye to allegedly discuss their operation in terms of self-critique. Two years later, Sanbar was asked by Godard to translate what the fedayeen were saying in the footage: “You are completely irresponsible, our enemy is ferocious and unlike us, they take things very seriously.  It has already been three times that the recognaissance units force us to cross the Jordan River at the exact same spot and every time the enemy is waiting for us there… Now we have lost our brothers.” Then, they insulted each other, a mode of discussion very distant from what Godard had wanted to show in the film as the fedayeen performing Marxist-Leninist self-critique. Looking at this material in 1972 was shocking for both Godard and Sanbar because they realized that they had not ‘listened’ to the revolutionaries. For Sanbar it was much more shocking because the discussion took place in his own language and yet, theories and unfaltering convictions had made him deaf and had made him idealize the struggle. (34) The ideology had covered up the fact that the fedayeen’s dialogue was a matter of life and death, not revolutionary theater. In the voice-over accompanying this scene Godard reiterates that his voice as a Maoist political tourist had covered up the voices of the men and women they had filmed, pondering on the fact that they had denied these voices and reduced them to nothing. The film vouches, first, for the need to restitute a voice to the dead Palestinians, and second, for the Western intellectuals’ need to show and to listen to images of Palestinians. In addition, while condemning and lamenting the wave of terrorism and massacres initiated by Black September, Godard and Miéville defined terrorism as a media event, a call of attention to the rest of the world, an opportunistic image created and performed for Western cameras. Sketching out the links between resistance, revolution, television, cinema and journalism, the film ends with a plea: “Pass these images (of the Palestinians) from time to time (in Western television).”

Black September massacres in Jordan and the Black September wave of terrorism that followed were perceived as the failure of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. (35) This perception coincided with some Western intellectuals’ disavowal of leftist ideology and their turn to human rights discourse. (36) By the mid-seventies, Palestinians had become their current figural images, on the one hand, “the intractable, anti-Semitic terroristic refugee,” (37) and on the other, the figures of victimhood without the means or the rights to create political solutions to their own problems. (38) The latter figure was framed by the ethical discourse to undo the wrongs to those outside of the Human Rights. The media became the privileged site for ethico-political intervention in the name of human rights particularly considering the Leftist belief in its emancipatory potential. This is the moment of what I call the mediatization of mediation, when the vanguard of activists including intellectuals became journalists, a problematic passage depicted in Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger: Profession Reporter. The possibility of ‘post-ideological’ intellectual engagement abroad is embedded in the film as the aporia of the outsider is either an impartial Rimbaudian poet and arms dealer or an objective journalist creating events as information accepting the political and economical interests that condition and presuppose the circulation of his or her images and reportages. Stripped off of leftist ideology, engaged intellectuals grounded the conditions for speaking for others from a discursive position of a depoliticized universal ‘we’ and an objective ‘it speaks’ from a community of ‘civilized’ nations. As Kristin Ross put it, they substituted revolutionary and political empathy for sympathy and they transformed pity and moral indignation into political emotions within the discourse of ‘pure actuality’ and emergency. This led to the new figure of alterity in the 1980s and 1990s as the ‘suffering other’ that needs to be rescued. (39)

What interests me here is the replacement of Marxist-Leninism as the framework for redemptive politics by the human rights discourse as the grounds to speak in the name of others. (40) By the late seventies, as Lyotard argues, granting the respect of human rights had entitled everyone to exercise the right to be informed and the right to be heard and to bear witness: “the world thus began to see itself in the media, ready to hear and speak, discuss, protest, explain ourselves, look at ourselves as humans fulfilling the duty of making rights prevail.” (41) What is more, the human rights claim to have a prescriptive status independent of political interests aim at proving that the wrongs done to the unfit should be solved by those who are fittest, as Spivak puts it: it is the ‘white man’s burden’ to civilize and develop those who cannot constitute themselves politically. (42) In such a dynamic, images are used to validate humanitarian aid and the human rights are alibis for economic, military and political intervention. The impulse to denounce and to bear witness to the abuses of human rights was fueled by market and the professional foreign correspondents, documentarians and agents who served an industry for the production of witness-images for a consumer market. (43) Over the past forty years, witness-images have sought to address a disinterested and liberal viewer, who would potentially act upon the events on the screen; moral shame and indignation were believed to be the catalysts to prompt outrage in the observer who as a potential agent could call for intervention in the events seen on screen. Paradoxically, the media renders the viewer impotent, as it presents events to the spectator who consumes