Immigrant Protest by Tyler Imogen Marciniak Katarzyna

Author:Tyler, Imogen,Marciniak, Katarzyna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.5. Activists in Bil’in make a banner, 2006. Courtesy of Jacob Ketriol

Yet the issue here is not one of visibility alone. The way that visibility is attained or allotted is also important. Writing about his experiences among Palestinian refugees and fighters in Jordan in the early 1970s in his book Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet emphasized how the Fedayeen (guerillas) were turned into “stars” by the foreign news media. One Palestinian fighter is recounted as declaring: “Stars, that’s what we were” (Genet 1986, 12). Another observes, however: “But you’d turned us into monsters, too. You called us terrorists! We were terrorist stars” (ibid., 13–14). Palestinian fighters could gain visibility, but it often came at a cost. Moreover, the terrorist is not the only image ascribed to the Palestinians within the internationalized iconic order. The other significant image is that of the Palestinian as victim. This image is partly the result of efforts on the part of Palestinians to gain acknowledgment from international observers in terms of their human rights. But the effects of this emphasis upon victimhood are not necessarily politically effective simply because the iteration of images of Palestinian suffering has the potential to naturalize this condition, encouraging a perception of Palestinians as those who exist to suffer. Even for those who are empathetic toward Palestinian plight, perceptions of Palestinians as essential victims do not encourage seeing them as equals. Palestinians thus come to be viewed as those who lack, not only human rights, but also political agency.8 This is why the images of Jarrar setting up his exhibition at the Hawara checkpoint are so important, as is the footage of Bilal Tamimi talking about his work as a filmmaker/reporter in David Reeb’s video. This imagery makes visible a different kind of Palestinian agency. But even this visibility can be defined as something that delimits Palestinian political agency. The roles adopted by Jarrar and Tamimi as image makers are that of documentarians who reveal the plight of their own people. Such acts of image making are important for the visibility of the Palestinian experience under occupation yet, at the same time, they also are framed by a particular delimitation of the relationship between Palestinians and cultural production that affirms a naturalized link between Palestinian image making and documentary media. This point can be further understood via an observation made by Rancière:

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