Rationale

Larisa Shaterian
April 2007
Revolutionary Media
Professor Holly Lewis

Rationale for Final Project

I have made a triptych of the Beit Hanoun Mosque Incident of November 3, 2006. At 3AM on November 3, Palestinian militants sought shelter from Israeli tanks in An-Nasser Mosque in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. When the morning arrived, it was clear that they would either be killed in the mosque or surrender to the Israeli soldiers and face an indefinite term of imprisonment and torture. Local radio stations picked up this story and called upon people to help the besieged men. A blog source says that the women of Beit Hanoun spontaneously gathered and marched to the mosque, while the New York Times and the LA Times say that the radio stations specifically told the women to go to the mosque and help the estimated 60 militants. In any case, that morning, a large group of women marched to the mosque (the LA Times estimates the group at 200 ). They split up, one group forming a human shield between the Israeli tanks and the mosque and the other escorting the men out of the mosque. At a certain point, the soldiers who had been besieging the militants began to shoot at the women. Nineteen women sustained injuries and two died from them. All of the militants were safely evacuated. Minutes later, the mosque collapsed, weakened from Israeli bulldozer attacks during the night of fighting.
From images available on the web I have “recreated” the Beit Hanoun Mosque Incident. It is an incomplete picture because the only images are from one or two Reuters cameramen who photographed and filmed parts of the event. The journalists seem to have followed the women’s demonstration to the mosque, the shooting, and the arrival of the ambulances. The dislocated viewer (that is anybody who was not there) does not see the perspective of the militants in the mosque, the women at the march, or the soldiers in their tanks. The viewer only sees the perspective of a zoom lens held by a Reuters journalist. Although it is by means of this lens that it is possible for the dislocated viewer to view these events, it must be noted that her perspective is formed by the lens and by the man who took the footage.
As Paul Virilio demonstrates in his book, War and Cinema, the camera and the gun are both weapons of war. The experience and representation of war is just as much of a battlefield as the actual one. Moreover, according to the Bush Administration the battlefield of the “War on Terror” is everywhere. This definition further blurs the lines between the representation of war and the actual experience of fighting. How much dislocated viewers are invested in the war depends on the way they see it. This logic may afford tools of perception just as much importance as machines of destruction. There is only one available visual perspective of the Mosque Incident, created by the Reuters journalist(s). However, the same images of the unarmed women marching and running away from tank fire are used to illustrate articles claiming that terrorists used these innocent women to save their lives or articles claiming that the women pictured are mothers, wives, and sisters saving the lives of their sons, husbands, and brothers. In both cases, it is the people who are not seen, the militants in the mosque, whose moral character drastically changes. Although any represenatation of the militans would probably show men with guns, the fact that they are not seen at all makes it easier for dislocated journalists to describe them either as savage terrorists or sympathetic young men. Because there are no images of their faces during the Incident, dislocated journalists can make their readers imagine their faces—were they fiercely grimacing, were their eyes wide with fear, or were they calmly praying? The dislocated journalists, however, cannot play on their readers’ imaginations when it comes to the women, the characters photographed in this story. All sources agree on several facts: the women marched to the mosque, freed the militants, and the Israeli Army shot at them leaving two dead and seventeen wounded. The images of this event confirm these facts. In war, as it is the purpose of a gun to kill and to maim, it is the purposes of the camera to create a collection of evidence that is almost impossible to refute and to convey an honest emotional message about what it was like at the event.
Despite the fact that almost every image of war is now made digitally, the legitimacy of digital images themselves is very hard to prove. The nature of digital imaging stipulates that there is no original: the image is simply data stored on a memory card, hard drive, or CD. Unlike film, digital images do not care about what they are stored on—they merely require something physical that can store digital data. Although war photographer James Natacheway now prints his black and white images with a digital printer to get the “most perfect” images possible, he still shoots rolls of film. He is not old-fashioned. He knows that he can always show a physical negative to a critic to prove that he bore witness to the horrific situations that he shot. A piece of film, being made out of silver ions in gel on plastic, reacts in predictable ways to different conditions which makes the negative itself very hard to manipulate. However, manipulations to a digital image are often impossible to spot. A compressed file contains no traces of the manipulation done to it before compression. In digital imaging, each new manipulation can be a new image, for there are no originals.