information passively unable to act upon the images shown on the screen. In addition, when packaged for consumption, images of desolation and disaster provoke in the spectator a powerful fascination, voyeurism, horror, compassion and guilt as well as relief and Schadenfreude. This kind of ‘disaster pornography,’ enacts a crisis of the viewership in the media, as the viewer-consumer is either in denial or acting as a voyeur. However, the crisis goes also the other way as well, as Thomas Keenan has claimed, photo opportunities are performances done for the camera that attempt to bring in international pressure upon the governments violating the imagee’s rights. (44) This overexposure, thus, is not accidental, as those who appear on the camera contribute actively to the proliferation of images of real dead and wounded bodies and disaster zones in a craze to bear witness to the wrongs done to them.  But, because of an excess of visibility, images of tragedies and violence have lost their potential to call for an ethical or political response while at the same time, justifying economic, political and relief interventions that aim at ‘breaking in’ by developing ‘intractable’ problematic communities and subsuming them to international economical interests. (45) Moreover, the proliferation of such images has led to a devaluation of experience. What is even more problematic is that with the inflation of images of depicting back-to-back disasters and violence consumers are overwhelmed by information about something remote and removed from any familiar context. Jean Genet wrote that when we contemplate a dead body, or look at a dead person closely, a curious phenomenon happens: the absence of life in a body is the equivalent of its total absence, the dead body’s image is its uninterrupted receding. Even if we approach the body, according to Genet, we will never touch it. (46) Alarmingly, the contemplation of the dead body has become an ethical intervention in itself, while its exposure in the most profound desubjectification as victim reinforces its status reduced to ‘bare life.’ (47) Still, Palestinian states of affairs are being depicted from the inside and the outside, through and from the witness-images that are merchandised under the documentary and journalistic modes. This is propelled by the post-ideological ‘passion for the Real’ framed by the politics and ethics of ‘truth.’ Purporting the virtual experience as the Real, extreme violence is exploited as the means of peeling off the deceptive layers of ideological reality. (48) In conclusion, the Palestinian figural of the impotent victim keeps on proliferating while their testimonies are questioned, dismissed as exaggeration or fiction due to the confusion between document and truth, which are clearly conditioned by power relationships. That is why these practices also have a strategic logic, in the sense that they continue to advance and believe in the self-evidence of images, who want to be faithful to the fact that people will be moved by seeing the reality of the situation. What must also be taken into account is that there has also been a shift in the media, along with being controlled traffic of information and images, its promotion sells and exploits sensationalism in order to control and to propagate barometric rises in fear and psycho-terror. 

The image of the Palestinian stone-thrower from the first and ongoing Intifadas was the first figure coming from inside of Palestine, (49) David against Goliath, which by now has been amalgamated with the figure of ‘terrorist,’ a threat coming from the outside. Since the nineties and increasingly so, the word ‘terror’ evokes the image of a man wearing a kuffiyah and a mask and carrying a kalachnikov, becoming the veritable icon of ‘Palestinian.’ Today, the labels through which the West sees the Palestinian struggle for self-determination are ‘Islam’ and ‘Terror.’ After the attacks of September 11^th, religion has increasingly been given as an explanation for terrorist attacks as suicide bombings, and the Islamic jihad has embodied an alleged resentment against Western democracy and modernity. ‘Islam,’ as a movement in the current post-Cold War globalized world functions as the West’s constitutive other. The main opposition of the contemporary political struggle is thus positioned between a tolerant multi-cultural Western liberalism and a fundamentalist militant Islam. (50) The East and West is an asymmetrical opposition reflected further in the oppositions between ‘unlawful combatants’ vs. ‘lawful combatants’ and ‘acts of terror’ vs. ‘acts of war,’ thereby excluding the political enemy from the political arena. ‘Islamic terror’ is furthermore, a special brand of terrorism that demonstrates Palestinians’ ‘tendency’ to resort to violence as opposed to violence as a means to resist occupation –amongst other means. Most notably, Palestinian passive resistance and enduring: sumud. In this regard, Israel holds the ‘moral high ground.’ It is engaged in a ‘just’ war for self-preservation against Palestinian terrorists. (51) Palestinian resistance thus, remains outside of the law and outside of the history of popular movements that challenge state authority. What is obliterated by these narratives is the historical function of terror in the West, what Walter Benjamin called ‘divine violence.’ From the French Revolution to Russia in 1905 to the French resistance and to the Red Brigades in Italy, terrorism has been understood as necessary acts that transcend the limits of the state of law in the name of revolutionary justice by evoking a wider humanity, as Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and others have argued. Historically in the West, equality, human rights and freedom have come with the terror needed to assert them. In this account, ‘divine violence’ is justified as necessary for the reconfiguration of social space and for the creation of a state, inseparable from the ‘mythic violence,’ which is the necessary violence to maintain populous democratic law and justice. Although terrorist attacks vindicated by Palestinians have been proved to be caused by harsh state repression and obliteration and as one of the means for warfare against Israel, (52) their reception in the West places them as other from its history of revolutionary destruction and annihilation and are explained today as ‘religious.’ It would be inaccurate, however, to consider suicide bombings as instances of ‘divine violence,’ because they are not aimed at destroying a state for the sake of reconfiguring the social space to impose a new social order (because they cannot). Rather, I would like to explore the question if suicide bombings unsettle the enemy’s social space by an act of bearing witness, in an excess of the real, (53) becoming the proof and testify to the real of the effect of Israeli annihilation. In this regard, speculations on the intention of the suicide bomber either as retaliation, hope for after-life reward, sacrifice or as an escape from political oppression and war tend toward easy explanations along the lines of individual psychopathology or generalizations about collective ideology. Wondering about the motivation for the action, ‘To kill in order to die or to die in order to kill,’ (54) is also useless, as we will never understand neither the intentions nor the motifs of the killers to commit suicide, as their actions have been clearly counterproductive and military insignificant, prompting, on the one hand, the strengthening international support of Israel condemning terrorism and has justified further expropriation, oppression and security deployment in Occupied Palestine. (55)

Moreover, as Talal Asad has demonstrated, the interpretation of suicide bombers as a sacrifice, as giving one’s life up as a gift for the nation for the sake of sanctification is not proper to the Islamic tradition. The idea of the suicide as a gift pertains to the Christian logic of the martyr, the one who ‘dies testifying for his faith.’ Martyr is the inaccurate word that has been used to translate shahid, which does not signify explicitly that someone dies in God’s cause. (56) Shahid, rather, expresses something with his or her violent death along the lines of the logic of shuhhada, the status conferred to all the Palestinians who have died in Israeli confrontation as witnesses (shuhhada means witnesses). In this manner, dying as shahid and shuhhada are seen as a triumphs rather than sacrifices. In killing others by killing himself, the shahid produces a spectacular act. Insofar as suicide bombings are broadly covered by the media, these incidents make a statement closer to political theater and action than religious acts. Suicide bombings express a reaction to injustice bearing witness to it by transgressing the law –as we have seen, as early as 1974 Godard and Miéville (and Jean Baudrillard) posited terrorist attacks, specifically Munich ’72, as a mediatic event and a call for attention from the rest of the world. As ‘bare life,’ outlaws and stateless, Palestinian suicide bombers prove injustice, creating events that by unsettling public space, constituting a subjective affirmation and reaction to conditions of oppression. The suicide bombing, an act of political subjectivity, creates an excess of the Real, bearing witness to the perceived asymmetry constitutive of terror against terror. Such excess of the Real breaks the symbolic order provoking shock and horror, which depend on the media to be propagated. What remains after the suicide attack will end up inevitably as another instance of ‘disaster pornography’ and yet, perhaps an act of witnessing has taken place an act that remains unrepresentable, outside of any cognitive domain.

Irmgard Emmelhainz

1. This text was published in 2008 in the Qattan Journal in Arabic.
2.  Elias Sanbar, Les Palestiniens, Photographie d’une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours, (Paris: Hazan, 2004), 7-13.
3.  Issam Nassar, “Familial Snapshots, Representing Palestine in the Work of the First Local Photographers,” History & Memory 12 no. 2 (Winter/Fall 2000), 9. 
4.  He shot it in 1964 in the Italian city of Matera, in the district of Basilicata. 
5.  Elias Sanbar, Figures du Palestinien: Identité des origines, identité du devenir, (Paris: Gallimard, (Paris: Hazan, 2004), 97.
6.  Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 54.
7.  This is a title of one of his poems from the collection Unfortunately, It was Paradise, ed. and trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
8.  Amira Hass, “You Can Drive Along and Never See an Arab,” Haaretz, January 22, 2003. Recently the Israeli court ruled out the right of  Palestinians from six villages to use route 443 adjacent to adjacent to in the West Bank linking the coastal plain to Jerusalem and built on  private expropriated Palestinian land.
9.  Cited by Said in the Preface of Dreams of a Nation, On Palestinian Cinema, ed.  Hamid Dabashi (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 2.
10. We must consider the fact that in the current globalized world we cannot see ourselves outside of spectacle –the Aristotelian social space has mutated into a global regime of the sensible made out of discursivities and visibilities appearing not only in the mass media but in art and culture as well. This is what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘ethical regime of images,’ which is concerned with knowing in what way images affect the mode of being of individuals and communities (See his The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, transl. Gabriel Rockhill, (London: Continuum 2004), 20-21).
