Rebecca Stein

This project investigates the impact of digital camera technologies on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Based on ethnographic research with a range of Israeli institutional actors, from the military to the human rights community, it studies the degree to which new camera technologies and networked photo sharing practices are altering the ways that Israeli military rule is practiced, represented, documented, and prosecuted, and how the viral visibility of military rule is affecting how mainstream Jewish Israelis understand themselves as an occupying power. Through archival research, this project also tracks the history of the Israeli military’s relationship to photographic technologies as tools of control, surveillance, and documentation as well as the history of the mainstream Israeli media’s relationship to the visual archive of occupation. It explores the ways that new technologies, changing practices of seeing, and new visual fields are recalibrating the terms of Israeli sovereignty.