Watching over Palestine
"This photograph of Kufr Bir'im was taken about one month
after the state of Israel was established. But this wasn't the
first aerial photograph Jews had taken of Arab villages. A Jewish
'air service' had been operating in Palestine's skies since 1947
and contributed to the systematic generation of intelligence on the
Arabs. It could do so because the British Mandate did not demand a
monopoly of the skies. The lives of the people who've just finished
harvesting their grain and bringing it to the threshing floor
aren't visible in this bird's-eye view. Instead we see the
environment of people's lives in military terms - access roads,
emplacements, escape routes, firing positions, etc. [...]"
1
In Ariella Azoulay's appropriated photograph of
the Palestinian town of Kufr Bir'im, loaned to her by Nahida Zahra,
a second-generation refugee, she provides the above caption as a
counter to the official Israeli version of events. The landscape
appears pock-marked with open, circular spaces to the right of the
city centre, where stacks of white cubes are interconnected and
seemingly built one upon another. A line snakes around the
perimeter, demarcating the space between Kufr Bir'im and the
surrounding hills, intermittent trees, fields differentiated only
by the subtle shades of grey in this black-and-white photograph. In
the image, the inhabitants of the village are invisible, and
intended to remain that way. One need not - should not - think of
the people occupying these spaces. Everyday human life is
abstracted into a series of blocks, passageways, and potential
targets.
This isn't accidental. The detachment of the soldier from his
victims is paramount in encouraging them to take action as well as
to deal with its consequences. As Dave
Grossman has noted, in his book On Killing, the closer the proximity of
the soldier to conflict, the stronger the effect on his (un)
willingness to pull the trigger. In his analysis of distance of
target against general capability to kill, the bomber, along with
the artillery crew, represents the maximum range,
"defined as a range where the killer is unable to perceive
his individual victims without using some form of mechanical
assistance - binoculars, radar, periscope, or remote TV
camera." 2
Grossman states:
"Bombing deaths are buffered by the all-important factor of
distance. They represent an impersonal act of war in which specific
deaths are unintended and almost accidental. ('Collateral damage'
is the military euphemism for such killing of civilians while
bombing military targets.) Execution of innocent civilians (...) is
on the other hand a highly personal act of psychotic irrationality
that openly refutes the humanity of the victims. So what is the
difference? Ultimately, the difference is distance."
3
This detachment through distance is more recently visible in the
increasing prevalence of drone missions where pilots are physically
absent from the cockpit, moving and manipulating their vehicles
from remote locations (such as C.I.A. headquarters in Langley,
Virginia or Creech Air Force Base in Nevada). Similarly, the
diminishment of a temporal delay between the locating of a target
and subsequent attack might also be seen as an attempt to bypass
individual deliberation, as
"[drones] provide an near-instantaneous responsiveness -
dramatically shrinking what U.S. military targeting experts call
the 'find-fix-finish' loop - that most other platforms lack."
4
Time to think, to consider one's actions, is diminished.
While Azoulay is careful to specify the exact circumstances of
this image - the evacuation of Kufr Bir'im's inhabitants and
deliberate erasure of its architecture - the aerial military
photograph is loaded with insinuations, and expectations, of
overhead assault. The surveillance plane is a precursor to the
bomber, relaying the preliminary information required to assess and
determine possible targets while, at the same time, capturing only
the formal, surface qualities of the cityscape. The photograph
implies an objectification and dehumanisation of the inhabitants
below, akin to the linguistic terminology that Grossman rightly
identifies, where 'signature strikes' refer to attacks on
individuals or groups who meet certain, unspecified definitions of
enemy combatants and 'bug splat', rather than 'collateral damage',
stands for unintended civilian casualties. These euphemisms act as
a corollary to aerial bombardment, a mode of distancing and
abstracting the reality below.
Azoulay's text cuts through the strategic interpretation of the
photograph, ensuring that the full consequences and moral
implications of Israeli actions are embedded within the image. Her
caption continues:
"The Arab Israeli citizens who were expelled from the
village still live nearby today. Had the rights stemming from
Israeli citizenship not been applied differentially to different
sectors of the population, they would long ago have obtained
redress and compensation.
This contextualisation doesn't necessarily offer that, but it
does close in on whom exactly lives within the image.
Chris Clarke
(critic and curator, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College
Cork)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Ariella
Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of
Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, (London: Pluto
Press, 2011), p. 249
2. Lt. Col. Dave
Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to
Kill in War and Society, (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), p.
107
3. ibid. p.
106
4. Micah Zenko,
Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies, (New York: Council
on Foreign Relations, 2013), p. 6. http://www.cfr.org/wars-and-warfare/reforming-us-drone-strike-policies/p29736?co=C009601