In May 2022, the longtime Palestinian reporter for Al Jazeera, Shireen Abu Aqleh, was killed by an Israeli soldier. Rebecca Stein could have predicted everything that followed. Although the Israeli military would admit responsibility months later, in the immediate aftermath a military spokesperson said about Abu Aqleh and her colleagues, “They're armed with cameras, if you'll permit me to say so” (Times of Israel, 12 May 2022). Meanwhile, the video of Abu Aqleh and her team under fire circulated widely, as did official Israeli talking points about other possible shooters. These images and talking points initiated yet another round in the contest to control the media coverage, what the Israeli military calls “another war zone” (quoted in Stein, 136). From their point of view, the State of Israel's legitimacy is at stake in the circulation of these images, and so the producers of critical images can be treated as “dangerous” targets (39, 51). For the state's critics, like the Israeli human rights NGO B'Tselem, such images represent a possible means of prodding an increasingly unmoved and hostile Israeli news audience (114–120). Given these high stakes, the history of these images is vital to understanding how the visual field of the violence of the Israeli settler–colonial project is mediated through changing technologies.
Here then is the importance of Rebecca Stein's new book, Screen Shots. It provides us with a systematic look at the histories—the shorter term of digital technologies and the longer term that preceded it—of this visual field. This is not to say that Stein has written a history per se; rather this is an ethnographic analysis of changing technologies with exacting attention to historical process. Screen Shots examines in detail adoption of photographic technologies (the camera, the photograph, the video) by Israel's highly militarized social institutions. Screen Shots also provides insight into some of the ways Palestinians and left-wing Israeli NGOs have been challenging that regime through their own kinds of photographic documentation. Stein's method is to follow the incorporation of photographic technologies into different organizations and sites. She illuminates these processes by focusing on how these technologies fail, in two senses: first, how they fail to live up to the hopes and fantasies of those who wield them, and second, how they are prone to a “range of breakdowns and glitches, lags and lapses” (14).
Stein examines the changing reflexivity of the visual field. For example, Stein details how the Israeli military came to think it needed trained “soldier photographers,” who could potentially document all of the military's encounters with Palestinians, with a fantasy of never being slow to respond to criticism (see especially Chapters 1 and 5). Stein also describes the events leading to B'Tselem's effort to equip and train West Bank Palestinians with digital cameras as a means of documenting human rights violations (Chapters 2 and 4).
Screen Shots continues themes from Stein's earlier work. The writer has generally taken a skeptical view of fetishes of technology and of the state, and in this book she addresses both. As before, she produces a useful corrective to both apologists and critics who treat the Israeli state as fully coherent and omnipotent. In Itineraries in Conflict (2008), Stein cast state tourism planning as haphazard, and in Digital Militarism (2015, with Adi Kuntsman) the skepticism is focused on the celebratory story of new media and the supposed role of this media in revolution. In Screen Shots, Stein's skepticism is focused on the hopes that a variety of actors develop around using new photographic technologies. In Chapter 1 she tells the story of the Israeli soldiers who founded the anti-occupation Breaking the Silence organization with a 2004 exhibit of photographs they took while in service during the Second Intifada. Stein recalls the infamous Abu Ghraib photos taken by American soldiers in Iraq during a discussion of how the Israeli military did not have extensive protocols in place about civilian technologies in a military zone. Many soldiers therefore photographed their service routinely, and these became part of the photo exhibit. This in turn was one reason that the military instituted stricter protocols around soldiers’ personal photography.
Stein takes her exploration of these themes to new places in Screen Shots. The book is full of poignant descriptions of what cameras can capture, of how they fail, and of how different actors view the results. Stein includes excellent ethnography, describing time spent with Israeli military officials, dissident soldiers, B'Tselem employees, Palestinian activists, and Israeli settlers to consider how they viewed images, and to what end those images could be used in the struggle over the visual field.
One cannot help but participate in the visual field that Stein analyzes. Stein's methodology leads to some truly heart-wrenching descriptions. How can we read impassively—with scholarly distance—as Stein reminds us of Bilal Tamimi's video, taken when an Israeli battalion raids his house in Nabi Saleh in the middle of the night as part of what the military calls “mapping”? Tamimi must wake his young children and have them identified and documented by soldier photographers. Most of these photos will be deleted, Stein explains in Chapter 1, as these photographic exercises “were performative spectacles of military power, ‘demonstrations of presence’” (42). Photography has been integrated into military practice in this instance to leave Palestinians with the knowledge that they have been identified through a photo, at gunpoint, and to imprint the image of Israeli soldiers and their militarized violence on even the youngest of children.
Many will find it useful to read Stein's careful history of how intellectuals and Israeli officials came to repudiate such heartbreaking videos, and how Palestinians thereby become “impossible witnesses.” Stein traces what she calls the “repudiation script” back to the work of two academics. They insist that the widely viewed footage of the killing of 12-year-old Muhammad Al-Durrah in 2000 was staged, initiating audiences in the practice of doubting all documentation of Palestinian injuries (75–80). Stein also explains how this repudiation script became entrenched among Israeli officials, intellectuals, and a large portion of the Israeli public.
As the book closes, Stein reflects on her attention to failures of cameras, especially by the Israeli military: “It is my hope that such scenes of failure, with the Israeli state and its technologies out of synch, can provide a modest means of unsettling the colonial present. Perhaps in such failures, other political futures can become visible” (162). She reminds us of what can be achieved with trenchant and systematic critique—even as we may feel overwhelmed by the obduracy of state violence.
Screen Shots enters a literature that at its core examines new media and photographic or journalistic realism in Palestine and Israel. As evidenced by the book's dense footnotes, Stein's range is (as usual) remarkable: she is equally well-versed in theories of photography and technological change as in the study and history of Palestine and Israel. Here she provides an excellent framework for examining a range of questions, from the current technologies of military surveillance to digital witnessing to the fantasies associated with digital media. We are fortunate to have this seminal work as a guide as we try to make other political futures become visible.