For my triptych, I printed out different manipulations of the same image and cut out forms and glued them on top of each other, adding a slight three dimensionality to my layers. I did contrast and color adjustment on Photoshop before doing the major work with scissors and glue. I darkened some of the women’s coats with a sharpie to flatten and highlight them against other women’s black coats. I manipulated the images to emphasize key elements of the story and to add life and movement to the crowds. Through my triptych I hope to make the story clearer. I combined an image of women being shot at with the image of the arrival of the ambulances because the ambulances came for the women who had been shot. The two images were taken from the same perspective, so I placed one woman over an ambulance—where she would be if the ambulance had not blocked the camera’s view. I wanted to make images that were conscious of the fact that they were manipulated, which is why my changes are so obvious. Although the fact that with Photoshop one can easily change the meaning of an image can be disturbing, but it is not always a negative thing. With my triptych I wish to acknowledge the fact that a digital image is very easy to manipulate but that these manipulations can also aid in communicating the evidence that the image presents.
The Beit Hanoun Mosque Incident is a cybernetic event. According to Donna Haraway’s definition in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a cyborg is “a hybrid of machine and organism.” The militants most likely used their cell phones to communicate their situation inside the mosque to the radio stations, and they and the soldiers communicated in gunshots. If it had not been for the radio, the women would not have mobilized with such speed and precision, if at all. However, the most interesting human/machine combination of that day was the human shield that the women of Beit Hanoun formed to protect the other women and the escaping militants. When a person is used as a human shield, often by an occupying Army doing a house-to-house search, this person is dehumanized by the action because his body is used as a barrier between soldiers and irate residents with weapons. It is the fact that the fact that the human shield is from the community that stops irate residents from shooting at the soldiers much more effectively than a physical shield would. The women, unlike most human shields one hears about in the news, decided to be a human wall. (For the purposes of this argument, a wall is a machine that serves as a barrier.) This seems to have been an effective tactic for, although the Israeli Army was eager to bulldoze part of the wall of the mosque, they were not as forthcoming to destroy the wall of women. By humanizing a wall, it seems that the women made a stronger wall because although it is almost normal to bulldoze a physical wall, it is morally heinous to bulldoze of 100 women. When one compares the fate of the women to the fate of the mosque, it is clear that a wall of women is better protection for 60 armed men than the walls of a mosque. At the end of the day two women were dead but all that was left standing of the mosque was its minaret. The mosque was destroyed. Only 1% of the group of women were killed. In certain cases, it seems that by making oneself do the work of a machine, one can actually be stronger than that machine because there is a moral weight attached to a human person.
In the last screen of the triptych there is an image from one of my own contact sheets. On it is a picture of a wall in the West Bank city of Nablus. Posters of martyrs and politicians cover the wall, many peeling off to reveal others in the winter rain. On the upper right-hand corner of the frame there is a picture of the Beit Hanoun women running away from the gunshots. By placing the women in the company of the politicians and martyrs, whoever put the poster up acknowledged their political role. As all nationalities are imagined and depend on national myths, the poster says that these women contribute to the national myth of what it means to be Palestinian. By virtue of the fact that they were unarmed women, they saved 60 lives.
I chose to use the story of the women of Beit Hanoun because it caught my attention because one almost never hears stories of women and non-violent action coming out of Gaza. I used the form of the triptych as a personal reaction against the Spectacle and because I wanted to slow down and re-visualize the usual way in which news stories are told.











Citations
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 2006

Arafat, Jehad. “The Courageous Women of Beit Hanun.” Posted by angela on her blog
Citizen Shift>> Community Blog >>What I say 3 times is true – Palestinian Perspectives. Posted on 22 November, 2006 at 11:49 pm http://citizen.nfb.ca/blogs/category/what-i-say-3-times-is-true-palestinian-perspectives/ Accessed April 29, 2007

Bordeaux, Richard and abu Alouf, Rushdi. “Women acting as human shields aid escape
of Palestinian militants” Los Angeles Times 3 November 2006, online ed. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-ex-mideast3nov04,0,2270037.story?coll=la-home-headlines Accessed April 29, 2007

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century.” The New Media Reader. Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin
and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachucettes: 2003. 516-541

Myre, Greg and El-Khodary, Taghreed. “Israel Kills 2 Women During Mosque Siege.”
New York Times 3 November 2006, internet ed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/04mideastcnd.html?ex=1320210000&en=2ae84b101763d1e6&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss Accessed April 29, 2007

Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema an excerpt from the Course Reader