Witnessing
Witnessing Organizations as Agents of Parrhesia
Organized grassroots witnessing, like the draft resisters’ proclamations of dissent discussed in the previous chapter, constitutes a central discursive move in the activist repertoire of the anti-occupation movement. Testimonial projects that claim recognition for socially and politically marginalized positions by inserting alternative voices into the public sphere often include individuals’ autobiographical testimonies produced through organized activist campaigns that are grounded in a view of speech as a form of action. Since, as Frosh (2006) puts it, “organizations can be witnesses, or at least originators and purposive agents of witnessing texts” (p. 276), they can be referred to as “witnessing organizations.” In the contemporary scene, witnessing organizations typically include alternative media outlets that provide venues for circulating journalistic reports that are ignored or shunned by mainstream media as well as archival projects of the type discussed in this chapter with reference to the Israeli veterans’ organization Breaking the Silence (Katriel, 2009; Katriel & Shavit, 2013; Shavit & Katriel, 2009). Much like the public letters of dissent discussed in the previous chapter, witnessing organizations work to transform personal experiences into political acts. They place discourse at the center of their activist repertoire, trusting it to carry the main burden of their oppositional message. Unlike the public refusal letters that advocate noncooperation with the state’s conscription law, witnessing organizations refrain from engaging in civil disobedience but engage in what we might call “parrhesiastic witnessing.” In speaking truth to power, they highlight the representational function of discourse as a tool of description, insisting on the concreteness and specificity of the social reality to which they attest. Yet, in Foucault’s (2001) words, the function of their witnessing as acts of parrhesia “is not to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but [it] rather has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor or of the speaker himself” (p. 17). In the case at hand, soldier-witnesses’ testimonies depict the everyday reality of the scene of occupation, confessing their past transgressions (Helman, 2015) andholding their imagined interlocutor - Israeli society - responsible for casting young soldiers in the role of occupiers. I propose to view this parrhesi-astic witnessing as a culturally recognized verbal ritual that is anchored in, and shaped by, the entrepreneurial or organizational context in which it is played out. The performative role of this verbal ritual is to break the silence that shrouds the topic of the occupation in mainstream Israeli society - to create presence out of absence. The ritualization of witnessing makes it a constitutive act of speech - speech as action in the most radical sense.
The witnessing acts discussed in this chapter construct the on-the-ground reality of the occupation regime as observed and experienced by Israeli soldiers who have become uneasy with its brutalities, and who therefore agreed to contribute their testimonies to the organizational archive of Breaking the Silence. Their often detailed protocol-style recounting of specific incidents seeks to establish the facticity of the soldier-witnesses’ testimonials, which draws its narrative authority from their military role as active participants in the scene of occupation. The following examples are illustrative of soldiers’ typically straightforward and down-to-earth descriptions of the routine violence of the occupation regime as it might have been observed by an outside reporter:
A patrol in the Bethlehem area. A commander takes an innocent civilian into one of the alleys, puts a gun-barrel to its [his] head, and tells him he is going to be shot. When the civilian cries, the commander tells him it was a joke and that he can go.1
Capture of two stone throwers, bringing them to the post and reporting the incident... When everyone came back the whole platoon beat the prisoners severely, while they were tied up and blindfolded, unable to move or see.2
The officer and soldier randomly gathered 20 Palestinian men, lined them up in the middle of the street in the sun for an hour not letting them move. When I approached the officer to inquire what this was all about, he answered “Just for fun, you know.” When they released them, they slapped them and let them go.3
During our stay in the [broadcasting station] building...One of the corporals...went up to the top floor, took a “mixer”, and put it in his personal bag in front of our eyes. When asked why he did it by the members of the Company, he avoided the question and let it go at that.4
In recounting such incidents of humiliation, torment, or looting without any commentary, soldier-witnesses provide factual information that seems to speak for itself. This type of information builds up the overall scene of the occupation as a system infused with human rights abuses that mark the cumulative indifference and harshness of Israel’s regime of control over the Palestinian population. In addition to providing information about this matrix of control, soldiers’ testimonies at times attest to the adverse personal and moral implications these oppressive practices have for the Israeli soldiers who enact them. The following are three examples of such introspective testimonies that testify to soldiers’ deep unease at their martial engagements which led them to question the nature and legitimacy of their military role:
Army service in Hebron is mainly contact with civilians. Human contact, constantly.
