#PEACE4IsraelAndPalestine As a campaigner, Ziadah is well aware of the importance of Western media as vehicle to publicize the plight of Palestinians. She accepts the necessity of speaking and writing in sound-bites and within word limits, and of providing statistics and citations to UN resolutions in order to come across as credible and reasonable. But while this is a job that is performed miles away from the violence, we get a sense of its risks and hazards when Ziadah confronts the following question from a journalist. ”[H]e asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children?” Ziadah must smile, have patience and respond in a tone and language that are out of joint with her anger and rage. The Palestinian campaigner’s job of representing the massacre of Palestinians within the allowable frames of the Western media is an unenviable one. The way that she comports herself before the journalist will affect how the massacre of which she speaks will be reported; appearing before the media, she herself must literally embody the massacre. “Today my body is a TV’d massacre“, the poem’s opening line, sums up this feeling. If she ever mentions “apartheid” or “occupation” in her response, then they would dismiss her as a hater of Jews. She is counseled to keep her response “non-political”: “We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story./ … You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story./ … How about you give us a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication?/ How about you?/ Do you have enough bone-broken limbs to cover the sun?/ Hand me over your dead and give me the list of their names in one thousand two hundred word limits.” Ziadah’s poetic rendition of this encounter with the journalist distills a number of insights into the mediated relationship between the Western spectator and the massacred Palestinians. The humans in the “human stories” which the media are interested in are only human bodies, not really Palestinians, because they are abstracted from their political context and other particular qualities, including agency. The “human” is thus the woman in Gaza who needs medication, the masses with broken limbs, and the dead assembled as names in a list. The “humans” in these human stories are what Giorgio Agamben called “bare lives”; that is to say, barely breathing and almost dead, if not already dead. These are the humans with whom the spectator could (be allowed to) relate with and accord sympathy to. They might even be said to have “human rights”.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 09:49:02 +0000
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