11. This corresponds to Godard as well as to a phrase by Elias Sanbar (also quoted in the film): “When an Israeli dreams at night, he does not dream of Israel, but of Palestine, while when a Palestinian dreams at night, he absolutely does not dream of Israel, but of Palestine.” From an encounter between Godard and Sanbar on January 16^th, 2005 recounted by Christophe Kantcheff URL: http://www.politis.fr/article1213.html Date Consulted: April 1, 2008
12.  Gilles Deleuze, “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat,” Revue d’études Palestiniennes No. 10 (Winter 1984), 41-43. It must be noted that 20 years ago Deleuze  could afford to be less prudent than Godard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2004. It must also be remarked that Deleuze’s article on Arafat, which was also published in his collection of writings Deux Régimes de Fous was censored in the English translation, Two Regimes of Madness, published in 2006.
13.  This is one of the hypotheses he advances in Figures du Palestinien: Identité des origines, identité du devenir, (Paris: Gallimard, 2004) and in the interview with Gilles Deleuze, published in Libération, 8-9 mai 1989, reprinted in Deux régimes de fous, (Paris: Minuit, 19?), 179-184.
14.  Gilles Deleuze, “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat,” Revue d’études Palestiniennes No. 10 (Winter 1984), 41-43
15.  Rosemarie Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press, 1979), 27. 
16.  Rochelle Davis, “Mapping the Past, Re-creating the Homeland,” Nakba: Palestine 1948, and the Claims of Memory, Edited by Ahmad H. Sa’di & Lila Abu-Lughod, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 54.
17. Moreover, through these testimonials the dispossessed Palestinians have counter-created a collective identity in the ‘victim,’ comparable only asymmetrically to what Norman Finkelstein has termed and condemned as the holocaust industry. This is a matter of further investigation.
18.  The term ‘traumatic realism’ has also been used in reference to the Holocaust and to describe Andy Warhol’s works, Dabashi uses it here to describe the outcome of the Palestinian ‘mimetic crisis’ in self-representation. 
19.  Hamid Dabashi, Introduction to Palestinian Cinema: Dreams of a Nation, (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 12.
20.  Arguably, the image of sexy revolutionary and abject victim are both aspects of a largely Leftist sensibility. The Right has traditionally focused on the image of the terrorist, it is the idea of ‘terrorist’ versus ‘freedom fighter.’
21.  Roland Barthes, Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse, (New York: Continnuum, 1998), 3-4.
22. See Jean-François Lyotard, The differend: Phrases in Dispute, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and Avita Ronell, The Testamentary Whimper, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 nos. 2-3, (Spring/Summer 2004). 
23.  See G.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or Philosophy After the New Media (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001).
24.  ‘Bare life’ is a term coined by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to describe the life that remains outside the walls of the city and of the law, the life that may be spared but not sacrificed. See his Homo Sacer: Soverign Power and Bare Life, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: The University Press, 2003).
25.  For images by the ONU and the UNRWA see Elias Sanbar, Les Palestiniens: La photographie d’une terre et son people de 1839 a nos jours (Paris: Hazan, 2004), 293-324.
26.  Literary examples are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s and Susan Sontag’s récits de voyage “Guerre Civile” (US/Black Panthers) (1966), and “Trip to Hanoi” (1968) respectively, Julia Kristeva’s Des chinoises (1974), a sociological investigation and also a récit de voyage, Jean Genet’s novel about his many trips to Palestine, “Un captif amoureux,” (1970-86) and Dario Fo’s Fedayn: La rivoluzione palestinese attraverso la sua cultura e i suoi canti (1972). Cinematic instances are Loin du Vietnam (1967) made collectively by Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers –Huey! (1968) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo Cina (1972); dealing with post-colonial matters there are René Vautier’s films about Algeria, Pasolini’s travel account Viaggio in India (1960) and Louis Malle’s film L’Inde Phantome (1969).
27.  He produced a book of photographs of refugees and fedayeen in relationship to the film Biladi une Révolution, shot in Jordan in 1970 directed by Francis Reusser. The book was printed in Switzerland, Edited by Vaugondry, with photographs by Armand Deriaz and texts by Palestinians.
28. It must be noted in passing that the Palestinian Revolution had her own cinema and photography department, that operated as a branch of Fateh’s Information Services Bureau led by Sulafa Jadallah, Hani Johariyyeh, Mustapha Abu Ali and Khadija Habshneh. This department created a cinema of the people based on political analysis that documented the revolution for internal and external distribution. Khadija Habshneh, “Palestinian Revolution Cinema,” This Week in Palestine (January 2008), available at: http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2355&ed=149&edid=149# Date Consulted: 15 January 2008. A longer version was published in Arabic in the Newspaper El Quds, January 2008.