People in a state the likes of which I had never witnessed before, poverty and misery that I could only dream existed. And I got into such a state where people come up and plead with me as though I were some -I don’t know - some ruler, just because I wear a uniform and carry a gun, so that I’d let them pass through where they’re not allowed. This was our daily dilemma...Because anyone who decides that a certain place is out of bounds, or places curfew so that people can’t get out of their homes for over half a year, doesn’t really know the situation on the ground the way we do, as soldiers who man the posts and know these people.5
I personally, sort of had this inner process, which made me kind of confront myself. I found myself in a situation that I didn’t know how to cope with. It had me checking myself all the time to see how I held to my values, how low I could go, because once it becomes a routine, you reach a situation where you can’t control it, it’s your routine, it’s your day-to-day, you just get orders and you carry them out without giving them a second thought.6
What I finally understood at the end of my army service, the thought that bothered me most was whether I’d protected myself or my country. Towards the end I understood this better, that I got to the point where I was watching out for myself, because I didn’t identify with the ideology...7
Incorporated into Breaking the Silence’s organizational archive, these soldierly testimonies, like the public letters of dissent discussed in the previous chapter, become codified and ritualized expressions of collective resistance available to the public at large. They can be similarly read as involving a double gesture of dissent that combines a rejection of the occupation regime with a reaffirmation of dissenters’ sense of belonging and patriotic sentiments. Soldier-witnesses’ testimonies about human rights violations by the Israeli military, and their confessional testimonies of their personal involvement in such transgressions, both constitute oppositional knowledge that destabilizes hegemonic positions according to which the ongoing occupation is an acceptable, if perhaps undesirable, political arrangement.8 The normalization of the occupation is grounded in a conspiracy of silence, a state of denial that, as Zerubavel (2010) describes it, “involves more than just the absence of action, since the things we are silent about are in fact actively avoided” (p. 33). Acts of witnessing in this context of advocacy thus address the gap between personal awareness and public discourse, between common knowing and acknowledging.
The employment of witnessing as defiant speech as a tool of advocacy has become an increasingly central feature in activist repertoires in the past few decades (Ristovska, 2018). Its rise in response to political violence and humanitarian crises has been insightfully explored by Givoni (2014), who says: “During the 20th century, witnessing outgrew its original affiliations with legal evidence and religious belief and became a social vocation in its own right” (p. 123). She analyzes three different historically situated models of ethically infused testimonies that share “the reframing of witnessing and testimony as gestures that, given the proper guidance and support, are bound to instigate a subjective transformation and not just produce empirical or metaphysical truths” (p. 126). They include Norton Cru’s (1988 [1929]) project of soldiers’ testimonies related to World War I,9 the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University,10 and the testimonial project of Doctors Without Borders^ which is associated with third world humanitarian emergencies. Exploring these high-profile episodes in the genealogy of twentieth-century witnessing, Givoni (2014) delineates the emergence of context-specific forms and norms that shape witnessing as a subjectively oriented, yet organizationally anchored, speech activity that serves as “an ever more viable alternative to traditional modes of political action and participation” (p. 136).
Organized oppositional witnessing is thus a discourse-centered form of activism that mobilizes personal testimonies as sites of knowledge production in and through which witnesses become who they are. When designed to expose suppressed knowledge, witnessing acts become parrhesiastic acts, enactments of defiant discourse. This is captured by the vernacular phrase “breaking the silence” (which gives its name to the organization on whose work I draw in the present and the following chapters). The silence it breaks is what Winter (2010) refers to as “political silence,” a socially constructed silence designed to “suspend or truncate open conflict over the meaning and/or justification of violence, either domestic or trans-national” (p. 5). As a discursive act, breaking the silence is underwritten by a language ideology in which speech is viewed as a form of action. The continuity between military action and discourse-centered activism is explicitly stated in soldier-witnesses’ collective self-introduction on the cover-page of one of Breaking the Silence’s early booklets: “During our service we successfully fulfilled a wide range of military tasks. There is one task left: to tell, to speak, and to hide nothing.”12 Silence-breakers insist on giving voice to previously suppressed voices (including self-censored ones). Indeed, the new presence of such voices in the public sphere actually works to frame theirabsence in retrospect as the product of silencing by power-holders who seek to maintain their position through keeping things as they are. Thus, writing about silencing and breaking the silence from a politically sensitive theological perspective, Brueggerman (2018) says: “Silencing is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo...Silence breakers characteristically insist that the old patterns of power must be disrupted and re-configured” (p. 9). He identifies the figure of Pharaoh as the metaphor for all silencers -the privileged ones, who in the biblical tradition included kings, priests, scribes, but also “the crowd.” In his view, silencing as a strategy for maintaining power, and breaking the silence as a strategy for resisting the power of domination, are fundamental to the dynamics of human societies:
...the ongoing historical process can be seen as an unequal contest between the silencers and those who would break the silence in the interest of new historical possibility. The contest is unequal because the silencers have better means of communication and control, not least management and ownership of most of the public media.
