Watched the One World Media awards and was particularly taken with a project organized by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in Occupied Territories. This was the Camera Distribution Project, which put a hundred video cameras in the hands of various Palestinians living in highly contested and violent zones in Gaza and the West Bank. B’Tselem then gave them training and let them film the daily trials, humiliations and violence that their lives have become. The raw footage from all these ordinary Palestinians reveals a personal side of the conflict that is rarely seen in the media, and places the tools that allow them to document these injustices right in their own hands. It’s harrowing stuff:
“On 8 June ‘08, two settlers tried unsuccessfully to drive shepherds off Palestinian land near Khirbet Susiya. After they left, the shepherds called relatives for reinforcement, fearing an attack. Among those who came was Muna a-Nawaj’ah, with a video camera she received from B’Tselem. Ten minutes later, she filmed four masked men armed with clubs approaching the family and attacking one of the shepherds. They then severely beat other members of the family.”
“The Abu ‘Ayesha family lives across the street from the extremist Tel Rumeida settlement in Hebron, West Bank. They suffer severe and frequent harassment at the hands of the settlers. 14-year-old Fida’ Abu ‘Ayesha has taken to using the camera as a form of protection, and as a way of documenting her reality. This is some of her footage, filmed between July 2006 and August 2007.”
You can view more here.
Seeing footage like this makes me realize that I am extremely privileged to live in a place where walking out of the house doesn’t mean being subjected to stones, spit, baseball bats to the head and invective, and also that being a child does not make you automatically innocent – in fact sometimes being a kid lets you get away with things that would otherwise get you shot or land you in jail (if the police actually cared about what was happening.)
In any case the Camera Distribution Project is one of the many new faces of the media. The line between journalist and subject is slowly erased. The means of production is handed directly to the producers and the line of distribution is open (more or less) to the non-privileged. The so called ‘virtue of objectivity’ that is so highly prized in journalism is shown to have a bias of its own – the bias of the spectator, which is a bias of values. What is valuable to a journalist is not what is necessarily valuable to the subject. Here the subject is the journalist, and that subjectivity shows itself with none of the shame attached to bias – it is merely what it is. Authority is derived from the truth of the detail, and not from the truth of the ‘whole’, which is a misnomer anyways because any idea of a ‘whole’ can never be a complete reality, but simply an imposition of a reality. So yeah, the award was well deserved and I would love to see the project exported to as many of the world’s conflict zones as possible.
I love how in one of the videos, the woman operating the camera uses it as she would a gun, aiming it at the injustices and their perpetrators with the eye of a sniper. The violence of the camera has replaced the violence of the gun, and while the effect is much less immediate it is just as final, and if there is a death, it is only the death of immorality’s blindness to itself.