29.  Jean Genet, “Une rencontre avec Jean Genet” (1983), Revue d’études Palestiniennes, Special issue on Genet and the Palestinians, 30.
30.  Jean Genet in “Près d’Aljoun,” from his notes from his trip to Jordan between October 1970 and april 1971, published in L’enemi déclaré, écrits complèts No. IV, (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 182.
31.  Jean Genet in “Un rencontre avec Jean Genet,” Révue d’études palestiniennes, special number dedicated to Genet and Palestine, 29. 
32.  Jean-Luc Godard, came to Palestine in 1970 with his film collective, The Dziga Vertov Group to make a film about the struggle that was supposed to be called Until Victory. The film was never finished but the Palestinian footage was incorporated in a latter version which Godard made with Anne-Marie Miéville in a film called Here and Elsewhere.
33.  Jean Genet, Captif Amoreux, (my italics)
34.   Elias Sanbar, “Vingt et un ans après,” Traffic No. 1, 1991, p. 116
35.  In France, for example, the Palestinian impasse in 1972 was articulated as lacking a cohesive strategy to resist Israel, as the fact that the guerrilla could not have defeated the enemy and had been incapable of coming up with a solution for the refugee problem. See Gérard Chailand, Voyage dans vingt ans de guerillas (Paris: l’Aube 1987), 110-115. Moreover, Jean François Kahn cites Arafat post-Black September, in reflective ‘auto-critique’: “After the poetic illusion and unbridled verbalism, we let ourselves get carried away by revolutionary exhibitionism.” Condemning the hijacking of planes, the Western diagnosis is, the Palestinian resistance has withdrawn, what is left, is their cause. See: Jean François Kahn, Les Feddayeen victimes de l’utopie, L’Express, 18-24 January 1971, 38-39.
36.  Specifically here of the French New Philosophers who became Human Rights’ staunchest advocates.
37.  Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 54.
38.  Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 167.
39.  Kristin Ross, p. 167
40.   It must be noted that the Human Rights were first declared in the French Revolution and then rearticulated following World War II; since then, they have been continually redefined, often in response to the world’s events and history. They include the right of resistance and the right to development: they are prior to political rights, which means that human rights are supposed to be inalienable and universal, free from determinations of any particular nation or state. See Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava, “The Claims of Human Rights: an Introduction,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 nos. 2-3, (Spring/Summer 2004). 
41. Jean-François Lyotard, “The General Line” (1990), Political Writings, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 110-111.
42.  Gayatari Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2-3 (Spring/Summer 2004), 524-525.
43.  See Jonathan Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media (London & New York: I.B. Thauris & Co Ltd, 1993)
44.  Thomas Keenan “Mobilizing shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2-3 (Spring/Summer 2004), 435
45.  Gayatari Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2-3  (Spring/Summer 2004), 524-525.
46.  Jean Genet, “Quatre Heures a Chattila,’ Revue d’études palestiniennes, p. 9
47. Let’s recall the fact that when disaster hits the West, wounded or dead bodies are rarely shown in the media. An example of this are the images of September 11^th that showed rubble, dust, destruction, people’s outrage and desperation but neither blood, bodies, nor the images of people falling from the towers at the time of the crashes which were immediately banned from circulation.
48.  Following Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, (London: Verso, 2002), 5, 6.
49.  Elias Sanbar, Les Palestiniens, Photographie d’une terre et de son people de 1839 à nos jours, (Paris: Hazan, 2004), 349
50.  Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
51. On my account of Palestinian suicide bombers I am almost entirely relying on Talal Asad’s brilliant account on: On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Israel’s ability to ‘hold the moral ground’ is inextricable from the way in which war and terrorism have been conceptualized, the former having legal status and the latter, illegal and immoral. After Talal Asad, Michael Waltzer (in his book Just and Unjust Wars), defines war as legitimate self-defense toward a threatened state and terrorism as illegal and morally worse than war and murder because it not only kills innocent people but introduces fear into everyday life, rendering public spaces insecure. See Asad, 23-17.
52.  See Araj, “Studies in Conflict in Terrorism,” forthcoming, 2008.
53.  Jean Baudrillard, « L’esprit du terrorisme », Le Monde,
02.11.01, available at URL: www.lemonde.fr/web/article/ 0,1-0@2-3232,36-239354,0.html,  Date Consulted 23.03.08
54.  Asad, p. 40
55.  Asad, p. 55
56.  Asad, pp. 44-52