(p. 10)
Accordingly, the contest of power is relegated to the sphere of knowledge and information, marking an effort to shape the public agenda through the rhetoric of presence. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) stress the politicized nature of the rhetoric of presence, saying: “The part that is played by [rhetorical] selection is so obvious that when facts are mentioned, we must always ask ourselves what it is that their use can strengthen or weaken” (p. 116). Silence-breakers, then, respond to the suppression of particular issues and topics by producing discourses that can counter present power arrangements and dominant social imaginaries, thereby opening the door to a change of perspectives among audiences who are willing to listen, and who might, in turn, coalesce into counter-publics (Warner, 2002). The silence-breaking move, as Brueggerman stresses, is grounded in the silence-breaker’s fundamental faith in the transformative and emancipatory capacity of truthful discourse. Such speech counts as full-fledged action in Arendt’s (1958) terms - it is speech that discloses who the actor joining the ongoing cultural conversation is. It is therefore speech that can generate new chains of speech and action, holding new possibilities for political life.
The main goal of witnessing as a form of discourse-centered activism, therefore, is to provide alternative information based on firsthand, credible knowledge that audiences can rely on in forming their position in relation to a particular state of affairs. This oppositional knowledge is disseminated through organizational platforms that mobilize the aura of authenticity carried by personal voices to challenge widely accepted truisms, arguments, and representations. The oppositional knowledge thus circulated is hoped to move audiences into embracing, or at least entertaining, alternative social imaginaries that have the potential to destabilize the status quo. The circulation of such counter-hegemonic knowledge involves claims to facticity that foreground the representational function of discourse. At the same time, this knowledge production highlights the consequentiality of discourse as an instrument of social change. It thus draws a link between responsibility-taking and evidentiary claims, a link addressed within a linguistic anthropological framework (Hill & Irvine, 1992) in terms of the relationship between agency and knowledge. As Hill and Irvine put it, “‘responsibility’ points toward the agency aspect of meaning while ‘evidence’ points towards the knowledge aspect” (p. 2). Individual soldiers’ testimonies by Breaking the Silence are primarily oriented to the epistemic, evidentiary dimension of their witnessing, but they also include explicit references to taking responsibility. The project as a whole is explicitly framed in the organization’s published mission statements as a form of responsibility-oriented, evidence-based venture by so-called “moral entrepreneurs” (Becker, 1963).
Projects centered on the production of oppositional knowledge in grassroots politics can be identified in Keane’s (2009) terms as part of today’s post-representative or “monitory” democracies. He says: “In the era of monitory democracy, the constant public scrutiny of power by hosts of differently sized monitory bodies with footprints large and small makes it the most energetic, most dynamic form of democracy ever” (p. 743). Monitory democracy is associated with the rise of media-saturated societies as well as with the emergence of contemporary audit cultures (Strathern, 2000). It delineates a techno-social landscape characterized by a demand for accountability, by institutional arrangements designed to monitor governmental practices, and by citizens’ participatory engagement in the monitoring of governmental action. Organized witnessing projects have given rise to an archival trend in contemporary activism, which plays an important role in struggles over the representation of the past. The newly coined term “memory activism” (e.g., Fridman, 2018; Gutman, 2017) refers to organized efforts by civil society agents to challenge hegemonic narratives that are promoted by the state via school curricula, mainstream media, official information agencies, touristic ventures, and so on. The veterans’ witnessing organization Breaking the Silence addresses both the past and the present by combining elements of alternative journalism and archive-building in its work (Ashuri, 2012; Katriel & Shavit, 2011). Its interventions relate to the sensitive issue of the army’s ethical conduct and have inserted a highly discordant note into the Israeli cultural conversation in which the army is routinely designated by officials - and popularly supported - as “the most moral army in the world.”
Just as the proclamations of dissent by draft resisters discussed in the previous chapter provided a stance-rich discursive environment for exploring dissenters’ self-positioning and evaluative stances, the testimonies discussed in this chapter provide discursive sites for exploring witnessing as an act of self-narration that becomes an organizationally supported political statement. Equipped with the credentials of former combat soldiers, who claim firsthand knowledge of the occupation regime, members of Breaking the Silence testify both to the Palestinians’ plight under the occupation’s repressive measures and to their own predicament as members of the occupying force. In so doing, they combine two modes of soldierly witnessing identified by military historian Yuval Harari (2005, 2008, 2009, 2010) in his extensive studies of soldiers’ war witnessing. Harari points out that over the past two centuries, war witnessing (in the West) has increasingly positioned combat soldiers as victims of the trauma generated by their disillusionment with their experiences in modern battlefields and the shattered promise of a “beautiful war” that would involve a heroic fight for one’s country’s (and one’s own) honor. This martial disillusionment gave rise to highly tormented testimonials by soldiers and former soldiers, which, as already mentioned, were published as letters, memoirs, poetry, and prose.13 Harari (2008) discerns in this body of literary and nonliterary texts, the emergence of a new mode of witnessing that characterizes veterans who have had a direct experience of war and therefore “lay claim to the visceral authority of flesh witnessing” of “men (and occasionally women) who have learned their wisdom with their flesh” (p. 7).
