Armed with a Camera: Gender, Human Rights, and Visual Documentation in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

This article offers an explanation for the use of the documenter’s gender as part of human rights politics. I examine the case of the Camera Project of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The organization, which distributes video cameras to Palestinian residents, celebrates the participation of women in the documenting project and declares that the women’s videos capture a unique point of view. In the article I question why the gender of a given witness would be emphasized as essential since there is no clear distinction in the visual outcome—that is, in the videos—between those taken by female and male photographers. I analyze visual material from the project and combine this examination with interviews with Palestinian women photographers, all of which reveals that their gender identity is not crucial to the message that the videos try to impart about Israel’s occupation. Drawing on critical feminist scholarship on the gendering of warfare and international law, I argue that preexisting cultural ideas about gender affect the organization’s strategic framing process.