How to Unsee Gaza: Israeli Media, State Violence, Palestinian Testimony
This essay studies the way that the traditional Israeli news media reported the Gaza war of 2008-2009 to their Jewish-Israeli target audience. My analysis pays particular attention to what the traditional Israeli media withheld from Jewish Israeli consuming publics during the course of the war -- namely, consistent depiction of the extent of Israeli inflicted violence upon Gazan people and infrastructure – and what it offered to Israeli media consumers as a wartime alternative. At the heart of this paper is a lethal incident of Israeli state violence in Gaza, querying its anomalous status as a Palestinian testimonial at a moment when Palestinian eye-witnesses accounts were largely absent from public Israeli view in media sources. The essay asks: how does one make sense of this scene of Palestinian trauma and the enormous attention it garnered among Israelis in the context of a national media that worked to systematically occlude the view of Israeli state violence and its Palestinian victims? In my conclusion, I will suggest ways this incident would anticipate the subsequent relationship between Israeli state violence and Palestinian visibility in the age of the smartphone witness.