Thus, eye-witnessing and flesh-witnessing ground two types of soldiers’ authority on the nature of war. The traditional authority of eye-witnessing, which underscores the role of the visual, is based on the following assumptions (Harari, 2010):
- 1. Knowledge consists of objective fact, which different people can observe and verify independently of one another; 2. Eye-witnesses of a certain event know more facts concerning that event than others; and 3. Eye-witnesses know these facts with greater certainty than others.
- (p. 61)
Eye-witnessing authority is constrained by such factors as soldiers’ necessarily limited point of view, the havoc and disorientation of the battlefield (colloquially known as “the fog of war”), and the tricks of human recollection. Collections of soldiers’ testimonies served to buttress individual soldiers’ eye-witnessing authority by incorporating a wide range of multiple, if partial, points of view. The second type of soldiers’ authority, flesh-witnessing, is not grounded in observations of facts but in the recounting of personal experiences, in experiential rather than in objective knowledge. Unlike authority of eye-witnessing, flesh-witnessing requires that people be physically and emotionally invested in what is happening in order to gain knowledge of who they are and what they have experienced. According to Harari’s (2009) historically situated account, flesh-witnessing has its roots in the culture of sensibility that emerged in the eighteenth century that mandated that people be very attentive to sensations and emotions as well as prepared to be influenced and changed by experience. He says that:
...sensibility depends on having experiences, and having experiences depends, in turn, on sensibility. Together they form a recurrent cycle of personal growth which, ideally, results in increasing knowledge. According to this scheme, knowledge can never be acquired without direct sensory experience. Consequently, true knowledge can never be translated into words, or passed on to somebody else verbally.
(p. 218)14
Given its dedication to the collection and dissemination of soldiers’ testimonies, Breaking the Silence can be seen as promoting a variant of warwitnessing. It combines modes of eye-witnessing and flesh-witnessing in support of soldier-witnesses’ claims to authority and authenticity as they produce counter-knowledge about the military practices of the occupation regime. The testimonial edifice amassed by this witnessing organization’s archive describes a wide range of human rights abuses routinely perpetrated by the military occupation regime that cause ravages to the Palestinians’ daily existence. These include restrictions on movement that keep Palestinians away from their fields, schools, hospitals, and extended families; the bureaucratic control and humiliation of the checkpoint system; the imposition of disruptive curfews; nightly incursions into Palestinian homes; random detentions; settler harassment; and more. While intended as a repository for future use, this archive is also mobilized as an active player in the anti-occupation struggle, serving as a dynamic platform in and around which witnessing is used to perform defiant discourse.
Breaking the Silence's testimonial project thus joins the efforts of other anti-occupation groups to provide publicly accessible platforms and occasions for the act of witnessing as a culturally available genre through which the reality of Palestinian life under occupation is conveyed to the Israeli public with the hope of countering its normalization. Other widely known witnessing organizations with a similar agenda include B’Tselem [literally, in the image (of God)],1' The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories founded in 1989 (at the height of the First Palestinian Intifada), whose mission is to collect and disseminate Palestinian witnesses’ testimonies about human rights violations; another is the women’s organization MachsomWatch [checkpoint watch],16 founded in 2001, whose members monitor soldiers’ conduct toward the Palestinian population at major checkpoints and in military courts, reporting on the scene of occupation as witnessed at these junctures on an ongoing basis and in real time (Mansbach, 2007). While B’Tselem testimonies are typical examples of victim testimonies, and MachsomWatch testimonies are typical examples of observer testimonies, Breaking the
Silence testimonies have a distinctive flavor as testimonies of perpetrators who expose their past transgressions but also see themselves as secondary victims of the occupation regime (Morag, 2017). They see their witnessing as a collective, organized defiant act of speaking truth to power that derives its political import from the aggregative power of numbers as well as from the persistence that marks their activist efforts. In the case of draft resisters’ public letters, their defiant discourse accompanies and gives meaning and depth to the refusers’ oppositional act. In the case of Breaking the Silence’s testimonial project, speech in the form of witnessing is a powerful act in and of itself. In the remainder of this chapter, I take a closer look at this project, its organized discursive actions, and its textual products.
